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The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
Philip Womack: Oh, the Places You’ll Go - The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith
He begins with oral storytelling, and canters right up to the present day and the works of Malorie Blackman et alia, emphasising the continued kinship of children’s stories with the earliest forms, and the role of the ‘haunted wood’, with its wonders and mysteries, in so many of them (although he eschews an explicitly Freudian reading). Leith identifies the extraordinary influence of the shadowy Aesop, whose legacy stretches down to Julia Donaldson, largely because of the ‘stripped-down, vernacular style’ of his fables (though verna doesn’t mean a ‘female’ slave, simply one of either sex born in the household). While The Haunted Wood doesn’t offer up anything new, Leith has synthesised a vast amount of material and produced a marvellously charming and enjoyable history for the general reader, as well as a spirited polemic on the importance of children’s literature.
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