Seth Lerer is the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Distinguished Professor of Literature at UCSD. Before joining the UCSD faculty in 2009, he was the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Stanford. Lerer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Wesleyan, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. Children’s Literature, featured in his Rorotoko interview, won the National Book Critics Award in Criticism in for 2008 and the Truman Capote Award in Literary Criticism in 2010. Lerer is also the author or editor of numerous other books—including Chaucer and His Readers, Error and the Academic Self, Inventing English—and articles and reviews in the fields of medieval literature and the history of scholarship. He is well known, too, for his public lectures on language and culture and his Teaching Company lecture series, The History of the English Language. Throughout his scholarship and teaching, Lerer focuses on the ways in which we see the world through language, and how reading, schooling, and political debate foster a literate imagination.
My book is about the making of the literate imagination in the history of children’s literature. More than just a survey of books and authors, Children’s Literature is a critical narrative of how education, the family, and social life come together in the many different kinds of things that children read.I look at literature that was not only written for children, but all books read by children: thus, at different points in history, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Defoe, and Twain were all “children’s writers” in that their works were adapted for and read by young people. My book therefore also looks at the wide traditions of children’s literature in the West—quite literally, from Aesop to Harry Potter—to see the different ways in which cultures and societies defined childhood, understood acts of reading and writing, and taught social values and ideals.Finally, my work looks at the history of the book and children’s literature: how the physical artifact of the written, printed, illustrated, and even digital book bears meaning and has a social impact on the imagination of the reading child.
Seth Lerer Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter University of Chicago Press400 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0226473017
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