Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
Section One: On Reading
The Existential Princess: A Fairy Tale
1 Beasts at Bedtime: Reading about Nature with Children
2 Doctor Dolittle and the Question of Reading
Section Two: Pastoral Stories
Topophilia
3 The Pastoral Promise: And They All Lived Happily Ever After
4 The Ecology of Pooh
5 Peter Rabbit's Brutal Paradise
6 In the Garden of Earthly Delights
7 Beyond the Pool of Darkness: The Pastoral Roots of Irish Stories
Section Three: Wilderness Stories
Lost in the Popo Agie Wilderness
8 On the Mallard
9 Where the Wild Things Always Were
10 Wild and Grimm Fairy Tales: Wilderness on the Margins
11 "Gollumgate": Tolkien and Ireland
12 "I Am in Fact a Hobbit": Tolkien as Environmentalist
13 The Tin Woodman's Path of Carnage through the Land of Oz
14 Hunger and Thirst in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games
Section Four: Children on Wild Islands
Old Tom's Island
15 The Why and the What of Islands
16 Archmage Ged, Merlin, and Harry Potter and the Training of Wizards and Witches
17 Is L. T. Meade the Real Author of Enid Blyton's Famous Five?
18 Robinson Crusoe: Now Here's a Cannibalism Tale for Every Child
19 On Isles Benevolent; on Isles Malevolent
Section Five: Urban Stories
The Urban Wild
20 The Urban to Rural Gradient of Children's Stories: The Happy Prince
21 Antipathy to Urban Life in Nursery Rhymes
22 Urban Decay: R. Crumb in the Nursery
23 The Escape Artist: Calvin and Hobbes and the Suburban Idyll
24 Babar: Elephant and Urban Adapter
Section Six: Learning to Care
And the World Hummed Back
25 Caring for the Rose: Environmental Literacy and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince
26 What Then Should We Do? The Lorax in the Twenty-First Century
Section Seven: Good Night, Sleep Tight
In the Tot Lot
27 Bookend Conversations
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index