Tatar challenges the assumptions we make about childhood reading. By exploring how beauty and horror operate in children's literature, she examines how and what children read, showing how literature transports and transforms children with its intoxicating, captivating and occasionally terrifying energy.

I. Children's literature? -- 1. Sex and violence : the hard core of fairy tales -- 2. Fact and fantasy : the art of reading fairy tales -- 3. Victims and seekers : the family romance of fairy tales -- II. Heroes -- 4. Born yesterday : The spear side -- 5. Spinning tales : the distaff side -- III. Villains -- 6. From nags to witches : stepmothers and other ogres -- 7. Taming the beast : Bluebeard and other monsters -- Epilogue : getting even -- Appendixes -- A. Six fairy tales from the Nursery and household tales, with commentary -- B. Selected tales from the first edition of the Nursery and household tales -- C. Prefaces to the first and second editions of the Nursery and household tales -- D. English titles, tale numbers, and German titles of stories cited -- E. Bibliographical note.

After returning to Fairyland, September discovers that her stolen shadow has become the Hollow Queen, the new ruler of Fairyland Below, who is stealing the magic and shadows from Fairyland folk and refusing to give them back.

What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property. The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, "childhood" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called "childhood." Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.

• Fully updated research and inclusion of recent children’s book titles, including more diverse and inclusive literature such as LGBTQ children’s books • New Read, Watch, Listen resources within each chapter; new Activities for Professional Development and Print and Online Resources sections • New emphases and expanded attention to censorship and diversity.

This book is a major study of child readers and their reading habits in the period when children's literature first became established.

Containing 40 stories in new translations by Tatar this celebration of the richness and dramatic power of the legendary fables also features 150 illustrations, many of them in color, by legendary painters.