Animality and Children's Literature and Film : Palgrave Macmillan : 9781349476480 : 134947648X : 27 Nov 2014 : "Over the past decade, animal/child relations have become the central focus of children's and young adult studies. Scholars to date, however, have continued to read the animal as a symbol of the human, or as a medium authors have used for didactic ends. This common assumption has resulted in framework that has ignored the rights and agency of not only animals, but children themselves. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctlyhuman through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human