This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of like sounds, William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.
Edited by:
Katherine Wakely-Mulroney,
Louise Joy
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 386g
ISBN: 9780367880248
ISBN 10: 0367880245
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 12 December 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
PART I INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and Louise Joy PART II FORM 2 Rhythm Derek Attridge 3 Free Play Revisited: the Poetics of Repetition in Blake's Songs of Innocence Corinna Russell 4 Play James Williams 5 Poetry in Prose: Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Books Katherine Wakely-Mulroney 6 The Rational Gothic: The Case of Ann Taylor's The Hand-Post Donelle Ruwe PART III EMBODIMENT 7 The Laughing Child: Children's Poetry and the Comic Mode Louise Joy 8 We may not know, we cannot tell : Religion and Reserve in Victorian Children's Poetics Kirstie Blair 9 Nursery Rhymes: Poetry, Language, and the Body Debbie Pullinger 10 That Terrible Bugaboo : The Role of Music in Poetry for Children Michael Heyman 11 Cognitive Poetics and The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry: A Primer of Possibilities Karen Coats 12 Inner Animals: Nature in Ted Hughes's Poems for Children David Whitley PART IV TASTE 13 Children, Poetry, and the Eighteenth-Century School Anthology Andrew O'Malley 14 Selection Andrea Immel 15 Anthologies Seth Lerer Index
Katherine Wakely-Mulroney is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Louise Joy is a Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK.
