Children's Literature, Issues of Definition: The "Why?" and "Why Not?" of Criticism

Abstract

THIS ESSAY IS CONCERNED WITH THE NOTIONS of form and content, as well as some ideological issues related to critico-literary canonisation. It engages with children's literature as textual practices, but also, in parallel, with (children's) (literary) criticism as an intellectual enterprise. Throughout what follows, I will consider some epistemological questions, and will place my thoughts within the affirmative why? and why not? of what I believe to be a counter-hegemonic argument, an argument interested in open-mindedness and unconditionality, or, in other words, (aca- demic) anarchism/freedom.1 Children's literature, as common beliefs often have it, is something one can buy in book-shops, or through websites such as Amazon, or pick up from library bookshelves. Approached this way, children's literature is a material object. And this is how many people—inside and outside academia—under- stand the phrase 'children's literature'. Nevertheless, children's literature, as an academic discipline, and given the way it has evolved over the past twenty years or so, and more particularly in quite a number of recent publications, is best described as sitting at the cross-roads of different definitional discourses: it is an ambivalent subject which very often leads to rather contentious debates as regards its very nature. In this essay, I would like to address some of the most influential arguments that have emerged since children's literature found its place within the academic arena. Therefore, I intend to read through the works of such critics as Jacqueline Rose and Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, who, using psychoanalysis, have focused on the fictionalisation of childhood in books written for and about children, and take their arguments through Jack Zipes and David Rudd who, reflecting on the genealogy of children's litera- ture have argued that through its institutionalisation it has acquired a specific and ideologically-restricted (or ideologically-restricting) definition, and Peter Hunt who approaches children's literature the most radically by introducing the idea of a childist criticism of children's literature. As will soon become clear, this essay focuses primarily on issues of aca- demic definitions, which all are concerned with what the phrase 'children's literature' is thought to mean and imply, or means and implies, or could mean and imply. My purpose is to concentrate on the fact that children's literature,