McGavran knows what he is looking for: The often obscure and even contradictory forms that romanticism took in nineteenth-century English children's literature. He performs a service to scholarship in children's literature by showing that the books being examined are not so simple as they may seem to those who disregard the complexity and sophistication of the field and only make a slap-dash study of it.

—Nineteenth-Century Prose

An impressive and valuable collection.

—Romantic Movement Bibliography

Offers thorough and careful readings of canonical Romantic texts and authors, but also showcases very good examples of some of the most interesting, revisionist work current in scholarship of the history of children's literature. . . . This collection asks provocative questions with implications beyond this volume, allowing for further study on this critical period in children's literature scholarship.

—Victorian Studies

The high quality of most of these contributions should help to break down further the obstinate notion that works written for juveniles somehow lack the required Arnoldian 'high seriousness' or Jamesian craftsmanship of canonized adult classics.

—Journal of English and Germanic Philology

The treatment of 'romanticism' in these eleven essays raises questions about the utility of broad and diffuse terms of explanation, especially when applied as if they had an autonomous content largely independent of the complex changing social, economic, political, aesthetic, religious, and psychological realities that affected perception and conduct from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

—History of Education Quarterly