Karin Google Lesnik-Oberstein

This is in my view the most important book ever written on children's literature and one of the most important books ever written also on wider issues around childhood. Rose introduces a wholly original (still the case, after all these years!) analysis of how children's literature as a body of work written by adults for children reveals what those adult writers (and adults more widely) believe children to be. But Rose further argues that this is not something that can be avoided by finding out if the child of children's literature is 'accurate' or not so one could know what children are 'really like' - instead,Rose argues through a specific interpretation of psychoanalysis (not the common, crude, version of psychoanalysis as a kind of bad pop-psychology at all) that childhood is always, necessarily, the memory of a past and is not a psycho-biological 'object'. This is a very challenging and complex argument which has very fundamental consequences: brilliant!