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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. In a perceptive review of The Hidden Adult, McGillis notes:

Adults desire both to end innocence and to preserve it. Such ambiguities necessarily find their way into books for children. And so all books for young readers present their child readers with a world that is simple enough for them to grasp, but this very simplicity implies a condition that is not simple (McGillis 2009, 257).

In Nodelman’s model, children often learn from children’s literature how to be childlike, or how to perform a childlike naïveté that is appealing to adults. I will return later in this chapter to the polarities between adult writer and child reader that have animated so much of the theorization of children’s literature.

Other polarities have affected the development and definition of children’s literature, including gender differences. M.O. Grenby provocatively asks: ‘Is there such a thing as children’s literature in any case? Might it be more accurate to talk of a boys’ literature and a girls’ literature?’ (Grenby 2008, 8). Gender difference, then, is one of many possible differences in the child audience (or of any audience) that make it impossible to generalize about children’s literature as a body. Much of children’s literature, if not all of it, is tailored to a certain demographic group. In Chapter 4, for example, we will see that differences between children (including gender, race, class, sexuality, or any combination of these differences) are driving the articulation of new literary histories and new definitions of the field.

In summary, rooting a definition of children’s literature in formal qualities fails, because counter-examples can always be found. Nor can it be rooted in any one experience of book ownership, or children as recipients of a literature crafted for them. Conflicting accounts of the definition, social purpose, and formal qualities of children’s literature may give the impression that we will never get close to defining the field or come to grips with its cultural meaning. But that might send us back to looking more specifically at each work, seeing how it functions within its own composition, distribution, and reception histories. Furthermore, the ongoing debates about the definition of ‘children’s literature’ reveal different facets of what children’s literature is and how it functions culturally.

Including and excluding texts in the genre

How can you tell when a book is explicitly not for children? Answering this question might help us move to a definition of children’s literature, since it reveals the immense energy our culture expends on what is appropriate for children and what is beyond the pale. We see this in the fact that so many censorship challenges pivot around children’s texts as adults object to their children reading certain texts that do not accord with their sense of what children should read. Children’s literature is seen as a necessary part of a child’s development; many stakeholders in that process are willing to invest a great deal of energy and thought in what young people read. Put less positively, it can be read as a market that commodifies childhood and reduces children and their caregivers to consumers.

Limit cases that challenge the boundaries of children’s literature are illuminating. Profanity, sexuality, and violence are often thought to be inappropriate for children, and even for young adults. Nodelman argues that the range of ‘excludable texts and properties within texts’ is ‘wide and various’:

books adults think children won’t like, books adults think children will like but shouldn’t, nonchildist books or nonquality books, books with language too complex for children’s limited cognitive abilities, texts too long for children’s limited attention spans, material too violent for children’s tender sensibilities or too sexy for children’s innocent purity—or, alternatively, material violent enough or sexy enough to dangerously arouse children’s uncontrollable passions (Nodelman 2008, 152).

According to this model, the field of children’s literature is a negotiation between what is culturally permitted and what is culturally forbidden. Nodelman notes the horrified reactions of early reviewers to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), despite the charm of the Wild Things and the mischievous twinkles in their eyes, although these reviewers were forgetting longstanding traditions of fairy tale monsters or figures such as Shock-Headed Peter (Nodelman 2008, 121). After Where the Wild Things Are, monsters in children’s literature were more accepted. Nodelman, however, notes that there are limits to the kinds of monsters who might appear in children’s literature. Forbidden characters might include

monsters made of human feces come to life, perhaps, or monsters who made children happy by fondling their privates or who encouraged children to brush their teeth every day and to refuse all candy and then turned out to be evil and wrong (Nodelman 2008, 123).

It is hard to argue with this. Such outré monsters will probably never feature in books for children. The boundaries of what is acceptable for children are set both by prevailing cultural norms and the politics and dynamics of the publishing industry. For Nodelman, a work of children’s literature might push at the boundaries of the field but never fully break them. On the other hand, historical examples like Struwwelpeter (Shock-Headed Peter) challenge Nodelman’s sense of the unthinkable in children’s literature. A contemporary publisher would almost certainly not produce a book that depicts graphic punishments for child misbehaviour, such as a girl who is burned to death when she plays with matches or a boy who has his hands cut off with scissors because he sucks his thumb. Children in the past read (and possibly enjoyed) such books, as well as nursery rhymes like ‘Alouette,’ where a speaker threatens to pluck the feathers from a lark in retribution for being woken up by its song. It is also undeniably true that children’s literature throughout its history has contained elements of the scatological or bawdy humour of various kinds. As one of innumerable examples, Roald Dahl’s The BFG (1982) features the title character of the Big Friendly Giant who drinks frobscottle, whose bubbles go downwards and cause noisy flatulence called ‘whizzpoppers.’

A more recent text that pushes the boundaries of children’s literature is Elena Ferrante’s recently translated picture-book The Beach at Night. First published (without controversy) in Italy in 2007, it appeared translated in English and illustrated by Mara Cerri in 2016. It is the story of Celina, a doll who spends a night of terror and abandonment on the beach when Mati—a little girl to whom she is devoted—accidently leaves her there. The Mean Beach Attendant sings a cruel and profane song when raking the beach and threatens to steal all of Celina’s words. She is threatened by fire, borne away by a storm, and submerged in the ocean. Although Celina is rescued by the cat Minù and brought back to her little girl, the book’s undertones of rape and abjection were felt by American reviewers to be pushing the boundaries. The New York Times review wryly points to cultural differences:

In Europe, darker picture books are common. Presumably just as the children of Europe willingly eat escargots and tripe stew at dinnertime, they fall asleep to picture books with titles like ‘My First Nightmare’ and ‘A Visit from Death’ (Russo 2016).

Whether the children of Europe are made of sterner stuff than their American counterparts must remain an open question. But it is clear that there are different norms within the publishing industry itself; the American publisher classified the audiobook (read by Natalie Portman) as a book for adults. Much depends, apparently, on the translation of the Mean Beach Attendant’s expletives when he tells Celina he has ‘shit’ for her ‘craw.’ In Italian, this word might be translated as ‘poo’ rather than ‘shit.’ It seems like the boundaries between children’s and adult literature are almost experienced as arbitrary standards rather than as a set of core traits in the book, sometimes as subtle as the tonal differences between a word like ‘poo’ and one like ‘shit.’

As we saw earlier, our definitions of children’s literature are bound up with notions of childhood innocence, but there is debate about whether that innocence even applies to current childhood and whether a literature that preserves that innocence is warranted. Julia L. Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone, in their introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, argue that the distinctions between literature for adults and that for children are increasingly blurred:

in the contemporary moment we seem to be at a point where the lines dividing children’s literature and literature for adults often cannot be easily drawn, which may come down to the fact that without ‘innocence’ as a clear demarcation of the line between childhood and adulthood, we are losing a sense of that boundary as well as the need for it (Mickenberg and Vallone 2011, 17).

Perry Nodelman disagrees:

In what I myself see as a time of increasingly repressive surveillance of and protectiveness toward children and of ongoing commodification of the cuteness of childhood innocence in the marketplace, the unconvincing assertion that we are moving beyond our cultural commitment to the idea of childhood as a safe preserve comes across as yet another way in which [current reference works in the field of children’s literature] are attempting to downplay the connections between children’s literature, children, and childhood (Nodelman 2013, 156).

Nodelman is quite willing, he notes, to acknowledge the diversity and complexity of ‘actual children’ (Nodelman 2013, 154), but he is firm in his belief that children’s literature itself emerges from the cultural desire to assert and preserve childhood innocence.

The questions of whether children’s literature can be defined as a literature that addresses the specific psychological, social, and cultural needs of children as a protected and innocent class frequently widen when looking outside the Anglo-American world. For example, Ann González, in Resistance and Survival: Children’s Narrative from Central America and the Caribbean (2009), considers questions of knowingness in the region’s children’s literature. The many trickster figures animating Central American and Caribbean literature do not resemble the ‘underdog’ of North American or European children’s literature but serve as figures of survival and resistance:

While U.S. and European literatures train their children to become better members of the dominant class (Kutzer), Latin American children, who have a long history of domination, first by Spain and then by the United States, have other lessons to learn: for example, how to resist submission or submit with dignity; how to fight the odds and insist on cultural, if not political, independence; how to get what they want without appearing to do so or without angering the dominant class; how to speak through silence and have the last laugh (González 2009, 1).

Trickster figures ‘find ways to cover their tracks and hide what they do; they speak on multiple, sometimes even contradictory, levels to multiple audiences: children, adults, colleagues, and peers. Yet the message is always fundamentally the same: how to get what is necessary without direct confrontation or open resistance’ (González 2009, 8). To consider the cultural functions of a children’s literature which stresses savvy resistance, we might turn to a picture-book by Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta and illustrated by Alfonso Ruano: The Composition (2000). The Composition features Pedro, a young boy who lives in an unnamed country under an authoritarian regime and who has seen his parents’ friends suddenly disappear. Military officials, seeing children as sources of information about the political resistance of their families, come to Pedro’s school to announce a prize for the best paper on the theme ‘What My Family Does at Night.’ Although Pedro’s parents are in fact members of the resistance who spend their nights listening to the radio for news, he writes that his parents play chess at night. When he reveals the subject of his composition to his parents, his father notes with relief and wry irony: ‘I guess we’ll have to buy a chess set’ (Skármeta 2000, n.p.). Although early in the book Pedro’s parents tell him that children should not concern themselves with politics, he proves them wrong. As Niall Nance-Carroll remarks: ‘Pedro’s successful deception represents a victory for his family, but it also represents in part a child’s victory over his parents, who have attempted to convince him that childhood is a state without political views, acts, or responsibilities’ (Nance-Carroll 2014, 276). One way to expand our vision of children’s literature, then, is to look at it within an international context in order to see what roles specific political structures play. Local, regional, and national specificities affect children’s experiences and shape their literature.

Emer O’Sullivan points to the ways in which the definition of children’s literature is political in exactly this sense, and that it cannot be determined ‘on the level of the text itself, that is to say in the form of specific textual features.’ For O’Sullivan, determinations of what is suitable for young people are made by ‘social authorities,’ which include ‘educational institutions both ecclesiastical and secular, figures active in the literary market (publishers, distributers, etc.) and those who produce the books (editors, authors, etc.)’ (O’Sullivan 2005a, 12). In this formulation, children’s literature is the product of many actors and a combination of institutions and individuals. As the complex interrelations between institutions and individuals change, so will the very nature of literature for children. Here O’Sullivan gets close to a definition of children’s literature, not by stressing its core features but by acknowledging it as a product of institutional values intersecting with individual experience. Such a method of thinking about children’s literature allows for infinite variance, and even contradictory values and qualities, and requires a full understanding of where a work falls within its multiple literary and cultural histories. This is well expressed by Jack Zipes:

For a children’s book to be recognized as a book for children, a system had to be in place. That is, a process of production, distribution, and reception had to be instituted within which places were assigned to different groups of people. Gender, age, and social class played roles. Indeed, it was not possible for a broad range of books to be approved and to reach children in specific ways until the system of production, distribution, and reception was instituted and became focused on how to socialize children through reading (Zipes 2001, 46).

Ultimately, the Children’s Literature scholar needs to ask incisive questions about the ‘ownership’ of children’s literature. As Peter Hollindale asks:

if the literature is owned by children, is it therefore not owned by adults? In meeting the needs of an immature audience, does it inevitably omit the necessary interests of a mature one? In order to read it, must we disrobe ourselves of our maturity, at least in part, in order to read as a child reads? Are we unavoidably stepping back, whether in nostalgia or condescension or escape, in order to reoccupy a prior self? Is it indeed possible to do this? (Hollindale 1997, 8–9).

Hollindale’s questions are all the more effective because he acknowledges that children construct childhood as they go along. Complicating this issue is the fact that children’s literature has the potential to follow us through an entire life cycle. For example, Laura Miller’s transmuted but never fully ruptured relationship with C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe reveals both a text that changes as people change, and a melancholic inability to recapture an earlier childhood reading.

Adult authors, child readers

Children’s literature is one of the few literary forms to be defined by the age, or more specifically the life stage, of its intended audience. Apart from some notable instances of child authorship and juvenile production (such as Gordon Korman’s raucous 1978 school story This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall), it is written by adults. To define children’s literature—to establish its contours, limits, and nature—is inevitably to grapple with this asymmetry in some way. Dynamics of power, autonomy, and authority vary widely between individuals and groups, to be certain, but, in the aggregate, children lack the material and cultural resources available to adults, they do not enjoy the same levels of independence, and they lack the same worldly experience. In The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), Jacqueline Rose forcefully engaged with this asymmetry brought about by adults writing literature for children: ‘There is, in one sense, no body of literature which rests so openly on an acknowledged difference, a rupture almost, between writer and addressee. Children’s fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in’ (Rose [1984] 1992, 2). In referring to the ‘impossibility’ of children’s literature in her subtitle, Rose was not in fact arguing that books like Peter Pan or Charlotte’s Web do not actually exist. She was asserting that books such as Peter Pan are produced for adult needs rather than those of children: a repository for adult hopes, anxieties, and fantasies. Following Freud and Lacan, Rose contended that adults producing children’s literature have an innate investment in a notion of the child whose development was linear. To Rose, the writer of children’s literature and the institutions that promote and disseminate children’s literature have a vision of the child as a stable point of origin. Above all, adults had an investment in a childhood innocence that children’s literature was meant to promote, protect, and embody. Hence children’s literature involved a great deal of manipulation and involved a wholesale projection of adult values on to children.

Rose’s work had an enormous impact on the field; it was a much-needed corrective to assumptions that children’s literature could speak in a simple and direct way to its readers. David Rudd and Anthony Pavlik note its timeliness in an institutional sense as well, since it offered Children’s Literature legitimacy in English and Literature departments: ‘the emerging academic study of children’s literature was trying to find its theoretical feet within an area that, while often celebrating the aesthetic and literary qualities of texts, had tended toward the utilitarian’ (Rudd and Pavlik 2010, 223). Rose inspired literary critics in particular to try to cultivate some scepticism about children’s literature’s connection with its young readers.

Critics of Rose objected, and still object, to her stress on asymmetrical power relationships, arguing for the ways in which children’s literature from the 19th century onward was attuned to child pleasures and desires, and moments where children collaborated with adults to shape the production of children’s literature. Others are less convinced of the absolute gap between children and adults. Rudd has been eloquent on this point, noting ‘children’s fiction is only really impossible if we see children as distinct from adults, standing outside society and language, rather than being actively involved in negotiating meaning’ (Rudd 2010, 290–291). Rudd turns to the ideas of Mikhail Bahktin and Valentin Vološinov to explore dialogism:

we, from our own particular historical and social location, are forever in dialogue with the texts we encounter (for example, as a child, female, middle class, Northerner, fan of science fiction, or whatever); and … these different discursive affiliations interact with a text that is itself made up of different discursive elements. To use the Russians’ terminology, albeit in translation, a text has “multi-accentuality” (Vološinov) or “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin Dialogic [Imagination]), such that a work is always dynamic, always subject to struggles over its signification. In this model, children’s fiction is always and forever possible, though its effectiveness can never be fully gauged (Rudd 2010, 294–295).

Bakhtinian models of language underscore the idea that exchange and communication is possible even across significant difference. While Rudd is right to note that the effectiveness of children’s fiction ‘can never be fully gauged,’ there is a recent effervescence of interest in children’s participation in literary and cultural forms, which includes but is not limited to child authors. Gubar has developed something known as the kinship model:

This model is premised on the idea that children and adults are akin to one another, which means they are neither exactly the same nor radically dissimilar. The concept of kinship indicates relatedness, connection, and similarity without implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality (Gubar 2013, 453).

The ‘kinship model’ helps bridge the gaps between child and adult readers while not eliding the differences between them.

Childist criticism

In 1991 Peter Hunt argued for what he called a ‘childist criticism,’ aimed at ‘reading, as far as possible, from a child’s point of view, taking into account personal, sub-cultural, experiential, and psychological differences between children and adults’ (Hunt 1991, 198). While this is a laudable aim, it has inbuilt limitations, as our discussion so far should indicate, acknowledged in the qualifier ‘as far as possible.’ One way, however, in which a childist criticism can work is to centralize children’s own literary opinions and preferences. Aidan Chambers, himself an established children’s and YA novelist, developed a ‘tell me’ method where he outlines a means to get children to talk about books in an informed way and to support their observations with evidence. He notes: ‘We begin to listen more attentively to the questions children generate themselves—and use those as springboards’ (Chambers 1996, 85).

Much of the best criticism in this vein is distinguished by awareness of its own limitations, as we see from Hugh Crago’s remarks on his own study of his daughter’s reading:

observed response to literature is not equivalent to internal experience of literature…. All we can trace, measure, analyze, is what individuals show us of their experience through speech, facial expression, or gesture (Crago 1985, 101).

It is impossible for any individual to communicate the whole essence of their experience as a reader; those communications are also altered by the dynamics between the interlocutor and the respondent. This, however, is not unique to child readers, since all people possess different abilities and inhabit different circumstances. Those differences always need to be bridged when talking about books, appraising their impact, or working within the field of literary culture in general.

Childhood experience and children’s literature

Jacqueline Rose and her followers, as I have noted, saw the gulf between children and adults as an impassable one, noting that adults sought to construct a childhood that harmonized with their own vision of childhood needs but that, above all, actually fed adult needs and fantasies. Some critics have responded by asserting that adults, and particularly authors for children, can actually have some access to those childhood experiences and capture them in literary form. In Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature (2006), Jerry Griswold draws on the work of Alison Lurie to note that ‘the great writers for children know—and their stories speak of and reveal—what it feels like to be a kid’ (Griswold 2006, 4). Certainly, a number of children’s literature authors have explicitly stated that they seek to be in touch with their childhood selves when they write, or even that they have never left those selves behind. One example of many is Maurice Sendak’s remarks to Nat Hentoff about making contact with the child within himself: ‘I communicate with him—or try to—all the time … The pleasures I get as an adult are heightened by the fact that I experience them as a child at the same time’ (Hentoff 1966, 42).

In contrast to Rose, Griswold does not see the endeavour of writing for children as rooted in nostalgia. Rather, a writer can capture embodied childhood experiences, with five recurrent patterns: ‘snugness,’ most often seen in the cosy cabins, homes, and dens in children’s literature; ‘scariness,’ allowing a certain ‘discomforting fun’; ‘smallness,’ manifested in miniature people or objects; ‘lightness,’ seen in the abundance of ‘airborne characters’; and ‘aliveness,’ revealed in talking animals, living toys, and animations of nature (Griswold 2006, 1–2). Objections to Griswold’s specific categories are quick to appear. For one thing, these qualities might be said to reflect a certain middle- or upper-class childhood, with its particular boundaries and protections and with access to certain spaces and pleasures. Roberta Seelinger Trites points to the arbitrariness of Griswold’s categories when she offers additional themes such as ‘fullness’ (acknowledging scholarship on children’s literature and food, eating, and hunger), ‘zaniness’ (acknowledging the long critical engagement with nonsense), as well as ‘queerness,’ ‘slowness,’ or ‘parentlessness.’ Griswold’s model is not adequate to serve as a fully-fledged account of everything children’s literature can do, and everything it is (Trites 2007a, 395–396). It does, however, gesture towards children’s literature’s evocation of certain spaces and sensations, and opens the door to thinking about them critically and imaginatively.

Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (2009) works in a similar vein to try to explore the nature of childhood reading. For example, Tatar writes about the appeal of horror and terror for child readers, and also about the role of sensory imagery in offering reading pleasure. She also considers the powerful cultural function of the bedtime story and rituals of routine reading. The patterns that Griswold and Tatar find offer a glimpse of the impact and experience of children’s literature. Indeed, for all of their limitations they effectively break down the distance between adult and child that Rose seeks to pinpoint.

Reception memoirs

One resource for Children’s Literature scholars as they seek to understand the role of children’s literature in the lives of children is provided by memoirs of reading. In the Introduction to this book I considered Margaret Mackey’s ‘auto-bibliography,’ One Child Reading, as an example of an interdisciplinary project that seeks to reconstruct childhood reading and the acquisition of literacy, even if that reconstruction is necessarily imperfect. Journalist and critic Laura Miller’s book about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series also devotes much time to charting her rapturous first readings of these books, especially The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In the appendix to Enchanted Hunters, Maria Tatar collects excerpts from an enormous variety of childhood reading, from adults from the 18th century to the present, with much emphasis on the emotions stirred by childhood reading.

Historical work on reading can also help us expand the purview of the discipline by looking at readers and literacy accounts from previously marginalized or understudied groups, as Jamie Campbell Naidoo and Sarah Park Dahlen ‬point out when they focus on 18th century slave narratives like that of Olaudah Equiano: ‘The authors of the slave narratives typically began by writing about what it was like to be a child in bondage. Thus, in these narratives, we have the origins of textually represented African American child life’ (Dahlen and Naidoo 2013, 35).‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Reception memoirs can offer a glimpse of the literary culture of a single generation. Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading (Spufford 2002), for example, covers the terrain of British childhood reading in the 1960s, with its ample consumption of now-classic books (by writers such as C.S. Lewis, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, and J.R.R. Tolkien) but also by some of the British authors most in vogue at that time, such as Leon Garfield, Jill Paton Walsh, Penelope Farmer, Peter Dickinson, and Alan Garner. It is obvious that these memoirs need to be read as carefully created works of art in their own right, with obvious selectivity and embellishment. Traditionally, autobiographical accounts and memoirs have in fact been counted as the least reliable of all sources. Susan Honeyman, among many others, considers the elusive nature of adult memory when it surfaces in both fiction and non-fiction: ‘Childhood is whatever adults have lost and maybe never had … How can any adult writer convincingly present such an inconsistent and imaginary position with any sense of authority?’ (Honeyman 2005, 4). But the recollection of childhood reading does shows that the impression made by children’s literature often endures over many decades and life changes, even without full access to the thoughts and feelings of childhood. First-person accounts of reading might be best approached not as reliable data but rather as traces of memory and emotion related to that reading.

Book history and correspondence

Another way to explore how children interacted with their reading material is to draw on book history and children’s correspondence. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, for example, described the book-destroying habits of Emily Dickinson’s young niece and nephew, details of which she discovered in an archive. This encounter, naturally, opens as many questions as it answers:

What to make of this ‘destruction of books?’ What does the mere fact of scribbling and cutting tell us about the children’s relation to print culture? Mattie colored the letters of her alphabet primer yellow, red, and blue. Does coloring adorn or deface these letters? (Sánchez-Eppler 2011, 153).

Sánchez-Eppler argues for an affective connection between the children and their books: ‘For these affluent children of the next generation, marking up books seems to have become part and parcel of learning to care about them’ (Sánchez-Eppler 2011, 153).

The letters to authors written by children offer another promising archive, albeit one that, once again, has its limits. Peter Pan’s Postbag (1909) was a series of missives from fans of the main Peter Pan actress, Pauline Chase. In our time, many children wrote letters to Judy Blume, the author of frank middle-grade books that touched on maturation, sexual development, and complex family dynamics. These epistolary overtures presume a kind of intimacy with the author, or create it. Many authors, such as Blume, actually do respond to these inquiries. In a recent article about agency in children’s literature, Sara L. Schwebel stresses that letters to authors can be constructed to win adult approval:

Historical sources authored by young people are limited, particularly before the mid-nineteenth century and especially for young and very young children. While this is a problem shared by other historical subjects (the working class), there is an additional challenge in the case of children: the sources that are available, particularly from historical periods but also from the contemporary era, were created largely under the supervision of adults. Letters, school assignments, and even diaries were frequently read and approved by grown-ups. The context in which such sources were produced—in institutional settings of the school and home, for pedagogical and spiritual exercises, under the guidance of adults and with the earnestness of youth seeking approval—makes it especially difficult to tease out the ideas of child writers. (Schwebel 2016, 279).

These historical sources might tell us something about educational conventions or epistolary etiquette, but they do not reveal children’s ‘genuine ideas about the books they have read or the ways they have accepted or rejected the world views presented in their pages’ (Schwebel 2016, 282).

At the same time, letters from children might be more viable as a source if those letters were written voluntarily, as Brian Rouleau observes when he describes early 20th century readers who wrote letters to authors of popular series books as ‘[a] coherent and highly self-aware subculture consisting of young readers invested in both the authors of their favorite books and the lives of characters created by those authors’ (Rouleau 2016, 404). These child readers were, in his words, ‘clearly convinced of their right, even their duty, to influence series fiction narratives’ (Rouleau 2016, 404). Reader suggestions allowed the presses to become attuned to contemporary sensibilities. Of course, these children were also participating in a commercial system, and reading clubs and junior presses were ‘free advertising in the form of word-of-mouth praise and local distribution networks concentrated in clubhouses, libraries, and schoolyards’ (Rouleau 2016, 413).

Child-centred literary criticism has shifted its attention to new work on fan fiction and fan sites authored by children, as well as children’s co-authorship with adults and children as authors. The digital age has offered new possibilities for this kind of engagement: the polar opposite of the model of the child as a mute receptacle for literary and cultural texts. In drawing on evidence from book history, personal accounts and letters, as well as from the observations of child readers in classroom and home settings, Children’s Literature scholars work towards an understanding of literature’s impact, also drawing on established methodologies from education, library science, and childhood studies.

Children’s literature vs. young adult literature

In several ways the divide between childhood and adolescence, and the passage between these two states, is a revealing litmus test for what children’s literature is. Where does children’s literature end and young adult literature begin? Just as children’s literature can be defined against its ‘adult’ counterparts, young adult literature often serves as a foil to children’s literature, with an inclusion of elements such as sexuality and the critique of authority that are ostensibly absent from children’s literature. Many people, for example, have noted the definite shift from the early novels in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series to the later books, with their growing complexity and length. The later books, arguably beginning with the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix(2003), grow progressively darker as the Hogwarts students fight Voldemort—even forming a student-led paramilitary group at one point to practise their defensive skills—and confront some of the turbulent emotions of the transition to adulthood. Should the earlier books in the series be described as children’s fiction and the later books as young adult fiction? If so, where does the distinction lie? Is it formal, thematic, or rooted in reader response? This interpretive problem should remind us of the search for a definition for children’s literature generally. It is, as always, easy to make counter-arguments that the earlier books in the series do not lack dark content, as in Harry’s extreme abuse at the hands of the Dursleys (he lives in a closet under the stairs), or Ginny’s feverish encounter with Tom Riddle’s diary in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998).

Our conception of the qualities of young adult literature as a separate genre is bound up with cultural notions about adolescence. G. Stanley Hall famously identified adolescence in 1904 as a particular life stage, one identified with modernity. Adolescence is in many ways defined as a time of transition made possible in modernity because it offers more scope for self-exploration. However, acknowledging that modern adolescence stemmed from ‘nineteenth century social and institutional changes,’ John Neubauer notes that it could also be seen as predating modernity: ‘identity crises of youth, generational conflicts, processes of maturation, and initiation rites were traditional themes of literature well before adolescence as we know it emerged’ (Neubauer, 1992, 75). In the medieval and early modern periods, for example, young people would often leave their families and go to live and work with another family or individual as apprentices, sometimes learning a trade or learning how to manage a household. This experience was a moment of transition and of emerging independence away from a family of origin; it sparked a number of conduct books and guides aimed at this specific demographic.

Other critics identify other pivotal moments for the development of adolescence as a distinct life stage. For Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva, the First World War was a turning point in generational self-definition; in the 1920s and 1930s ‘a new young generation of writers began to depict the moral and spiritual crises of that disinherited era’ (Hilton and Nikolajeva 2012, 5). The Second World War, they note, was also a catalyst for the expression of an adolescent culture. Anne Frank’s diary had a genuine effect in opening up the horizons of an adolescent culture, combining its coming of age narrative with her exceptional circumstances as she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic (Hilton and Nikolajeva 2012, 6).

In the post-war period in North America, adolescents acquired more purchasing power than they had in the past, which allowed for the development of a ‘teenage’ popular culture. The emergence of rock and roll in the late 1940s and early 1950s is one example; it helped catalyse a youth culture through fashion, record purchases, jukeboxes, and TV programs. The best known young adult book of the immediate post-war period is 1951’s The Catcher in the Rye, where a disaffected Holden Caulfield reflects with disgust on the ‘phonies’ of adult culture. Caulfield distinguishes himself both from young children and from adults.

Many critics identify young adult literature as primarily a marketing category: a perception that has only intensified with the recent blockbuster success of many Young Adult (YA) books. Karen Coats, however, draws our attention to the instability of these marketing categories, noting that a work such as Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) was not written with the YA audience in mind, but was embraced by young readers. Furthermore, ‘savvy marketers have tapped into the crossover phenomenon by creating alternate covers and trim sizes that correspond to consumer expectations to house the same texts’ (Coats 2010, 322). The same book, then, is claimed as an ‘adult’ and a ‘young adult’ text, framing and defining it within two possible markets.

Michael Cart notes that ‘young adults are beings in evolution, in search of self and identity; beings who are constantly growing and changing, morphing from the condition of childhood to that of adulthood’ (Cart 2008). Roberta Seelinger Trites, in Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel (2007), links that growth to political development, noting that ‘these texts create a parallel between the individual’s need to grow and the society’s need to improve itself. In focusing on the growth of an individual character, we often miss the metaphorical use to which the individual’s growth has been put’ (Trites 2007b, 144). It certainly seems that there is a hunger for such narratives of growth. Julie Beck, responding in 2014 to a series of articles in the popular press that castigated adult readers for reading young adult fiction, argues that young adult literature is well suited to reflect times of growth or rapid change:

what unites works of YA fiction, whether set on suburban streets or on a spaceship in the future, is how quickly and how dramatically its characters experience change … narratives of change always resonate, even if, as adults, our own changes often happen more subtly (Beck, 2014).

The process of sexual maturation is seen as a definitive marker within YA literature, reflecting the experience of puberty as a phase of adolescent development. Some critics argue that the presence of sexual content means a book is a YA book and not a children’s book; others do not see the inclusion of sexuality as the dividing line.

Young adult literature has become a cultural space not only for the developmental narratives so central to the genre, but also a cultural location for engaging contemporary political issues, among them cloning, environmental degradation, inequality, and gender. We see these conversations unfolding in both realistic fiction and fiction that is variously described as speculative or fantastic, including YA dystopias. This is not to say that children’s literature does not tackle such subjects; we will see in Chapter 3 that literature for even the youngest children sometimes tackles sophisticated political ideas. But there seems to be a particular energy now in presenting these debates and issues to contemporary adolescent audiences or, at a minimum, a cultural appetite for presenting these conversations in the accessible form of YA literature. Hilton and Nikolajeva argue that YA literature marks ‘the adolescent’s struggle for fully adult capability and identity in areas that do in fact mark the teenager off from the child: in firstly political and in secondly sexual agency and awareness’ (Hilton and Nikolajeva 2012, 11). Trites, in her landmark study of YA literature, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Trites 2004), puts questions of power at the absolute centre of the genre: the exposure of authoritarian structures and the adolescent’s own navigation of social structures work together in adolescent fiction.

The recent development of the ‘emerging adult’ category and what is often called ‘New Adult fiction’ has complicated matters of these age-levelled boundaries still further. Molly Wetta defines New Adult fiction as featuring protagonists whose ages range from 18–25, sometimes stretched to 30, and often with college experience. Ultimately, these books feature characters in a post-adolescent phase of life but who have not reached adulthood: ‘These novels aim to bring the emotionally intense storylines and fast-paced plotting of young adult fiction to stories that focus on a new range of experiences in life beyond the teenage years’ (Wetta 2013). Once again we see the development of a sub-category of literature that responds to the real and perceived needs readers have at specific stages in their life cycle: stages of life that are also historically and culturally contingent. For example, the college experience that so many of these ‘emerging adult’ novels captures is not a universal experience for many reasons. However, there is clearly enough of a niche for these books to justify a marketing category of their own.

Disciplinary commitments and definitions

Children’s Literature as a study draws on the skills of librarians, teachers, literary critics, and others. Each discipline has its own privileged methodologies and concerns. But wherever the institutional home for the study of children’s literature is, it is possible, and often desirable, to draw on the theories, methodologies, and texts of multiple disciplines. Literary critics can offer formal understanding of literary language and structure, locate works within the wide sweep of literary history, and historicize the works within their specific literary period. Librarians, literary critics, and teachers all share an interest in questions of censorship, in the effects on the discipline of the major children’s literature prizes, and children’s access to a wide range of children’s literature.

In Children’s Literature Comes of Age ([1996] 2016), Nikolajeva argues that: ‘The notions of childhood and the educational aspects of reading have crucially influenced the evolution of children’s literature and have gone hand in hand with pedagogical views of literature as a powerful means for educating children. Children’s literature has therefore been studied with a view to the suitability of books for children’s reading’ (Nikolajeva [1996] 2016, 3). Picking up on the entwined status of children’s literature and the field of education, Emer O’Sullivan notes that: ‘The general status of children’s literature also depends on the relationship between the cultural and educational systems, which can vary greatly within a culture from epoch to epoch’ (O’Sullivan 2005a, 19). Karin Lesnik-Oberstein believes that ‘it is also still unclear even within the field itself, and despite extensive debates on the issue, what exactly constitutes an “academic” study of children’s literature and its criticism as opposed to, say, educational or librarianship courses and publications on children’s fiction. In fact, it is disputed whether such a separation is either possible or desirable’ (Lesnik-Oberstein 2004, 1).

In the past, some Children’s Literature scholars have felt disrespected within English and Literature departments, as Beverly Lyon Clark (2003) notes when she writes about the distortion of the term ‘children’s literature’ to ‘kiddie lit.’ Clark is particularly interested in the cultural devaluation of children’s books from the 19th century to the present, pointing out that many 19th century elites enjoyed and lauded works of children’s literature such as Huckleberry Finn or Little Women. As the prestige of these works slipped they became associated with children, and increasingly derided. She traces this condescension to the historical dominance of women in fields such as education or librarianship. As Clark notes, ‘[A]ttitudes toward children’s literature are never simple; they’re always complexly connected to attitudes associated with gender or class or … a particular profession’ (Clark 2003, 75), by which she means the cultural devaluation of librarianship and teaching as feminized vocations. The historical and central role of women in librarianship, teaching, and children’s publishing has been explored by Jacalyn Eddy’s study of women in children’s book publishing from 1919 to 1939 (Eddy 2006) and Anne Lundin’s history of the establishment of Children’s Literature canons by schools, professional organizations, and libraries (Lundin 2004). Women shaped the world of 19th and early 20th century children’s literature and the field of Children’s Literature offered them many professional opportunities not otherwise available.

Children’s Literature scholarship is increasingly aware of its relationship to other disciplines. For example, Kenneth Kidd’s Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature (2011) shows that children’s literature and psychoanalysis have a mutually constitutive relationship: ‘Not only did the serious study of children’s literature start with Freud,’ Kidd has argued, but we could also say that ‘psychoanalysis developed in part through its engagement with children’s literature’ (Kidd 2011b, vii). At its best, the study of children’s literature invites its practitioners to reflect on how and why they approach the subject, how they weigh evidence such as literary responses from children, and what they think the purpose of the experience and study of children’s literature is. The field of Children’s Literature continues to add to its range of potential methodologies and theoretical possibilities, as Chapter 4 will investigate in greater detail by exploring some recent developments, such as Childhood Studies approaches.

Fully engaged with the nature of disciplinary differences, Karen Coats speaks in practical terms about the limits of any single discipline:

No one discipline has the last word regarding what defines childhood or what constitutes effective intervention. The best solutions for the problems of individual children are usually going to be situational rather than systemic. Because children in their specificity can be extremely complex, a correspondingly complex array of possibilities and imaginative approaches, informed by a multiplicity of disciplinary strategies, will be most effective for educating the child worker, teacher, researcher, and/ or parent (Coats 2001, 145).

Case study: E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

In a recent poll for BBC Culture, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) was named the most popular work for children of all time. One reason, among many, for the book’s cultural presence over several decades is its ability to reach out to both child and adult readers. Yet the book is also very clear about the differences between children and adults, not to mention humans and the animal world. It shows a world of talking animals in the barnyard available to children but incomprehensible to adults, sometimes to comic effect as the humans fall for Charlotte’s trick and wildly misunderstand the miracle they have witnessed. It is also skilled at capturing the physical and emotional sensations of a protected childhood, with its vulnerable young protagonist Wilbur, who is the runt of a litter of new-born pigs, becoming increasingly cherished. Wilbur receives comfort and protection, first from Fern Avery, a young girl who saves Wilbur from being slaughtered by her father, nursing him tenderly with a bottle, and then by the literate spider Charlotte, who offers him friendship and then, filling something of a maternal role, mounts a successful campaign to convince Wilbur’s owner, Mr Zuckerman, not to kill him.

When Wilbur is moved from the Avery home to the Zuckerman barn he is listless and lonely: the loneliness of a child in need of company and nurture, which Charlotte, in becoming his friend, offers him. As he grows, it becomes apparent that his destiny is the slaughterhouse. Charlotte’s task then is to convince the farmers that he is an extraordinary pig and should be kept alive. She does this by weaving words into her web: ‘SOME PIG,’ ‘RADIANT,’ ‘TERRIFIC,’ and ‘HUMBLE.’ In saving Wilbur’s life, Charlotte ensures that, in many ways, he never has to grow up: he can remain a protected child forever. At the end of the novel he finds himself in a cyclical world, where life is ‘very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be’ (White [1952] 1980, 183). Read this way, the continuity of Wilbur’s life inheres in an avoidance of the hard facts of adulthood, an assertion of the pastoral in the face of potential change.

Norton D. Kinghorn, however, sees the novel as embodying ‘inevitable, irresistible, implacable change’:

change in two worlds: the world of the barn, of the seasons, all of nature; and the world of humans, who appear in the novel as interlopers, creatures lost to the mysteries of nature, no longer able to fathom the miracle of a spider’s web or the chirping of crickets or the coming of spring (Kinghorn 1986, 5).

In some ways this reading depends on an interpretation of the seasons not as a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, but as indicators of the forward march of time.

Fern’s movement away from the world of the barnyard into a fascination with a local boy, Henry Fussy, is one of the text’s markers of inevitable change. At the beginning of the novel, Fern can sit for hours in the barn and hear the animals’ conversation, albeit as a spectator and not as a participant. Fern’s mother, Mrs Avery, is concerned about her daughter and goes to see a medical doctor, Dr Dorian, to ask his advice. Dorian leaves open the possibility that children might see things that adults cannot, but predicts that Fern will probably outgrow the barn in time, which does indeed happen: ‘Fern did not come regularly to the barn any more. She was growing up, and was careful to avoid childish things, like sitting on a milk stool near a pigpen’ (White [1952] 1980, 183). Even at the fairground, when Wilbur wins a special prize, Fern is off exploring with Henry. John W. Griffith sees Fern as embodying one model of childhood: the feckless child who, like Peter Pan, moves quickly away from attachments and who is hard to pin down (Griffith 1993, 30–31).

Charlotte’s Web is also a narrative of someone who faces mortality but is granted a reprieve. It begins with the startling line: ‘Where’s Papa going with that Ax?’ (White [1952] 1980, 1). In this sense it can be read as reflecting the Cold War fears of the time of its publication in 1952, with looming threats that are averted, however temporarily. Yet in its simple but direct account of Charlotte’s death, bound together with her sacrifices for Wilbur, the text asks its readers to confront the difficult topic of mortality. In her study of terminally ill children dying of leukaemia, Myra Bluebond-Langner poignantly notes:

The most popular book among these children was Charlotte’s Web. When Mary and Jeffrey reached stage 5, it was the only book they would read. Several children at stage 5 asked for chapters of it to be read to them when they were dying. But as one parent stated, ‘They never chose the happy chapters.’ They always chose the chapter in which Charlotte dies. After any child died, the book had a resurgence of popularity among the others (Bluebond-Langner 1978, 186).

E. B. White’s biographer, Scott Elledge, points out how singular and valuable White’s novel is when he notes that ‘Children’s books in the past had seldom faced up so squarely as did Charlotte’s Web to such truths of the human condition as fear of death, and death itself; and they had not implied the courageous agnosticism that disclaimed any understanding of why life and the world are the way they are’ (Elledge 1984, 305). It remains true that Wilbur survives, and Charlotte does not. That has been read in gendered terms as a female sacrifice, perhaps even a maternal sacrifice. We can also see the text as facilitating two sorts of recognition: the need to face the harshest of possible realities, and simultaneously to avoid it.

In some ways Charlotte’s Web seems like a throwback to the animal fables of classic children’s literature. With its talking animals it is clearly an animal fantasy. However, White was quite adamant that the characters were animals and not humans; he had consulted scientists at a natural history museum and he was quite pleased at the ‘scholarly accuracy of his text and [Garth] Williams’s drawings’ (Elledge 1984, 295). White was in this regard the heir of the tradition of Beatrix Potter, where an imaginative and fantastic text was united with a keen-eyed, almost scientific, sense of observation. White believed that ‘he helped readers free themselves from prejudices against spiders’ (Elledge 1984, 303). Elledge notes: ‘In 1952 few children’s books have made so clear as Charlotte’s Web that the natural world of the barn does not exist to serve the world of the farmers who think they own it’ (Elledge 1984, 305). At the same time the book sends something of a mixed message about animals, which is not lost on Griffith as he notes that White’s ‘feeling about animals seems to have been an unusual mixture of the naturalist’s love of pure observation, the farmer’s businesslike concern for care, feeding, and harvesting, and the pet-lover’s pleasure in animals’ companionship, enriched by a certain imaginative projection onto them of human personalities’ (Griffith 1993, 55). This may be one of the book’s signature attributes: its oscillation between different modes of human-animal relationship, even if some of those relationships are read with a critical edge.

Charlotte’s Web undeniably displays animals as smarter than people, one source of its humour. People immediately believe Charlotte’s woven words. Only one interlocutor suggests that they might not be dealing with an extraordinary pig but with an extraordinary spider. In its use of satire, with its knowingness aimed at adult readers, this scene can be seen as ‘cross-writing’; it can also be seen as one of the many ways in which the novel initiates novice readers into questions of interpretation.

Charlotte’s Web is replete with the contradictions of children’s literature. It figures childhood as a protected space away from concerns such as mortality, yet offers the opportunity to face up to death as well. It promises growth and change, yet also works to keep Wilbur’s position static and to emphasize a reassuring cyclical world. In this way it embodies the manner in which children’s literature reflects a kind of nostalgia for childhood, while elegiacally marking it as all too fleeting.