What Children Read: A 2000 Year History from Aesop to Harry Potter
Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature and former Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on literature and language– most recently on Children’s Literature, Jewish culture, and the life of the theater. He has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Truman Capote Prize in Criticism. Among his many publications, he has written the books Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage.
Overview
The History Of Children’s Literature
Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. Children’s Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter.
Capturing the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary talk reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. It’s is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word.