Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-375) and index.

Introduction : Toward a new history of children's literature --
Speak, child : children's literature in classical antiquity --
Ingenuity and authority : Aesop's fables and their afterlives --
Court, commerce, and cloister : the literatures of medieval childhood --
From alphabet to elegy : the Puritan impact on children's literature --
Playthings of the mind : John Locke and children's literature --
Canoes and cannibals : Robinson Crusoe and its legacies --
From islands to empires : storytelling for a boy's world --
On beyond Darwin : from Kingsley to Seuss --
Ill-tempered and queer : sense and nonsense, from Victorian to modern --
Straw into gold : fairy-tale philology --
Theaters of girlhood : domesticity, desire, and performance in female fiction --
Pan in the garden : the Edwardian turn in children's literature --
Good feeling : prizes, libraries, and the institutions of American children's literature --
Keeping things straight : style and the child --
Tap your pencil on the paper : children's literature in an ironic age --
Epilogue : Children's literature and the history of the book.