Toward a new history of children's literature --
1. Speak, child : children's literature in classical antiquity --
2. Ingenuity and authority : Aesop's fables and their afterlives --
3. Court, commerce, and cloister : the literatures of medieval childhood --
4. From alphabet to elegy : the Puritan impact on children's literature --
5. Playthings of the mind : John Locke and children's literature --
6. Canoes and cannibals : Robinson Crusoe and its legacies --
7. From islands to empires : storytelling for a boy's world --
8. On beyond Darwin : from Kingsley to Seuss --
9. Ill-tempered and queer : sense and nonsense, from Victorian to modern --
10. Straw into gold : fairy-tale philology --
11. Theaters of girlhood : domesticity, desire, and performance in female fiction --
12. Pan in the garden : the Edwardian turn in children's literature --
13. Good feeling : prizes, libraries, and the institutions of American children's literature --
15. Keeping things straight : style and the child --
15. Tap your pencil on the paper : children's literature in an ironic age --
Epilogue : Children's literature and the history of the book --
