Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature - Softcover

Lurie, Alison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316246255 ISBN 13: 9780316246255

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 1998

Synopsis

In sixteen spirited essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie, who is also one of our wittiest and most astute cultural commentators, explores the world of children's literature--from Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss, Mark Twain to Beatrix Potter--and shows that the best-loved children's books tend to challenge rather than uphold respectable adult values.

About this title

From Library Journal:

While not a comprehensive history of the unorthodox in children's books, the 16 essays collected here (some from the New York Review of Books and Children's Literature ) do offer witty and illuminating insights into the classics they explore. Chapters on folktales, Greenaway, Nesbit, Barrie, and Milne are especially rich. Lurie may win new readers for Shardik , T.H. White, and William Mayne. Essays on Mrs. Clifford's and F.M. Ford's little-known stories unconvincingly stretch the "subversive" to include these writers' very private, and even unbalanced, use of unconventional material, while Chapters 3 and 4, on adult books, have crept in on a subversive mission of their own. Although the theme announced in the subtitle is not so strong a unifying thread as one might wish, the book is worth having for its careful, reasonably feminist, and often fascinating readings of some enduring texts.
- Patricia Dooley, Univ. of Washington Lib. Sch., Seattle
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0316246255
• ISBN 13: 9780316246255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256