ABSTRACT
Coming from the era before the advent of children’s literature, nursery rhymes are, though often thought to be full of hidden meanings, nevertheless a model for texts with a joint child–adult readership – as evidenced in the much-argued allegorical content of many nursery rhymes. With selected texts from Iona Opie and Peter Opie’s The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1997), this chapter investigates the manner in which knowledge of and dissemination of nursery rhymes, via parents and other adults, connects those parent figures and the children in their care with a putative ‘traditional knowledge’ and so a popular wisdom about various aspects of life and society. Themes for analysis include the implication of the unknowability of animals, parameters of non/human identity, nature–culture conflicts, eco-phobia, and the celebration of human kindness/unkindness towards animals. In particular, this chapter examines how nursery rhymes embrace the aesthetics and ethics of human–animal interaction in various manifestations of anthropomorphic nonsense and humanimal ambivalence. We are interested in the source of these ambivalences, and whether they involve relationships between adults and children, or between humans and other-than-human animals.
