The neglect of sustained, theoretical inquiry into the aesthetics of children’s literature is a symptom of our discipline’s history. As it developed in North America, the academic discipline of children’s literature emerged in the context of the canon-busting and -expanding cultural studies movements of the 1960s and ’70s, a theoretical milieu newly suspicious of objective claims of aesthetic value. In recent years, however, the global field has seen renewed interest in aesthetics as “sensuous knowledge,” a mode of apprehension inextricably bound to both history and ideology. The word _aesthetics_ has ancient roots, its earliest forms the Greek _aisthanomai_ and _aisthetikos_ (both summoning the idea of perception). In his seminal study _Aesthetica_ (1750–58), Alexander Baumgarten reworked these ancient terms—including _aisth_ē_sis_ (sensation)—into our more contemporary understanding of _aesthetics_. The term has oscillated between apparent opposites: aesthetic value as both subjective and universal, as perceived sensually but primarily understood via intellectual contemplation, and as inhering in objects themselves yet requiring cultivated judgment to be experienced. As Raymond Williams reminds us, Baumgarten uses the term to describe “beauty as phenomenal perfection” (1983a, 31). Lars-Olof Åhlberg argues that since Baumgarten, aesthetics “has mostly been conceived of as the philosophy of art, or, as the theory...

**Overview of the Course** In the spring of 2013 I led a graduate seminar at San Diego State University called Keywords in Children’s Literature (ENGL 727). The course centered on Philip Nel and Lissa Paul’s first edition of _Keywords in Children’s Literature_ (New York UP, 2011). _Keywords_ was our only required text. SDSU’s Department of English and Comparative Literature is the home of the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, and it has a robust undergraduate and graduate program of study in children’s literature (three contributors to _Keywords_ are SDSU professors of children’s and young adult literature). Therefore, the group of graduate students enrolled in this seminar had already taken at least one undergraduate- and one graduate-level course in literature for young people. For professors at an institution with students less familiar with children’s literature, I would recommend supplementing _Keywords_ with an array of primary texts discussed in the volume. However, given our students’ background in children’s literature, I felt comfortable focusing almost exclusively on _Keywords_, using the volume as a primary text to explore and—eventually—to generate a new list of the key terms and concepts around which the discourse of children’s literary studies has crystalized. We did...