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.
I’d like the browsing reader to come, first, to the general introduction to my book – here I outline the principles and scope, the personal experiences that led me to write it, and the expectations of the reader.Then, I would like the reader to experience the book’s various chapters according to his or her tastes.For example, “Theaters of Girlhood” discusses literature for and about young women, addressing the performative nature of female identity in history and locating that focus in some of the classics of the genre (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Wizard of Oz).Male readers may be fascinated by the chapters on boys’ adventure books and the “ripping yarns” of the nineteenth century (with their blend of colonial aspiration and Darwinian science).Historians may be intrigued by the importance of the work of John Locke in the history of children’s literature and may focus on the chapter devoted to him.Similarly, scholars and students of American Studies may find the chapter on the Puritans particularly interesting, especially the understanding of the Puritans as deeply focused on childhood and family and, in effect, as developing modern children’s literature out of a blend of religious instruction, private journal writing, and allegorical narrative.I’d like my book to have a wide readership, not only teachers and students, but parents, librarians, public activists—and even children themselves.I have tried to treat children’s literature as literature: that is, as the sustained, imaginative work of writers with aesthetic concerns, social interests, and technical flair.I’d like to see my book stimulate further work in the field, especially the notion of children’s literature as a “world” phenomenon, the idea of children’s literature in a digital age, and the changing nature of public and school libraries.Finally, I’d like to encourage readers of the book to read to children—to recognize that social and personal bonding goes on over the pages of a book and that the best dreams come from having been read to sleep.
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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