The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities New Edition

A welcome addition to the growing field of childhood studies, The Children’s Table offers astute and thought-provoking essays addressing such areas of humanistic inquiry as philosophy, law, architecture, American studies, and children’s literature.

–Beverly Lyon Clark “Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America“

This important collection of essays seeks to define the emerging discipline of childhood studies, to explain what it has to contribute and how that understanding provides an analytic tool to help us approach many fields. These essays challenge the binary manner in which modern society divides adults from children and propose much more subtle approaches for reconsidering the spectrum of human capability. As they rightly argue, paying attention to children has the potential to make us reconsider many other categories of ability and our entire conception of dependency. It forces us to reframe our ability to understand the past as well as our present. Arguing persuasively that the enlightenment bifurcation dividing childhood from adulthood hides as much as it reveals, they suggest many approaches for overcoming it and make powerful arguments for why we must try.

–Holly Brewer “Burke Professor of American History, University of Maryland”

This timely collection on childhood studies is both usefully focused and richly diverse, with essays on literature, history, architecture, critical race studies, child-centered jurisprudence, adoption, gender and queer identity, archive studies, and performance theory. Taking up critical questions of disciplinarity, professionalization, and institutionalization, The Children’s Table models and encourages greater dialogue within as well as beyond the humanities. Useful for advanced students and scholars, it also offers an excellent introduction to the subject. An impressive, fun, highly engaging volume.

–Kenneth Kidd “Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature“

An essay collection that will empower readers with the resources to articulate the significance of childhood studies. .. A benchmark contribution, The Children’s Table defines our field and illuminates our future.–M. Tyler Sasser “International Research in Children’s Literature”

JAMES MARTEN is professor of history at Marquette University. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of several books, including America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace (Georgia); Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America; Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front; and The Children’s Civil War.

LYNNE VALLONE is a professor of childhood studies and English at Rutgers University. She is the author or editor of numerous works including Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature.

ANNA MAE DUANE is an associate professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Georgia) and Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation.