378 pp, large 8vo (9 7/8" H). Pictorial endpapers, many b&w and color photographs and reproductions. "(T)races the history of children's books in Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand from the very first printed books through to the present day. (This book) takes 'children's literature' to mean books designed for children as well as books for childhood, and so embraces everything from religious tracts to multi-media comics, from the 'classic' to the unashamedly popular. Written by leading experts, this survey shows that children's literature reflects how childhood has been defined, controlled, and appreciated at different times. It reveals how adults have explored questions of power, entertainment, sexuality, and equality through their writing for children, and demonstrates how the borders between what is adult and what children's fiction are routinely blurred. A series of chronological chapters charts the 'history' which begins in the sixteenth century with grammars and ABCs. We move from books of instruction through to fables and fantasies in the eighteenth century, from reward books and romance to school stories in the nineteenth, and on to comics, colour picture-books, and science fiction in (the twentieth century). Throughout the text, books, authors, illustrators, publishers, and children readers are discussed within their wider social, political, and economic environment. Richly illustrated in black and white and colour, and with a section on further reading, a full index, and a chronology which places books for children in their literary and political context, this is a fascinating study which will delight all readers, young and old." Dust jacket has minor edge wear and light edge wrinkling; tiny dent on front hinge; slight fading to color on front panel, spine, top edge and flap-folds.

Chldlren's  Literature,  Juvenile,  Reading,  Publishing,  Victorian,  American,  America,  Britain,  British,  Canada,  Canadian,  Australia,  Australian,  New  Zealand,  Books,  Grammars,  ABCs,  Picture,  Illustrated,  Fantasy,  Science  Fiction,  Reward,  School  Stories,  Adolescence,  Adventure,  Aesop,  Joan  Aiken,  Louisa  May  Alcott,  Horatio  Alger,  Hans  Andersen,  Animals,  R.M.  Ballantyne,  James  Barrie,  Enid  Blyton,  Angela  Brazil,  John  Bunyan,  Frances  Hodgson  Burnett,  Lewis  Carroll,  William  Caxton,  Chapbooks,  Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge,  Comics,  Crusoe  Tales,  Daniel  Defoe,  Charles  Dickens,  Maria  Edgeworth,  Education,  Fairy  Tales,  Leon  Garfield,  Alan  Garner,  Samuel  Goodrich,  Kenneth  Grahame,  Grimm,  John  Harris,  Thomas  Hughes,  Indigenous  Peoples,  James  Janeway,  Richard  Jefferies,  Charles  Keeping,  Dorothy  Kilner,  Charles  Kingsley,  Rudyard  Kipling,  Andrew  Lang,  Edward  Lear,  C.S.  Lewis,  Penelope  Lively,  John  Locke,  George  MacDonald,  Captain  Marryat,  John  Masefield,  William  Mayne,  A.A.  Milne,  Mrs  Molesworth,  Hannah  More,  Edith  Nesbit,  John  Newbery,  Opie,  Jill  Paton  Walsh,  Philippa  Pearce,  Play,  Playing,  Poetry,  Protestants,  Puritans,  Arthur  Rackham,  Arthur  Ransome,  Religion,  Morality,  Romanticism,  Sexuality,  Mary  Martha  Sherwood,  Social  Realism,  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  Time  Travel,  J.R.R.  Tolkien,  Geoffrey  Trease,  Sarah  Trimmer,  Mark  Twain,  United  States,  War,  Isaac  Watts,  Laura  Ingalls  Wilder,  William  Wordsworth,  Charlotte  M.  Yonge.