Playing with Books

This book is simultaneously a history of children's literature, an analysis of the modern conception of childhood, a study of the stylistics of children's literature, and a rhetorical examination of children's novels. All these diverse strands are connected by a single thesis exploring the nature of children's play and what it reveals about children's biological nature and the nature of their literature. Chapter One examines the earliest forms of children's literature and evaluates how, as pre-readers and a kind of primitive Other, children must "fall into literacy" at some point along their educational path. Chapter Two examines the psychoanalytical stylistics and unique "taste" of children's literature, focusing on the repression of sex, horror, and irony in children's books. Chapter Three reveals the biological significance of children's play, constructing a rhetoric with which to study children's literature as a kind of toy that children are biologically predisposed to learn from. Finally, Chapters Four through Six study the narrative techniques of several children's novels, focusing particularly on how Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland created an original formula which can be clearly described and differentiated from that of adult novels.