Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Perry Nodelman My daughter Alice, who is not quite three, sits, absorbed by Sesame Street, her favorite TV program. She clutches her favorite sheet (once bright yellow), her favorite doll (a disgustingly cutesie-poo product of the Fisher-Price Company), and her current favorite book: Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. It's clear that her experience of that excellent book does not exist in a vacuum: she likes the goblins in it at least partly because one of her records has a song on it about g-g-g-goblins; and if the truth were known, she'd probably choose the sheet and the ugly doll over the book any time. She has taste, but it's not always good taste. The child for whom children's books do exist in a vacuum must be rare indeed. In one of the articles that follows, Wendy Saul tells how her house filled up with toys she didn't approve of, despite her best efforts to keep them out. Toys like those, and TV shows and comic books and movies and pocket novels produced by mass marketers in massive quantities, are far more significant in the lives of most children than any sort of books at all. As for those relatively few children lucky enough to have access to worthwhile books, their reactions and responses to those books are determined, at least partly, by the artifacts of commercial culture even the most protected of children experience. Those artifacts are well worth exploring; that culture is one we all share and should know more about. The articles that follow are responses to commercial culture by people professionally interested in children's literature. Wendy Saul and Jill May discuss toys intended for children of various ages; Patricia Dooley looks at "first books"; Jon Stott discusses comic books, and Doug Street current movies. Carol Billman, Gary Granzberg, and Perry Nodelman discuss various aspects of TV, and finally, Lois Kuznetz and Eve Zarin share their impressions of romantic novels for girls. All of them find implications in the materials they explored that ought to help us, both in our understanding of the lives of children and in our investigations of children's literature. Copyright © 1982 Children's Literature Association