Books Received

Darger’s Resources. By Michael Moon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Henry Darger was an eccentric outsider artist who often depicted children as martyrs and victims of violence. In his scholarly study of Darger’s art, Michael Moon discusses how Darger was inspired, in a sometimes twisted way, by illustrations from children’s books, comic strips, and other forms of popular culture associated with childhood. Moon’s study does not shy away from the disturbing nature of Darger’s art, but instead shows how it addresses the relationship between childhood and the dark side of the human imagination.

Nursery Rhyme Comics. Edited by Chris Duffy. Introduction by Leonard S. Marcus. New York: First Second Books, 2011.

The editor of this collection invited fifty contemporary cartoonists to illustrate traditional nursery rhymes, and the result is an amusing and eclectic collection of nursery rhymes presented as comic strips. The contributors to this collection include Roz Chast, Jules Feiffer, and Gene Luen Yang.

Seedlings: English Children’s Reading and Writers in South Africa. By Elwyn Jenkins. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2012.

The author of several books about South African children’s literature, Elwyn Jenkins has also published many essays related to this topic in journals and magazines. In this volume, he collects these pieces; as such, this book need not be read from cover to cover. Also, not all of the essays deal directly with South African children’s literature. For example, one is about J. R. R. Tolkien and Rudyard Kipling and their connections to South Africa.

Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples. By Charles Dickens. Introduction by Paul Schlicke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Although Charles Dickens was not known as a children’s author, he often wrote about children and young adults. This collection brings together some of Dickens’s earliest pieces about young people. The literary sketches reprinted in this volume all originally appeared in the 1830s.

Teaching Young Adult Literature Today: Insights, Considerations, and Perspectives for the Classroom Teacher. Edited by Judith A. Hayn and Jeffrey S. Kaplan. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

Intended for language arts teachers in middle and secondary schools, this volume consists of fourteen chapters covering such topics as dystopian novels, LGBTQ young adult literature, and genre-blurring literature. In addition to discussing various examples of works for young adults, the contributors provide practical advice for teachers on how to incorporate such literature into classroom activities.