Book Reviews

Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Seth Lerer. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008. 385 pages. USD 30.00 (hardback).
This ambitious book seeks to encapsulate in one volume over 2500 years of
Western literature that shaped the contours of British and Anglo-American
children’s fiction and poetry. To that end, Seth Lerer promotes what he calls
a ‘new’ history of the subject by interweaving four analytical strands. First, using
a ‘History of the Book’ approach, he defines children’s literature as any written
or printed material that children read, and thereby rejects traditional and much
current scholarship aligning the birth of children’s literature with John Newbery’s
eighteenth-century practice of producing and marketing texts specifically for
children. Second, with this expanded definition of children’s literature comes
a longer historical trajectory no longer dependent upon an eighteenth-century
inauguration. Indeed, the pre-modern genres of allegory, romance, and moral
fable and their deployment of dense symbolism, Lerer claims, are essential to
understanding contemporary English-language children’s texts. He thus begins
with ancient Greek and Roman pedagogical materials for school children and
segues through late antiquity into the medieval period via fables, popular
tales and poetry in the vernacular, and courtesy and conduct manuals before
encountering the Puritans, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, John Locke, and
fairy tales. He then chops various nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts into
five distinct categories – boys’ books, girls’ books, imaginative books, canonised
books, and medal-winning books – and concludes by examining the tonal shift in
children’s fiction from the occasionally mischievous but still rigorously regulated
self-expression of the 1950s and early 1960s to the self-conscious intertextuality
and snarky disaffection of the 1990s. Third, across this broad trajectory, Lerer
focuses upon figurations of reading, writing, list-making, and other forms
of ‘literate organization’ (11) to study the elements that he believes spark
cognitive, intellectual, imaginative, emotional, and psychological development
and transformation within the Ur-reader – that is, himself. Analysing these tropes
can, he hopes, help show readers the process whereby they can become what they
read. Finally, in the spirit of more inclusive self-creation through reading, Lerer
maintains that one of the book’s goals is to ‘realign what has become a largely
Anglophone focus for children’s literary study’ (9) into one that encompasses all
of world literature. Incorporating English translations of original Greek, Latin,
French, German, and Danish texts, as well as a section on post-war Eastern-
European pop-up books, is his step in that direction.
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Areas to delight in or to deplore are inevitable in a book this expansive in

scope. On the positive side, Lerer makes some smart, timely arguments. Opening
up a too-constricted definition of children’s literature is a crucial corrective;
anyone who studies children before the twentieth century already knows that
children read and were influenced by far more than so-called children’s books.
It is high time that children’s literary histories acknowledged and analysed those
materials (though Lerer’s use of Charles Darwin here makes little sense; why
not Walter Scott? or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?). Lerer also persuasively
argues across his volume that children’s literature in its various forms concerns
at heart a pursuit for cultural literacy. From Roman schoolboys memorising and
declaiming lessons to rehearse the power and control of speech that marked
the adult citizen’s public life to mid-twentieth-century youths conning Dr. Seuss
for lessons about personal style within restrictive normative environments, Lerer
reveals how closely children’s texts help readers interpret, perform, and thereby
create their roles as children and/or as future adults within society, according to
the broad dictates of their times.
Lerer’s generally graceful writing, paired with excellent synthesis, cannot
spare his study from several unfortunate flaws. Despite the author’s call for more
globally inclusive scholarship, his book reinscribes the Grand Narrative starring
the elite white child as Every Reader. He discusses no non-white ethnic or racial
texts, historical perspectives, or contexts, nor does he examine the multiple ways
that reading is socially constructed across different populations. His intention
to study a ‘universal’ ideal reader may be well-meaning (352–3, n. 29), but it
translates into naïve cultural myopia. Moreover, his goal to reach beyond the
Anglophone is more prod than self-prescription; using fairy tales by Charles
Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, and Hans Christian Andersen does not enfold
new, unstudied voices. Completely overlooking the vital influence of logos in the
Western tradition may be this book’s most bizarre omission. Post-Reformation,
the protestant practice of mediating the world through the Bible – in which word
and world become one – spurred a host of historical phenomena that created
the British and Anglo-American cultural importance of reading and books.
This absent element, however, points to yet another problem with this study:
the further Lerer travels from his expertise as a medievalist, the thinner and
breezier his arguments tend to become. Scholars interested in pursuing reading
and scholarship tropes may find some value in the modern material, but the
book’s merits lie primarily in the fresh, insightful analysis in the chapters covering
antiquity through the medieval period.
Sandra Burr
Northern Michigan University, USA
DOI: 10.3366/E1755619809000556