Professor Teresa Michals' book, Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James has been named the Children's Literature Association 2016 Honor Book.
Per the Children's Literature Association Website this honor is "awarded annually by the Association to recognize outstanding book-length contributions to children's literature history, scholarship, and criticism. Eligible titles must be published, book-length works on the history of and/or scholarship or criticism on children's literature."
Awards are given for books published two years prior to the award year.
Published in 2014, the book "explores why some books originally written for a mixed-age audience, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, eventually became children's literature, while others, such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, became adult novels. Michals considers how historically specific ideas about age shaped not only the readership of novels, but also the ways that characters are represented within them. Arguing that age is first understood through social status, and later through the ideal of psychological development, the book examines the new determination of authors at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Henry James, to write for an audience of adults only. In these novels and in their reception, a world of masters and servants became a world of adults and children."
Congratulations to Professor Michals on this award.