Children's Literature

Carrie Hintz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138667952
• eBook ISBN: 9781317212126
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Children's Literature is an accessible introduction to this engaging field. Carrie Hintz offers a defining conceptual overview of children's literature that presents its competing histories, its cultural contexts, and the theoretical debates it has instigated.

Positioned within the wider field of adult literary, film, and television culture, this book also covers:

• Ideological and political movements
• Children's literature in the age of globalization
• Postcolonial literature, ecocriticism, and animal studies

Each chapter includes a case study featuring well-known authors and titles, including Charlotte's Web, Edward Lear, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. With a comprehensive glossary and further reading, this book is invaluable reading for anyone studying Children's Literature.

1

DEFINITIONS

Definers and anti-definers

Roderick McGillis once called the energy scholars put into defining children’s literature ‘a mug’s game’ that ‘deflects them from confronting important issues such as the subversive potential or the political implications of their subject’ (McGillis 2009, 261). Marah Gubar notes the virtues of keeping definitions of children’s literature as open as possible:

The fact that something is very difficult to define—even ‘impossible to define exactly’—does not mean that it does not exist or cannot be talked about. In such cases, we simply have to accept that the concept under consideration is complex and capacious; it may also be unstable (its meaning shifts over time and across different cultures) and fuzzy at the edges (its boundaries are not fixed and exact). Childhood is one such concept; children’s literature is another (Gubar 2011, 212).

For Gubar, the lack of consensus is ‘no real impediment’ for ‘the vast, silent majority of scholars’ who ‘cheerfully carry on with their scholarship on specific texts, types, and eras of children’s literature’ (Gubar 2011, 210).

Overly firm definitions prevent us from exploring texts that might enrich our understanding of children’s literature. This includes texts that may have been part of the outlook of children in an earlier generation but are not read now, and texts not intended for children but enjoyed and read by them nevertheless. Many definitions of children’s literature that stressed qualities of simplicity of form and theme, Gubar notes, had the effect of excluding many authors from children’s literature’s ‘golden age’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time that produced many of the works that are now considered ‘classics.’ Works such as Tom Hood’s From Nowhere to the North Pole (1875), with its quicksilver reversals between the human and the animal worlds, exhibited both sly humour and a strong current of satire, and can therefore fall between the cracks of a definition that stresses simplicity of form and theme.

Too much adherence to strict definitions, then, runs the risk of narrowing a critic’s field of vision. Gubar, for one, would prefer that we err on the side of inclusion. There is no doubt that some critics espouse an ‘anti-definer’ stance out of frustration that a definition of children’s literature remains elusive. This is well expressed in John Rowe Townsend’s remark: ‘Since any line-drawing must be arbitrary, one is tempted to abandon the attempt and say there is no such thing as children’s literature, there is just literature. And in an important sense, that is true. Children are not a separate form of life from people; no more than children’s books are a separate form of literature from just books’ (Townsend 1980, 196–197). Townsend’s argument, while in many ways appealing, fails to account for any qualities of children’s literature that make it distinct from adult literature.

Perry Nodelman, staunchly positioned in the ‘definer’s camp,’ contends that many people refuse to define children’s literature because they have an almost mystical sense of childhood’s ineffability: ‘Childhood cannot be defined because definition is an act of logic and reason, and childhood is presumably the antithesis of logic and reason—a time of innocence, the glory of which is exactly its irrationality, the lack of knowledge and understanding that presumably offers insight into a greater wisdom’ (Nodelman 2008, 147). Ironically, he asserts, those who resist pinning down a definition of childhood actually hold a firm definition of it as ‘a form of pastoral or utopian idyll’ (Nodelman 2008, 147). He believes that all works of children’s literature share elements in common and that there is a need to identify their common features. His own list spans four pages of bullet points with 45 distinct qualities that help him identify a text as a work of children’s literature, including techniques such as ‘a childlike view of the events described’ (Nodelman 2008, 77).

Defining Children’s Literature: shaping the field

While it is true that a vast number of Children’s Literature scholars are able to proceed with their work even in the absence of definitional consensus, it is a rare Children’s Literature scholar who has never reflected on the boundaries of their field or what distinguishes a work of children’s literature. It is in that spirit that we will examine some of the prevailing definitions of children’s literature, aware that each definition allows for a certain vision of children’s literature but excludes others. As Gubar noted, definitions of children’s literature shape our encounter with the texts themselves and what we exclude from our field of vision. But should the genre be defined by its formal qualities, the subjective experience of the readers, the intentions of its authors, the contours of the literary market, or some combination of these factors? I will explore various definitions, but I will also identify exceptions that render these definitions flawed or non-viable. What is clear, ultimately, is that social and political institutions determine the contours of children’s literature and also determine our working definitions of children’s literature.

When trying to isolate what makes children’s literature distinct, critics frequently start with its formal qualities, especially the ostensible simplicity of children’s books. Myles McDowell offered such a definition in 1973:

children’s books are generally shorter; they tend to favour an active rather than a passive treatment, with dialogue and incident rather than description and introspection; child protagonists are the rule; conventions are much used; the story develops within a clear-cut moral schematism which much adult fiction ignores; children’s books tend to be optimistic rather than depressive; language is child-oriented; plots are of a distinctive order, probability is often disregarded … (McDowell 1973, 51).

Peter Hunt aptly notes that this is a ‘circular definition’ (Hunt 2011, 45). Children’s literature is anything with a shorter, simpler structure; works with a shorter, simpler structure are children’s literature. In addition to its circularity, we can question the individual characteristics McDowell assigns to children’s literature. Even the supposedly clear-cut morality of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, with their overt allegories of good and evil, has its ambiguities. Edmund’s perfidy is attributed to the malign influence of his school, which makes the narrative more complicated and serves as something of an absolution of his wicked betrayals. Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) presents another challenge to McDowell’s sense of the simplicity of children’s literature. Epic in length, with intertwined adventure, myth, and folklore, Watership Down draws self-consciously from classical epics by Homer and Virgil to tell the story of a warren of rabbits that escapes an environmental disaster to seek a new home. It also includes words from the rabbits’ own invented language, and this vocabulary is essential for an understanding of the rabbits’ culture. Finally, the work’s themes are morally complex and require critical judgments from its readers. For example, at one point the main group of wild rabbits encounters a prosperous warren known as Cowslip’s Warren, named after Cowslip, the first rabbit they meet. They soon discover that the tame rabbits are surrounded by human snares but ignore these threats to enjoy material comfort for a comfortable life, laying bare the theme of freedom and security. In its contrasting models of heroism, the book asks readers to make judgments about physical strength vs. intellectual acuity. Watership Down allows for darkness and pessimism, especially as regards the impact of human intervention in nature. It is very far away from the brevity and simplicity (both moral and formal) McDowell stresses, and helps us see the innate limitations of his definition. Some critics, to be sure, do challenge the classification of Watership Down as children’s literature. But others read the book as central within the children’s literature tradition, not to mention the many child readers who have read and enjoyed the book through the years.

In one of the first studies of children’s literature, written in 1932, F.J. Harvey Darton offered a much-quoted definition of children’s literature as ‘printed books produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet’ (Darton [1932] 1982, 1). This, of course, excludes much literature that is didactic in nature, and in particular some of the earliest children’s literature. In Darton’s definition, children’s literature is specifically crafted to offer children diversion. As we will see in Chapter 2, this is often a position associated with the 19th century ‘golden age’ of children’s literature, with the anti-didacticism of writers such as Lewis Carroll. It may even exclude works such as concept picture-books, which are widely produced today and which function to teach children the alphabet, their numbers, and so on. You could argue that these works, too, are capable of offering their young readers pleasure, with visually and verbally appealing elements and the not-inconsiderable delight of mastering concepts. Perhaps Darton’s definition could apply to such works, but then the lines between the books ‘meant to teach them’ and those that offer ‘spontaneous pleasure’ become hopelessly muddled. Basing the definition of children’s literature on its capacity to spark or sustain pleasure obviously raises problems; the notion of ‘spontaneous pleasure’ is too subjective to serve as a reliable sign of children’s literature.

We might consider a definition based on children’s ownership of their own books. This, of course, excludes those children who do not have the resources or the desire to own books but who still read. It also links children’s literature with capitalist systems that encourage private ownership of goods and the cultivation of an ethic of ownership in youth. Many scholars have considered children’s literature as a process of embourgeoisement, the inculcation of middle-class ideals. Yet a definition that pivots on children’s ownership of their own books ignores the fact that a book read out loud to a child at a library or schoolroom is still children’s literature, even if the book is not owned by the child or by the child’s family.

Others base their understanding of children’s literature on a specific understanding of private reading, as distinguished from an oral tradition. In his controversial The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman ([1982] 1994) argued that institutions that promoted childhood literacy gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘childhood,’ complete with its own literature. Adults in their turn kept ‘a rich content of secrets’ from the young: ‘secrets about sexual relations, but also about money, about violence, about illness, about death, about social relations (Postman [1982] 1994).’ In his view, contemporary mass media culture has eroded the boundaries between child and adult: both childhood and children’s literature disappear when children are exposed to the same mass media products consumed by adults. This concept of children’s literature excludes dramatic productions shared by child and adult audiences and any book read aloud to a mixed audience of children and adults, especially in earlier periods in history. For example, Abigail Williams’ (2017) Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home talks about reading in 18th-century England as a collective and intergenerational practice that often involved books read aloud: a model of literacy that did not separate child and adult audiences, despite the presence of some bowdlerization.

When defining children’s literature as the literature that adults write with a child audience in mind, we violate the often-stated tabu in literary criticism against the ‘intentional fallacy,’ the assumption that the meaning of a work is inherent in the intentions of the author. In 1946, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote an essay challenging the notion that an author’s intention can be discerned from a given literary work. Any explicit statements about the intended meaning of the work from the author or anyone else can be similarly misleading (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946). Basing a definition of children’s literature on the idea that it is the literature intended for children, therefore, does not account for the ways in which children have claimed many books never intended for them. On the other hand, Linda Hutcheon offers a subtle critique of the intentional fallacy, noting that New Critics such as Wimsatt and Beardsley (as well as poststructuralist critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) objected to the use of ‘authorial intent as the sole arbiter and guarantee of the meaning and value of a work of art. No one denies that creative artists have intentions; the disagreements have been over how those intentions should be deployed in the interpretation of meaning and the assignment of value’ (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 106–107). There is still, then, some value in exploring the author’s intention. It still matters. For example, Enid Blyton and J.K. Rowling wrote for children intentionally. Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982) is written in the voice of a teenager, but much of its delicious irony is aimed at an adult readership, as was her intention.

Some critics see children’s literature as encompassing anything at all that children read, including works clearly intended for adults, with the understanding that anything read by a child is ‘children’s literature.’ This is a definition respectful of the range of children’s reading and willing to acknowledge how wide in scope it can be. However, if anything, this definition is too capacious and does not go very far in delineating the boundaries of children’s literature, since in theory any literary work could be included. If Gubar is right to argue that we should avoid a definition that is too narrow, some might argue that we should avoid a definition that is too broad.

Barbara Wall roots the definition of children’s literature in the tonal and narrative changes that happen when adults write for children:

My conclusions are founded on the conviction that adults, whether or not they are speaking ironically, speak differently in fiction when they are aware that they are addressing children. Such subtleties of address define a children’s book (Wall 1991).

Many critics have developed an understanding of children’s literature as a mixture of younger and older voices, and one that speaks to children and adults simultaneously. U.C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers introduced the concept of ‘cross-writing,’ noting that ‘a dialogic mix of older and younger voices occurs in texts too often read as univocal. Authors who write for children inevitably create a colloquy between past and present selves’ (Knoepflmacher and Myers 1997, vii).

Some definitions of children’s literature are based on the notion that it is the literature that best captures the physical, psychological, or existential experience of childhood. Peter Hollindale, for example, notes in his Signs of Childness in Children’s Books (1997) that ‘childness is the distinguishing property of a text in children’s literature, setting it apart from other literature as a genre, and it is also the property that the child brings to the reading of a text’ (Hollindale 1997, 47). Hollindale reads children’s literature as a place where many interests meet:

the children’s concern with the presentness of her own childhood, and interest in its possibilities; the adult’s recall of childhood and desire to refresh the roots and keep a sense of continuous identity; and the adult’s hopes and beliefs and desires about childhood, what it is and what it ought to be (Hollindale 1997, 42).

Here we see children’s literature fulfilling a range of wishes and needs for very different readers. As Kimberley Reynolds explains: ‘Hollindale proposes that children’s books create a space where adulthood and childhood can meet and mingle, with adults reactivating aspects of what it was like to be a child—particularly the mutability and potentiality of childhood—while children gain insights into what it is like to be adult’ (Reynolds 2011, 55). While children seek adult knowledge, adults, in contrast, seek to connect with their own childhood, constructed in imagination as a simpler and more pleasurable time. Maria Nikolajeva describes children’s literature (distinguishing it from young adult literature) as ‘optative’ or presenting a utopian vision of childhood that reflects the realm of childhood as adults want it to be, ‘not as it is, but as adult authors remember it, as they wish it were or had been and might be in the future, and not least what they wish, consciously or subconsciously, that young readers should believe it is’ (Nikolajeva 2014, 33). When encountering content that seems to puncture that innocence, adult readers express a sense of shock, wanting to shield children from the seamier side of life, a desire that many child readers in their eagerness to attain worldly knowledge do not share.

For Nodelman, children’s literature aspires to control its child readers by underscoring the polarities between adult and child, often in complicated ways. Behind every work of children’s literature there is a phenomenon he terms the ‘hidden adult,’ a sophisticated adult knowledge that remains in seemingly innocent texts for children...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Definitions
• 2. Children’s literature: early and global histories
• 3. Children’s literature and the political
• 4. Theories and methodologies
• 5. Children’s literature and the global and natural world
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index