IRSCL Award Winner 2005

The Poetics of Childhood
By Roni Natov

(New York and London: Routledge, 2003)

The IRSCL Award for outstanding research honours a distinguished work in the field of children's literature research published in the two years prior to the Congress at which it is awarded. Several eligible publications were nominated for the 2005 award, documenting how productive IRSCL members have been and how children's literature studies continues to go from strength to strength. The Board's task in selecting the winner was not easy but this year's winner was unanimously acknowledged by all as providing an example of excellent scholarship deserving of the Award.

The Poetics of Childhood by Roni Natov, Professor of English at Brooklyn College New York and co-founder of the journal The Lion and the Unicorn , is a study of the sensibility of childhood and the way writers have attempted to find a language in their work for children and for a mature audience with which to recreate this sensibility. Closely and intelligently reading an eclectic range of works from classics of children's literature (Burnett's The Secret Garden , Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden ) as well as modern titles (Rowling's Harry Potter ), the poetry of Wordsworth and Blake, Nabokov's Lolita, Lessing's The Fifth Child or Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things , Natov examines the construction of innocence, of the pastoral and the anti-pastoral, not shirking from the dark images that contribute to the poetics of childhood.

Extensive reviews of Roni Natov's The Poetics of Childhood by IRSCL scholars from the Netherlands, the USA, Finland, the UK and Italy can be read in the review section of the IRSCL website ( http://www.irscl.ac.uk/reviews.htm ).