... You asked me how "revolutionary" Where the Wild Things Are is. There have been a good many fine picture books in the past. (Some by Margaret Wise Brown, and illustrated by one of two or three or four talented artists.) But I think Wild Things is the first complete work of art in the picture book field, conceived, written, illustrated, executed in entirety by one person of authentic genius. Most books are written from the outside in. But Wild Things comes from the inside out, if you know what I mean. And I think Maurice's book is the first picture book to recognize the fact that children have powerful emotions, anger and love and hate and only after all that passion, the wanting to be "where someone loved him best of all." I'm writing this in a terrible hurry, so forgive me, please. A lot of good picture books have had fine stories and lovely pictures (Peter Rabbit, the best of Dr. Seuss, Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats), and some have touched beautifully on basic things in a child's life, physical growth, going to bed, coming to terms with a new sister or brother (this is making them sound sappy but they are far from that — I'm thinking of Ruth Krauss' The Growing Story, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon, Charlotte Zolotow's Quarreling Book, the Hobans' Baby Sister for Frances). But it just seems to me that Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are goes deeper than previous picture books. And of course his use of three consecutive double-spreads to show what happened when Max cried, "Let the wild rumpus start!" has never been done in any book.That extract comes from Dear Genius: the collected letters of Ursula Nordstrom (HarperCollins, 2000) edited by Leonard Marcus.
While talking about wild things I note that SSRN offers an extract from Twining's forthcoming General Jurisprudence: Understanding Law from a Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press):
This book explores how globalisation influences the understanding of law. Adopting a broad concept of law and a global perspective, it critically reviews mainstream Western traditions of academic law and legal theory. Its central thesis is that most processes of so-called 'globalisation' take place at sub-global levels and that a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law should encompass all levels of social relations and the legal ordering of these relations. It illustrates how the mainstream Western canon of jurisprudence needs to be critically reviewed and extended to take account of other legal traditions and cultures. Written by the one of the foremost scholars in the field, this important work presents an exciting alternative vision of jurisprudence. It challenges the traditional canon of legal theorists and guides the reader through a field undergoing seismic changes in the era of globalisation.
