NBCC Awards Book on Kid Lit Criticism
RSSBy Rocco Staino -- School Library Journal, 03/16/2009
The National Book Critics Circle Awards (NBCC) has recognized the often overlooked area of children’s literature, giving its 2009 award in the field of criticism to Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago, 2008).
The book charts makings of Western literary imagination from “Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's 
Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter”—and reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Shel Silverstein, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers.
Lerer, who serves as dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California in San Diego, explores ancient and contemporary books that have forged a lifelong love of literature in young readers. Along the way, Lerer also examines the evolution of family life and human growth, as well as the schooling, scholarship, publishing and politics in which children found themselves changed by the books they read.
His work includes a broad range of influences—including Shakespeare’s plays, John Locke’s theories of education, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the Puritan tradition.
Lerer says in his book that children’s literature “has forms and genres, an imaginative scope, a mastery of figurative language, an enduring cast of characters, a self-conscious sense of authorship, a poetics, a politics, a prose style.”
Commenting on the book, NBCC board member and book critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carlin Romano said Lerer brought to his subject the critical acuity and unlimited openness it deserved. “He insisted on placing a complex literature within the history of childhood, a story both contested and blessedly clear. He took into account the cavalcade of publishing history, without permitting it to trample the imaginative “transformations” wrought by the books. He understood that his terrain included not just books written for children, but books read by them, driving home the critical spine signaled by his subtitle.”
Since 1974, the NBCC has selected books in six award categories, including poetry, autobiography, biography, general nonfiction, and fiction It is comprised of 900 book reviewers, and its 24-member board works in committees to select the finalist in each category .
Watch a video interview of Seth Lerer at the NBCC award ceremony.
