Latest posts
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The Golden Age of Children’s Classics: Alice, Oz, and the Books That Shaped Childhood
Sometime in the half-century between 1865 and 1911, childhood acquired a literature of its own, and the books written in those years have never been…
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Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The Dark Originals
The stepsisters in the Grimms’ Cinderella do not merely fail to fit the slipper. They take a knife to themselves. The mother hands the first one a blade…
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Alice in Wonderland: The Logic of Nonsense
On a golden afternoon in July 1862, a shy Oxford mathematics don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three young daughters of the college dean rowing…
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Pollyanna and the Cult of Optimism
There are not many novels whose protagonist has been demoted to a common noun, and fewer still where the demotion counts as an insult. To call someone a…
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The Wizard of Oz: America’s Own Fairy Tale
In the introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900, L. Frank Baum made a quiet declaration of independence. The old fairy tales, he wrote,…