SOURCE: Stevenson, Deborah. “The River Bank Redux?: Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and William Horwood's The Willows in Winter.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 21, no. 3 (fall 1996): 126-32.

In the following essay, Stevenson discusses William Horwood's The Willows in Winter as a sequel to The Wind in the Willows.

Children's literature has for some time been interested in the sociohistorical forces of literature, the text as reflection and catalyst of culture. Though “new historicism” is a broad term, covering a variety of critical approaches, the method is indispensable for examining the relationship between culture and literature, and the kind of history literature makes as well as the kind of literature history makes: the forces, in short, that make children's literature the intriguingly peculiar genre it is. New historicism has made for fruitful analysis in the hands of critics such as Tony Watkins, who has used it to illuminate...