Children's literature : a reader's history, from Aesop to Harry Potter / Seth Lerer

Originally published: 2008

Includes bibliographical references and index

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