Nursery Rhymes

This classic dictionary brings together over 500 nursery rhymes, songs, nonsense jingles, lullabies, and rhyming alphabets traditionally handed on to young children. All the items have been arranged alphabetically, from `A was an apple-pie' to `Yankee Doodle came to town' and include such favourites as `A frog he would a-wooing go', `Baa, baa, black sheep', `Dance to your daddy', `Jack and Jill', and `Old Mother Hubbard'. With each item comes a unique set of historical and bibliographical notes that record the earliest known publication of each piece, describe the circumstances of its origin, illustrate changes in wording over time, and indicate variations and parallels in other languages. In a detailed and fascinating introduction, the editors describe the different types of rhyme, the earliest published collections, theories of origins, and such questions as whether or not individual rhymes originally portrayed real people and who was Mother Goose. Complementing the rhymes are nearly a hundred illustrations, including reproductions of early appearances in ballad sheets and music books, which show the development of nursery rhyme illustrations over the last two centuries. For this revised edition, the notes have been updated and extended in the light of recent scholarship, providing an unrivalled wealth of literary and bibliographical information. There is also a new essay on the singing tradition of nursery rhymes by Cecily Raysor Hancock, making The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes an indispensable source of reference for scholars and book collectors, and a volume to be treasured by parents and children alike. 'No reader's imagination could fail to be enriched by this book' - Sunday Times 'The classic on the subject' - Daily Telegraph

Developed as an inclusive, broad-ranging & user-friendly text, this book presents the unique insight of teachers as researchers & counters the view that art is emotionally-based & therefore irrelevant to thinking & learning. The areas covered include drama, dance, music, arts environments, technologies, museums & galleries, literacy, cognition, international influences, curriculum development, research & practice.

The Man in the Moon has dropped down to earth for a visit. Over the hedge, a rabbit in trousers is having a pipe with his evening paper. Elsewhere, Alice is passing through a looking glass, Dorothy riding a tornado to Oz, and Jack climbing a beanstalk to heaven. To enter the world of children's literature is to journey to a realm where the miraculous and the mundane exist side by side, a world that is at once recognizable and real--and enchanted. Many books have probed the myths and meanings of children's stories, but Goldthwaite's Natural History is the first exclusively to survey the magic that lies at the heart of the literature. From the dish that ran away with the spoon to the antics of Brer Rabbit and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, Goldthwaite celebrates the craft, the invention, and the inspired silliness that fix these tales in our minds from childhood and leave us in a state of wondering to know how these things can be. Covering the three centuries from the fairy tales of Charles Perrault to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, he gathers together all the major imaginative works of America, Britain, and Europe to show how the nursery rhyme, the fairy tale, and the beast fable have evolved into modern nonsense verse and fantasy. Throughout, he sheds important new light on such stock characters as the fool and the fairy godmother and on the sources of authors as diverse as Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, and Beatrix Potter. His bold claims will inspire some readers and outrage others. He hails Pinocchio, for example, as the greatest of all children's books, but he views C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well. Fresh, incisive, and utterly original, this rich literary history will be required reading for anyone who cares about children's books and their enduring influence on how we come to see the world.