Change, Tradition, and Critical Styles in the Contemporary World of Children's Books

Abstract

�� ��� arrival of Harriet the Spy with fanfare and announcements of approval of its 'realism' makes me wonder again why that word is invariably applied to stories about disagreeable people and situations, wrote Ruth Hill Viguers in the February 1965 issue of Horn Book Magazine. Are there really no amiable children? No loyal friends? No parents who are fundamentally loving and understanding? I challenge the implication that New York City harbors only people who are abnormal, ill-adjusted, and egocentric. Mrs. Viguers went on to say that many adult readers would find the book sophisticated, funny, and penetrating. Children, however, do not enjoy cynicism. I doubt its appeal to many of them. This is a very jaded view on which to open children's windows. Harriet the Spy was not universally denounced. Other critics, also forthright and vigorous, acclaimed it as brilliant, new, and at long last something appropriate for modern children. For example, Ellen Rudin had written this in the School Library Journal, November 15, 1964: Harriet M. Welsh is not a lovable child, but she is one of the meatiest heroines in modern juvenile fiction. . . . This novel is . . . a children's book, surely, told at a level comprehensible to children, yet it is intensely written, involuted, rich in dramatic vignettes and in warm, breathing characters. Harriet suffers growth and change in the best tradition of literature's most anguished heroines. Harriet the Spy bursts with life. It is up to date, here and now, this minute, real. Get it into circulation, quick! Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet became one of the early focal points in the upheaval that has gone on in the world of children's books over the last decade. Who are these critics of children's literature? What are their beliefs about it, their values? Along what dimensions do they differ? Is there a psychology of the critic? Or perhaps several psychologies? How does change come into the children's book world? These are *Presented at the Seminar on Children's Literature, Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 26-29, 1975. The research was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.