children's literature essay

Once upon a time: a brief history of children’s literature

Director, Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, The University of Western Australia

Researcher, The University of Western Australia

Lecturer in medieval and early modern history, The University of Western Australia

Disclosure statement

Susan Broomhall receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Joanne McEwan receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Stephanie Tarbin receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

University of Western Australia provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

April 2 is International Children’s Book Day and the anniversary of the birth of one of the most famous contributors to this genre, Hans Christian Andersen . But when Andersen wrote his works, the genre of children’s literature was not an established field as we recognise today.

Adults have been writing for children (a broad definition of what we might call children’s literature) in many forms for centuries. Little of it looks much fun to us now. Works aimed at children were primarily concerned with their moral and spiritual progress. Medieval children were taught to read on parchment-covered wooden tablets containing the alphabet and a basic prayer, usually the Pater Noster. Later versions are known as “hornbooks”, because they were covered by a protective sheet of transparent horn.

Spiritually-improving books aimed specifically at children were published in the 17th century. The Puritan minister John Cotton wrote a catechism for children, titled Milk for Babes in 1646 (republished in New England as Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes in 1656). It contained 64 questions and answers relating to religious doctrine, beliefs, morals and manners. James Janeway (also a Puritan minister) collected stories of the virtuous lives and deaths of pious children in A Token for Children (1671), and told parents, nurses and teachers to let their charges read the work “ over a hundred times .”

These stories of children on their deathbeds may not hold much appeal for modern readers, but they were important tales about how to achieve salvation and put children in the leading role. Medieval legends about young Christian martyrs, like St Catherine and St Pelagius, did the same.

Other works were about manners and laid out how children should behave. Desiderius Erasmus famously produced a book of etiquette in Latin, On Civility in Children (1530), which gave much useful advice, including “don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve” and “To fidget around in your seat, and to settle first on one buttock and then the next, gives the impression that you are repeatedly farting, or trying to fart. So make sure your body remains upright and evenly balanced.” This advice shows how physical comportment was seen to reflect moral virtue.

Erasmus’s work was translated into English (by Robert Whittington in 1532) as A lytyll booke of good manners for children, where it joined a body of conduct literature aimed at wealthy adolescents.

In a society where reading aloud was common practice, children were also likely to have been among the audiences who listened to romances and secular poetry. Some medieval manuscripts, such as Bodleian Library Ashmole 61 , included courtesy poems explicitly directed at “children yong”, alongside popular Middle English romances, saints’ lives and legends, and short moral and comic tales.

Do children have a history?

A lot of scholarly ink has been spilled in the debate over whether children in the past were understood to have distinct needs. Medievalist Philippe Ariès suggested in Centuries of Childhood that children were regarded as miniature adults because they were dressed to look like little adults and because their routines and learning were geared towards training them for their future roles.

But there is plenty of evidence that children’s social and emotional (as well as spiritual) development were the subject of adult attention in times past. The regulations of late medieval and early modern schools, for example, certainly indicate that children were understood to need time for play and imagination.

Archaeologists working on the sites of schools in The Netherlands have uncovered evidence of children’s games that they played without input from adults and without trying to emulate adult behaviour. Some writers on education suggested that learning needed to appeal to children. This “progressive” view of children’s development is often attributed to John Locke but it has a longer history if we look at theories about education from the 16th century and earlier.

Some of the most imaginative genres that we now associate with children did not start off that way. In Paris in the 1690s, the salon of Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, brought together intellectuals and members of the nobility.

There, d’Aulnoy told “ fairy tales ”, which were satires about the royal court of France with a fair bit of commentary on the way society worked (or didn’t) for women at the time. These short stories blended folklore, current events, popular plays, contemporary novels and time-honoured tales of romance.

These were a way to present subversive ideas, but the claim that they were fiction protected their authors. A series of 19th-century novels that we now associate with children were also pointed commentaries about contemporary political and intellectual issues. One of the better known examples is Reverend Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863), a satire against child labour and a critique of contemporary science.

The moral of the story

By the 18th century, children’s literature had become a commercially-viable aspect of London printing. The market was fuelled especially by London publisher John Newbery, the “father” of children’s literature. As literacy rates improved, there was continued demand for instructional works. It also became easier to print pictures that would attract young readers.

More and more texts for children were printed in the 19th century, and moralistic elements remained a strong focus. Katy’s development in patience and neatness in the “School of Pain” is key, for example, in Susan Coolidge’s enormously popular What Katy Did (1872), and feisty, outspoken Judy (spoiler alert!) is killed off in Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians (1894). Some authors managed to bridge the comic with important life lessons. Heinrich Hoffman’s memorable 1845 classic Struwwelpeter reads now like a kids’ version of dumb ways to die .

By the turn of the 20th century, we see the emergence of a “kids’ first” literature, where children take on serious matters with (or often without) the help of adults and often within a fantasy context. The works of Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, JM Barrie, Frank L Baum, Astrid Lindgren, Enid Blyton, CS Lewis, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling operate in this vein.

Children’s books still contain moral lessons – they continue to acculturate the next generation to society’s beliefs and values. That’s not to say that we want our children to be wizards, but we do want them to be brave, to stand up for each other and to develop a particular set of values.

We tend to see children’s literature as providing imaginative spaces for children, but are often short-sighted about the long and didactic history of the genre. And as historians, we continue to seek out more about the autonomy and agency of pre-modern children in order to understand how they might also have found spaces in which to exercise their imagination beyond books that taught them how to pray.

• Fairy tales
• Children's books
• Hans Christian Andersen

Want to write?

Write an article and join a growing community of more than 181,200 academics and researchers from 4,924 institutions.

Register now

Children's Literature

Lisa Rowe Fraustino , Hollins University

Journal Details

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to:

The Editors Children's Literature Hollins University P.O. Box 9677 Roanoke, VA 24020 E-mail:  [email protected]

Manuscripts submitted should conform to the style in this issue. Submission as an e-mail attachment (MS Word) is preferred. To facilitate anonymous review, the author’s name should not appear on the essay. Please provide full contact information in a separate document. Double-spacing should be used throughout text and notes.

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review Policy

Children's Literature  is the annual publication of the Children's Literature Association and the MLA Division on Children's Literature.

Essays submitted to  Children's Literature  should be original work that is not under review elsewhere. We will consider translations of previously published work, if the material is seen as useful for our readers. Submissions are initially reviewed by the editor. Strong submission are then sent to two reviewers. Both author and reviewers remain anonymous to each other throughout the process.

We publish theoretically-based articles that demonstrate an awareness of key issues and criticism in children’s literature. We typically require at least one round of revision in response to reviewers' comments; often published essays go through two or more rounds of revision. Accepted essay are edited by the editor, the JHUP copy-editor, and a proof reader. Authors can expect a twelve to twenty-four month time frame from first submission to publication.

Editor-in-Chief

Lisa Rowe Fraustino Hollins University

Book Review Editor

Melissa Jenkins, Wake Forest University

Editorial Assistant

Lisa J. Radcliff,  Hollins University

Children’s Literature Advisory Board

Janice M. Alberghene,  Fitchburg State University    Ruth B. Bottigheimer,  SUNY at Stony Brook    Elisabeth Rose Gruner,  University of Richmond    Margaret Higonnet,  University of Connecticut    U. C. Knoepflmacher,  Princeton University    Roderick McGillis, University of Calgary

Children’s Literature Association Officers 2016–2017

Kenneth Kidd,  University of Florida,  President   Teya Rosenberg,  Texas State University,  Vice President/President-Elect   Annette Wannamaker,  Eastern Michigan University,  Past President   Gwen Athene Tarbox,  Western Michigan University,  Secretary   Roberta Seelinger Trites,  Illinois State University,  Treasurer

Children’s Literature Association Board of Directors

Philip Nel,  Kansas State University , 2014-2017   Sara Schwebel,  University of South Carolina , 2014-2017   Marah Gubar,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology , 2015-2018   Joe Sutliff Sanders,  Kansas State University , 2015-2018   Eric L. Tribunella,  University of Southern Mississippi , 2015-2018   Thomas Crisp,  Georgia State University , 2016-2019   Elisabeth Gruner,  University of Richmond , 2016-2019   Jackie Horne,  Independent Scholar , 2016-2019   Nathalie op de Beeck,  Pacific Lutheran University , 2016-2019

Send books for review to:   Melissa Jenkins     English Department     Wake Forest University     P.O. Box 7387     Winston Salem, NC 27109-7387     Email queries to: [email protected]      

Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Web of Science
• Biography Index: Past and Present (H.W. Wilson), vol.22, 1994-vol.38, 2010
• Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson), 1988-
• Education Research Complete, 1/1/1993-
• Education Research Index, Jan.1993-
• Education Source, 1/1/1993-
• Humanities Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1988-
• Humanities Index (Online), 1988/00-
• Humanities International Complete, 1/1/1993-
• Humanities International Index, 1/1/1993-
• Humanities Source, 1/1/1988-
• Humanities Source Ultimate, 1/1/1988-
• Library & Information Science Source, 1/1/1972-1/1/1982
• MasterFILE Complete, 1/1/1993-
• MasterFILE Elite, 1/1/1993-
• MasterFILE Premier, 1/1/1993-
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1988-
• Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, 1/1/1993-
• Professional Development Collection, 1/1/1993-
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
• TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 1/1/1995-
• Book Review Index Plus
• Gale Academic OneFile
• Gale Academic OneFile Select, 01/1989-
• Gale General OneFile, 01/1989-
• Gale OneFile: Educator's Reference Complete, 01/1981-
• Gale OneFile: Leadership and Management, 01/1981 -
• InfoTrac Custom, 1/1981-
• ArticleFirst, vol.24, 1996-vol.39, no.1, 2011
• Electronic Collections Online, vol.31, no.1, 2003-vol.39, no.1, 2011
• Periodical Abstracts, v.19, 1991-2011
• Education Collection, 1/1/1991-
• Education Database, 1/1/1991-
• Literary Journals Index Full Text
• Periodicals Index Online
• Professional ProQuest Central, 01/01/1991-
• ProQuest 5000, 01/01/1991-
• ProQuest 5000 International, 01/01/1991-
• ProQuest Central, 01/01/1991-
• ProQuest Professional Education, 01/01/1991-
• Research Library, 01/01/1991-
• Social Science Premium Collection, 01/01/1991-
• The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)

Abstracting & Indexing Sources

• Children's Book Review Index   (Active)  (Print)
• Children's Literature Abstracts   (Ceased)  (Print)
• MLA Abstracts of Articles in Scholarly Journals   (Ceased)  (Print)

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0.4 (2022) 0.4 (Five-Year Impact Factor) 0.00007 (Eigenfactor™ Score) Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor): Note: While journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time in June 2023, they will not receive ranks, quartiles, or percentiles until the release of 2023 data in June 2024.  

© Clarivate Analytics 2023

Published annually in May

Readers include: Librarians, teachers, writers, scholars, and those interested in children's literature

Children's Literature  does not publish print advertisements.

Online Advertising Rates (per month)

Promotion (400x200 pixels) - $338.00

Online Advertising Deadline

Online advertising reservations are placed on a month-to-month basis.

All online ads are due on the 20th of the month prior to the reservation.

General Advertising Info

For more information on advertising or to place an ad, please visit the  Advertising page.  

eTOC (Electronic Table of Contents) alerts can be delivered to your inbox when this or any Hopkins Press journal is published via your ProjectMUSE MyMUSE account. Visit the eTOC instructions page for detailed instructions on setting up your MyMUSE account and alerts.  

Also of Interest

Joseph Michael Sommers, Central Michigan University

Kate Quealy-Gainer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Linda Mahood, University of Guelph

Dora Malech, Johns Hopkins University

David L. Russell, Ferris State University; Karin E. Westman, Kansas State University; and Naomi J. Wood, Kansas State University

Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State University

Adam Ross, The University of the South

Meghan O’Rourke

Nathan L. Grant, Saint Louis University

Charles Henry Rowell

Maria Farland, Fordham University and Duncan Faherty, Queens College and The CUNY Graduate Center

Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang, Malmö University, Sweden

Hopkins Press Journals

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature

Childhood Studies

• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Children's Literature

Introduction.

• General Reference Books
• Other Reference Resources
• Bibliographies
• Short Introductions
• General Introductions and Guides
• Anthologies
• Essay Collections
• Essay Collections from Journals and Conferences
• “Traditional” Criticism
• Literary Theory
• Interdisciplinary Criticism
• Language and Narrative
• Ecocriticism
• International
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Disability and Death
• Gender Studies
• Multiculturalism and Translation
• Crossover Fiction
• Empire, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism
• Fairy Tales and Folktales
• Fantasy and Fantastic Realism
• Historical Fiction
• Horror and the Gothic
• Picture Books, Comics, and Illustration
• School Stories
• Science Fiction
• Popular Culture and Children’s Literature
• Children’s Literature in Education
• Children and Texts
• Collections of Essays
• 19th-Century Authors
• 20th-Century Authors

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Animations, Comic Books, and Manga
• Children and Animals
• Children's Media Culture
• Children’s Reading Development and Instruction
• Education: Learning and Schooling Worldwide
• Films for Children
• Images of Childhood, Adulthood, and Old Age in Children’s Literature
• Innocence and Childhood
• Literary Representations of Childhood
• Material Cultures of Western Childhoods
• Queer Theory and Childhood

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Agency and Childhood
• Childhood and the Colonial Countryside
• Colonialism and Human Rights
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Children's Literature by Peter Hunt LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 27 November 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0014

The study of children’s literature as an academic discipline has developed since the 1980s from its roots in education and librarianship to its place in departments of literature and childhood studies. Although its practitioners position themselves at different points on the spectrum between “book-oriented” and “child-oriented,” the study is held together by the “presence” of some concept of child and childhood in the texts. The distinctions that apply in other literary systems between “literature” and “popular literature” or “literature” and “nonliterature” are not necessarily useful in this field. Nevertheless, criticism tends to fracture between a liberal-humanist and educationalist view that children’s literature should adhere to and inculcate “traditional” literary and cultural values and a more postmodern and theoretical view that texts for children are part of a complex cultural matrix and should be treated nonjudgmentally. In addition, the discipline is multi- and interdisciplinary as well as multimedia: its theory derives from disciplines such as literature, cultural and ideological studies, history, and psychology, and its applications range from literacy to bibliography. Consequently, children’s literature can be defined and limited in many (sometimes conflicting) ways: one major problem for scholars is that the term children’s is sometimes taken to transcend national and language barriers, thus potentially producing a discipline of unmanageable proportions. As a result, this article is eclectic, but it excludes specialist studies to which children’s books are peripheral or merely instrumental, such as folklore or teaching techniques. Children’s literature is also studied comparatively and internationally, with German and Japanese writing being particularly important. This article largely confines itself to English-language texts and translations into English.

Reference Resources

Children’s literature has been well catered for in terms of reference books, partly because the subject is of interest to the general public as well as to academics. General Reference Books thus range from large illustrated encyclopedic guides to collections of academic essays, as well as short introductions aimed primarily at students.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Childhood Studies »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Abduction of Children
• Aboriginal Childhoods
• Addams, Jane
• ADHD, Sociological Perspectives on
• Adolescence and Youth
• Adolescent Consent to Medical Treatment
• Adoption and Fostering
• Adoption and Fostering, History of Cross-Country
• Adoption and Fostering in Canada, History of
• Advertising and Marketing, Psychological Approaches to
• Advertising and Marketing, Sociocultural Approaches to
• Africa, Children and Young People in
• African American Children and Childhood
• After-school Hours and Activities
• Aggression across the Lifespan
• Ancient Near and Middle East, Child Sacrifice in the
• Animals, Children and
• Anthropology of Childhood
• Archaeology of Childhood
• Ariès, Philippe
• Attachment in Children and Adolescents
• Australia, History of Adoption and Fostering in
• Australian Indigenous Contexts and Childhood Experiences
• Autism, Females and
• Autism, Medical Model Perspectives on
• Autobiography and Childhood
• Benjamin, Walter
• Bereavement
• Best Interest of the Child
• Bioarchaeology of Childhood
• Body, Children and the
• Bourdieu, Pierre
• Boy Scouts/Girl Guides
• Boys and Fatherhood
• Breastfeeding
• Bronfenbrenner, Urie
• Bruner, Jerome
• Buddhist Views of Childhood
• Byzantine Childhoods
• Child and Adolescent Anger
• Child Beauty Pageants
• Child Homelessness
• Child Mortality, Historical Perspectives on Infant and
• Child Protection
• Child Protection, Children, Neoliberalism, and
• Child Public Health
• Child Trafficking and Slavery
• Childcare Manuals
• Childhood and Borders
• Childhood and Empire
• Childhood as Discourse
• Childhood, Confucian Views of Children and
• Childhood, Memory and
• Childhood Studies and Leisure Studies
• Childhood Studies in France
• Childhood Studies, Interdisciplinarity in
• Childhood Studies, Posthumanism and
• Childhoods in the United States, Sports and
• Children and Dance
• Children and Film-Making
• Children and Money
• Children and Social Media
• Children and Sport
• Children and Sustainable Cities
• Children as Language Brokers
• Children as Perpetrators of Crime
• Children, Code-switching and
• Children in the Industrial Revolution
• Children with Autism in a Brazilian Context
• Children, Young People, and Architecture
• Children's Humor
• Children’s Museums
• Children’s Parliaments
• Children's Views of Childhood
• China, Japan, and Korea
• China’s One Child Policy
• Citizenship
• Civil Rights Movement and Desegregation
• Classical World, Children in the
• Clothes and Costume, Children’s
• Colonial America, Child Witches in
• Colonization and Nationalism
• Color Symbolism and Child Development
• Common World Childhoods
• Competitiveness, Children and
• Conceptual Development in Early Childhood
• Congenital Disabilities
• Constructivist Approaches to Childhood
• Consumer Culture, Children and
• Consumption, Child and Teen
• Conversation Analysis and Research with Children
• Critical Approaches to Children’s Work and the Concept of ...
• Cultural psychology and human development
• Debt and Financialization of Childhood
• Discipline and Punishment
• Discrimination
• Disney, Walt
• Divorce And Custody
• Domestic Violence
• Drawings, Children’s
• Early Childhood
• Early Childhood Care and Education, Selected History of
• Eating disorders and obesity
• Environment, Children and the
• Environmental Education and Children
• Ethics in Research with Children
• Europe (including Greece and Rome), Child Sacrifice in
• Evolutionary Studies of Childhood
• Family Meals
• Fandom (Fan Studies)
• Female Genital Cutting
• Feminist New Materialist Approaches to Childhood Studies
• Feral and "Wild" Children
• Fetuses and Embryos
• Films about Children
• Folk Tales, Fairy Tales and
• Foundlings and Abandoned Children
• Freud, Anna
• Freud, Sigmund
• Friends and Peers: Psychological Perspectives
• Froebel, Friedrich
• Gay and Lesbian Parents
• Gender and Childhood
• Generations, The Concept of
• Geographies, Children's
• Gifted and Talented Children
• Globalization
• Growing Up in the Digital Era
• Hall, G. Stanley
• Happiness in Children
• Hindu Views of Childhood and Child Rearing
• Hispanic Childhoods (U.S.)
• Historical Approaches to Child Witches
• History of Childhood in America
• History of Childhood in Canada
• HIV/AIDS, Growing Up with
• Homeschooling
• Humor and Laughter
• Images of Childhood, Adulthood, and Old Age in Children’s ...
• Infancy and Ethnography
• Infant Mortality in a Global Context
• Institutional Care
• Intercultural Learning and Teaching with Children
• Islamic Views of Childhood
• Japan, Childhood in
• Juvenile Detention in the US
• Klein, Melanie
• Labor, Child
• Latin America
• Learning, Language
• Learning to Write
• Legends, Contemporary
• Literature, Children's
• Love and Care in the Early Years
• Magazines for Teenagers
• Maltreatment, Child
• Maria Montessori
• Marxism and Childhood
• Masculinities/Boyhood
• Mead, Margaret
• Media, Children in the
• Media Culture, Children's
• Medieval and Anglo-Saxon Childhoods
• Menstruation
• Middle Childhood
• Middle East
• Miscarriage
• Missionaries/Evangelism
• Moral Development
• Moral Panics
• Multi-culturalism and Education
• Music and Babies
• Nation and Childhood
• Native American and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood
• New Reproductive Technologies and Assisted Conception
• Nursery Rhymes
• Organizations, Nongovernmental
• Parental Gender Preferences, The Social Construction of
• Pediatrics, History of
• Peer Culture
• Perspectives on Boys' Circumcision
• Philosophy and Childhood
• Piaget, Jean
• Politics, Children and
• Postcolonial Childhoods
• Post-Modernism
• Poverty, Rights, and Well-being, Child
• Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica Childhoods
• Premodern China, Conceptions of Childhood in
• Prostitution and Pornography, Child
• Psychoanalysis
• Race and Ethnicity
• Racism, Children and
• Radio, Children, and Young People
• Readers, Children as
• Refugee and Displaced Children
• Reimagining Early Childhood Education, Reconceptualizing a...
• Relational Ontologies
• Relational Pedagogies
• Rights, Children’s
• Risk and Resilience
• School Shootings
• Sex Education in the United States
• Social and Cultural Capital of Childhood
• Social Habitus in Childhood
• Social Movements, Children's
• Social Policy, Children and
• Socialization and Child Rearing
• Socio-cultural Perspectives on Children's Spirituality
• Sociology of Childhood
• South African Birth to Twenty Project
• South Asia, History of Childhood in
• Special Education
• Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence
• Spock, Benjamin
• Sports and Organized Games
• Street Children
• Street Children And Brazil
• Subcultures
• Teenage Fathers
• Teenage Pregnancy
• The Bible and Children
• The Harms and Prevention of Drugs and Alcohol on Children
• The Spaces of Childhood
• Theater for Children and Young People
• Theories, Pedagogic
• Transgender Children
• Twins and Multiple Births
• Unaccompanied Migrant Children
• United Kingdom, History of Adoption and Fostering in the
• United States, Schooling in the
• Value of Children
• Views of Childhood, Jewish and Christian
• Violence, Children and
• Visual Representations of Childhood
• Voice, Participation, and Agency
• Vygotsky, Lev and His Cultural-historical Approach to Deve...
• Welfare Law in the United States, Child
• Well-Being, Child
• Western Europe and Scandinavia
• Witchcraft in the Contemporary World, Children and
• Work and Apprenticeship, Children's
• Young Carers
• Young Children and Inclusion
• Young Children’s Imagination
• Young Lives
• Young People, Alcohol, and Urban Life
• Young People and Climate Activism
• Young People and Disadvantaged Environments in Affluent Co...
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|162.248.224.4]
• 162.248.224.4

(Stanford users can avoid this Captcha by logging in.)

• Send to text email RefWorks EndNote printer

Understanding children's literature : key essays from the second edition of The International companion encyclopedia of children's literature

Available online.

• EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

More options

• Find it at other libraries via WorldCat
• Contributors

Description

Creators/contributors, contents/summary.

• 1. Introduction: The Expanding World of Children's Literature Studies Peter Hunt, Cardiff University
• 2. Theorising and Theories: How Does Children's Literature Exist? David Rudd, Bolton Institute
• 3. Critical Tradition and Ideological Positioning Charles Sarland, Liverpool John Moores University
• 4. The Setting of Children's Literature: History and Culture Tony Watkins, University of Reading
• 5. Analysing Texts: Linguistics and Stylistics John Stephens, Macquarie University
• 6. Readers, Texts, Contexts: Reader-Response Criticism Michael Benton, Professor Emeritus, University of Southampton
• 7. Reading the Unconscious: Psychoanalytical Criticism Hamida Bosmajian, Seattle University
• 8. Feminism Revisited Lissa Paul, University of New Brunswick
• 9. Decoding the Images: how Picture Books Work Perry Nodelman, University of Winnipeg
• 10. Bibliography: the Resources of Children's Literature Matthew Grenby, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
• 11. Understanding Reading and Literacy Sally Yates, Literacy Consultant UK
• 12. Intertextuality and the Child Reader Christine Wilkie-Stibbs, University of Warwick
• 13. Healing Texts: Bibliotherapy and Psychology Hugh Crago, Co-Editor Australia and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy
• 13. Theory into Practice: the Views of the Authors Peter Hunt, Cardiff University General Bibliography Glossary Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Bibliographic information

Browse related items.

• Stanford Home
• Maps & Directions
• Search Stanford
• Emergency Info
• Terms of Use
• Non-Discrimination
• Accessibility

© Stanford University , Stanford , California 94305 .

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music and Religion
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Society
• Law and Politics
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Games
• Computer Security
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business Strategy
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Systems
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous
• Next chapter >

Introduction

Julia Mickenberg is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States and coeditor of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature.

Lynne Vallone is Professor and Chair of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, the first Ph.D.-granting department of Childhood Studies in the United States. She is the author of Becoming Victoria and Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries as well as co-associate general editor of the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature.

• Published: 18 September 2012
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This article presents the handbook's purposes and organization, and then briefly outlines some of the field's history, highlighting a number of key principles and important scholarly works. Finally, it turns to important issues related to four general rubrics. These rubrics, which serve as the structuring apparatus for the handbook, emerged organically from the essays and point to key areas of inquiry in children's literature study: Adults and Children's Literature; Pictures and Poetics; Reading History/Learning Race and Class; and Innocence and Agency. The discussion of these categories is designed to introduce the essays that are grouped under each of these rubrics (chronologically within each thematic section) and to situate the issues they raise within scholarship and literary history. The essays collected serve less to demarcate the field of children's literature than to push at the generic and gatekeeping boundaries that cordon off “children's literature” as a field of study.

The growing attention given to childhood as a category of analysis has infused the academic study of children’s literature with new energy. It has also highlighted the exciting and innovative aspects of children’s literature scholarship, which today benefits from the insights of historians, sociologists, psychologists, media studies scholars, political scientists, and legal scholars, as well as literary critics, education specialists, and library professionals. Focusing their analyses on children’s texts and children’s culture, contemporary scholars are producing theoretically sophisticated, politically engaged, and historicized yet wide-ranging work that marks this field as exceptionally dynamic. To mention only a few examples, recent work interrogating the roles of children and childhood in social, cultural and literary history includes studies of “boyology” and queer theory; child-rearing manuals and the Walt Disney company; radical children’s literature or the radical possibilities of children’s literature; African American children in slavery; the history of babysitting; postcolonial theory and American, Canadian, and Australian children’s books; and the “hidden adult” in children’s literature. 1 But even as the study of children’s literature attracts new scholars in a range of fields and gains in academic prestige, scholars in the field nonetheless can find themselves on slippery ground, experts in something that, arguably, kids might know more about than they do.

Back in 1984, Jacqueline Rose’s assertion in The Case of Peter Pan, Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction that children’s literature was itself “impossible” startled children’s literature scholars: written by adults for children, children’s literature, she argued, is never “children’s;” instead, it represents an adult projection of what childhood is or ought to be. 2 Rose’s claim was not simply provocative; it also invited literary critics to presume grounds previously ceded to children were rightfully theirs. But many—laypeople and scholars alike—continue to believe that children’s literature is for children. If that is the case, arguably, it must be simple, transparent, and hardly worthy of analysis, which is to say, might children’s literature criticism itself be “impossible”? 3

Although clearly the growing body of sophisticated children’s literature criticism belies these assumptions, a scholar new to the field might understandably suspect that there is very little to know in order to read children’s books critically or that this expertise ought to be easy to come by. Conversely, of course, he or she might find a children’s book’s apparent simplicity—or perhaps its unexpected complexity—baffling: how, and where, to begin approaching the children’s text? We believe that if he or she is willing to leave preconceptions and prejudices about the complexity and literary value of children’s literature behind, in reading children’s literature critically a scholar new to the field is likely to discover unexpected richness in both children’s literature itself and in the range of scholarship that addresses, analyzes, or incorporates it. Certainly, we hope that the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature will help address the needs of this beginning scholar—as well as the interests of those well established in the field.

Thinking about the unexpected pleasures—and risks—taken when adults read and analyze children’s literature, that is, when adults presume a higher order of expertise over a body of literature that has been codified (by design or by adoption) as “children’s,” one of this book’s editors is reminded of a time she was seated in an airplane next to a child traveling alone. She tried to make small talk with him—to make him more comfortable (so she imagined). After looking up several times from his book to answer her questions, he finally said, with exasperation, “This is the brand new Harry Potter book, which I waited a long time to get, and I really just want to focus on reading it now. I hope you don’t mind.” Chastened, the adult so-called expert in children’s literature was reminded not only of how easy it is to make assumptions about what children need but also of that almost holy bond that can be formed between child and book. In reading children’s books critically, as many of the essays included in this handbook remind us, it is important to acknowledge the phantom child—implied, addressed, represented, assumed—always lurking, though perhaps never quite possible (as Rose would say). Although our interest in creating the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature is scholarly rather than sentimental, anyone interested in exploring children’s literature confronts the haunting presence of childhood and the child reader within every text written for or adopted by children.

We begin the discussion that follows by outlining this book’s purposes and organization, and then we briefly review some of the field’s history and highlight a number of key principles and important scholarly works. Finally, we turn to important issues related to four general rubrics under which we have grouped the essays that follow. These rubrics, which serve as the structuring apparatus for the book, emerged organically from the essays and point to key areas of inquiry in children’s literature study: Adults and Children’s Literature; Pictures and Poetics; Reading History/Learning Race and Class; and Innocence and Agency. Our discussion of these categories is designed not simply to introduce the essays that are grouped under each of these rubrics (chronologically within each thematic section) but also to situate the issues they raise within scholarship and literary history.

Organizing Principles: Canons, Contexts, and Classrooms

This handbook attempts to reveal the possibilities of children’s literature criticism. In creating it we avoided replicating existing reference works that survey the various genres in children’s literature, offer national literary histories, or define important terminology. 4 Our goal was to create an interdisciplinary book that uses literary texts to introduce theoretical, methodological, and critical approaches, as well historical, political, and sociological themes. This makes the book valuable both to those wishing to gain a basic introduction to the field and to scholars seeking clear models of interdisciplinary approaches that have been enriching the field. The essays address a representative sampling of texts, in various genres, from the colonial era to the present, and from Britain, the United States, and Canada, that regularly appear (or arguably ought to appear) on syllabi of children’s literature or childhood studies courses. The contributors provided headnotes that introduce the individual authors discussed, as well as lists of further reading that point readers toward the broader implications of each essay. Taken together, all of these features make the handbook a practical companion for graduate and undergraduate courses in which literary texts themselves (not abstract theoretical paradigms, generic formulas, or historical rubrics) are the focus of study.

The essays collected here serve less to demarcate the field of children’s literature than to push at the generic and gatekeeping boundaries that cordon off (and can marginalize) “children’s literature” as a field of study. By introducing works that may not immediately spring to mind as “literature”—including film, children’s writing, comics, and musical recordings—but that belong to children’s culture more generally, we hope to expose all of the messy possibilities of children’s literature scholarship and encourage readers to go beyond this handbook and make connections between children’s literature and other cultural arenas.

As scholars who came to children’s literature from different disciplines—Lynne Vallone from literary studies and childhood studies and Julia Mickenberg from American studies with training in cultural history—in approaching our task as editors, we have tried to make our disciplinary differences a virtue. These disciplinary differences affected how we initially sought to shape the volume, our choices about scholars whose work we hoped to include, and the topics we wanted to cover; they also had an effect upon what we brought to the editing process itself, in the sense that each of us encouraged contributors to think expansively and in interdisciplinary ways.

We approached some of the top scholars of children’s literature to become contributors, also stretching the boundaries of the children’s literature field to bring it into dialogue with exciting work being done in the broader area of childhood studies, a burgeoning interdisciplinary arena that incorporates work related to children and childhood from history, media studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, legal studies, politics, literature, and other disciplines. Instead of giving contributors a predictable assignment typical of many reference works, for example, to characterize a genre (the school story; fantasy; primers) or a critical approach (feminist, Marxist, postcolonial), we let our contributors propose “wish lists” of accessible, in-print texts from the Anglo-American tradition that they felt were particularly “teachable” and flexible and that, if not readily classifiable as canonical, rightly deserved a place within the canon. We felt that if scholars were encouraged to write about a work about which they felt passionate, then exciting and perhaps unpredictable—in the best sense—scholarship would ensue, scholarship that organically addresses many of the forms, approaches, and issues that in a traditional handbook format might be explicated in a more mechanical fashion. What emerged confirms the value of our unconventional approach: a book of original, innovative essays that use individual texts of various genres, historical eras, and national traditions to model critical approaches to reading and analyzing children’s literature or to explore historical and/or sociological themes.

This book was constructed with the notion of “canonical” children’s literature as a guiding principle but also as something contributors should actively call into question. In asking contributors to choose a “canonical” text as the centerpiece of their essays, from which they could address larger issues and showcase various theoretical frameworks or methodological approaches, we operated on the assumption that canonical works—especially those that are taught at the college level and also assigned in primary schools—are thought to embody qualities worth preserving and/or attitudes worth refuting. As such, these texts may be particularly revealing of the culture from which they emerged, especially in terms of how childhood is constructed. But we also asked our contributors to think about neglected texts that were popular in their time, retain a following, or can be said to be worthy of inclusion in a canon.

Although many of the children’s works considered in the following essays are widely accepted as canonical— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Tom Sawyer , and Peter Pan , for example—not all of the texts discussed continue to be “works for children” anymore: some are too far removed from the lives of contemporary children (the Evangelical best-seller Froggy’s Little Brother ) or have long ago fallen out of classroom use (the New England Primer ). However, each of the works discussed in the handbook—whether novel, film, comic strip, picture book, poem, memoir, primer, or play—may lay claim to the status of the “classic” or deserve to be placed there. Certainly, one person’s “classic” might be another’s “trash,”yet we felt that a classic children’s book should be in print or readily available and embody qualities that had at one time communicated something essential to an understanding of childhood of a certain era.

Deborah Stevenson clarifies the qualities of a children’s literature classic in this way: “a text need not be popular with a multitude of contemporary children in order to be a classic. It must, however, speak of childhood, not just of literature, to adults” (119). Some of the works analyzed in this handbook may be considered to have recently achieved “classic” status in the canon of children’s literature—Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor, or the Frog and Toad books—and others may be classified as “classics-in-the-making” (the Harry Potter books or Gene Luen Yang’s award-winning graphic novel, American Born Chinese ). While the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature does not attempt to create a canon of children’s literature, it engages with many of the same questions of value, significance, and boundaries.

History and Approaches to Children’s Literature

Children’s literature has come rather late to the canon-formation game; it was not thought important enough to be included in the “high stakes” canon wars of the 1980s. Children’s literature first began to be recognized as a specialty in some university English departments in the 1980s and 1990s; previously it tended to be taught only in schools with strong elementary education programs or in library schools. Anthologies of national literatures (e.g., The Norton Anthology of American Literature ) still mostly ignore children’s literature. If they do include works such as Little Women or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , these stories, as Beverly Lyon Clark has discussed in Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003), are no longer labeled “children’s literature,” for the term is still often viewed as something of an oxymoron in the context of Great Books. Even when children’s literature is recognized within literary history it is often classed as a genre in and of itself: the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Novel , for instance, has a single chapter on “the children’s novel,” even as it recognizes the generic diversity of novels for adults.

Although only recently has this study begun to earn serious recognition within the academy, the critical study of children’s literature has a well-established history. Scholarly works on children’s literature began to appear in the early to mid-twentieth century, in works such as F.J. Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1932) and Paul Hazard’s Books, Children, and Men (published originally in French in 1944), which sought to place children’s literature within a larger cultural context. Within literary studies, the study of children’s literature gained a significant foothold in the 1970s: the British journal Signal was established in 1970; the U.S. journal Children’s Literature was established in 1972; and the Children’s Literature Association was formed in 1973, holding an annual conference beginning the following year and promoting scholarship in the field. And numerous colleges and universities developed programs in children’s literature study, based in English departments, library schools, and schools of education. Foundational works published since the late 1970s have shaped the field in important ways, helping define its contours and unique qualities, 5 bringing theoretical perspectives to bear, 6 creating essential historical overviews, 7 highlighting the intersection between ideologies and politics, 8 opening the canon of nineteenth-century literature (and other time periods) to include works for children, 9 and attending to the child reader/writer. 10

Beyond its academic history, children’s literature has developed in conjunction with a long tradition of critical evaluation that followed the development of children’s book publishing itself. Experts in the field have offered advice on what books to give to children since the late eighteenth century (see, for example, Sarah Trimmer’s The Guardian of Education and Charlotte Yonge’s influential three-part essay in Macmillan’s Magazine , “Children’s Literature of the Last Century”). “Treasuries” of children’s stories and popular anthologies have appeared in Britain and the United States since the late eighteenth century as well. 11 With the advent of library services to children in the late nineteenth century—special reading rooms for the young, staffed by librarians (most of them among a new cadre of college-educated women) trained to select books for children—new standards of quality in the field developed. Librarians, booksellers, and critics began to publish regular lists of recommended children’s books ( Booklist , for example, began publication in 1905, and The Horn Book , devoted to the critical evaluation of children’s books and scholarship in the field, first appeared in the United States in 1924). Macmillan established the first juvenile division in a U.S. publishing house in 1919, and most other publishers followed suit within the following two decades, continuing the field’s professionalization. In Britain, which had a long legacy of children’s book publishing going back to the printer John Newbery, the Puffin imprint of Penguin published its first children’s books in 1940, thus inaugurating an Anglo-American tradition of high-quality but affordable children’s books that would be continued in the United States with Little Golden Books.

Author and illustrator awards for children’s books have grown in number and prestige in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and have contributed to the process of canon formation in the field. Awards include the Newbery Medal (est. 1922) and the Caldecott Medal (est. 1937) in the United States and the British Carnegie Medal (est. 1937) and Kate Greenaway Medal (est. 1955). In Canada, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature and Illustrators was established in 1937. Peter Hunt’s Children’s Literature: An Anthology 1801-1902 (2000) and the comprehensive Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) point to the fact that children’s literature, while perhaps not integrated within a larger literary canon, has certainly developed a canon of its own, a point that returns us to the essays in this volume, which are organized under the general rubrics discussed below. 12

Adults and Children’s Literature

The creation of a children’s literature canon interests literacy specialists, parents, librarians and scholars—not children, without whom there would be no “children’s literature.” The first part of the handbook explores both the differences as well as the surprising affinities between adult and child audiences that are fundamental to the very project of children’s literature criticism. In narrating his responses to children’s books of the 1960s and 1970s in his memoir The Child That Books Built , Francis Spufford makes a compelling case for the benefits of reading as a child and rereading children’s literature as an adult: “The book becomes part of the history of our self-understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we come to be securely our own” (9). Like Spufford, a growing number of adults find themselves (often despite themselves) engrossed by children’s fare—be it the Harry Potter series or the Twilight books or the Wes Anderson film adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox . The many reiterations of children’s books in Western children’s culture—in films (from The Cat in the Hat to The Polar Express to The Golden Compass ), toys (Fancy Nancy dress-up kits, American Girl dolls, and Harry Potter trading cards), amusement park rides (think of much of Disneyland), cultural references (“down the rabbit hole,” a “Grinch”)—attest to the powerful presence that children’s books hold in today’s world. But this very ubiquity can make it harder to pin down just what we mean when we talk about children’s books or children’s literature. What might these terms mean today, and what have they meant in the past? What might “children’s literature,” variously defined, tell us about childhood(s) and culture(s)?

Peter Hunt’s opening essay for the volume, centered on the Alice books, asks foundational questions about children’s literature that help orient any scholar or adult reader of children’s books, starting with the basic issue of defining “children’s literature.” Spufford suggests a children’s book is whatever a child reads, whether it is The Hobbit , To Kill a Mockingbird , or Where the Wild Things Are , all touchstone books for him. Interestingly, all three of these books may be called works of “cross-writing” as described by U. C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers. 13 Put simply, cross-written books engage both the child and the adult, whether through dual readership or by reflecting the interplay of voices or images that either simultaneously or differently address both adults and children.

The “cross-written” nature and formative effects of children’s literature—or at least many works of children’s literature—make its study inherently interesting and also make a project such as ours especially difficult. As Spufford’s memoir reminds us, all former book-loving children may be considered “experts” in children’s literature and may bring this expertise to any new reading of a children’s book. But this seeming easy access to children’s books can produce stumbling blocks to critical reading—especially for students who have only recently left childhood behind. Yet, children’s literature is well suited to introduce students to the pleasures of analyzing literature and culture because its texts tend to be readily accessible.

Bringing children’s literature to the college-level classroom goes some way toward fulfilling Knoepflmacher’s and Myers’s prognostication about the fertility of reading children’s books when readers, and critical practices, are all grown up: “Cultural studies itself, as most centrally the study of relationships within and between cultures, has to go back to how cultures produce and construct citizens and consumers” (xv). Knoepflmacher and Myers claim a kind of partnership between adults and children in cross-writing that might provide more nuanced and sophisticated views of children and childhood in literature and in life: “Cross-writing may even help us revise, once and for all, the notions of a ‘Romantic’ natural childhood which still tend to dominate most readings of children’s literature and the child” (xvi). Indeed, the idea of cross-writing has proven to be instructive in many of the essays gathered here and is foundational to our purpose of bringing new scholarship on important children’s works (as a means for highlighting significant historical, critical, theoretical, or methodological issues) to an adult audience of students and educators. Yet, although cross-written, or “cross-over,” fiction, as Karin Westman calls the Harry Potter books in her essay for this volume, is not universally appreciated by some critics—she cites A. S. Byatt’s now notorious New York Times editorial that denigrates the “childish adult” reader of Rowling’s series—we agree with Westman that the increasing tendency of “children’s literature” to attract adult readers and serious scholarship is indeed energizing, as the essays collected here indicate.

The first four essays in the handbook wrestle with the following fundamental issues in children’s literature study: the meanings of “childhood,” “children,” and “children’s literature” and the power dynamics inherent in these terms (Peter Hunt); the politics of children’s literature and its analysis (Richard Flynn); the ways in which children’s books can serve in the college classroom as primers for critical literacy (Teya Rosenberg); and the significance of children’s literature’s growing popularity with adults and increasing intertwining with consumer culture (Karin Westman).

Pictures and Poetics

We grouped together a seemingly diverse set of essays that discuss aspects of visual or poetic forms, both of which traffic in images, visual or verbal, to communicate information succinctly, often in playful ways, to a child audience. Visual imagery has special resonance for the field of children’s literature. Most obviously, both illustrated books (in which pictures supplement the text but are not integral to it) and picture books (where the text, if any, is incomplete without reference to illustrations) are among the forms most likely to be labeled “children’s books,” and this has been the case for centuries: among the earliest Western texts published for children, such as Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), illustrations were used to engage young readers’ attention. Comenius wrote, “Pictures are the most intelligible books that children can look upon” (qtd. in Zipes et al. 1051). The picture book as we know it, with interdependent text and imagery, is primarily a twentieth-century form, and, as the essays by Nathalie op de Beeck and Kenneth Kidd suggest, relating picture books to modernism and psychoanalysis respectively, the history of the picture book cannot be separated from intellectual and artistic paradigms and practices that have helped define twentieth-century culture. Pictures provide an important mode of communication with preliterate children who can understand visual cues earlier than verbal ones. But visual images also distill a great deal of information. The old cliché that a picture tells a thousand words simultaneously suggests the form’s appropriateness to children and childhood but also reminds us of visual imagery’s beguiling complexity and the challenges of acquiring vocabulary sufficient to analyze it.

Discussing picture books’ complex modes of communication, Perry Nodelman notes in Words about Pictures (1988) :

[Picture books] imply a viewer with a mastery of many skills and much knowledge. Yet for the most part they also imply a viewer who is innocent, unsophisticated—childlike. Picture books are clearly recognizable as children’s books simply because they do speak to us of childlike qualities, of youthful simplicity and youthful exuberance; yet paradoxically, they do so in terms that imply a vast sophistication in regard to both visual and verbal codes. Indeed, it is part of the charm of many of the most interesting picture books that they so strangely combine the childlike and the sophisticated—that the viewer they imply is both very learned and very ingenuous. (21) 14

The idea of cross-writing again becomes useful in thinking about how to approach picture books critically, for the picture books that become family, library, and classroom favorites are typically those that sustain a dual appeal, particularly given the fact that younger children, usually without purchasing power of their own, gain access to picture books through the various intercessions of adults and older readers who read aloud, select books, buy them, or check them out of the library. Thus, picture books often operate at several different levels that appeal differently to adults and children. Take, for example, the 1999 picture book written by Philomen Sturges and illustrated by Amy Walrod, Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza . Adapting the classic tale of the Little Red Hen who repeatedly seeks assistance in baking a loaf of bread but whose appeals fall on deaf ears until the bread is ready to be eaten, Sturges and Walrod upend the didactic imperative of the traditional tale with a laid-back urban hen who is happy to let her goofy animal friends (a duck wearing a bathing cap and inner tube, a beatnik cat wearing a beret and playing the saxophone, etc.) enjoy the fruits of her labor. Although the friends predictably are willing to help Hen eat the delicious pizza when it’s done, they are also happy to clean up after dinner while the hen relaxes. In addition to revising the original plot with enough familiar details that children as well as adults will recognize the humorous aspects of the conscious revision, Sturges also plays with language in ways that adults will appreciate perhaps more than children. Even as the familiar “Not I!” refrain of the original story is retained, a new twist is added: when the hen realizes she has no pizza pan (and, later, flour and, still later, mozzarella cheese) she exclaims, in each instance, “Cluck!” (“I need a pizza pan” or flour or mozzarella cheese)—“fowl” language that is (hopefully) more likely to induce chuckles in adults than in young children. So too are adults more likely to see the humor in a beatnik cat or in the can of dolphin-safe tuna visible on the hen’s pantry shelf.

Attention to visual imagery and iconography, along with an awareness of the sophisticated and multiple layers of address in works for children, is essential not simply because children’s books often contain pictures but also because in our mass-mediated contemporary culture, the visual reigns supreme. This also means that any study of visual imagery in children’s culture must move well beyond picture books. It is not only fruitful but also necessary to approach the category of “children’s literature” as inclusively as possible to include all forms of media aimed at children, from children’s books to films, television programs, comic strips, graphic novels, and even websites and video games. And as with picture books, these forms are also quite often cross-written to engage adult and child audiences, especially in the case of box office films that young children may attend only if there is an adult to take them to the theater.

Attending to these other forms of visual media, the handbook includes essays (not exclusively in the Picturebooks and Poetics section) that discuss children’s film (Nicholas Sammond); comic strips (Charles Hatfield); graphic novels (Lan Dong); and the multimedia record album/television program/book, Free to Be … You and Me (Leslie Paris). Children’s films, as Ian Wojcik-Andrews has discussed, operate in close dialog with children’s literature, and thus critical frameworks developed by scholars of children’s literature bring important insights to the studies of these films. Although comic strips are rarely understood as literature, Charles Hatfield argues in his essay on Peanuts that they represent an ideal example of cross-writing. And in a striking contrast to comics, the graphic novel—somewhere between a comic book and a novel—is increasingly recognized as an ascendant literary form that, once again, is difficult to classify in terms of audience but that tends to attract young readers in part by virtue of its visual codes.

The image as a structuring category encompasses not only visual texts but also poetry, which relies on the evocativeness of language to fashion carefully selected words into dense snapshots of meaning. A number of important works in the field of children’s literature criticism such as Zohar Shavit’s The Poetics of Children’s Literature (1986) and Roni Natov’s The Poetics of Childhood (2002) argue that both childhood and children’s literature have associations with the notion of the poetic—that is, with creativity, innocence, fluidity, purity, or essence. Although such notions are hotly contested (much of the scholarly work in the field is devoted to challenging them), there is a great deal to be gained from investigating the very notion of poetry through the lens of childhood. Poetry and poetics figure into children’s literature both in forms clearly demarcated as verse—as in Langston Hughes’s The Dream Keeper , a collection of poetry for children, which Katharine Capshaw Smith discusses in her essay here, or The Bat-Poet, which Richard Flynn discusses in an earlier section—and in rhyming, rhythmic, or metered texts such as Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat , the vehicle for Kevin Shortsleeve’s essay on the politics of nonsense.

Reading History/Learning Race and Class

Covering a wide range of children’s books, from historical fiction (Michelle H. Martin and M. O. Grenby) to autobiography (Phillip Serrato), from Evangelical “street arab fiction” (Kimberley Reynolds) to the domestic novel (Kelly Hager, Mavis Reimer, and Beverly Lyon Clark), to the coming-of-age story (June Cummins), the chapters in this section of the handbook are all concerned with how child characters are invited to belong, or are kept from belonging, to familial, class, racial, ethnic, religious, and/or national groups. Moreover, as “unwritten” or untainted by culture, and as the object of contrast or comparison with adults or “others” (who are often described as childlike), the child makes a natural figure upon which ideas of national and racial identities may be draped, as Mavis Reimer, Kelly Hager, Beverly Lyon Clark, and June Cummins discuss in their essays for this volume. Recent scholarship in childhood studies has, for example, brought to light the central placement of the figure of the child within social, political, scientific, and theoretical discourses of the nineteenth century. Claudia Castañeda, in her book Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (2002), argues that the “child-body” functions as a potent “figuration” of development with significant implications for nineteenth-century European ideologies supporting racial hierarchies and imperialism. In scientific discourses such as Spencerian evolutionary biology and physiological psychology, the white, Western, middle-class adult male was viewed as the final standard of the completed, developed body and self, leaving children and racialized “others” behind. The child represented, for many, the savage past of human life, a position that put colonial and racial others at the bottom of social structures, outside of normalcy and into “pathology.” In Herbert Spencer’s published essays on education (collected in one volume in 1860 as Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical ), he refers to a biological history of human development in which the physiological, emotional, and instinctive natures of the child are reflected in the savage: “During early years, every civilized man passes through that phase of character exhibited by the barbarous race from which he is descended. As the child’s features—flat nose, forward-opening nostrils, large lips, wide-apart eyes, absent frontal sinus, &c.—resemble those of the savage, so too do his instincts…” (qtd. in Castañeda 21).

Such ideas about the relationship between the child and the childlike savage may be traced in nineteenth-century American constructions of childhood as well. In Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005), Karen Sánchez-Eppler comments, “Inchoate, children are often presented as not yet fully human, so that the figure of the child demarcates the boundaries of personhood, a limiting case for agency, voice, or enfranchisement. Hence, for people who are not male, or white, or American, or considered sufficiently sane or sufficiently rich, exclusion from civil rights has often been implemented through analogies to the child” (xxiv). Essays in this volume that focus on texts about immigrant or minority children directly confront the question of what it means to be socialized for citizenship and to retain a sense of personal dignity in a society in which they are likely to remain infantilized in the eyes of those who are part of the dominant culture.

In Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. DuBois (2006), Caroline F. Levander illustrates the ways in which, in the conflict between righteous young colony and corrupt parent nation, notions of children and childhood played essential roles in young America’s rhetoric of rebellion, rights, and liberty. Dependent, in part, on the same discourses of developmentalism and the importance of whiteness described in nineteenth-century evolutionary biology, the child, according to Levander, functions as central to “key political debates crystallizing national identity that enables the child to act as a persuasive vehicle through which individuals come to affiliate with the nation at pivotal moments in its development …” (12).

By the 1970s, when Mildred Taylor first began publishing the Logan family series of historical novels (discussed here in an essay by Michelle Martin) based on stories from her family, nineteenth-century discourses of “racial science” promoted in anthropometrical studies and in physiological psychology, and unconsciously influencing authors such as Twain, had been rethought and discarded. However, the United States continued to show deep racial divisions, and persistent racial intolerance threatened to overshadow the legal gains of the recent civil rights movement. Just as living children played an essential role in the civil rights movement itself—marching in Birmingham or serving as martyrs for the movement (in the latter instance as the cases of Emmett Till or the four girls who died in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham make clear)—so multicultural children’s literature has played an essential role in socializing the young to reject notions of white supremacy or narrow nationalist thought, as discussions in the handbook of Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit , and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese suggest.

In addition to informing illuminating notions about the child within discussions of racial and national identity, the figure of the child provides a lens through which class identity can be interrogated. As Troy Boone argues in Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (2005), both the conflation of the working classes with the idea of the juvenile and working-class youth themselves were essential to the ideological enterprise of imperialist Victorian England, themes explored in other chapters in this section in essays by Kimberley Reynolds and Kelly Hager, respectively, on two nineteenth-century novels: the British Evangelical novel Froggy’s Little Brother by “Brenda” and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney.

Innocence and Agency

We have collected the final group of essays under the category “Innocence and Agency,” two key terms in the study of childhood, children, and children’s literature. Perhaps no concept related to childhood is more contested than the notion of children’s innocence, understood both in terms of lack of knowledge and lack of sin. The idea of innocence as a defining feature of modern childhood forms a basis for innumerable programs and policies affecting children, including censorship, which has historically been undertaken under the guise of protecting children. As legal scholar Marjorie Heins demonstrates in Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (2001), industry codes among producers of films, comic books, and television programming were established as a way for these producers to show their commitment to children’s best interests and as a way to preempt censors. 15 The very category of children’s literature comes not simply from the recognition that children are cognitively less developed than adults, not fully literate, and less experienced—and therefore in need of simpler materials that will be comprehensible and relevant to them—but also from the belief that certain material is inappropriate for the young: for example, explicit sexuality, violence, political exhortation, or discussions about drugs, rape, or murder.

But the idea of childhood innocence is relatively recent, a product of the romantic era. In what became a landmark if controversial text in the study of childhood, French art historian Philippe Ariès argued in Centuries of Childhood: a Social History of Family Life (1962) that the concept of childhood did not exist until the seventeenth century, and then only for the middle and upper classes. Although his historical evidence has been called into question, what remains striking about his findings, which others have corroborated, is the fact that until relatively recently, most children were not shielded from sex, death, or other realities, and they were expected to work and add to the family income from a very young age. In other words, the idea of childhood innocence is a distinctly modern phenomenon and not something inherent to the child’s being.

The Puritans believed in infant depravity or the doctrine of original sin. As Courtney Weikle-Mills’s essay on The New England Primer reminds us, the Puritans emphasized literacy in the young as an essential means for transmitting religious belief and for promoting penitence, prayer, and piety, all seen as keys to salvation. In a time when infant mortality rates were extremely high, children were taught repeatedly in the few reading materials to which they had access that death could come to them at any time. The danger was not simply the loss of life itself but, worse, the threat of eternal damnation if one had not been saved. The title of James Janeway’s A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671) makes clear the emphasis on child death: this highly influential work remained in print in Britain and America for more than two hundred years and spurred imitations of triumphant child deathbed scenes into the Victorian era.

In Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985), sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s examination of life insurance policies helped her make the argument that children became emotionally priceless (i.e., valued in sentimental terms) as they became economically useless. This transformation of the child from performing important economic work to performing affective roles essential to a family’s emotional well-being was completed for children of the working classes only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after child labor was strictly curtailed and education mandated. This shift went hand in hand with the assumption that childhood was a unique and sacred stage of life that merited special protection, nurturance, and guidance. In Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain: Margaret Macmillan, 1860–1931 (1990), Carolyn Steedman emphasizes the reach of this change, as poor and working-class children, like their more affluent counterparts, were granted the “right to childhood.”

With the movement toward a construction of the child as innocent—and a waning of patriarchal authority—came a shift in children’s literature away from didactic and religious instruction and toward works written for children’s enjoyment as much as for their edification. This process began in the eighteenth century, as educators and theorists of childhood ranging from John Locke to Jean Jacques Rousseau emphasized the pedagogical value of children’s play and stressed that children would learn more if they were interested in what they read. Such thinking applied primarily to middle- and upper-class children, but as Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s essay on Swiss Family Robinson and child book makers would suggest, it would filter into children’s literature as well as educational practice. The idea that children’s reading should be a pleasurable activity would dominate by the late nineteenth century.

As Eric Tribunella’s reading of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in terms of the “schoolboy crush” would suggest, ostensible innocence can grant a kind of agency—within bounds—to the child who can be seen as unaware of the sexual context in which he/she operates, thus marking those relationships as unthreatening. If Peter Pan , the topic of Marah Gubar’s essay, has become a flashpoint for thinking about notions of childhood innocence, the long 1960s are often seen as a turning point in thinking about childhood innocence. Rising divorce rates, the questioning of authority, the women’s movement (which some believed contributed to the breakdown of traditional family structures), as well as the sexual revolution itself all produced commentary in the 1970s and 1980s on “the disappearance of childhood”—a discourse that assumed the increasing intrusion of the “real world” upon children’s lives constituted a threat to childhood. 16 Changing perceptions of childhood were manifest in transformations in children’s literature, particularly as expectations about appropriate content for children’s literature also shifted. Discussions of the sea change in children’s literature brought about by the 1960s typically focus on the rise of adult themes in the ascendant genre of adolescent literature—themes such as drug abuse, divorce, rape, homosexuality, teenage pregnancy, masturbation, alcoholism, and gang violence—which would have been taboo in children’s literature only a decade earlier. 17 Claudia Nelson’s essay centering on the historical novel Jade and Leslie Paris’s discussion of Free to Be … You and Me in different ways both come to grips with the impact of the sixties revolutions, particularly the sexual revolution, on children’s literature and notions of child innocence and agency.

As suggested above, in the contemporary moment we seem to be at a point where the lines dividing children’s literature and literature for adults often cannot easily be 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. Exceptions remain, of course (the motion picture rating system is alive and well, as are Internet filtering devices and other vehicles for protecting children from media content considered by many to be inappropriate), but Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the subject of the handbook’s final essay (by Naomi Wood), is a good example of a set of works that engages both child and adult readers, in part by interrogating the very idea of childhood innocence.

Concluding Comments

Given the limitations of space and the fact that contributors were afforded significant leeway in their text selections, the final collection of essays is not comprehensive in terms of national traditions, historical periods, genres, social issues, theoretical traditions, or methodological practices. Still, we believe the handbook demonstrates the complexity and richness of scholarship in children’s literature and points readers toward other important work in a range of fields. The four rubrics under which the essays are grouped not only highlight themes fundamental to the study of children’s literature, but as categories they are also flexible enough to encompass a wide range of key issues, and the essays cover a diverse array of topics and genres (from children’s writing to the history of the book to African American, Asian American, and Mexican American children’s literature), theoretical/methodological approaches (including postcolonial, psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, and performance studies), and historical and sociological issues important to children and childhood (from religious indoctrination, modernism, child-rearing advice, consumerism, and the relationship of second-wave feminism to children’s media in the 1970s).

In forming this handbook we have attempted to tackle some questions essential to understanding children’s books, questions that both engage the phantom child and situate children’s books within literary history and culture more generally: Where do children’s books belong? How do children’s books engage with and create culture? What makes children’s books especially useful vehicles for understanding the past and the present? If this handbook does more to raise questions than to provide answers, it will have succeeded in its goal of demonstrating the richness of children’s literature scholarship at a moment of great possibility within the field.

See, in order, Kidd; Sammond; Mickenberg; Reynolds; Mitchell; Forman-Brunell; Bradford; Nodelman, The Hidden Adult . This list, of course, simply gestures at the richness of work being done on the topic of children and childhood and is not meant to convey the entirety of excellent recent work in literature, history, American studies, or childhood studies.

Karín Lesnick-Oberstein makes a related argument in Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child . She claims that children’s literature criticism is based on a fictional construct, “the child,” and by virtue of this fact, children’s literature criticism in fact has no real ground to stand on.

See, for example, Hunt and Ray; Rudd; Zipes, Oxford Encyclopedia ; Grenby and Immel; Nodelman and Reimer. See also comprehensive websites by academic librarians such as David K. Brown’s site (from the University of Calgary, Canada), the Children’s Literature Web Guide: http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dKbrown/aboutclwg.html , and Professor Emerita of Rutgers University Kay E. Vandergrift’s Special Interest Page on Children’s and Young Adult Literature: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/professional-development/childlit/ .

See Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature ; Nodelman, Words about Pictures ; Nikolajeva.

See Rose; Bradford; Dusinberre; Wall; Paul; Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell .

See Avery; Pickering; MacCann.

See Stephens; Richards.

See Nelson; Griswold; Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland ; MacLeod, A Moral Tale ; Plotz.

See Steedman, The Tidy House ; Wolf and Heath.

Some influential American examples include Charles Herbert Sylvester’s multivolume Journeys through Bookland and May Hill Arbuthnot’s Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature .

See also Stahl, Hanlon, and Keyser, which is a kind of hybrid anthology of primary texts and criticism.

Knoepflmacher returns to the topic of “generational dynamics” in children’s books and discusses Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (along with Mary Norton’s The Borrowers ) in particular—in “Children’s Texts and the Grown-Up Reader.”

See also the following scholarship on picture books, picture-book theory, and visual literacy: Bang; Doonan; Lewis; Nikolajeva and Scott; Sipe and Pantaleo.

See Gilbert for additional information on comic book censorship and youth.

See Postman and Polakow for further discussion of this topic.

See MacLeod, American Childhood , and Townsend.

Works Cited

Arbuthnot , May Hill. The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature; Single-Volume Edition of Time for Poetry, Time for Fairy Tales and Time for True Tales. A Collection of Poems and Stories for Children, to be used in the Classroom, Home or Camp; especially Planned for College Classes in Children’s Literature … Illustrated by Arthur Paul [and Others]. Rev ed. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1961 .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: a Social History of Family Life . Translated from the French by Robert Baldick. New York: Knopf, 1962 .

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922 . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994 .

Bang, Molly. Picture This: How Pictures Work . New York: SeaStar Books, 2000 .

Boone, Troy. Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire . New York: Routledge, 2005 .

Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature . Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne UP, 2001 .

Brown, David K. Children’s Literature Web Guide . The Doucette Library of Teaching Resources at University of Calgary, Canada. April 22, 1998 . Web. 22 January 2010. 〈 http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dKbrown/ 〉.

Byatt, A. S. “ Harry Potter and the Childish Adult. ” New York Times , 7 July 2003 .

Castañeda, Claudia. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds . Durham NC: Duke UP, 2002 .

Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America . Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003 .

Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1932 .

Doonan, Jane. Looking at Pictures in Picture Books . Stroud, UK: Thimble 1992 .

Dusinberre, Juliet. Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987 .

Forman–Brunell, Miriam. Babysitter: An American History . New York: New York UP, 2009 .

Gilbert, James Burkhart. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s . New York: Oxford UP, 1986 .

Grenby, M. O., and Andrea Immel. The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009 .

Griswold, Jerome. Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America’s Classic Children’s Books . New York: Oxford UP, 1992 .

Hazard, Paul. Books, Children, and Men . 5th ed. Boston: Horn Book, 1983 .

Heins, Marjorie. Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth . New York: Hill and Wang, 2001 .

Hughes, Langston. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems . New York: Knopf, 1932 .

Hunt, Peter, and Sheila G. Bannister Ray. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature . London: Routledge, 1996 .

Hunt, Peter. Children’s Literature: An Anthology, 1801–1902 . Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature . Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1991 .

Janeway, James. A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children . London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1676 .

Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale . Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004 .

Knoepflmacher, U. C. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998 .

Knoepflmacher, U. C.. “Children’s Texts and the Grown-Up Reader.” In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature , edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, 159–73. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009 .

Knoepflmacher, U. C., and Mitzi Myers. “ From the Editors: ‘Cross-Writing’ and the Reconceptualizing of Children’s Literary Studies. ” Children’s Literature 25 ( 1997 ): vii–xvii.

Lesnick-Oberstein, Karín. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child . Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994 .

Levander, Caroline Field. Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois . Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006 .

Lewis, David. Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text . London: Routledge/Falmer, 2001 .

MacCann, Donnarae. White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900 . New York: Garland Publishing, 1998 .

MacLeod, Anne. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries . Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994 .

MacLeod, Anne. A Moral Tale: Children’s Fiction and American Culture, 1820–1860 . Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975 .

Mickenberg, Julia L. Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States . New York: Oxford UP, 2006 .

Mitchell, Mary Niall. Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery . New York: New York UP, 2008 .

Natov, Roni. The Poetics of Childhood . New York: Routledge, 2002.

Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917 . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991 .

Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic . New York: Garland Publishing, 1996 .

Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picturebooks Work . New York: Garland Publishing, 2001 .

Nodelman, Perry, and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature . 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003 .

Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008 .

Nodelman, Perry. Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books . Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988 .

Paul, Lissa. Reading Otherways . Portland, ME: Calendar Islands, 1998 .

Pickering, Samuel F. John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England . Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1981 .

Plotz, Judith A. Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood . New York: Palgrave, 2001 .

Polakow, Valerie. The Erosion of Childhood . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992 .

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood . New York: Delacorte Press, 1982.

Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Children’s Literature . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 .

Richards, Jeffrey, ed. Imperialism and Juvenile Literature . New York: St. Martin’s P, 1989 .

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction . London: Macmillan, 1984 .

Rudd, David. The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature . New York: Routledge, 2010 .

Sammond, Nicholas. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 . Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005 .

Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005 .

Shavit, Zohar. Poetics of Children’s Literature . Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986 .

Sipe, Lawrence R., and Sylvia Joyce Pantaleo. Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality . New York: Routledge, 2008 .

Spufford, Francis. The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading . New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002 .

Stahl, J. D., Tina L. Hanlon, and Elizabeth Lennox Keyser. Crosscurrents of Children’s Literature: An Anthology of Texts and Criticism . New York: Oxford UP, 2007 .

Steedman, Carolyn. Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret MacMillan, 1860–1931 . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990 .

Steedman, Carolyn. The Tidy House: Little Girls Writing . London: Virago, 1982 .

Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction . London: Longman, 1992 .

Stevenson, Deborah. “ Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children’s Literature Canon, Or the Drowning of the Water Babies. ” The Lion and the Unicorn 21, no. 1 ( 1997 ): 112–30.

Stimpson, Carol R. “ Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons and Whistling Jo March. ” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 21, no. 4 ( 1990 ): 957–76.

Sturges, Philomen, and Amy Walrod. The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza . New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 1999 .

Sylvester, Charles Herbert. Journeys through Bookland; a New and Original Plan for Reading, Applied to the World’s Best Literature for Children . Chicago: Bellows-Reeve Company, 1912 .

Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children’s Literature . New York: HarperTrophy, 1992 .

Trimmer, Sarah. The Guardian of Education . 5 vols. London, 1802 –6.

Vandergrift, Kay E. Kay E. Vandergrift’s Special Interest Page . 14 August 1995. Web. 22 January 2010. 〈 http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/professional-development/childlit/ 〉.

Wall, Barbara. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991 .

Wojcik-Adrews, Ian. Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory , New York: Garland Publishing, 2000.

Wolf, Shelby Anne, and Shirley Brice Heath. The Braid of Literature: Children’s Worlds of Reading . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992 .

Yonge, Charlotte. “ Children’s Literature of the Last Century. ” Macmillan’s Magazine 20 ( 1869 ).

Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children . New York: Basic Books, 1985 .

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales . Rev. and exp. ed. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002 .

Zipes, Jack. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature . 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006 .

Zipes, Jack, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, and Gillian Avery, eds. The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English . New York: W.W. Norton, 2005 .

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Undergraduate
• High School
• Architecture
• American History
• Asian History
• Antique Literature
• American Literature
• Asian Literature
• Classic English Literature
• World Literature
• Creative Writing
• Linguistics
• Criminal Justice
• Legal Issues
• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• World Affairs
• African-American Studies
• East European Studies
• Latin-American Studies
• Native-American Studies
• West European Studies
• Family and Consumer Science
• Social Issues
• Women and Gender Studies
• Social Work
• Natural Sciences
• Pharmacology
• Earth science
• Agriculture
• Agricultural Studies
• Computer Science
• IT Management
• Mathematics
• Investments
• Engineering and Technology
• Engineering
• Aeronautics
• Medicine and Health
• Alternative Medicine
• Communications and Media
• Advertising
• Communication Strategies
• Public Relations
• Educational Theories
• Teacher's Career
• Chicago/Turabian
• Company Analysis
• Education Theories
• Shakespeare
• Canadian Studies
• Food Safety
• Relation of Global Warming and Extreme Weather Condition
• Movie Review
• Admission Essay

Annotated Bibliography

• Application Essay
• Article Critique
• Article Review
• Article Writing
• Book Review
• Business Plan
• Business Proposal
• Capstone Project
• Cover Letter
• Creative Essay
• Dissertation
• Dissertation - Abstract
• Dissertation - Conclusion
• Dissertation - Discussion
• Dissertation - Hypothesis
• Dissertation - Introduction
• Dissertation - Literature
• Dissertation - Methodology
• Dissertation - Results
• GCSE Coursework
• Grant Proposal
• Marketing Plan
• Multiple Choice Quiz
• Personal Statement
• Power Point Presentation
• Power Point Presentation With Speaker Notes
• Questionnaire
• Reaction Paper
• Research Paper
• Research Proposal
• SWOT analysis
• Thesis Paper
• Online Quiz
• Literature Review
• Movie Analysis
• Statistics problem
• Math Problem
• All papers examples
• How It Works
• Money Back Policy
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• We Are Hiring

Children’s Literature, Essay Example

Pages: 2

Words: 607

Hire a Writer for Custom Essay

Use 10% Off Discount: "custom10" in 1 Click 👇

You are free to use it as an inspiration or a source for your own work.

Prior to joining this class, I had the perception that children’s literature was all about simple and unfounded English sentence structure and fictional tales that anyone can easily make up. The fact that the course is titled children’s literature did not strike a chord with rules of writing, aesthetics, or seriousness in literary forms and theories. As I signed up for this class, I thought that literature for children entails stories for entertainment and nothing worth to study.

In overall, I came into the class with high expectations as a learner is always expecting to gain some new knowledge. In this class, I have learnt various aesthetics of children’s literature. I have learnt the different ranges of children literature from contemporary to classic material, the popular and the highbrow, works for infants to material for the young adults (Christensen 236). It is amazing how children’s literature can be analyzed from fictional to non-fictional material, to drama or even poetry, including visual narratives from graphic novels to comics and picture books. In terms of moral, it is always put in a humorous way and this make them to serve in two-fold. Notably, children’s literature tends to have a child’s perspective; repetition is a very common style in it.

I have learnt that children’s literature can be analyzed textually and interpreted from different theoretical perspectives, besides exploring historical approaches. As a child, I remember how, together with my age mates, had a profound fascination with illustrations and pictures in books sometimes not paying attention to the words written therein. In this class, I have learnt the importance placed on visuals in children’s literature. The fact that pictures have accompanied children’s stories since time immemorial underpins the role visuals play (from the papyrus in Byzantine Egypt to the computer generated graphic illustrations). Many people continue to appreciate occasional drawings, which are found in chapter books (Lerer 29). This is the difference between children’s literature and adult literature.

I signed up for the class not knowing that different genres exist in children’s literature. My perception that all children’s literature is the same changed as the class progressed (Thomas Jr 69). The different genres I have learnt include picture books, poetry books, traditional literature, modern fantasy, “fractured” fairy tales, science fiction, contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction and biography, informational books (non-fiction), and graphic novels. Notably, children’s literature in all sense should have some aesthetic value as it represents special form of succession and transmission of culture, a combination of cultural design and spiritual communication between two generations. The aesthetic value of children’s literature should be different from that of adults. Since children are still in the formative age, the idea that “goodness is beauty” appeals as an aesthetic value in the molding of young souls in order to have a better functioning society especially in morals and embracing virtue (Thomas Jr 72). Therefore, every literature for children must have a moral behind it, which is not necessarily the case for adult literature.

I am familiar with “Cinderella” by William Wegman, and its moral still lingers in my mind. The aesthetic value of this book is found in the way it is interesting to read, proper articulation of words, well-constructed plot, appropriateness and appeal of the story for its intended age range, and themes and morals worth conveying to children.

Works Cited

Christensen, Nina. “Childhood revisited: On the relationship between Childhood Studies and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly , 28. 4 (2003): 230– 239. Print

Lerer, Seth. Children’s literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print

Thomas Jr, Joseph T. “Review of Aesthetic Approaches to Children’s Literature: An Introduction, by Maria Nikolajeva.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies , 3. 3 (2007): Print

Stuck with your Essay?

Get in touch with one of our experts for instant help!

Healthcare, Annotated Bibliography Example

The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner, Essay Example

Time is precious

don’t waste it!

Plagiarism-free guarantee

Privacy guarantee

Secure checkout

Money back guarantee

Related Essay Samples & Examples

Voting as a civic responsibility, essay example.

Pages: 1

Words: 287

Utilitarianism and Its Applications, Essay Example

Words: 356

The Age-Related Changes of the Older Person, Essay Example

Words: 448

The Problems ESOL Teachers Face, Essay Example

Pages: 8

Words: 2293

Should English Be the Primary Language? Essay Example

Pages: 4

Words: 999

The Term “Social Construction of Reality”, Essay Example

Words: 371

Children’s Literature in Literacy Education Essay

Dramatic play, storytelling, picture books, popular culture and child’s development, significance of the fairy tales.

As the matter of fact, literature and literacy emerged from the human desire to share experience and to get a better understanding of the perception of the existence. It is worth stating that all the fairy tales and myths aim to help people to understand something that cannot be explained. Literature plays an integral role in the children’s development and the process of growing up. Literature is the need of the human being to express feelings and experience through words and stylistic devices.

A great variety of children literature address different needs; some books aim to explain the world around us, whereas other ones describe the daily routine, stress the conflict situations, and show some possible variants and option for a solution or omitting. Some books are written to highlight the differences that are common in the world, namely cultural, national, or racial. However, no matter what the content is, each book is created to transfer the vital message.

For the child to be able to understand and perceive the knowledge hidden in the book, he should be able to read. Reading is not only about pronouncing words together; it is more about the capability to understand the text and to analyze what is read. The primary aim of the paper is to provide the in-depth analysis regarding the role of the children’s literature in the literacy education.

Reading and dramatic play are the perfect tools that help to develop the child’s imagination and contribute to the expansion of the world outlook. Dramatic play is usually used to see how the child interacts with the environment. The fundamental purpose of the teacher is not to give children printed words to learn by heart but to create the prolific atmosphere to play, be unique, and reflect the inner world with the attention to the reality (Mayesky, 2006).

Through the performance, the teacher can draw appropriate conclusions regarding the feelings of the child and his role in the family. Unconsciously children behave with the toys or classmates the way they are treated in the family. The dramatic play allows the children to behave like adults. This type of the activity is acceptable to children of any age as the dramatic play changes and becomes more complex with the maturity.

The dramatic play is used in the prekindergarten programs to foster the developmental process. It is a common pedagogical technique (Gupta, 2009). One child is a storyteller; he chooses people from the group to make a performance. A narrator dictates the rules, children make costumes and play. Imagination and creativity skills develop rapidly; furthermore, children learn how to act in a group and follow the rules. The primary objective is considered to be the promotion and increase of interest towards literacy development. Firstly, the children play the stories they have read or told, however, later they start inventing their own as they have the individual experience.

In the modern world, where the vast majority of people are obsessed with the Internet and technical gadgets, the number of people who enjoy reading and children who prefer reading fairy tales to playing on the smartphone decreases. The question arises, is it necessary to promote literature in the modern highly technological world? Einstein, the outstanding scientist, once stated that to encourage the child and to develop intelligence, the fairy stories should be read to him.

The famous words of Einstein had an impressive influence “if you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales” (Batt, 2006). The principal significance of telling the stories to children is the level of the intimacy during the process, the magic that happens when the expressions from the imagination become real with the help of words. It contributes to the better development of self.

Storytelling improves imagination, critical thinking skills, problem-solving, listening, and communication skills. The richness of culture and experience of the ancestors can be found in the stories everyone has heard in childhood. Who would people be without the storytelling?

Language games, songs, fairy tales, and rhymes have a positive effect not only on children in kindergarten and school, however, on toddlers and infants as well. The vast majority of parents are surprised by this fact. According to the recent researchers, there is the link between the language experience the infants and toddlers have and their future development of communication and language skills (Birckmayer, Kennedy, & Stonehouse, 2008).

Although the children of this age do not understand the meaning of the words, they perceive the tune and sounds. It is significantly important to engage children in language experience to foster positive development.

The recent researches prove that more and more children attend the preschool programs in Europe. The reason for such popularity of the pre-educational centers is that the early cognitive competence is linked to the academic success and achievements the person will have in the future. The primary problem of the modern education is that it is focused on the domains, such as “cognitive, social, emotional, or physical” (Fleer & Hammer, 2013).

There are great chances for one aspect to become the leading one. The kindergartens experience “schoolification”. Nevertheless, the fundamental factor for successful academic performing, emotional domain, is not well addressed in modern school and kindergartens as the cognitive aspect receives the priority. As Vygotsky puts it, there is a relation between intellect, affect, language, and thought. The educational programs in kindergarten exclude the aspect of emotional development, and, according to Vygotsky it is the major drawback of the modern educational system. The implementation of the fairy tales into the developmental program will beneficially affect further child’s improvement.

Fairy tales are considered to be “cultural device for emotion regulation” (Fleer & Hammer, 2013). Telling stories the teacher engage children in emotion regulation. They participate in “telling, retelling, and role-playing of fairy tales” (Fleer & Hammer, 2013).

Picture books can also be used by teachers to promote and foster the development of imagination and cognitive development with the help of literature. Images in such types of books are commonly connected and play the same role as the printed text. The message is conveyed through art and text. The picture books engage children on both, emotional and intellectual levels. The text in the picture books is as significant as images are, as it provides the child with the ability to understand the language in use and develop creativity and imagination (Kiefer & Tyson, 2014). The words that are used in the text expand the vocabulary of a child (Kiefer & Tyson, 2014). They can guess the meaning simply by looking at the picture as it corresponds the meaning of the text.

From the birth, every child has chances to succeed, to prosper, and make changes. Learning experience affects the future development of the person. Acquiring skills and knowledge do not start at school; it starts from the very first day of life. The world of a child consists of family and place of living. Understanding and exploring the world involves three areas, namely “being belonging, and becoming” (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009). These notions the child can learn from literature.

It is worth highlighting that books provide children with the models of behavior, attitude towards people, tolerance, and respect (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009). Some books, like Where the Wild Things Are by Sendak, aim to show that every person has a place in the world and should find where he belongs to. The question regarding belonging is essential to cover. In addition, children’s literature addresses the question of being.

Fairy tales and novels depict the model of behavior, the peculiarities of establishing the relationships between people and maintaining them. Moreover, the diversity of the world is also shown in the literature. Taken into consideration stated above significance of the literature in the positive child’s development, it should be pointed out that the teachers should pay a lot of attention while selecting the stories. In the case, the educator wants to address the question of tolerance and differences between the human beings; Whoever You Are by Mem Fox seems to be the perfect option.

Educating children, the teachers should not eliminate the issue of becoming. Knowledge, needs, and preferences of children change during the childhood, and the area of becoming reflects these processes. Paulette Bourgeois aims to help children in understanding their self and the world around (Adam, 2014). The series of Franklin books written by this talented author provide the children with understanding how to interact with the classmates, be honest, fight with fears, and appreciate moral values.

According to the experts, children need to be surrounded by the literature and be able to interpret the language of it, this way they will enjoy the learning process and will have a fruitful academic performance in future. A new generation can change the way people live now and improve the living standards of the whole nation. That is, it seems significant to show children the world of literature as the books are an unlimited source of information, advice, and experience. It is impossible to show the outstanding result in school or college without reading and critical thinking skills. Nurturing the love towards literature, people facilitate the way; the child will have towards success and development. The ability to interpret and analyze the literature forms since the childhood, and that is, should be addressed to from the very first day of life.

Modern children face a much more various literature opportunities than during any time in history. Earlier, the access to the literature had not so many people as the books were written in Latin and cost so much that not everyone could afford it. The advantages of the printed technologies provided the broader group with the possibility to read. The literacy became a larger notion encompassing not only ability to write and read but, more importantly, to analyze, understand, perceive, and draw conclusions.

Nowadays, the children literature is represented not only in the printed form but in the electronic as well. The experts have already revealed the interrelation between the enjoyment of reading and academic success. The dominant activity in children is play. Imagination is significant for their development, and that is should be used by educators to improve the learning abilities of children. Through the play, a child learns “the difference between reality and fantasy and engaging in imaginative thought, so necessary in reading and text construction” (Ashton, 2007). Every book has a message that is subconsciously perceived.

That is, the children’s literature should be carefully selected. Some stories promote stereotyping; the example of it can be Power Rangers advocate the image of the boy who is ruthless, strong, and violent at some point, whereas Barbie establishes the stereotypes regarding the woman’s appearance and standards of beauty that can lead to eating disorders and low self-esteem. Nevertheless, the stories help children to develop intellect, imagination, nurture the love towards learning and reading, and understand the world around better.

Although the adults believe that some fairy tales are too scary to be told to children, the recent researchers prove that telling and reading such stories are the essential part of the positive child’s development. From fairy tales, children can learn how to deal with the problems and solve some issues. However, it is worth stating that adults can make the same too. Children usually imagine that they are the main heroes of the story and their possible actions in certain situations (Fremantle, 2013).

Moreover, from fairy tales they become aware that life is not always easy and happy, something bad may happen as no one is protected from the challenges and difficulties. To secure children and build the emotional shield, that will protect the child in any case. Reading fairy tales children understand that all people are different, there are different races and cultures; everyone should be respected and treated equally. Tolerance, respect, and critical thinking skills can be taught from fairy tales.

In conclusion, it should be pointed out that the literature plays an essential role in the child’s development and the process of growing up. The major purpose of the creation of the first myths, novels, and fairy tales was to transfer the knowledge and experience to the next generations and to provide the explanations for the phenomenon that could not be understood. As the matter of fact, with the technological development and all the advance and progress that society has already made, the purpose of the literature and education seems to be the same.

Teachers are the guides that lead children into the world of literature to have unlimited access to the experience that was gained for centuries for us to be able to speak to the ancestors with the help of the book. Reading develops a number of skills, among them critical thinking and language skills. Moreover, the ability to read, perceive, and analyze the information facilitates the process of education, which consequently lead to more successful future. Unfortunately, the vast majority of schools make an accent on the decoding text, rather than on the sufficient perception of the information. Understanding the significance of literature will bring the society to the new level of development and evolution.

Adam, H. (2014). Children’s literature. In J. Fellowes & G. Oakley (Eds.), Language, literacy and early childhood education (pp. 512-533). Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

Ashton, J. (2007). Barbie, the Wiggles and Harry Potter. Can popular culture really support young children’s literacy development? European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 13 (1), 31-40.

Batt, T. (2006). The story sack: storytelling and story making with young children (pp.25-29). Auckland, N.Z. :Playcentre Publications.

Birckmayer, J., Kennedy, A., & Stonehouse, A. (2008). From lullabies to literature: stories in the lives of infants and toddlers . Washington, DC : NAEYC.

Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations. (2009). Belonging, being and becoming – the early years learning framework for Australia . Canberra: DEEWR. Web.

Fleer, M. & Hammer, M. (2013). Emotions in imaginative situations: The valued place of fairytales for supporting emotion regulation. Mind, Culture, and Activity 20 (3), 240-259.

Fremantle, S. (2013). Chapter 6 ‘Once upon a time’: A study of children’s response to fairytale. In P. Pinsent (Ed.), The power of the page children’s books and their readers (pp.55-65). Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.

Gupta, A. (2009). Vygotskian perspectives on using dramatic play to enhance children’s development and balance creativity with structure in the early childhood classroom. Early Child Development and Care, 179 (8), 1041-1054.

Kiefer, B. Z., & Tyson, C. A. (2014). Charlotte Huck’s Children’s Literature: A brief guide (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Mayesky, M. (2006). Dramatic play and puppetry (8th ed.). Australia: Delmar Thomson Learning.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, September 11). Children’s Literature in Literacy Education. https://ivypanda.com/essays/childrens-literature-in-literacy-education/

"Children’s Literature in Literacy Education." IvyPanda , 11 Sept. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/childrens-literature-in-literacy-education/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Children’s Literature in Literacy Education'. 11 September.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Children’s Literature in Literacy Education." September 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/childrens-literature-in-literacy-education/.

1. IvyPanda . "Children’s Literature in Literacy Education." September 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/childrens-literature-in-literacy-education/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Children’s Literature in Literacy Education." September 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/childrens-literature-in-literacy-education/.

• Bettelheim's Views on Fairy-Tales
• "Fairy Tale Films" by P. Greenhill and S. Matrix
• Discussion of Fairy Tales Aspects
• The Uses of Enchantment in Fairy Tales
• Disney's Effect on the Fairy Tales and Morals
• Fairy Tale Marriages Are Not Real
• Fairy Tale Traits in The Great Gatsby
• "The Fairy Tales of Tex Avery" by Morris
• Folk and Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty
• Wilde’s Fairy Tales as the Ones That Teach Moral Lessons
• Philosophical Picture Books in Education
• Mike Schmoker: Reading, Writing, and Thinking for All
• Science and Mathematics Teaching and Applications
• Primary Sources and Backward Design in History
• Teaching Counting to Disabled or English Learners

Childrens Literature: The Importance Of Children's Literature

Ever since there were children, there has been children 's literature” (lerer, 2008). Children 's literature is a field that emerged long time since the age of Ancient Greek, but it was limited to one genre of literature which is short stories, most of them were told orally only. These stories became a kind of folklore , in which there are no exact records for them. However, with the development of the science, technology, psychology and philosophy, this field of literature had become more important in pedagogy and get more attention last few years. Scholars had found that teaching children through literature and stories could be useful than the traditional ways of teaching. Adding to that, reading stories can help the children to develop their self-confidence, advance their knowledge and their language. Also, it will make them more imaginative, creative, and emotional. Publishing books for young readers in England had approximately started in the seventeenth century. Not all the books that the children read during this century were intended to be children’s books, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example, was published as adult’s story but children were interested in reading it. Generally, books that were made especially for children in the seventeenth century’s were limited to certain topics such as pedagogy and religion. For example, teaching alphabet, sounds, good manners, and moral lessons and religious concepts. People believe that reading a very important skill

Innocence In The Wizard Of Oz

Perchance some grown ups will find it interesting anyway. Usually, older folks have to read children’s books for something specific, to analyze it, to read it to their children, but maybe they do like reading it just for gratification. Nevertheless, a children’s book doesn’t have an audience restriction. It can educate and delight each one of us.

Censorship In The Hunger Games

Today, there is an all-too-common problem surrounding the censorship of children’s literature. The American Library Association (ALA) states, “parents challenge books more than any other group” (Szymanski 2007).

Under The Never Sky Analysis

When I was a child, I had no experiences of reading stories. We didn't read a book, but we are studied what we've learned in the school. They didn't have a book story for children to read. We learned in the text book and read a little short story. We learned

Why Should Books Be Banned

Books can create portals to different life experiences and encourage reading. A few schools and libraries have challenged the educational value of some books, however, therefore leading them to eventually be prohibited in a particular place. Each reason may be different depending on the book and the location of the exclusions. Books are icons of literature and their value should outshine the occasionally offensive topic. Be that as it may, there are multiple reasons why books should be taught and included in a curriculum.

Dr. Seuss Impact On Children's Literature

To be successful in life, it is required to know how to read. Reading brings knowledge and knowledge brings intelligence, wisdom, and understanding. People learn from many different forms of literature. One of the most important kind of literature is children's literature. It is responsible for teaching children things like vital knowledge that are required for school and life.

Dr Seuss Impact On American Literature

The illustrations also helps the child comprehend the story. Dr. Seuss also impacted American Literature by hiding messages in some of his books. The message would go over

Huckleberry Finn Should Be Banned

Different types of literature open new doors through which students’ can explore the unknown and expand their knowledge of controversial topics. The great examples found in literature have been the subject of much debate, as school boards wrestle with whether children should be allowed to read such difficult, harsh topics, as said in the article “How Banning Books Marginalizes Children” (Source F). There are so many brilliant works of literature spanning a wide variety of genres and topics, and a single school board should not determine what students learn. No one is proposing that second graders read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but rather that we intentionally choose literature that will expand, rather than limit, children’s options and minds. Not only do these great works lay the groundwork for our future generation, but they also serve to diversify students’ writing and analysis skills.

Dr. Seuss Accomplishments

His imagination and creativity influences the childhood of multiple generations by helping children learn to enjoy reading. Geisel changed the face of children’s literature in the mid-20th century, and his success still lives on today. Geisel´s success only increased as he grew through

The Veldt The Children's Story Analysis

“If you don’t control your mind, someone else will,” according to the poet, John Allston (Midday Motivation). He explains that putting trust in a stranger is one of the most common ways in which a utopia is corrupted. Trust is a part of daily lives, so it is not surprising that the concept of trust is a key notion in stories. In the stories The Veldt and The Children’s Story, the authors Bradbury and Clavell, use trust to corrupt someone's utopia and create another's. The ideas of utopia are deepened through the comparisons and contrasts of other symbols and messages in the stories.

Should Books Banned Books?

“the positive outcomes of reading included enjoyment, knowledge of the self and other people, social interaction, social and cultural capital, imagination, focus and flow, relaxation and mood regulation, as well as improvements in communication abilities and longer-term education outcomes.” (“The power of reading: how books help develop children’s empathy and boost their emotional development”). This statement talked about how the books that are prohibited are really enabling children to advance in school. This statement additionally discloses how kids associate with the books. " fiction causes us see how other individuals feel and think.

Narrative Literacy Examples

Literacy narratives help accomplish multiple tasks so their work can fall into the genre of narrative literacy. Looking into Graff , Barrientos , and Alexie narrative stories we see they all share the same task, which is to share their experience with reading. Other task they incorporated into their stories was to share tips o how to read. For example, using cliff notes to give you a heads up on what you will be reading. Graff shows us how he used cliff notes to engage in a "classic" book, therefore he was able to annotate the reading.

Constrained Skills In Early Childhood

Reading is an essential life skill. The ultimate goal of reading is to comprehend and make meaningful connections with text. Therefore, the development of skills needed for reading begins at an early age and progresses through stages into adulthood (Chall, 1996). Within the early stages of reading development, children begin learning and acquiring these specific skills. Moreover, many of the skills learned during early childhood are constrained skills.

Literary Analysis: A Hymn To Childhood

In the poem, “A Hymn to Childhood,” Li-Young Lee talks about having fragmented individuality from childhood due to war. He is lost in perception of a traumatic childhood caused by war and a normal naïve childhood. Lee depicts the two diverged childhoods from his memory through the use of antithesis to emphasize the world perceived by a self fragmented individual. Throughout the poem, he consistently presents two opposing ideas to show what it feels like to grow up with emotional trauma.

Adult Character Stereotypes In Children's Literature

Children’s literature is the body of written works and accompanying illustrations produced inorder to entertain and instruct young people. The fundamental goal of children’s literature is to instruct and entertain. It covers various diverse themes such as mystery, fantasy and war. Some themes are discernible to the young reader, whereas some are more likely to be understood by an adult reader. This means that children’s literature is accessible to all ages, with different pieces of information within the text becoming clearer each time it is read.

The Importance Of Censorship In Literature

In a society where children are bombarded with electronics and technology, it can be challenging to convince them to sit down and either read or listen to a story. Reading and hearing stories helps to spark children’s imaginations and dreams. For some children, bedtime stories are not only special for the heroes or princesses they feature, but also for the scheduled time they get to spend one on one with their parent or guardian. In order for children to learn to enjoy reading they must be able to have a choice in what they are able to read. This is something that is taught to them from a young age, whether they are picking a bedtime story or a novel to read at school, it must be something that interests them.

More about Childrens Literature: The Importance Of Children's Literature

Related topics.

It Was Enough to Make You Wish You Lived in a Boxcar

Gertrude Chandler Warner’s “The Boxcar Children,” celebrating its 100th year, depicts the delights of concocting scrumptious meals.

“Benny discovered his beloved ‘pink cup.’” This illustration appeared in color in the first edition of the original 1924 version of “The Boxcar Children.” Credit... Dorothy Lake Gregory

Supported by

• Share full article

By Anna Holmes

Anna Holmes, founder of the website Jezebel and a former columnist for the Book Review, has written about numerous children’s books for The Times and about Margaret Wise Brown for The New Yorker.

• March 15, 2024

It was the food. It was always about the food.

At first, bread, butter, wild blueberries. Later, dried beef and “precious little vegetables” like onions, carrots, potatoes and parsnips. Later still, ginger cookies with scalloped edges, doughnuts and something called cherry slump. This was a meal, Gertrude Chandler Warner writes, “that nobody ever forgot.”

It was enough to make you wish you lived in a boxcar.

Of course, in order to live in that boxcar you would have to have lost your parents (including a father who drank himself to death) and been on the run from “authorities” (in this case, concerned adults) who might want to separate you from your siblings or hand you over to your paternal grandfather — a man you heard was cruel.

All these things would have to have happened, which is part of the appeal of Warner’s “The Boxcar Children,” celebrating its 100th year (a milestone Penguin Random House will honor with a special anniversary edition in the fall).

Warner, a grade school teacher who as a little girl loved watching the trains go by from her home in Putnam, Conn., wrote 19 installments of the series, and ghostwriters wrote over a hundred more.

The original book tells the story of the orphaned Alden siblings (Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny), who strike out on their own and find refuge in an abandoned boxcar, which they gussy up with treasures (cups, hay beds, a pitcher with a small chip in its “nose”) from a nearby dump. I first read it in 1981 or 1982, when I was 8 or 9. I found a copy, with a worn cloth cover encased in plastic, at my local library; devoured it in two, maybe three sittings; and never forgot it. (The version the publisher sent me before I wrote this essay is the “simpler” one abridged by Warner in 1942 to make it more accessible to young children.)

It’s an unassuming yet captivating book, depicting a sort of fantasy world with no (or very few) adults, a secret hideaway and the delights of junior domesticity — playing “house” and concocting scrumptious meals. It’s like reading about a group of kids who’ve gone camping without counselors.

The Alden children aren’t presented as confronting acute or sustained food insecurity. Warner only briefly mentions her fictional charges suffering from pangs of hunger, and that’s just in the beginning. (The baby of the bunch, 5-year-old Benny, is the most anxious in terms of having enough to eat.) But food — along with cleaning (dishes, clothes, the interior of the boxcar, themselves) — is a constant theme: the procuring of it, the preparation of it, the eating of it, the squirreling away of it, the anticipation of it. And, in some cases (blueberries and cherries), the literal harvesting of it. (None of the Aldens’ food is stolen from others, unless you count a few eggs from the nest of a runaway chicken that they find while traipsing through the woods.) Henry even gets their adopted dog, Watch, his own bone.

Food figures prominently in other children’s books, of course — most notably the “Little House” books, but also “Harriet the Spy” and “All-of-a-Kind Family,” whose female protagonists, from very different milieus, generations and cultural backgrounds, encounter any number of goodies while on their adventures. Harriet, who likes tomato sandwiches, milk and cake, lives near an Italian grocery, a frequent stop on her spy route; the five girls of “All-of-a-Kind Family” spend the pennies and nickels they save on treats like candies, pickles and crackers.

But the food in “The Boxcar Children” is so central, so memorable. For the Alden children the days and hours are marked not by school lessons or play dates but by meals and the position of the sun.

Bread is “fragrant,” with “crusty ends.” Cheese in wax paper is “golden.” Early in the book, Jessie, a “little housekeeper” in line with the gender roles of the time, devises a makeshift refrigerator: a small pool of water in which she stores milk (“cold as ice”) and butter (“cool and sweet”).

A couple of weeks ago, a friend who has written extensively about children’s literature, Lizzie Skurnick, 51, was visiting my home in Los Angeles and spotted a copy of “The Boxcar Children” on my coffee table. “I loved that book — the food!” she exclaimed. When I spoke to her later, she elaborated on what she meant, saying she sees food in “The Boxcar Children,” and other children’s books in which it plays a starring role, as a signifier for building social relationships and bonds and asserting autonomy.

“Each time these kids are successful with food, it’s like they’ve recreated a little bit of the adult world in their outside world,” she explained.

“In the real world, most children have food handed to them. But in children’s books, harvesting and maintaining and fixing, or scavenging or buying, one’s own food is an act of independence. So figuring out that the butter needs to go in the stream is like solving a puzzle; it’s an act of adult invention. Whereas little kids would let their butter spoil, big kids can figure out how to make a house out of an old boxcar.”

A woman of an older generation, the retired English professor Barbara Traister, 80, read “The Boxcar Children” growing up. She, too, remembers the food. “It’s such an essential thing for kids,” she told me from her home in Philadelphia. “‘What are we going to eat today?’ ‘Mom, can I have a snack?’ Children’s writers — good ones — pick up on that. Think of Winnie the Pooh. He’s always worried about his honey, and Piglet is always looking for his acorns.”

By the end of “The Boxcar Children” — the first book, that is — Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny have been reunited (or, perhaps more accurately, united) with their grandfather, who turns out to be kind rather than cruel. They’ve made a new home in the wealthy man’s mansion, where each child has a room of his or her own in which to sleep and Jessie has a big kitchen in which to cook.

Yet the children miss their old boxcar.

Soon enough, to their pleasant surprise, their beloved former home has been secretly trucked in to live out its days on their grandfather’s sprawling property.

“Everything was in place,” Warner writes. “Here was Benny’s pink cup, and here was his bed. Here was the old knife which had cut butter and bread, and vegetables, and firewood, and string, and here were the letters for Benny’s primer. Here was the big kettle and the tablecloth. And hanging on a nearby tree was the old dinner bell. Benny rang the bell over and over again, and Watch rolled on the floor and barked himself hoarse.”

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement

Ilr Magazine – Good To The Very Last Book

The importance of children’s literature.

Every educational process begins with literature, because it assumes an informative role and opens the doors to knowledge, provides access to knowledge, brings information to practical life. There are many ways and several resources to work with literature such as (tales, poems, legends, stories, characters, fables, theaters, illustrative images, ludic, picture books, etc.).

Children’s literature allows children to write better, developing their creativity, because the act of reading and the act of writing are closely linked. In this sense, “children’s literature is, first of all, literature, or rather, it is art: a phenomenon of creativity that represents the world, man, life, through the word”. It merges dreams and practical life, the imaginary and the real, ideals and their possible/impossible realization.

Children’s literature has the task of transforming dreams into reality, it is an excellent resource for the teaching-learning process, for the child’s growth, its joy and its magic. Children’s literature in the early stages of learning has a forming and socializing function.

Children’s literature promotes the child in its developmental and socialization process, and in this phase the child’s interests are related to sound, rhythm, individualized scenes, books with few texts, many prints and rhymes, dealing with animals and known objects and scenes familiar to the world of children. In this literary process, one finds – if the privileged space to stimulate the subject as generator of the magical hypotheses, as it affirms.

It is the magical mentality phase, in which the child makes little difference between the external and the internal world. Literature will help – there to make the distinction between the “I” and the world through books, engravings of objects in their environment. Between 4 and 6 years the child prefers to read magical realism: fairy tales, legends, myths, fables, which can offer imaginative change, because at this stage of his development the child is essentially susceptible to fantasy.

Literary texts provide skills, knowledge and languages suitable for children with different levels of understanding. Literature promotes the integral formation of the child, stimulating them with several teaching methodologies such as: legends, fables and short stories that are richer narratives of knowledge.

It is observed that stories such as: Little Red Riding Hood, The Beauty and the Beast, The Ugly Duckling, Rapunzel, Cinderella, the Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs and all their characters, even being “old” stories continue to be an attraction for children, and efficient methods against anguish, suffering and child fears.

When these stories are presented to children with concrete methodologies in search of developing the imaginary, certainly these children find in the characters of the story their “idol” or their “hero”, and this fact develops in children feelings of curiosity, interpretation, interest, affection, magic and courage.

The importance of children’s literature as a creative stage within the general problem of imagination, since it is not clear at what age or in what form and circumstances it appears in the child.

However, in the development of literary teaching, the mediating teacher must pedagogically use all available resources to contribute to the learning of the students in an appropriate way, where each child demonstrates his or her capacity and ease in imagining, understanding, interpreting, writing, reading and speaking in a formal way through storytelling.

Because only an excellent class where the diversity of pedagogical resources is present together with play in the teaching-learning, is that the children have built their own understanding of the real world, of the socialization among others in a gradual and meaningful way through their creativity and imagination.

The literary process is fascinating in all ages, we must keep in mind that the habit of literature does good even for adults. We must break down the barriers of prejudice that still exist in some contexts of society, which believe and interpret the literary process in an empty and meaningless way with human life in society, because this analysis stems from unobserved and deeply studied questions about the literary genres and the cognitive development of people.

Literature acts as an instrument of mediation for the development of the child in a participative and critical way in the teaching-learning process, its educational character contributes in a positive way to the socialization and formation of the child, in its interpretation of the world, people, cultural and linguistic varieties and its own personality.

Literature is a verbal art in which it involves a representation and a vision of the world that are centered on the creator of literature, where he draws elements from the world to help the reader structure his cultural universe.

In summary, considering reading as an achievement that occurred gradually, it is observed that it is a fundamental element in the formation and construction of knowledge of the child, and that it goes far beyond the mechanical decoding of written lines, but in the curiosity and consequent discovery unveiled through it.

We understand that the vast description around the potential extracted from children’s literature, as a post in this work, which can, above all, contribute to the formation of active and competent readers, consequently to a significant learning of the child in the educational process, because as we know the first contact with books should happen in the child’s childhood and preferably with their relatives.

The family is very important in the educational process, and it should seek to develop the child’s imagination, creativity, taste for reading and writing, opening spaces in the child’s life in the acquisition of knowledge and social communication in formal and non-formal contexts.

Just as the school is responsible, the family is also responsible for the teaching-learning, because when the school and the family decide to collaborate and act together in the search for strategies and knowledge projects, certainly this teaching-learning process is modifiable, beneficial, meaningful and pleasant for all members of the school community.

A New Era for Children’s Literature

Ever since I was born and could see, Everywhere I looked, I saw dance. In the clouds as the wind blew them across the sky, In the ripples on a pond, Even in the sea of ants marching up and down their hills. Dance was all around me. Dance was me.

As a young girl, Melanie Kirkwood Marshall ’15 wanted to dance. If Sassy could, why couldn’t she?

Over and over again, she read that opening passage of Debbie Allen’s children’s book Dancing in the Wings. She pored over Kadir Nelson’s sparkling illustrations of Sassy, a young black girl who, her classmates tease, is too tall to dance. Encouraged by her family, Sassy dances anyway. And after winning a big audition, she concludes: “Mama was right — being tall wasn’t so bad after all.”

“I didn’t know it at the time — no kid would be thinking, ‘Oh, my mom got this because it validates my appearance’ — but I leaned on that book heavily for understanding who I was and what I wanted to do,” says Kirkwood Marshall, who is African American.

Such is the importance of multicultural children’s literature. Scholar Rudine Sims Bishop famously coined the phrase “mirrors and windows” — meaning that a good book can serve as a window to an unfamiliar world, a mirror for self-affirmation, or, ideally, both.

But for all the potential, mirrors for children of color have been scarce. Dancing in the Wings was one of some 5,000 children’s books published in the U.S. in 2000. Only 147 of them — less than 3 percent — featured black characters. Only 151 books combined featured Asian, Latino/Latina, or indigenous characters.

Today, more than half of K–12 public school students are children of color, yet less than 15 percent of children’s books over the past two decades have contained multicultural characters or story lines. In 2018, roughly 10 percent of all children’s books featured black characters, 7 percent featured Asian characters, 5 percent featured Latino/Latina characters, and 1 percent featured indigenous characters.

These troubling numbers come from the  UW Cooperative Children’s Book Center , or CCBC, which has become the authoritative source nationally for tracking diversity in children’s and young adult literature. Since 1985, the center’s librarians have indexed every new book, providing data for a long-overdue reevaluation of the publishing industry and promoting a more accurate reflection of a diverse world.

Along the way, their efforts have collided with century-old barriers in children’s literature. And although there’s reason for optimism, their work is far from over.

“I Feel Guilty When I’m Not Reading”

Despite its name, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center is for adults.

“We always say, ‘We’re a collection of books for children and teens for adults who work with children and teens’,” says Kathleen T. Horning ’80, MA’82, director of the CCBC, which is part of the UW School of Education and supported by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

The center opened in 1963 with joint funding from the state and the university — hence cooperative — as a resource for Wisconsin’s librarians and teachers to assess new books and donate their old ones. Thanks to major investments in education by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, public school libraries suddenly had money and sought guidance on how best to spend it.

The UW campus didn’t have space for an unproven library, so the CCBC opened on the fourth floor of the state capitol building under the massive dome. It expanded and moved to the new Helen C. White Hall in 1971, and later to its current home in the Teacher Education Building.

Now with an established reputation, the CCBC receives nearly every children’s book from American (and some Canadian) publishers — as many as 3,500 per year. Its four librarians — Horning, Megan Schliesman MA’92, Merri V. Lindgren ’88, MA’89, and Madeline Tyner MA’17 — each read and evaluate upwards of 1,000 volumes per year. “You do that at home,” says Schliesman, laughing. “If you didn’t have a passion for it, you would hate this job. I feel guilty when I’m not reading.”

The CCBC highlights the best 250 books of the bunch in its annual publication, Choices, which emphasizes diverse works. Outreach remains central to its mission, with the librarians frequently traveling the state to speak to teachers and librarians. The center also provides information to Wisconsin schools and libraries responding to book challenges from community members.

The CCBC’s library contains a current collection of all new publications, a permanent collection of recommended books, and a historical collection of previously acclaimed works. The vast inventory serves as a treasure trove for UW students and faculty conducting research on children’s literature.

According to Horning, no other children’s book center offers such a range of services — from reviewing books and gathering data to shelving every publication and traveling the state. In the 1990s, government representatives from Malaysia and Venezuela visited the CCBC to learn how to create a state-sponsored center back home.

“It doesn’t seem possible for anyone to replicate it,” says Horning, who has been on the staff since 1982. “They can replicate a part of it but not all of it. And that’s probably because when this library was started — in terms of the economy, in terms of partnerships — it was exactly the right time.”

And it perfectly positioned the CCBC to expose a serious problem in the world of children’s literature.

Diversity in Children’s Books 2018

Percentage of books depicting characters from diverse backgrounds based on the 2018  publishing statistics  compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. 1%      American Indians/First Nations

5%      Latino/Latina

7%      Asian Pacific Islander/Asian Pacific American

10%   African/African American

27%    Animals/Other

50%    White

The All-White World

Ginny Moore Kruse MA’76 was honored, and then alarmed.

In 1985, the American Library Association asked the longtime director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center to join the national Coretta Scott King Book Award committee. The annual award recognizes outstanding books by black authors and illustrators.

The committee didn’t convene for long. There were only 18 books for consideration — 0.7 percent of the 2,500 published that year.

“I was flabbergasted,” says Kruse, who headed the CCBC from 1976 to 2002.

The same year, Horning received a call from a librarian at a Milwaukee public school looking for multicultural books. “I looked up ‘blacks, fiction’ in the Subject Guide to Children’s Books in Print and found a really small column of books,” Horning says. “Before it, there were a couple of pages labeled ‘bears, fiction.’ It struck me as quite ironic that there were all these books about bears and so few books about black people.”

Horning and Kruse decided to publish the 18-book statistic in the 1985 Choices and vowed to continue tracking diversity among new titles. Their efforts captured the attention of the children’s book world, but underrepresented readers had been aware of the problem for decades.

“We weren’t the first people to realize the paucity of books by African American writers and artists,” Kruse says. “Black librarians, black teachers, black literature experts, black families — they had experienced the lack of books reflecting themselves and their lives. What made the CCBC stats memorable was the numbers confirming the experiences.”

Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, portrayals of people of color in children’s books relied on racial stereotypes and caricatures, as in Little Black Sambo. “No matter that my mother said that I was as good as anyone,” children’s author Walter Dean Myers wrote in 1986. “She had also told me, in words and in her obvious pride in my reading, that books were important, and yet it was in books that I found … blacks who were lazy, dirty, and above all, comical.”

Between the 1930s and 1950s, several authors of color found success writing children’s books, including Ann Petry, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Yoshiko Uchida. But they were rare and their books exceptions.

In 1965, the Saturday Review rocked the publishing industry with its article  “The All-White World of Children’s Books.”  Author Nancy Larrick reviewed 5,000 recent books and found that less than 1 percent portrayed contemporary African American life. A librarian told Larrick: “Publishers have participated in a cultural lobotomy,” treating the African American as “a rootless person.”

Around the same time, advocates formed the Council on Interracial Books for Children to encourage authors of color to create books and to push publishers to accept them. In step with the civil rights movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s, multicultural literature proliferated, and literary giants of color emerged — Myers, Virginia Hamilton, Sharon Bell Mathis, Mildred D. Taylor, Lucille Clifton.

And then, for some four decades, progress halted. An economic downturn in the mid-’70s slashed book budgets for public schools and libraries, and “books by minority authors, bought in addition to usual purchases, were the first to go,” USA Today reported in 1989, becoming the first national outlet to cite the CCBC’s data.

With publishers increasingly relying on large bookstores for sales, the long-held notion that  black books don’t sell  became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Systemic barriers and the editorial instincts of overwhelmingly white publishing houses deterred would-be authors of color.

According to the CCBC’s data, between 1985 and 2014, children’s books by African American authors or illustrators never surpassed 3.5 percent of annual publications. Books containing African American content never reached 6 percent. Even more sparse were books about Asian Americans, Latinos/Latinas, or indigenous people.

Every few years, according to Horning, a new media outlet would pick up the CCBC’s statistics, but the resulting conversation would soon trail off. Then something changed.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks

In 2013, 94 of the 3,200 new children’s books received by the CCBC — 2.9 percent — featured black characters.

Frustrated by the familiar tale, Walter Dean Myers and his son Christopher, also a children’s book author, penned a pair of powerful columns in the New York Times. The younger Myers referred to “the apartheid of literature — in which characters of color are limited to the townships of occasional historical books that concern themselves with the legacies of civil rights and slavery but are never given a pass card to traverse the lands of adventure, curiosity, imagination, or personal growth.”

Later that year, the announcement of an all-white, all-male panel for a major book festival sparked outrage on Twitter. The resulting hashtag, #WeNeedDiverseBooks, evolved into a  nonprofit organization  that continues to promote diversity in children’s literature and fund programs for aspiring book creators and publishers of color.

The numbers are trending up. Between 2014 and 2018, the CCBC saw books about African Americans and indigenous people roughly double, and books about Asian Americans and Latinos/Latinas triple. The librarians credit scholars and advocates on social media who are keeping the conversation going, as well as independent publishers, such as Lee & Low Books, that are dedicated to diversifying literature.

The progress is still relative. While books about Latinos/Latinas may have tripled, the CCBC has found that they still represent only 6.8 percent of all books. In 2017, a character in a picture book was four times more likely to be a dinosaur than an indigenous child, and two times more likely to be a rabbit than an Asian American child. Only two picture books had a child with a disability as a primary character.

The CCBC now tracks disability and other forms of identity like gender and sexual orientation. Later this year, the center plans to launch a public database logging all of the children’s books it receives. Researchers will be able to easily identify books with specific themes or aspects of representation.

The data have found a permanent home on social media. “We used to see the conversation [on diversity] blow over after a month, but it hasn’t blown over this time,” Horning says. “We get two or three emails and calls a week asking for our stats.”

But with social media comes controversy. And on Twitter, discussion of children’s literature has become contentious, with charges of prejudice and countercharges of censorship.

“Toxic Online Culture”

As a UW senior in 2014, Melanie Kirkwood Marshall camped out in the Cooperative Children’s Book Center to study the representation of black girlhood in young adult literature. The few books she found were disappointingly homogeneous. But now, as a doctoral researcher, she’s noticing promising trends.

“Not only are we seeing an increase in realistic fiction,” she says, “but there’s an uptick in speculative and science fiction stories. They’re allowing black girls an opportunity to imagine themselves in ways they wouldn’t have before.”

Doctoral researcher Melanie Kirkwood Marshall sees an increase in books “allowing black girls an opportunity to imagine themselves in ways they wouldn’t have before.”  LAWRENCE AGYEI

The CCBC librarians note that the #OwnVoices social media movement has paved the way for such stories. It promotes the importance of “cultural insiders” portraying their own identities and experiences.Proponents of #OwnVoices believe that when “cultural outsiders” attempt to write about people from different backgrounds, they’re prone to stumble into problematic representations, ranging from harmful stereotypes to inauthentic narratives. And now, social media critics often condemn books and authors — as renowned as Dr. Seuss and J. K. Rowling — for cultural insensitivities. To some, that’s the price of progress. To others, it’s a slide toward censorship.

The publisher Scholastic famously recalled the 2016 picture book A Birthday Cake for George Washington after a social media outcry. Initially praised by reviewers for its tale of the president’s enslaved head chef, the book was denounced for glossing over the horrors of slavery.

Last year, two authors of color pulled their debut young adult novels just prior to publication. A Place for Wolves by Kosoko Jackson, a gay black author, received online criticism for using the Kosovo War as a backdrop for the love story of a non-Muslim American. The fantasy novel Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, angered #OwnVoices supporters by allegedly paralleling the history of African American slavery.

“It just snowballed into a lot of people who hadn’t read the book [criticizing it],” Zhao told National Public Radio in November after releasing Blood Heir with revisions.

Some see these anti-book campaigns as an expression of “cancel culture.” Ruth Graham cautioned in Slate: “We’ve gotten an increasingly toxic online culture around [young adult] literature, with ever more baroque standards for who can write about whom under what circumstances. From the outside, this is starting to look like a conversation focused less on literature than obedience.”

By contrast, adherents of #WeNeedDiverseBooks claim they’re protecting children from hurtful material and challenging authors to be more sensitive. They’re happy to wrest some of the power from a publishing industry that’s still 80 percent white and has historically controlled what stories are told. “Social media is giving a voice to a lot of people who never had a platform before,” Horning says.

Equipped for Tomorrow

As the children’s book world grapples with these complex discussions, sociological studies affirm the importance of representation. Research has shown that children notice race as early as six months, begin to internalize bias between the ages of two and five, and can become set in their beliefs by age 12.

“If children grow up never seeing, never reading, never hearing the variety of the wide range of voices, they lose so much,” Kruse told the journal Language Arts in 1993. “They will not be equipped for today, not to mention tomorrow. The world will go right past them. They are going to be stunned when everyone is not like them.”

Last year, Kirkwood Marshall became a mother herself. One of the first books she bought her daughter was Sulwe, written by Lupita Nyong’o and illustrated by Vashti Harrison. It follows a young black girl’s journey from being insecure about her skin tone to embracing her unique beauty.

“It’s come full circle,” Kirkwood Marshall says. “I did the same thing [as my mother] — I wrote a note to my daughter in the book. It just says: May you always love your beautiful brown skin.

CCBC Choices

“What I never want to get lost in the discussion about the quantity is that there are phenomenal multicultural books published each and every year,” says Megan Schliesman, a librarian at the Cooperative Children’s Book Center. Here are the staff’s five favorite titles of 2019.

Frankly in Love, by David Yoon (Putnam, age 13 and up)

High school senior Frank Li hides the fact that he’s dating a white girl from his conservative Korean parents. Frank’s first-person voice is funny and tender, and this emotionally charged debut novel offers a nuanced examination of race, love, and family.

Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, by Kevin Noble Maillard, illustrated by Juana Martinez-Neal (Roaring Brook, ages 3–7)

Parallel narratives detail the characteristics and cultural importance of this staple of Native American diets. The illustrations exude a sense of homey security, showing the realistic variety in hair, eye, and skin colors of indigenous peoples.

My Papi Has a Motorcycle, by Isabel Quintero, illustrated by Zeke Peña (Kokila, ages 3–6)

As Daisy rides with Papi on his motorcycle, she describes her neighborhood and city in a delightful, loving ode to present and past, family and community. The mixed-media art features a warmly colored palette and cartoon-like energy.

New Kid, written and illustrated by Jerry Craft (HarperCollins, ages 9–13)

A funny and thought-provoking graphic novel details Jordan Banks’s seventh-grade experience as one of the few African American kids in an elite suburban school. This fearless social satire will offer affirmation for some readers and revelation for others.

Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, by Kwame Mbalia (Disney Hyperion, ages 8–13)

While visiting his grandparents in Alabama, Tristan falls into a parallel universe populated by characters from African and African American traditional stories. Also featuring two strong girls, this tale explores how stories have the power to help people connect and survive.

Essay on Children’s Literature

Introduction.

Children’s literature is an essential part of any educational program as it provides children with a window into different worlds and ways of thinking. It is a medium that can facilitate the development of emotional intelligence, empathy, and tolerance, crucial attributes in creating holistic learners who contribute positively to society (Patel, 2020). This essay will explore “Black Dog” by Levi Pinfold and explain why it is appropriate and beneficial for the Foundation Phase classroom. The essay will also contextualize the construct of childhood relevant to the picture book and learners, identify the moral/lesson raised in the story, and provide specific examples from the narrative and visual elements that support the book’s inclusion in the classroom to construct my argument.

The Construct of Childhood in Black Dog

Black Dog is a picture book that explores the theme of fear and how it can overwhelm and paralyze individuals, making them unable to appreciate the beauty of life (Pinfold, 2012). The story revolves around a family that wakes up one day to find a black dog outside their house, growing larger every day until it becomes a gigantic, fearsome creature. The black dog represents the family’s fears; the story is a metaphor for how fear can take over one’s life.

The picture book is suitable for children in the Foundation Phase classroom, which comprises children aged between five and seven years. At this stage, children are beginning to develop their emotional intelligence and are learning how to interact with others. They are also learning to express themselves and developing empathy and tolerance toward others (Patel, 2020). The book’s theme of fear is particularly relevant to children at this age as they are often confronted with new experiences and situations that can be daunting and overwhelming. Children can learn to confront and overcome fears by reading Black Dog, an important life skill.

The Moral/Lesson Raised in the Story

The moral/lesson raised in the story is that fear can be overcome with courage and love. When the family in the story finally confronts the black dog, they realize it is not as fearsome as it seems. They learn that the black dog is friendly and playful and that they have been missing out on its companionship because of their fears. The lesson here is that fear can prevent one from experiencing the beauty of life, and that courage and love are necessary to overcome it.

Specific Examples from the Narrative and Visual Elements

The narrative and visual elements of the book support the inclusion of Black Dog in the Foundation Phase classroom. For example, the illustrations are highly detailed and are drawn in a style that is both eerie and whimsical. Dark tones and shadows create a foreboding atmosphere, reflecting the family’s fears (Gaudio, 2020). However, the illustrations are also infused with humor and playfulness, which help to alleviate the tension and create a sense of optimism.

The narrative is also highly engaging and is written in style accessible to young readers. The repetition and rhythm create a sense of continuity and reinforce the book’s central theme. For example, the refrain “But the biggest, blackest dog was yet to come” is repeated throughout the book, which creates a sense of anticipation and suspense (Pinfold, 2012). The repetition also emphasizes the family’s growing fears and how they cannot overcome them.

Another example from the narrative and visual elements that support the book’s inclusion in the classroom is how the black dog is portrayed. Initially, the dog is depicted as a small, unassuming creature easily ignored. However, as the family’s fears grow, so do the dog’s size and ferocity. This visual transformation is a metaphor for how fear can distort one’s perceptions and make even the most harmless things seem threatening (Gaudio, 2020). By the end of the book, the dog has returned to its original size, and the family realizes that their fear has magnified the dog’s appearance. This realization is a powerful message for children, as it teaches them how to question their perceptions and recognize the role that fears can play in distorting their view of the world (Patel, 2020).

In addition to the visual and narrative elements, the book’s use of language is also noteworthy. The straightforward language makes it easy for young readers to follow the story. However, there are also moments of poetic language that add depth and complexity to the narrative. For example, describing the black dog’s eyes as “two black holes that seemed to go on forever” is both evocative and haunting, and it captures the family’s sense of dread and foreboding (Gaudio, 2020).

The Contribution of Black Dogs to Emotional Intelligence, Empathy, and Tolerance

Black Dog significantly contributes to developing young learners’ emotional intelligence, empathy, and tolerance. The book teaches children how to recognize and confront their fears, an essential life skill. It also shows them the importance of courage and love in overcoming fear and experiencing the beauty of life.

According to Thexton et al. (2019), the book promotes empathy by showing children how fear can distort one’s perceptions and create unnecessary barriers between individuals. The black dog is a metaphor for the unknown and the unfamiliar. The family’s fears represent the natural human tendency to be wary of anything different from what we are used to. By confronting their fears, the family in the story learns that the black dog is not a threat but a companion, a powerful message for children about the importance of empathy and understanding.

Finally, the book promotes tolerance by showing children that things are not always as they seem. The family’s fears of the black dog were based on their perceptions, distorted by their fears. By recognizing this, the family overcame their prejudices and embraced the black dog for what it was. This message of tolerance and acceptance is essential for creating an inclusive and open-minded society.

In conclusion, Black Dog by Levi Pinfold is a picture book that is appropriate and beneficial for the Foundation Phase classroom. The book’s theme of fear and how it can be overcome with courage and love is highly relevant to young learners just beginning to develop their emotional intelligence and empathy. The narrative and visual elements of the book support the central theme, and the book’s use of language is simple and poetic. Overall, Black Dog significantly contributes to developing young learners’ emotional intelligence, empathy, and tolerance. It should be included in any classroom library to create holistic learners who contribute positively to society.

Gaudio, L., 2020. Black Dog: A Memoir. Southern Connecticut State University.

Patel, A., 2020. Developing a rich reading approach in the Early Years. The Power of a Rich Reading Classroom, p.125.

Pinfold, L., 2012. Black dog. Candlewick Press.

Thexton, T., Prasad, A. and Mills, A.J., 2019. Learning empathy through literature. Culture and Organization, 25(2), pp.83-90.

Cite This Work

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Related Essays

Evolution of popular sovereignty, a girl walks home alone at night, the babadook, and y tu mamá también, female characters analysis, my preferred art: les demoiselles d’avignon and other works by pablo picasso, would george washington, who died in 1799, have recognized the united states of 1860, chinese food in the uae, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

Children’s Literature and Its Importance

Introduction.

The development of early reading skills is critical for modern children, and educators pay much attention to the choice of books and the quality of their content. Reading helps to calm down, relax, examine the world, enlarge the level of knowledge, socialise, and even build confidence (Young Readers Foundations, 2018). However, the global pandemic has affected the book industry and provoked reading difficulties among children, which results in re-evaluation of early reading skills and the role of adults in children’s reading experiences (Cabrera, 2020; United Nations, 2021). A range of children’s books has to be improved, focusing on phonological awareness, the combination of literacy skills, and the involvement of supportive people.

Range of Children’s Texts

The growth of children depends on many factors, and one of them is a range of books young readers could use. Today, children’s literature includes picture books, short stories, poetry, songs, and comics that address young readers (Alvstad, 2019). Each source of information has its peculiarities and goals. For example, picture books contain visual and verbal material with the help of which children contribute to their symbolic understanding, analogical reasoning, and the differentiation between reality and fantasy (Strouse, Nyhout and Ganea, 2018). Young readers observe images, listen to what is read by an adult, and make their first meaningful comparisons. Fantasy books, or chapter books, introduce the world of magic, paranormal events, and unusual situations where animals could talk, and ordinary subjects possess power (Corona, 2017). Realistic fiction and traditional literature are used for educational purposes to help a child learn about the world and become its meaningful part.

Importance of Developing Phonological Awareness

When parents, teachers, or other regular caregivers choose the reading material for their children, they have to use specific teaching strategies. Talbot (2020) underlines the significance of phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate letter sounds) as a part of phonological awareness built in the preschool period and defines reading and spelling skills. Phonological awareness is necessary to identify and use different phonological units, which allows understanding words, improving learning, and reading independently with time (Milankov et al. , 2021). When children are able to combine sounds, they get themselves prepared for reading and spelling. With time, educators must explain the meaning of sounds and syllables. Still, spelling and writing have nothing in common with phonological awareness in children’s literature because associations between letters and sounds only matter (Clayton et al ., 2019). As soon as children succeed in using and comprehending phonemes and sounds, they take a crucial step to develop their early reading skills.

Texts to Develop Early Reading Skills

Early reading is an achievement for many families where the child’s development is considered. As well as reading to a child plays a crucial role, the promotion of reading skills has to be encouraged with attention to children’s linguistic and cognitive competencies (Niklas, Cohrssen and Tayler, 2016). Pre-literacy skills may be well developed or damaged, depending on the chosen book. Therefore, it is important to know why reading matters and what can be done at an early stage when knowledge is minimal. Many researchers agree that children whose reading is driven by interest are more successful in developing their skills (Parry and Taylor, 2018; Saracho, 2017; Walgermo et al ., 2018). Not to lose their desire to read or at least observe books, children need motivation, extra support, and professional stimulation like a favourable environment or an appropriate context (Axelsson, Lundqvist and Sandberg, 2020). Thus, parents and educators try to offer exciting short stories to their children where rhyme and simple words are used. Pictures also raise the interest of a young reader to pay more attention to the book, advance comprehension and vocabulary.

The Role of Adults in Supporting Children Experiences with Literature

In addition to the quality of the texts in children’s literature, the role of parents has to be underlined. These people usually support the development of the child and the enhancement of language and reading skills (Reggin et al ., 2019). When a child attends a school, a number of rules should be followed, which affects the attitudes of children toward reading tasks. Thus, parents begin literary progress early before formal schooling. Parents are the first teachers for their children who introduce reading for pleasure and learning new material with fun (Bano, Jabeen and Qutoshi, 2018). The role of adults in supporting children’s experiences with literature may be improved in many ways. There can be storytimes for a family to read something new. To make this activity more captivating, adults should share similar books (to prove their interest in the child’s activity) or create a reading corner at home (to encourage the reading desire). Bano, Jabeen and Qutoshi (2018) show that children whose adults never support their reading experiences lag behind the group. Adults show to combine reading with games, determining fluency, speed, and comprehension.

Reflective Reading Skills

In addition to properly developed reading skills, children need to know how to reflect on when they read or hear. In most cases, students try to memorise the answers to specific questions and ignore the rest of the text when completing their regular tasks (Bano, Jabeen and Qutoshi, 2018). Reflective reading at an early age is a chance to show children how to enjoy the reading process and its outcomes, how to know the answers and pose new quotes, and how to participate in an interesting discussion. Young readers like to compare themselves with characters and think about what they could do like the main characters (Walgermo et al., 2018). Regarding such intentions, self-awareness, a deep understanding of the text, comparison, and questions are defined as the necessary skills in reflective reading.

Skills in Selecting Texts for Children

Finding children’s literature should not be a challenge for parents and children. There are many recommendations on how to choose a text for early childhood reading activities. Saracho (2017) combines a high literacy level with self-concepts and interests. One of the skills to select a text is observation and critical thinking. Parents and other engaged adults should know what their children like and prefer to know. In most cases, young boys are attracted by construction and cars, and girls want to know about fashion or animals. Comprehensive development and the ability to compare and contrast are also critical skills as they allow adults to offer a variety of books. Finally, cooperation is what young learners appreciate and want to observe in their relationships with adults.

Children’s literature plays a vital role in early childhood development. A number of skills should be recognised at an early stage, and reading is an activity when the first tasks emerge. Children read together with or for their parents or listen to what their parents tell. As such, phonological awareness, fluency, critical thinking, and analytical skills are formed during the first reading practices. Young readers need support from adults, and the role of their parents becomes an essential part of the research. Reading is not only an interesting and informative but motivating and supportive background for children to succeed in writing and further education.

Reference List

Alvstad, C. (2019) ‘Children’s literature,’ in Washbourne, K. and van Wyke, B. (eds.) The Routledge handbook of literary translation . New York: Routledge, pp. 159-180.

Axelsson, A., Lundqvist, J. and Sandberg, G. (2020) ‘Influential factors on children’s reading and writing development: the perspective of parents in a Swedish context’, Early Child Development and Care , 190(16), pp. 2520-2532.

Bano, J., Jabeen, Z. and Qutoshi, S.B. (2018) ‘Perceptions of teachers about the role of parents in developing reading habits of children to improve their academic performance in schools’, Journal of Education and Educational Development , 5(1), pp. 42-59.

Cabrera, I. (2020) World reading habits in 2020 [infographic] . Web.

Clayton, F.J. et al . (2020) ‘A longitudinal study of early reading development: letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN, but not letter-sound integration, predict variations in reading development’, Scientific Studies of Reading , 24(2), pp. 91-107.

Corona, L. (2017) Children’s literature types . Web.

Milankov, V. et al . (2021) ‘Phonological awareness as the foundation of reading acquisition in students reading in transparent orthography’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , 18(10). doi: 10.3390/ijerph18105440

Niklas, F., Cohrssen, C. and Tayler, C. (2016) ‘The sooner, the better: early reading to children’, SAGE Open, 6(4). doi: 10.1177/2158244016672715

Parry, R. L. and Taylor, L. (2018) ‘Readers in the round: children’s holistic engagements with texts’, Literacy , 52(2), pp. 103-110.

Reggin, L. et al . (2019) ‘Parents play a key role in fostering children’s love of reading’, The Conversation . Web.

Saracho, O. N. (2017) ‘Literacy and language: new developments in research, theory, and practice’, Early Child Development and Care , 187(3-4), pp. 299-304.

Strouse, G. A., Nyhout, A. and Ganea, P. A. (2018) ‘The role of book features in young children’s transfer of information from picture books to real-world contexts’, Frontiers in Psychology , 9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050

United Nations (2021) 100 million more children fail basic reading skills because of COVID-9 . Web.

Walgermo, B.R. et al . (2018) ‘Developmental dynamics of early reading skill, literacy interest and readers’ self-concept within the first year of formal schooling’, Reading and Writing , 31(6), pp. 1379-1399.

Young Readers Foundations (2018) The importance of reading: why we should read books every day . Web.

Video Voice-over

Cite this paper

Select style

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

ChalkyPapers. (2023, October 16). Children’s Literature and Its Importance. https://chalkypapers.com/childrens-literature-and-its-importance/

"Children’s Literature and Its Importance." ChalkyPapers , 16 Oct. 2023, chalkypapers.com/childrens-literature-and-its-importance/.

ChalkyPapers . (2023) 'Children’s Literature and Its Importance'. 16 October.

ChalkyPapers . 2023. "Children’s Literature and Its Importance." October 16, 2023. https://chalkypapers.com/childrens-literature-and-its-importance/.

1. ChalkyPapers . "Children’s Literature and Its Importance." October 16, 2023. https://chalkypapers.com/childrens-literature-and-its-importance/.

Bibliography

ChalkyPapers . "Children’s Literature and Its Importance." October 16, 2023. https://chalkypapers.com/childrens-literature-and-its-importance/.

• Discussion of Frame Analysis’s Importance
• Commercials in Social Studies Curriculum
• Student Loan Forgiveness: Advantages and Disadvantages
• A Change Initiative in an Educational Organization
• Linguistics Instruction for Teachers of English
• Importance of Safe School Environment
• The Influence of Behavioral Modification on Educational Prosperity
• Education: “Strategies for Developing Intergroup Dialogue”
• Balancing College Sports and Academic Mission
• The Free Federal Student Aid Application (FAFSA)

• Australia edition
• International edition
• Europe edition

Maryse Condé, Guadeloupean 'grand storyteller' dies aged 90

Author of novels drawing on African and Caribbean history enjoyed international acclaim, including the New Academy prize, which stood in for the Nobel in 2018

Maryse Condé, the Guadeloupean author of more than 20 novels, activist, academic and sole winner of the New Academy prize in literature , has died aged 90.

Condé, whose books include Segu and Hérémakhonon was regarded as a giant of the West Indies, writing frankly – as both a novelist and essayist – of colonialism, sexuality and the black diaspora, and introduced readers around the world to a wealth of African and Caribbean history.

Writing of the “unputdownable and unforgettable” epic Segu, Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo praised her as “an extraordinary storyteller”, while author Justin Torres wrote: “One is never on steady ground with Condé; she is not an ideologue, and hers is not the kind of liberal, safe, down-the-line morality that leaves the reader unimplicated.”

Alain Mabanckou, the award-winning Congolese writer and professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, wrote on X that Condé was the “Grande Dame of World Letters” and had bequeathed a body of work “driven by the quest for a humanism based on the ramifications of our identities and the fractures in history”.

Born Maryse Boucolon in Guadeloupe in 1934, the youngest of eight children, Condé described herself as a “spoilt child … oblivious to the outside world”. Her parents, she told the Guardian , never taught her about slavery and “were convinced France was the best place in the world”. She went to Paris at 16 for her education, but was expelled from school after two years: “When I came to study in France I discovered people’s prejudices. People believed I was inferior just because I was black. I had to prove to them I was gifted and to show to everybody that the colour of my skin didn’t matter – what matters is in your brain and in your heart.”

Studying at the Sorbonne, she began to learn about African history and slavery from fellow students and found sympathy with the Communist movement. She became pregnant after an affair with Haitian activist Jean Dominique. In 1958, she married the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé, a decision she later admitted was a means of regaining status as a black single mother. Within months their relationship was strained, and Condé moved to the Ivory Coast, spending the next decade in various African countries including Guinea, Senegal, Mali and Ghana, mixing with Che Guevera, Malcolm X, Julius Nyerere, Maya Angelou, future Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo and Senegalese film-maker and author Ousmane Sembène.

Unable to speak local languages and presumed to hold francophile sympathies, Condé struggled to find her place in Africa. “I know now just how badly prepared I was to encounter Africa,” she would later say. “I had a very romantic vision, and I just wasn’t prepared, either politically or socially.” She remained outspoken until she was accused of subversive activity in Ghana and deported to London, where she worked as a BBC producer for two years. She eventually returned to France and earned her MA and PhD in comparative literature at Paris-Sorbonne University in 1975.

Her debut novel, Hérémakhonon, was published in 1976, with Condé saying she waited until she was nearly 40 because she “didn’t have confidence in myself and did not dare present my writing to the outside world”. The novel follows a Paris-educated Guadeloupean woman, who realises that her struggle to locate her identity is an internal journey, rather than a geographical one. Condé later recalled the Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo telling her: “Africa … has codes that are easy to understand. It’s because you’re looking for something else … a land that is a foil that would allow you to be what you dream of being. And on that level, nobody can help you.” “I think she may have been right,” Condé later wrote.

In 1981, she divorced her husband after a long separation and, the following year she married one of her English-language translators, Richard Philcox.

She gained prominence as a contemporary Caribbean writer with her third novel, Segu, in 1984. The novel follows the life of Dousika Traore, a royal adviser in the titular African kingdom in the late-18th century, who must deal with encroaching challenges from religion, colonisation and the slave trade over six decades. It was a bestseller and praised as “the most significant novel about black Africa published in many a year” by the New York Times.

The next year she published a sequel, The Children of Segu, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the US. Over the coming decades, she would become a prolific writer of children’s books, plays and essays, including, in 1986, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, based on the story of an American slave who was tried for witchcraft; Tree of Life in 1987; Crossing the Mangrove in 1989; Windward Heights, a Caribbean retelling of Wuthering Heights, in 1995; Desirada in 1997; The Belle Créole in 2001; The Story of the Cannibal Woman in 2003; and Victorie: My Mother’s Mother, in which she reconstructed the life of her illiterate grandmother, in 2006.

After teaching in New York, Los Angeles and Berkeley, Condé retired in 2005. She wrote two memoirs: 2001’s Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood, and in 2017, What is Africa to Me? She was awarded France’s Legion of Honour in 2004, and shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize, then a lifetime achievement award, in 2015. When she won the New Academy prize , the one-off award intended to replace the Nobel prize in literature when it was cancelled in 2018, she described herself as “very happy and proud”.

“But please allow me to share it with my family, my friends and above all the people of Guadeloupe, who will be thrilled and touched seeing me receive this prize,” she said. “We are such a small country, only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes and things like that. Now we are so happy to be recognised for something else.”

In her final years, she lived in the south of France with Philcox. Her novel The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, translated into English in 2020, explores the dangers of binary thinking through the lives of two twins. Her eyesight became too bad for her to write unassisted, so she wrote her last books by dictating to a friend.

Her last novel, The Gospel According to the New World , published in 2021 and translated into English in March 2023, was shortlisted for the International Booker prize. The novel follows the journey of a baby rumoured to be the child of God.

Writing, she once wrote, “has has given me enormous joy. I would rather compare it to a compulsion, somewhat scary, whose cause I have never been able to unravel.”

• Maryse Condé
• Fiction in translation

Most viewed