It is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives--Graham Greene The luminous books of our childhood will remain the luminous books of our lives.--Joyce Carol Oates Writers, as they often attest, are deeply influenced by their childhood reading. Salman Rushdie, for example, has said that The Wizard of Oz made a writer of me. Twice-Told Tales is a collection of essays on the way the works of adult writers have been influenced by their childhood reading. This fascinating volume includes theoretical essays on Salman Rushdie and the Oz books, Beauty and the Beast retold as Jane Eyre, the childhood reading of Jorge Luis Borges, and the remnants of nursery rhymes in Sylvia Plath's poetry. It is supplemented with a number of brief commentaries on children's books by major creative writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston and Maxine Kumin.

Caleb Woolf has designs on the basket of food that Cassie Cloak takes to her grandmother every Sunday, so they set a trap to teach him a lesson.

Twice Told Tales are not only for the young. Many have discovered the "magnificent, colorful, many-sided, fantasy world of fairy tales" as children, but, as Hans Dieckmann points out, we can rediscover their value as adults. "As with all great art, the fairy tale's deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his life." (Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment) By the use of case histories, Dr. Dieckmann recounts ways in which "the greatest treasures of the soul" can be revealed in fairy tales. He graphically shows how fairy tales can give "color and vivacity to a life grown empty, sterile, and desolate." Dr. Dieckmann interprets the symbolic significance of many individual fairy tales and relates their meaning to various stages of a person's development.

This book reappraises the place of children's literature, showing it to be a creative space where writers and illustrators try out new ideas about books, society, and narratives in an age of instant communication and multi-media. It looks at the stories about the world and young people; the interaction with changing childhoods and new technologies.

This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.