Children's Literature

by Lerer, Seth

• ISBN13: 9780226473000
• ISBN10: 0226473007
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-06-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children's literature. Its history is inseparable from the history of childhood, as children are indelibly molded by the tales they hear and readstories they will one day share with their own sons and daughters. Children's Literaturecharts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, fromAlice's Adventures in Wonderlandto Peter Pan, fromWhere the Wild Things Areto Harry Potter. Seth Lerer here explores the iconic books, ancient and contemporary alike, that have forged a lifelong love of literature in young readers during their formative years. Along the way, Lerer also looks at the changing environments of family life and human growth, schooling and scholarship, and publishing and politics in which children found themselves changed by the books they read. This ambitious work appraises a broad trajectory of influencesincluding Shakespeare's plays, John Locke's theories of education, Darwin'sOn the Origin of Species, and the Puritan traditionwhich have each shaped children's literature through the ages as well. The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children's literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shel Silverstein, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers.Children's Literatureis an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word.

Author Biography

Seth Lerer is the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford University. He is the author of many previous books, including Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and the editor of several collections, including The Yale Companion to Chaucer.

 

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Toward a New History of Children's Literature

Speak, Child: Children's Literature in Classical Antiquity

Ingenuity and Authority: Aesop's Fables and Their Afterlives

Court, Commerce, and Cloister: The Literatures of Medieval Childhood

From Alphabet to Elegy: The Puritan Impact on Children's Literature

Playthings of the Mind: John Locke and Children's Literature

Canoes and Cannibals:Robinson Crusoeand Its Legacies

From Islands to Empires: Storytelling for a Boy's World

On beyond Darwin: From Kingsley to Seuss

Ill-Tempered and Queer: Sense and Nonsense, from Victorian to Modern

Straw into Gold: Fairy-Tale Philology

Theaters of Girlhood: Domesticity, Desire, and Performance in Female Fiction

Pan in the Garden: The Edwardian Turn in Children's Literature

Good Feeling: Prizes, Libraries, and the Institutions of American Children's Literature

Keeping Things Straight: Style and the Child

Tap Your Pencil on the Paper: Children's Literature in an Ironic Age Epilogue Children's Literature and the History of the Book

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.