Children's literature : a reader's history, from Aesop to Harry Potter
Seth Lerer (Author)
Children's Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to 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 influences--including Shakespeare's plays, John Locke's theories of education, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and the Puritan tradition--which have each shaped children's literature through the ages as well.--From publisher description
Criticism, interpretation, etc
ix, 385 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780226473000, 9780226473017, 0226473007, 0226473015
176980408
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 Crusoe and 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