The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America

By John Goldthwaite and John Goldwaite

Book Overview

The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted.

Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well.

Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195038061
• ISBN13: 9780195038064
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

the ideal story represents the biblical view of wisdom

The ideal tale teaches moral wisdom as represented in the Book of Proverbs; the fairy godmother represents Dame Wisdom. Goldthwaite presents a rare Christian literary point of view and criticizes writers who represent the world in some gnostic or pagan point of view. He does not bother to argue the validity of his point of view. He believes. Earth and the Heavans are God's. Writers who do not reflect this are either heretics or pagans From his position akin to Dante's, you may sense how much of modern literature inhabits either limbo or hell.