Children's Literature

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.

Seth Lerer is dean of arts and humanities at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many books, including Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and the editor of several collections, including The Yale Companion to Chaucer.