20 The Urban to Rural Gradient of Children’s Stories: The Happy Prince

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Introduction 1
4. Section One: On Reading
5. The Existential Princess: A Fairy Tale 15
6. 1 Beasts at Bedtime: Reading about Nature with Children 17
7. 2 Doctor Dolittle and the Question of Reading 26
8. Section Two: Pastoral Stories
9. Topophilia 35
10. 3 The Pastoral Promise: And They All Lived Happily Ever After 39
11. 4 The Ecology of Pooh 49
12. 5 Peter Rabbit’s Brutal Paradise 59
13. 6 In the Garden of Earthly Delights 71
14. 7 Beyond the Pool of Darkness: The Pastoral Roots of Irish Stories 83
15. Section Three: Wilderness Stories
16. Lost in the Popo Agie Wilderness 95
17. 8 On the Mallard 98
18. 9 Where the Wild Things Always Were 104
19. 10 Wild and Grimm Fairy Tales: Wilderness on the Margins 119
20. 11 “Gollumgate”: Tolkien and Ireland 133
21. 12 “I Am in Fact a Hobbit”: Tolkien as Environmentalist 139
22. 13 The Tin Woodman’s Path of Carnage through the Land of Oz 152
23. 14 Hunger and Thirst in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games 156
24. Section Four: Children on Wild Islands
25. Old Tom’s Island 163
26. 15 The Why and the What of Islands 165
27. 16 Archmage Ged, Merlin, and Harry Potter and the Training of Wizards and Witches 178
28. 17 Is L. T. Meade the Real Author of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five? 191
29. 18 Robinson Crusoe: Now Here’s a Cannibalism Tale for Every Child 195
30. 19 On Isles Benevolent; on Isles Malevolent 213
31. Section Five: Urban Stories
32. The Urban Wild 225
33. 20 The Urban to Rural Gradient of Children’s Stories: The Happy Prince 228
34. 21 Antipathy to Urban Life in Nursery Rhymes 231
35. 22 Urban Decay: R. Crumb in the Nursery 235
36. 23 The Escape Artist: Calvin and Hobbes and the Suburban Idyll 239
37. 24 Babar: Elephant and Urban Adapter 244
38. Section Six: Learning to Care
39. And the World Hummed Back 255
40. 25 Caring for the Rose: Environmental Literacy and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince 256
41. 26 What Then Should We Do? The Lorax in the Twenty-First Century 272
42. Section Seven: Good Night, Sleep Tight
43. In the Tot Lot 277
44. 27 Bookend Conversations 281
45. Acknowledgments 291
46. Notes 295
47. Index 319