2008 Criticism Finalist Children’s Literature, by Seth Lerer

by Carlin Romano | Mar-09-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Carlin Romano discusses Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, From Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press).

Once upon a time—2008, actually—a longtime scholar at Stanford published a magisterial study that began with these words: “Ever since there were children, there has been children’s literature.” To the people of the NBCC Board, it seemed as if Seth Lerer, in his journey through centuries of what we shelve under that seemingly familiar genre, had been there since the beginning, watching wisely from up close.

In Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History,From Aesop to Harry Potter, Lerer brought to his subject both the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative “transformations” wrought by the books. He understood that his terrain included not just books written for children, but books read by them, driving home the critical spine signaled by his subtitle.

Lerer accomplished much else in his fairy-tale feat of levitating a University of Chicago Press study, despite its small type, to a possible national prize from critics beleaguered by eye strain. His book revealed Aesop as the sophisticated anti-authoritarian that children intuit. It detected the “distinctively pre-modern” forms of children’s literature amid “allegory, moral fable, romance, and symbolism.” It delineated the impact of Darwinism on 19th-century literary species. It made it all the way to Harry Potter without relying on magic, but just sound common sense informing profound erudition. Finally, it made its case that “children’s literature exists as literature: that it has forms and genres, an imaginative scope, a mastery of figurative language, an enduring cast of characters, a self-conscious sense of authorship, a poetics, a politics, a prose style.”

Reflecting on the opening pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, in which the narrator recalls the difficulty of getting adults to understand a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant, Lerer wrote, “I find children’s literature to be a world of snakes, seductive things that live in undergrowths and that may take us whole.” So, it is said, members of the NBCC Board swallowed whole this splendid meditation on the literature that changes us most, and lived happily ever after.