Children's literature

This chapter introduces the key authors, concepts, and genres of Romantic-era children's literature. Romantic authors pioneered many of today's common features of children's books, such as motherese, conversational modes, large font, and active learning. The chapter presents these innovations and explains the scholarly lingo of children's literature studies, such as cross-writing, cross-reading, and rational pedagogy. The chapter is organized around important prose genres for children. As the author introduces each genre-easy readers, mixed-genre anthologies, books of scenes, London cries, geographies, biographies, exemplary histories, and juvenilia-she highlights how books for children engage larger sociocultural phenomena such as anti-Semitism, commercial publishing, colonialism, gender, and poetics.