Children's Literature: An Anthology 1801 - 1902 - Paperback

by Peter Hunt (Author)

Edited by one of the leading scholars in children's literature studies, this highly entertaining and scholarly anthology features over 120 complete works, poems, stories, and extracts from novels.

• Includes over 120 complete works, poems, stories and extracts from novels.
• Provides an entertaining and scholarly view of the development of children's literature in the UK and the USA, with representative pieces from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
• Includes both famous books and poems, as well as less well-known but fascinating examples.
• Features a bibliography of the best critical and historical secondary sources.

Back Jacket

This anthology of nineteenth-century English-language children's literature brings together over 120 works, including poems, stories and extracts from novels. The collection explores both famous and lesser-known works from writers as diverse as Maria Edgeworth, Edward Lear, Louisa May Alcott, Catherine Parr Traill, Charles Kingsley, Horatio Alger Jr, Susan Coolidge, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ethel Turner, Thomas Hardy, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Rudyard Kipling. All texts are introduced with contextualizing headnotes and are organized chronologically; they can also be referenced by theme, genre, author and country.

Peter Hunt's introduction discusses the ways in which the history of children's literature may be, and has been, read, and sets out four key criteria for selecting the texts: that they are historically significant, representative of their period or country, readable, and comprehensible in extract form.

Edited by one of the leading scholars in children's literature studies, this important anthology will provide students and general readers with an indispensable, much needed, and above all, entertaining account of the development of the form in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Author Biography

Peter Hunt is Professor of English at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He has written 11 books and over 200 articles on children's literature. Among his most recent books are the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (1996), Children's Literature (Blackwell, 2001) and Children's Literature: An Illustrated History (1995).