‘Words and Wonder: Rediscovering Children’s Literature’

Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas

Walk through the doors of Words and Wonder and you’re not just entering an exhibition — you’re stepping into a parallel universe, one that smells faintly of old paper, ink, and something far more elusive: memory.

Hosted at the Harry Ransom Center, this lovingly assembled journey through the history, politics, and cultural power of children’s literature is less a nostalgic pat on the head and more a reminder that the stories we read before we can name our wounds are often the ones that shape them most.

The exhibition opens with the expected — Carroll, Milne, Baum, Blyton — but sidesteps sentimentality by asking better questions: Who gets to tell the story? Who is allowed to be the hero? And who’s been left out of the library altogether?

It’s a masterclass in curation. Yes, there are glorious first editions (Dickens’ Child’s History of England, Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a tattered but still luminous Velveteen Rabbit), but the real magic happens in the margins. Drafts with furious crossings-out, letters between authors and editors debating the “suitability” of witches or weeping, censorship notes that now read like satire. And best of all: glimpses into stories that never made it into the canon — stories by women, by queer authors, by Indigenous and Black writers whose work was deemed too strange, too sad, too real.

A small but electrifying display pairs books that shaped generations with the social conditions under which they were published. A 1940s reader extolling the virtues of silent girls and obedient dogs sits uncomfortably beside a zine-style handbound book from a 1970s feminist collective titled Jenny Fights Back. There’s an entire case devoted to banned books — And Tango Makes Three nestled between The Bluest Eye and The Rabbits. You get the sense that the real wonder here is not imagination, but resistance.

For all its archival reverence, Words and Wonder is anything but twee. It’s playful, yes — you can hear the occasional giggle from a delighted child spotting a beloved cover — but it also respects childhood as a site of complexity. There’s a wall of quotes from young readers that offers more insight than most academic panels: “This book made me feel seen.” “This book made me afraid in a good way.” “I didn’t know girls could be wolves too.”

Amen, kid.

By the time you reach the final room — an interactive storytelling space filled with floor cushions, future classics, and a writing station for visitors to contribute their own tales — the message has landed: children’s literature isn’t lesser. It isn’t fluff. It’s the first architecture of belief.

And as Words and Wonder makes clear, the battle over what children are allowed to imagine is always, always a political one.

So bring your inner child. And your critical adult. They’ll both leave wiser.