Children's Literature

This course takes as its focus the history and critical analysis of children's literature in Britain from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century works for children.

The first half of the course concentrates on poems, short stories, and excerpts of other prose works included in the anthology From Instruction to Delight and is designed to survey the development of a literature shaped specifically for children from its beginnings to the Golden Age of the nursery at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The second half of the course will sample various genres in children's literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as animal stories, fantasy, historical fiction, trauma literature, and picture books. Our historical and geographic lens will expand to include works published in the United States and Canada. Central to our study will be an examination of the construction of childhood across the centuries; an extended consideration of the intersections and relationships between literature, politics, philosophy, commerce, religion, economics, and art; and an investigation of the dynamics between literature written for adult audiences and books read by children.

A foundational principle of our course is that children’s literature performs important socio-cultural work and that the best examples of works read by young readers invite well informed, thoughtful, sophisticated, and engaged close analysis. As we progress through our course we will interrogate hackneyed clichés and popular assumptions such as that the primary function of books read by children (past or present) is to stimulate the imagination of the child; that children's literature is simplistic, conservative, or moral; that children are naturally sweet, innocent little angels; and that childhood is a period of sweetness and light safely removed from adult concerns.