Warren W. Wooden's pioneering studies of early examples of children's literature throw new light on many accepted works of the English Renaissance period. In consequence, they appear more complex, significant, and successful than hitherto realized. In these nine essays, Wooden traces the roots of English children's literature in the Renaissance beginning with the first printed books of Caxton and ranging through the work of John Bunyan. Wooden examines a number of works and authors from this period of two centuries -- some from the standard canon, others obscure or neglected -- while addressing questions about the early development of children's literature.

Movable books are an innovative area of children’s publishing. Commonly equated with spectacular pop-ups, movable books have a little-known history as interactive, narrative media. Since they are hybrid artifacts consisting of words, images and movable components, they cross the borders between story, toy, and game. Interactive Books is a historical and comparative study of early movable books in relation to the children who engage with them. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh focuses on the period movable books became connected with children from the mid-17th to the early-19th centuries. In particular, she examines turn-up books, paper doll books, and related hybrid experiments like toy theaters and paignion (or domestic play set) produced between 1650 and 1830. Despite being popular in their own time, these artifacts are little known today. This study draws attention to a gap in our knowledge of children’s print culture by showing how these artifacts are important in their own right. Reid-Walsh combines archival research with children’s literature studies, book history, and juvenilia studies. By examining commercially produced and homemade examples, she explores the interrelations among children, interactive media, and historical participatory culture. By drawing on both Enlightenment thinkers and contemporary digital media theorists Interactive Books enables us to think critically about children’s media texts paper and digital, past and present.

This book provides a wealth of fascinating information about many significant and lesser-known nineteenth-century Christian authors, mostly women, who were motivated to write material specifically for children’s spiritual edification because of their personal faith. It explores three prevalent theological and controversial doctrines of the period, namely Soteriology, Biblical Authority and Eschatology, in relation to children’s specifically engendered Christian literature. It traces the ecclesiastical networks and affiliations across the theological spectrum of Evangelical authors, publishers, theologians, clergy and scholars of the period. An unprecedented deluge of Evangelical literature was produced for millions of Sunday School children in the nineteenth century, resulting in one of its most prolific and profitable forms of publishing. It expanded into a vast industry whose magnitude, scope and scale is discussed throughout this book. Rather than dismissing Evangelical children’s literature as simplistic, formulaic, moral didacticism, this book argues that, in attempting to convert the mass reading public, nineteenth-century authors and publishers developed a complex, highly competitive genre of children’s literature to promote their particular theologies, faith and churchmanships, and to ultimately save the nation.

Analysing Lewis Carroll's Alice books in the context of children's literature from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, Ronald Reichertz argues that Carroll's striking originality was the result of a fusion of his narrative imagination and formal and thematic features from earlier children's literature. The Making of the Alice Books includes discussions of the didactic and nursery rhyme verse traditionally addressed by Carroll's critics while adding and elaborating connections established within and against the continuum of English-language children's literature. Drawing examples from a wide range of children's literature Reichertz demonstrates that the Alice books are infused with conventions of and allusions to earlier works and identifies precursors of Carroll's upside-down, looking-glass, and dream vision worlds. Key passages from related books are reprinted in the appendices, making available many hard-to-find examples of early children's literature.

This book offers a historical analysis of key classical translated works for children, such as writings by Hans Christian Andersen and Grimms’ tales. Translations dominate the earliest history of texts written for children in English, and stories translated from other languages have continued to shape its course to the present day. Lathey traces the role of the translator and the impact of translations on the history of English-language children’s literature from the ninth century onwards. Discussions of popular texts in each era reveal fluctuations in the reception of translated children’s texts, as well as instances of cultural mediation by translators and editors. Abridgement, adaptation, and alteration by translators have often been viewed in a negative light, yet a closer examination of historical translators’ prefaces reveals a far more varied picture than that of faceless conduits or wilful censors. From William Caxton’s dedication of his translated History of Jason to young Prince Edward in 1477 (‘to thentent/he may begynne to lerne read Englissh’), to Edgar Taylor’s justification of the first translation into English of Grimms’ tales as a means of promoting children’s imaginations in an age of reason, translators have recorded in prefaces and other writings their didactic, religious, aesthetic, financial, and even political purposes for translating children’s texts.

The first compilation of the full first-edition texts of the classic fairy tale collections by Joseph Jacobs, with Jacobs' original prefaces and annotations. In these two classic collections, first published in 1890 and 1894, Joseph Jacobs combined folklore, children's literature, and the eclectic scholarship of the Victorian era to create a storehouse of tales that inhabited the imaginations of children and adults for generations. Here readers first met Tom Tit Tot, Molly Whuppie, and Jack the Giant-Killer, and first read the stories of the Three Little Pigs, the Three Bears, and Henny-Penny. Jacobs' daring collections challenged conventional thinking about the meaning of "folk," the individual artistry behind folktales, and the boundaries between folklore and literature, anticipating modern developments in folklore studies. His original editions of these 87 classic tales, along with the original illustrations, are reprinted in this new volume, offering readers an unsurpassed understanding of the development of the classic fairy tale in late Victorian England.

"This is a brief, readable account of English prose fiction for children from its beginning main streams of development and includes the 'Courtesy Books' of a later age, and the work of the remarkable John Newbery in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century which began with Mrs. Sherwood's The Fairchild Family - 'designed to strike the fear of hellfire into every child's soul' - later saw the works of Lewis Carroll, Stevenson, Henty and the development of the school story from 'Tom Brown' to 'Stalky.'"--Book Jacket.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.

"In the pivotal decades around the turn of the century, American domestic life underwent dramatic alteration. From backstairs to front stairs, spaces and the activities within them were radically affected by shifts in the larger social and material environments. This volume, while taking account of architecture and decoration, moves us beyond the study of buildings to the study of behaviors, particularly the behaviors of those who peopled the middle-class, single-family, detached American home between 1880 and 1930." "The book's contributors study transformations in services (such as home utilities of power, heat, light, water, and waste removal) in servicing (for example, the impact of home appliances such as gas and electric ranges, washing machines, and refrigerators), and in serving (changes in domestic servants' duties, hours of work, racial and ethnic backgrounds)." "In blending intellectual and home history, these essays both examine and exemplify the perennial American enthusiasm for, as well as anxiety about, the meaning of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This title explores how the concept of childhood in the Victorian era was constructed through ideological work in children's literature, as well as contemporary pedagogical and medical writing.