Articles of this book - Donelle Ruwe Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau; Ruth Carver Capasso Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century French Children’s Literature; Ken Parille 'Wake up, and be a man'; Claudia Nelson Drying the Orphan’s Tear; Kate Lawson The 'Disappointed' House; Fern Kory Once upon a Time in Aframerica; Laura B. Comoletti and Michael D. C. Drout How They Do Things with Words; Philip Nel 'Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple'; Sandra Beckett Parodic Play with Paintings in Picture Books; Clare Bradford The End of Empire?

This book explores how ideas about age changed for novels and their readers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.

This directory is a handy on-volume discovery tool that will allow readers to locate rare book and special collections in the British Isles. Fully updated since the second edition was published in 1997. this comprehensive and up-to-date guide encompasses collections held in libraries, archives, museums and private hands. The Directory: Provides a national overview of rare book and special collections for those interested in seeing quickly and easily what a library holds Directs researchers to the libraries most relevant for their research Assists libraries considering acquiring new special collections to assess the value of such collections beyond the institution,showing how they fit into a ‘unique and distinctive’ model. Each entry in the Directory provides background information on the library and its purpose, full contact details, the quantity of early printed books, information about particular subject and language strengths, information about unique works and important acquisitions, descriptions of named special collections and deposited collections. Readership: Researchers, academic liaison librarians and library managers.