Fundamental Concepts of Children's Literature Research

Literary and Sociological Approaches

Hans-Heino Ewers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415896481
• eBook ISBN: 9781135968250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book, Ewers provides students and professors with a new system of categorization for a differentiated description of children's literature. In the early 1970s, Swedish children's literature scholar Göte Kingberg worked to establish a system of scientific terminology for international use, but these terms are now somewhat antiquated. This book offers a much-needed update, systematically analyzing the field and articulating its key definitions, terms, and concepts.

International in scope, this study touches on subjects including the distribution of primers and textbooks, the means by which children's books are evaluated and classified, and the ways in which children's literature can find an adult audience. Also discussed are the system of symbols, norms, concepts, and discourses that have evolved during the past two centuries, leading to an investigation of how authors and publishers have endeavored to make literature "appropriate" for children and of what it means to accommodate children's needs, wishes, and values. Throughout, Ewers provides concrete examples and clear definitions of terms so that any scholar interested in children's literature will find this book approachable, insightful, and one that crosses cultural boundaries.

Part I
Literary Communication with Children and Young People

Chapter One
Children’s Literary Communication

If we ask what the subject matter of children’s and young people’s literary studies is, the answer might well be: all literary communication in which children and young people are the addressees. We will therefore reserve the term ‘children’s literary communication’—meaning literary communication to children—for this subsection of all literary communication. This will then be the first category to be explained in this introductory study. As far as the concept of communication is concerned, inclusive definitions are provided by general communication studies (cf. Schulz 2002) and cultural semiotics (cf. Posner 2003). We will delve no further here into the question of what distinguishes literary communication from other forms of communication, such as scientific communication or everyday communication. Let us at this point just mention, however, that in the context of this study the word ‘literary’ is not confined to fiction, but also always includes factual and informational literary communication. With this broad conception of the term ‘literary’ we are continuing a tradition that has long predominated in this field: experts in children’s and young people’s literature have from the very beginning always regarded non- fiction as falling within their purview.

Children’s literary communication as a special case within literary communication

In order to distinguish between children’s and young people’s literature and other forms of literary communication, we must begin with the basic categories of communication theory, those of sender, message, and receiver. Communications are targeted, i.e. the messages they transmit are aimed at one or more target groups. These latter are called the addressees, meaning those among the receivers “whom the sender wishes to believe that s/he is trying to reach them with his/her utterance” (Posner 2003, 41). The establishment of these target group(s) is one element of communication, which can be defined as the process of addressing. This process is performed by the addresser. The addressee(s) can be named in, or their names can be attached to, the message, which then demonstrates this process of addressing. This category of addressing can therefore sometimes describe a process (to address), on other occasions a quality of the message (being addressed).

The fact that children and young people are among the receivers of a literary message is, from the viewpoint presented here, not an adequate reason to call this ‘children’s literary communication’. We can only talk of it in this way when the message(s) they receive are actually messages addressed to children and young people. To set children’s literary communication in motion is the business of the addresser; this occurs by means of the act of addressing a literary message to children and young people. It is produced by all the participants in an act of literary communication who are capable of or have the authority to undertake the act of addressing, which in this case means: to declare that the group constituted by children and young people are the intended direct recipients of this literary message.

Of course, the receivers of a literary message need not be exclusively the addressees, the group that is targeted or spoken to. There are always other receivers as well who are not among the addressees of the message and of whom the sender has, as a rule, no knowledge. In face-to-face communication this would be unthinkable; in such a situation the sender of the message can ensure that it does not reach the wrong ears. With literary communication, however, we are dealing with written communication, which represents an “extended speech situation”. The two elements of a normal “speech situation”, the production of a message by a speaker and its reception by a hearer, are now separated. They become spatially and temporally separate “incomplete speech situations”, which are no longer connected by means of personal contact, but only through the medium of the message stored in the form of writing (Ehlich 1983, 38). As a result we have the increasing independence of the “handing down of the text [ … ] from the persons who are handing it down” and their intentions concerning the receiver (ibid., 39). In other words, we are faced with the possibility that the message will be appropriated by unforeseen receivers.

Children and young people are obviously among the unintended receivers of many literary messages: To a certain extent they tend to receive literary messages that are not addressed to them. For instance, young people are among the passionate fans of Terry Pratchett or Stephen King, whose works are certainly not addressed to young people. This means, however, that children and young people are not just involved in children’s and young people’s literary communication in the sense defined above, but also in other forms of literary communication. It is therefore sensible to separate children’s literary communication from the generality of literary communication involving children when we are defining terminology. The latter would include all forms of literary communication in which children and young people are involved as the receivers of literary messages.

Although after these introductory remarks we intend to limit children’s and young people’s literary studies to the investigation of children’s literary communication, not all literary communication involving children and young people is part of its remit. Looking at all of these different forms in their entirety would in our view be the responsibility of other disciplines, such as reception theory or the theory of reading or readers wherever the latter two are concerned with children and young people. These disciplines overlap with children’s and young people’s literary studies at the point where they are concerned with the reception by children and young people of all the literary messages that are addressed to children and young people.

The pattern of children’s literary communication

The sender can stand in various different relationships with the literary message s/he is sending, resulting in a need to distinguish between different types of sender. We may be dealing with senders who are communicating a message for the first time; they are then at the same time the producers, the originators of the message. Other senders are passing on messages, which they have not produced themselves, but have received from other senders (we then call them ‘resenders’). They are thus feeding messages into a communication process for a second or later time. In doing this, they can behave in different ways: They may pass the message on in unaltered form, but they could also send the message on only after they have altered it in some way. A fourth type of sender is defined by his/her place in the course of the communication: this is the resender who chooses different paths for resending, who can decide, which transmission channel the message is fed into. Apart from the first, all other sender types are receivers of a literary message before they become active as senders. In our view, literary communication can only be adequately captured by a communication model that starts from the premise of such a graduated set of modes of sending literary messages. A message like this, before it lands with a receiver who does not send it on but simply receives it, runs through a number of intermediary stations where it is received and passed on.

In the present context it is important to realize that all the senders involved in a particular literary communication process can at the same time function as addressers. The originator and first sender of a literary message can provide this with a particular address. In such a case, all subsequent senders have two courses of action open to them: They can respect the address that has already been attached to the message and allow it to form part of the resent message, thus avoiding, as (re)sender, becoming active as an addresser. But they also have the opportunity to provide an address of their own choice. They can limit a pre-existing act of addressing or expand it by means of adding further addressees, or even replace it with a totally different address. In terms of the definition provided here, we can talk of children’s literary communication from the very moment it is decided to address a particular literary message to children and young people. This can happen at the very beginning, but it can also happen later, at any one of the many intermediate stages of literary communication. We are therefore dealing with different patterns of children’s literary communication, which can be defined in terms of which type of sender brings children and young people into play as addressees in any given case.

One initial scenario might be that we have senders who address a literary message to children and young people without having produced it themselves, but simply readdress it—though without any change—thus extending the scope of the address. In the form in which the sender received it, the literary message showed no signs of being addressed to children and young people: It is only by means of the act of resending that it is additionally aimed at this originally unintended group of receivers. Let us take a sender—a parent, librarian, teacher or educator—who regards novels like Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel (1906), Carson McCullers’ Frankie (1946), J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) or Günter Grass’ novella Cat and Mouse (1961), as suitable reading matter for young people, and puts this idea into practice, whether it be by means of giving the books as gifts or by personal recommendation, or on a more general level by publication, including public book discussions and reading lists etc. In individual cases a lasting consensus can be produced: Parts of what is generally available as literary material can in this way be marked as being suitable reading matter for children and young people, without having been originally intended for this target group and even without being produced as a separate publication tailored to that group. This pattern of children’s literary communication can be designated here as ‘recommended reading for children and young people’.

A second scenario is somewhat similar at first: Here too a literary message is not created but simply passed on unchanged, having its address expanded to include children and young people. However, this change in the group addressed does not just occur as a reading recommendation, as the resenders are able to produce the work as an independent publication. They have the opportunity to feed the chosen literary message into a channel of transmission that is aimed specifically at the target group of children and young people. An example of such a channel might be children’s and young people’s periodicals, whose publishers have always printed lyric poetry, prose, and dramatic works of general literature unchanged in their publications and thus in a certain sense brought them retrospectively into the sphere of children’s literary communication. As we can see here, it is not just individual literary messages, but also channels of transmission or organs of publication as such that can be provided with an address. As well as children’s and young people’s periodicals we could also mention almanacs, book series, programs on radio and television or Internet home pages, which are targeted at children and young people. This pattern of children’s literary communication will be defined here as ‘children’s-only publishing’.

The third pattern we will mention here has as addresser a sender who has not produced the message, but simply received it. This sender also adds children and young people to the previous addressees as a target group. However, s/he only regards such an extension of the groups addressed as justifiable if s/ he modifies the literary message s/he has received. Modifications of received literary messages can be very different in extent, and thus we must ask ourselves from what point onward we can speak of a ‘new’ literary message. However we will here only consider those cases where the sender describes her/ his own message explicitly as the modification of a previously received message. To put it in terms of literary theory, the sender insists on being, not the author or imitator, but simply the reworker of another’s original work. In this particular form of children’s literary communication we are dealing with the phenomenon of ‘children’s editing’ of works of general literature. Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s travels or Baron Münchhausen might be included in such a list, books, which are by no means presented to children in their original form, but rather as re-worked texts.

With the fourth pattern to be dealt with here, it is the act of addressing the literary message to children and young people that is the starting point of the literary communication. In this case it is the originator and first sender of the literary message her/himself who functions as addresser and determines that children and young people are the group at which the message is targeted. An author decides to enter into literary communication with children and young people and generates a message, which is aimed from the outset at this target group. Here the message is in its original form already addressed to children and young people. The author also expects that the original act of addressing will be respected by all other senders concerned with further transmission, and that her/his message will be fed into a channel that leads to the desired receivers. We will define this form here as ‘original children’s writing’.

In many ways researchers into children’s and young people’s literature tend to regard the last-mentioned form of children’s and young people’s literary communication as their actual object of investigation and to neglect the other forms or even to ignore them. We cannot accept this. Of course the fourth pattern of children’s literary communication described above takes on the form of a complete literary communication parallel to general literary and other forms of literary communication: It is here that it has most set itself apart as a form of independent literary communication. On the other hand, the other forms present a kind of serial communication, which is linked to other forms of literary communication within which it is less a matt...

Table of contents

• Children’s Literature and Culture
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Literary Communication with Children and Young People
• Part II Children’s Literary Distribution and Evaluation Systems
• Part III Semiotics of Children’s and Young Adult Literature
• Part IV Children’s Literature as Literature Suitable for Children and Young People
• Notes
• Index
• Persons
• Subjects