The Poetics of Childhood investigates the sensibility of childhood and the ways writers try to recapture it. It explores the earliest conceptions of innocence and the development of literature about children through contemporary times. It encompasses the pastoral, the dark pastoral, the anti-pastoral; it addresses picture books, fantasy, and realism. It looks with originality at the literature of childhood, inclusive of children's literature and literature about childhood, so that the child and adult can be seen reflexively--the child in the adult and the various stages of childhood as they are remembered and retained in adulthood. It confronts issues of primal and socially constructed desire adn the use of childhood to talk about desire. It is a poetics, a way of imagining the experience of childhood and explores childhood as a particulary fluid and porous time, it also addresses issues of creativity. This is an essential reference for teachers, parents, artists, and writers.
Biography
Roni Wiliams
'The Poetics of Childhood is a Sterling contribution to the internationally renowned Children and Culture series... Natov's commanding work... demonstrates for me the power of the fine art of close reading in the hands of an experienced reader and writer of literary criticism.' - Children's Literature Association Quartely, Vol.28, No. 3
'This important, provocative book adds to the literature of the continuing war between the purveyors of light and of darkness, and critically centers the conflict in our earliest experiences, where perhaps all must be won or lost.' - Leo Zanderer, The Lion and the Unicorn
