Children's literature provides a medium through which writers re-create or approximate the sensibility of a child. But what exactly is this sensibility, and how does it find creative expression in adulthood? What language can portray the seemingly untranslatable experience of a child? "The Poetics of Childhood," winner of the 2005 International Research Society for Children's Literature Award, investigates these and other questions in a highly original investigation of the elusive sensibility of childhood and the ways writers have tried to capture it over time. Roni Natov traces the...
Children's literature provides a medium through which writers re-create or approximate the sensibility of a child. But what exactly is this sensibilit...