This chapter is an extensively revised and extended version of a chapter published initially as: ‘Children’s Literature and the Environment’ in: Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (eds), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 208-18, with thanks to Zed Books for granting permission for the re-use of the original chapter material. Roger Duvoisin, Children’s Book Illustration: The Pleasures and Problems, in S. Egoff, G. T. Stubbs and L. F. Ashley (eds), Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 361. Stella Lees and Pam Macintyre, The Oxford Companion to Australian Children’s Literature (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 27. I am focusing on Anglo-American culture in this discussion. It is significant that this prevalence of animals and the natural world does not necessarily occur (to the same degree) in children’s books in every culture although it is also notable that these ideas are increasingly exported and disseminated globally. This relatively lengthy list of some of the most famous and/or widely marketed of children’s books (largely selected from British and American texts) is intended to give the reader unacquainted with the history of children’s literature (studies) an idea of the pervasiveness and sheer volume of the presence of ideas about the natural, nature, animals, the environment and ecology in children’s books. This list also suggests (in a necessarily crude way, with no intention or pretence to be definitive, or to suggest specific influences or links) some of the main concepts and uses of nature, animals and the environment in children’s books; the groupings within the listing very roughly divide the books into those primarily focusing on (1) forms of fables, (2) so-called ‘anthropomorphized’ animals (although it may be noted there are critical problems with the term ‘anthropomorphosis’ which I discuss in this chapter further), (3) relationships between humans and animals, (4) mixtures of fairy-tale, fantasy, or nonsense, and humans and animals, (5) humans in the wild (natural environment or animal community). All these categories have occurred from early stages in the production of children’s books, and they account for the main forms in which nature, animals, the environment and/or ecology occur in contemporary texts labelled ‘children’s books’. James Serpell, ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Animals in Children’s Lives’, Society and Animals, 7:2, pp. 87-94, p. 87. For a more detailed version of this argument, see Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For the classic outline of the historical development of the concept of the ‘child’ see: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973). Despite criticisms which have been made of some of the evidence Ariès uses, this book still seems to me the most methodologically sophisticated and interesting study of the field. For a more extensive defence of Ariès see Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. B. Foxley (London: Everyman’s Library, 1911), pp. 76, 84, 147-8. John Locke, The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 259-60. Ibid., p. 259. Jacqueline Rose first formulated this seminal argument in her book The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992 [1984]). Lynne Cherry, The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990); Chief Seattle and Susan Jeffers (illus.), Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle (London: Puffin, 1991). Johan Rudolf Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson (London: Wordsworth, 1993). I have not been able to ascertain if these, or similar, illustrations were present in every other edition. Where I can note that the very issue of whether a ‘real wild’ could ever exist as that which could be outside of a prior knowledge which defines it precisely as ‘real wild’ is part of my reading here. My thanks to Dr Mark Philpott for pointing out to me another source for this biblical allusion, one of the many in The Swiss Family Robinson: in this case not only the Satanic snake, but also Moses’s bronze snake that saved the lives of the Israelites from a plague when they looked upon it. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Period (Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 1987). Sue Walsh, ‘Child/Animal: It’s the “Real” Thing’, in: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 32, Special Issue ‘Children in Literature’, 2002, pp. 151-162, p. 152. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 4-5. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, p. 65. Keith Tester, Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991) Walsh’s note here is: ‘Tester’s argument, which is a critique of what he takes to be Mary Midgley’s essentialist position that a fish is always a fish’, can be found in Tester, pp. 17- 47 (especially pp. 46-47). Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers, ‘Word Children’, in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 178- 203, p. 183. Walsh, ‘Child/ Animal: It’s the “Real” Thing’, pp. 158-9. Sue Walsh, ‘The Child in Wolf’s Clothing: The Meanings of the “Wolf” and Questions of Identity in Jack London’s White Fang’, European Journal of American Culture, 32:1, pp. 55-77, p. 61. References within the quote are to: June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) and Earle Labor (1967), ‘Jack London’s Mondo Cane: “Bâtard,” The Call of the Wild and White Fang’, in J. Tavernier-Courbin (ed.), Critical Essays on Jack London (Boston, MASS: G.K. Hall, 1983), pp. 114–30. Carolyn L. Burke and Joby G. Copenhaver, ‘Animals as People in Children’s Literature’, Language Arts, 81:3, January 2004, pp. 205-13, p. 207. Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 5, p. 7. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 16-17. For an extensive discussion of the history of feminist critiques of science and objectivity see: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Motherhood, Evolutionary Psychology and Mirror Neurons or: “Grammar is Politics by Other Means”’, Feminist Theory, 16:2, pp. 171-187, doi: 10.1177/1464700115586514. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. and annotated by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 68. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books (London: Penguin, 1987 [1894]), p. 13. For much more extensive readings in this way of Kipling’s work, see: Neil Cocks, ‘Hunting the Animal Boy’, in: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 32, Special Issue ‘Children in Literature’, 2002, pp. 177-86 and Sue Walsh, Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood, series ‘Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present’, series ed. Claudia Nelson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). For more extensive discussions of the debates around animals and language, see for instance: Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber, 2003) and Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language (Chicago, ILL.: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, pp. 1-2. Walsh, ‘Child/ Animal: It’s the “Real” Thing’, pp. 159, quoting from Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers, ‘Word Children’, p. 184.