"Thy Life to Mend, This Book Attend": Reading and Healing in the Arc of Children's Literature

Abstract

Reading and healing come together in the traditions of children's literature as ways of locating the child's imaginative world in bed. In the American Puritan tradition, in particular, acts of reading and forms of healing give voice to a distinctively inward looking sense of youthful spirituality — a kind of antitheatrical conception of childhood. And in a range of works responding to that Puritan tradition (Hawthorne's exemplary biographies for children; Margaret Wise Brown's classic *Goodnight Moon*), the acts of reading together constitute acts of making both the child and the family whole.