This book is simultaneously a history of children's literature, an analysis of the modern conception of childhood, a study of the stylistics of children's literature, and a rhetorical examination of children's novels. All these diverse strands are connected by a single thesis exploring the nature of children's play and what it reveals about children's biological nature and the nature of their literature. Chapter One examines the earliest forms of children's literature and evaluates how, as pre-readers and a kind of primitive Other, children must 'fall into literacy' at some point along their...

From his early "Curtain Raiser" to the late Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot took an interest in all the arts, drawing on them for poetic inspiration and for analysis in his prose. T. S. Eliot and the Arts provides extensive, high quality research about his many-sided engagement with painting, sculpture, museum artefacts, architecture, music, drama, music hall, opera and dance, as well as the emerging media of recorded sound, film and radio. Building on the newly published editions of Eliot's prose and poetry, this contemporary research collection opens avenues for understanding Eliot both in his...