Holiday Work: On Writing for Children and for the Academy

Abstract

There are numerous academics who have also been novelists, including several prominent writers of children’s literature. Yet the relationship between academic writing and the writing of fiction has not been systematically explored, nor have the kinds of knowledge gained from the experience of writing fiction always been easy to incorporate into the scholarly and institutional contexts of academic criticism. The author discusses some of the ways in which academic and fiction writing can complement and inform each other, drawing on his own experience in both fields. He also argues that ‘the act of writing’ needs to be far more thoroughly integrated into English studies at both a practical and a theoretical level.