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By focusing on the children's book business of the long eighteenth-century, this book argues that the thinking, knowing children of the Enlightenment are models for the technologically-connected, socially-conscious children of the twenty-first. The increasingly obsolete images of Romantic innocent and ignorant children are bracketed between the two periods.
List of contents
Introduction: And in this Book There Are Many Houses. Chapter 1: This is the House that Ben Built. Chapter 2: These are the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 3: These are the Lessons Taught from the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 4: These are the Women Who Wrote the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 5: These are (Not) the Children who Read the Books that Lived in the House that Ben Built. Chapter 6: In the End
About the author
Lissa Paul, a professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University in Canada, publishes and speaks internationally. She is the author of
Reading Otherways (Thimble 1998), an Associate General Editor of
The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature (Norton 2005), and co-editor, with Phil Nel, of
Keywords for Children's Literature (New York UP 2011) . She is currently working on a biography of Eliza Fenwick (1767-1840).
Summary
By focusing on the children’s book business of the long eighteenth-century, this book argues that the thinking, knowing children of the Enlightenment are models for the technologically-connected, socially-conscious children of the twenty-first. The increasingly obsolete images of Romantic innocent and ignorant children are bracketed between the two periods.
Additional text
"While this is definitely a scholar's book drawing on scholarly contexts, readers familiar with standard histories of children's literature will find food for thought in Paul's championing of figures earlier historians have dismissed."-- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, 2011
"An image-rich and engaging work of scholarship…Paul’s book includes much that will be of interest to those in book history, women’s writings, and children’s literature, particularly in its study of the importance and reach of Talbart’s collection of books. Paul also provides important jumping-off points for future, much-needed research into the careers of Fenwick and Ann and Jane Taylor." –Studies in English Literature, 2011
