Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 37

Much of my work as a critic of children’s literature has been completed with ready access to the rare book rooms where the lucky few can consult Victorian picturebooks. I wrote this chapter, by contrast, during the COVID-19 pandemic from Aotearoa New Zealand, where the numbers of Victorian picturebooks are limited at the best of times. I wish to conclude, then, by noting that initiatives making early picturebooks available online are indispensable in allowing scholars to fill the many remaining lacunae in our knowledge, even from a distance. Some important collections, such as the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature (University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries n.d.), have digitizations freely available. New scholarly projects on the early picturebook also involve digital humanities components. “Nineteenth-Century European Picture-Books in Colour” (PiCoBoo), a project led by Francesca Tancini (n.d.) in conjunction with Matthew Grenby, provides invaluable information about early picturebooks along with page images of some books and a field-defining insistence on the colored picturebook’s cultural importance in nineteenth-century Europe. The “Learning as Play” site animates a number of the nineteenth-century movable picturebooks which run alongside other less novel picturebook forms (Reid-Walsh 2019). Writing this chapter made me highly grateful for this work – as well as clamorous for more of it.