Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter

Children'sliterature? Have children really ever had a literature of their own? Jack Zipes - translator of the Grimm tales, teacher, storyteller, and scholar - has never flinched from the hard questions about kids and books. InSticks and Stoneshe raises the stakes for everyone who cares about children's literature and culture. From the grisly nineteenth century moralism of Slovenly Peter (whose fingers get cut off) to the wildly successful Harry Potter books, children's literature is in many ways the grown ups' version - a story about childhood that adults tell to kids. And that, argues Jack Zipes, can be a problem: even the experts don't really know what children make of what we give them.Sticks and Stonesargues that despite common American assumptions about children's books, our investment in children is paradoxically curtailing their freedom and creativity. With refreshing independence, Jack Zipes contends that children are best served neither by the current polemics of thereligious right or the radical left.

Jack Zipes is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota.