Children's Literature and the Traditional Art of Storytelling

Abstract

Epics for children, as far as poetic structure is concerned, consist in the telling of stories. In the old days, everyone used to tell stories; with the expansion of orthographic culture and the emergence of a high literature based on it, storytelling shifted more and more into the background. Modern epic literature, the central genre of which is the novel, has increasingly distanced itself from the structural principles of the old art of storytelling. However, in the field of children's literature, storytelling is still flourishing, now as ever: children's literature still constitutes a type of literary culture in which stories are told, recited at social gatherings, or read aloud, and they continue to be silently read late into childhood. Stories are not merely told within the family, at kindergarten, or in children's groups; this traditional art has also been long-since rediscovered in the field of education. Yet, at the same time, the art of storytelling in most other cultural contexts has been slowly disappearing, if it has not already vanished altogether. What are the reasons for this contrast between a culture that has largely lost the art of storytelling and children's literature and culture,