Children's Literature Criticism: The Old and the New

Abstract

Understanding Children's Literature sets itself up as an introductory collection of essays about the relationship between literary theory and children's literature. The essays are by well-known, highly respected critics, such as Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Tony Watkins, John Stephens, Perry Nodelman, Hamida Bosmajain, Lissa Paul, and Hugh Crago. These and other critics in the book focus their theoretical lens, as it were, on such important issues in children's literature as definition, history, culture, ideology, linguistics, picture books, psychoanalysis, feminism, intertextuality, and literacy. Placed under the microscope are a wide range of old and new children's texts. TL· Wind in tL· Willows, TL· Secret Garden, TL· Hobbit, Low Tide, Where tL· Wild Things Are, Mr Gumpy's Outing, and Higglety Pigglety Pop! are just some of the closely examined books that give students an understanding of how literary theory might be used to dissect children's literature. The opening essay, Introduction: The World of Children's Literature Studies, is by Peter Hunt, a critic who as well as anybody can see the complexities that inform an understanding of children's literature. Understanding Children's Literature has been the central theoretical text in my undergraduate theory class this semester, along with Rebecca Lukens's A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature. I chose Hunt's book because I was reviewing it (what better way to know a book than to teach it). I chose Lukens's book because I didn't want my students to think that the ideas and concepts about children's literature criticism in Hunt's book, indeed the whole concept of children's literature studies, appeared out of nowhere. Quite the contrary. I wanted them to understand the history of children's literary theory, the theories themselves, and the direction in which children's literature criticism seems to be heading today, i.e., toward a much more interdisciplinary mode of interpretation. By reading back and forth between the two quite different approaches to children's literature of which Lukens and