Book launch: Sophie Heywood’s “Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control”

Join us in person or online for the launch event for Sophie Heywood’s new monograph:

Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control (Bloomsbury, Perspectives on Children’s Literature series, 2025)

Author: Sophie Heywood (CBCP/ University of Reading)
Discussant: Lucy Pearson (Newcastle University)
Chair: Nicola Wilson (CBCP/ University of Reading)

This is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

• To join us in person come along to Room 128, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
• To join us via MS Teams, please register here

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control.

Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process.

Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.

The book is open access and can be downloaded for free (from 20 February 2025) here.

Author: Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French and a founding co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading, UK. She specializes in the history of comparative children’s literature and publishing. Her first monograph was a literary and publishing history of iconic French children’s author, the Comtesse de Ségur (Manchester University Press, 2011), and between 2016 and 2018 she led an international research network on the impact of the ’68 years on cultures of childhood, The Children’s ’68, funded by the STUDIUM/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship programme. 

Discussant: Lucy Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University, and leader of Newcastle’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her research focuses on children’s publishing and the development of children’s literature since the mid twentieth century. She is the author of The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s (Ashgate, 2013) and is currently working on a new history of the UK’s Carnegie Medal.