Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 19

The child’s bookshelf changed after the mid-nineteenth century, as fiction came to further dominate what children read and adults recommended. Fantasy, the ultimate detachment from the troubles of the world, became the narrative type associated with childhood innocence and the worldly ignorance it demanded. In this new reading climate, some of the more popular nonfiction works survived, especially The New England Primer, the Life of Washington, and the “joyful death” biography, all of which remained standard reading material for generations of young audiences. Others, like “Against Idleness and Mischief” in Watts’s Divine Songs, came under attack; Alice famously muddles the words to this poem at the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mocking the work’s earnest warnings against idleness and play. Yet, though the prominence of nonfiction waned in late nineteenth century, it remains instructive and revealing to examine the nonfiction that preceded the Golden Age. In these works, we not only see children’s books became more established in the marketplace, but we see the way this early stage of the industry sought largely to widen children’s horizons, rather than contain them, and to prepare young people’s attention to the larger political, cultural, and economic issues of the day. Because these texts were more common and more trusted, they are the central battlegrounds where the era’s ideological battles to further acknowledge and esteem childhood were fought and won.