HIST 100: Children’s History and the History of Children (Fall 2024)

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature is at once a literary history, an introduction to various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, a review of genres, and a selection of original and interdisciplinary essays on canonical and popular works for children in the Anglo-American tradition. It is geared toward graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and scholars new to the study of children's literature, as well as teachers and anyone wishing to keep up with new research and innovative approaches to children's literature. Twenty-six essays by top scholars from varied disciplines address theoretical, historical, sociological, and critical issues through analyses of classic novels such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, The Swiss Family Robinson, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped, and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew; early educational and religious works such as The New England Primer and Froggy's Little Brother; picture books, comics and graphic novels such as Millions of Cats, Where the Wild Things Are, the Peanuts series and American Born Chinese; early readers such as The Cat in the Hat and the Frog and Toad books; newer children's classics including Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Jade, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, The Circuit, the Harry Potter series and His Dark Materials trilogy; works of poetry such as The Bat Poety and The Dreamkeeper; a play, Peter Pan; and media classics such as Free to Be You and Me and Dumbo. An editors' introduction surveys key trends in criticism, the field's history, and foundational scholarship.

In this extensively illustrated reference book Anne Buck delivers to the reader a fresh understanding of four centuries' worth of customs and mores and rather arcane insights, such as those related to the construction of clothing. Clothes and the Child will prove not only invaluable to the scholar, the collector, and the costumier but also enlightening and entertaining to the casual reader. Anne Buck, an international authority on costume history, identifies trends in children's clothing as they pertain to the evolution, in England, of adult attitudes toward children and child care. These ideas, and the clothing they engendered, as the author makes clear, were all part of a broader sweep of new social values and new technologies that altered society. Furthermore, the author analyzes the changing relationship between children and adult dress throughout the centuries. Buck divides the book into three periods: Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence, and proceeds chronologically within each section. She analyzes existing antique garments, and gleans evidence from the written material that has survived: letters, journals, and various public accounts; as well as from the visual record in paintings, sculptures, and drawings. In this way she provides a rich description that accounts for the lives of and attitudes toward children from various strata of society.