num_pages: 384
description: "Rich in content, abundant and perceptive in treatment," wrote The Horn Book of The Green and Burning Tree, Eleanor Cameron's first and now classic exploration of children's books. Readers will find this new volume of her essays no less fascinating and no less devoted to the transforming power of fiction for children. Mrs. Cameron explores issues and questions that have been of lifelong interest, extending and deepening her earlier thinking. In the title essay she examines childhood experience and the writer to come, later taking up the power of dreams and the unconscious in the work of Sendak, Stevenson, Barrie, Carroll, White, and Le Guin, and in her own novels, too. Discussing the creation of character, she looks at Paterson, Mahy, Voigt, Cassedy, and Hoban, among others. And she illuminates other topics as well, including the pleasures and problems of time fantasy; the responsibilities of the critic; and the use and misuse of imagery. Throughout run two themes of passionate interest to her: the power of place and the power of private vision. This is a work of inestimable value to writers, teachers, librarians, students, parents - to anyone interested in giving our youth, as Mrs. Cameron says, "not what it already knows, but what it has not yet divined."
language: English
title: Seed and Vision
titlecomplete: Seed and Vision
ratings_count: 3
awards: awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Mythopoeic Scholarship Award
category: Myth and Fantasy Studies
publisher: Plume