DON'T TELL THE GROWN-UPS: Subversive Children's Literature

by Alison Lurie ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 1990

Novelist Lurie's (The Truth About Lorin Jones, 1988, etc.) 16 essays on children's literature and its makers, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books and the journal Children's Literature, are tied together here by the assertion that the great children's literature is ""subversive""--that is, that it mocks adult pretension and hypocrisy and that its liberating fantasies get children out from under repression by adults. That's a far from original idea--one that applies variously, and in various interpretations of the word ""subversive,"" to the authors covered here; and one that was systematically and productively applied in Humphrey Carpenter's Secret Gardens (1985), which discussed many of the same authors but is not, oddly, included in Lurie's bibliography. Most of the essays, which draw heavily on other biographies and studies of the writers, bring out the psychological ties between the lives and the works of James Barrie (""The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up""), E. Nesbit (a feminist and socialist who ""remained about twelve years old all her life"" and who used magic as a metaphor for the imagination); A.A. Milne (who re-created the ""lost paradise"" of childhood), and others. Lurie's discussion of Kate Greenaway concentrates on her relationship with John Ruskin, a dirty old man who kept urging the illustrator to undress her darling ""girlies."" Another essay compares Tolkien and T.H. White; to White's advantage (not surprisingly, she finds Tolkien morally simplistic. No big new interpretation here, then--but Lurie, who teaches children's literature at Cornell, offers some literate, readable profiles and many thoughtful, informed, and interesting observations along the way.

Pub Date: March 8, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION