As a phenomenon, children’s literature is in many ways paradoxical. It is meant to initiate novice readers into the ‘ways of the world’ but often expected to preserve childhood innocence in the process. Children’s literature immerses children in the normative ethos of the dominant culture, yet can also function as a space to nurture transformative social change and to cultivate young people’s rebellious instincts. It appears to encourage individuals to develop as autonomous subjects in pursuit of their individual interests but also explores relational selfhoods and community. These contradictions and others make it difficult to generalize about the nature and cultural function of children’s literature. In fact, scholars of Children’s Literature frequently do their best work when they focus their attention on works and literary movements that challenge our preconceptions of what children’s literature is and what it should be. We might think, for example, of work that finds ‘knowing’ rather than ‘innocent’ children in historical children’s literature, such as the sophisticated ‘artful dodgers’ described by Marah Gubar in Victorian children’s culture. There are also the many literary works for children where childhood innocence is not a desired quality, as we see from Ann González’s work on the savvy, adept ‘trickster figures’ of Central American and Caribbean children’s literature. We can also see, in work by Robin Bernstein and others, how childhood innocence has functioned for a long time as a privilege denied to children of colour.
Children’s literature has always responded to the perceived cultural and social needs of young people: from the medieval courtesy books that taught the etiquette needed for the social harmony of extended family households to contemporary works that tackle the complex social dynamics of our time. In any given period of literary history, however, children’s literature can offer sharply contrasting messages. For example, 19th century children’s literature produced the whimsical nonsense of writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, encouraging anarchic play, but also offered many narratives of social conformity and personal restraint through the didactic texts that flourished in the period. Perhaps children of the period were thought to need both whimsy and discipline at different times. Alternatively, we might see the history of children’s literature as marked by a contest between warring visions of children’s literature and the qualities it should embody.
In many ways, children’s literature continues to exist because adults are determined to carve out a distinct literary and cultural space for young people in the face of profound cultural and technological change. But the adaptation of these works in multiple fields and the success of ‘cross-over’ works like the Harry Potter series may be a sign that children’s literature—as well as the film, television, and game adaptations of works for children— hearkens back to one of its earliest moments as shared adult-child culture rather than a cultural enclave for young people alone. This is another contradiction of children’s literature: a literature that exists for the needs of younger people may ultimately belong to all readers equally, while still existing as a literary market that is tailored to younger people.
As it always has done, children’s literature registers cultural change and to some extent drives it. Through moments of insight into the natural world and animal life we can catch a glimpse in children’s literature of new ways of being human, and in the process rethink human society. There is a renewed sense of urgency to educate children about the new world they will face in the 21st century. We see new attention to questions of stewardship of the earth and a truer reckoning with historical atrocities. As an academic field, Children’s Literature is fully established across multiple disciplines and is constantly renewed by new methodologies and cultural concerns. New developments include a stronger sense in English departments of what other disciplines can teach us, and attempts to break down the division between ‘book people’ and ‘child people.’ We are also gleaning new insights from current research into cognition and children’s attainment of literacy. Global histories and histories of little-known literary movements promise to productively unsettle the established contours of the field. The loop between activists, writers, and scholars has encouraged diversity and pressed for the inclusion of marginalized voices, and this changes our sense of a universal childhood and a literature responding to that childhood. The scholar who works in Children’s Literature must now—more than ever—see the works they study within these wider cultural concerns, with the study of children’s books all the more urgent and rewarding for that fact.