AP/CCY 3998 6.00

The Child and the Book: Children’s Literature Research Methods

This course incorporates book history, childhood studies, literary analysis, and digital humanities methodologies in its exploration of the social and textual production of children’s literature. Beginning with entrepreneurial printer and children’s bookseller John Newbery’s new methods of marketing to child readers and the “invention” of childhood as a post-Enlightenment project, this course will discuss the interconnections of philosophy, “the market” for books, the child in the age of industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, the archive, and the historical “register” of these dynamic material objects we call books. Using the new Children’s Literature Collection housed in the Clara Thomas Archive & Special Collections, in addition to a variety of international digital archives and special collections, this course will situate our explorations of “child” and “youth” characters and readers at the interstices of philosophy, cultural and material modes of production, and the forces of industrialization.