For this seminar, we will read and discuss, in the spirit of my book Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, several classic children’s novels and fairy tales. In Tending the Heart, I endeavor to uncover within the great children’s stories the deeply rooted sources of morality. We will explore in depth how these stories build virtue and enrich the child’s moral imagination, which is the capacity to see and experience ours as a moral world.
To this end, I have chosen three of the great children’s novels: George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Kenneth Grahame’s, The Wind in the Willows, and Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. The four classic fairy tales I have in mind are: Snow White, the Grimms’ version of Sleeping Beauty (usually titled Briar Rose), Beauty and the Beast, and Hansel and Gretel.
