ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on nonsense in poetry for children, its rhetorical means, and its ideological effects. It deals with cautionary verses, with a particular emphasis on the most famous nonsense poem of all time, Lewis Carrol’s ‘Jabberwocky’. The book examines didacticism, as it concerns power and especially gender relations, human–animal relations and adult–child relations. It discusses the wildness and domestication problematics in children’s literature, with particular reference to Jimmy Kennedy’s lyrics to ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’. Besides, the child–adult dichotomy that has been at the core of children’s literature has been to some extent dissolved, with the crossover phenomenon becoming a part of contemporary cultural reality. Entering Planet Earth’s Sixth Great Extinction, also known as the Anthropocene Extinction, the question is what can be done to reverse the course of the current catastrophe.
