Wilson Special Collections Library will host “Corruption of the Innocents: Controversies about Popular Children’s Books” in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room beginning Thursday.
The exhibition, which is free and open to the public until August 7, features pieces of controversial British and American children’s literature and showcases the research of undergraduates enrolled in English 295, “Popular Forms of Children’s Literature.”
“Nowadays, we think of nursery rhymes as harmless and charming, but in the 17th, 18th or even 19th centuries, adults worried about nursery rhymes because they thought they were nonsensical and therefore would lead children astray,” said English professor Laurie Langbauer.
Langbauer said fairy tales were also controversial in the 18th century because of concerns over their violent and sexual content.
Notable items in the exhibition include a World War II propaganda poster by Dr. Seuss, the first English translations of Brothers Grimm and a scrapbook belonging to a Chapel Hill native.
“One of our scrapbooks was put together by an African-American man who kept it throughout his life, but he started when he was a child,” said Emily Kader, rare book research librarian at Wilson Library.
The course itself explores the common notions of childhood in a variety of settings and how popular children’s literature reflected these notions.
“(Students) suggested the ways in which adults were trying to enforce their ideals of what children should be through the books that children read,” said Langbauer. “But when it was popular literature that children searched out on their own, children’s literature could also be a way to contest those ideals, and that gave children a kind of agency in making choice of things that weren’t completely sanctioned.”
