Description
The author of some thirty-five books for children and young adults, Avi has been praised for his versatility and willingness to experiment. His books encompass historical fiction, mysteries, comic-book novels, picturebooks, comedies, ghost stories, and animal fantasies. With Presenting Avi, Susan P. Bloom and Cathryn M. Mercier provide the first full-length biocritical study of this notable writer. The book's approach actually evolved from a graduate course Avi taught in the late 1980s at Simmons College's Center for the Study of Children's Literature, wherein the focus was on a writer's oeuvre as a way of establishing links between one work and another. Presenting Avi concentrates on the intertexuality of Avi's work: viewing each book in the context of all his works, and all his works in the context of a single book. In these lucid discussions the authors trace recurrent patterns, themes, ideologies, and images. Informing the analyses are the comments of critics and scholars, and Avi himself, who made early journals and other important source materials accessible to the authors during the study's development.
