Learning how to feel : children's literature and emotional socialization, 1870-1970

The “affective turn” in the humanities has produced a burgeoning scholarship on the role of emotion in social life from a variety of philosophical, theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Among researchers of children’s literature, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Maria Nikolajeva, and John Stephens have introduced Cognitive Poetics and Theory of Mind to the analysis of emotion and empathy in children’s texts. The affective turn has also stimulated renewed interest in, and a proliferation of research centres for, the history of emotion across the globe. Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970 is the work of researchers affiliated with one such institution, the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. The majority of the contributors are historians. Their disciplinary location informs their approach to children’s fiction, mostly from Western Europe, Britain and the United States. It also shapes the contributor’s understanding of how literary texts mediate in the emotional socialization of children and adolescents.