Literary prizes: Their role in the making of children's literature

Abstract

The institutional discussion on the (literary) quality of texts is confined to one or more groups of experts and can be divided into phases. The phased character is due to the fact that various types of experts successively devote their attention to an ever smaller part of the total literary production. Gradually, they reach agreement on the literary quality of the texts that remain object of their study. A discussion is confined to the set of experts who accept both their mutual expertise and the arguments they pass off as the right qualitative standards to be applied in the evaluation of texts. One text can be subjected to discussions and evaluations in various circuits of experts. The prizes presented to Dutch children's books in the period 1955–1985 very well illustrate the two features of the institutional discussion on the (literary) quality of texts. Prizes meant for texts published recently make a broad selection from the totality of literary works produced. Prizes awarded structurally at a later stage, such as prizes for the complete works of an author, narrow down this selection. Roughly, the participants in the institutional discussions on children's literature can be divided into two groups; one group claims to use ‘pedagogic’ standards, the other group claims to use ‘purely literary’ standards. Accordingly, the character of the prizes ranges from ‘pedagogic’ to ‘literary’. These differences do not manifest themselves in the number of judges that prizes share; there are no mutually exclusive circuits of experts. But the recruitment of the judges does reflect the difference in character. Until 1970, nearly all judges who awarded several prizes started their career in the juries with a ‘pedagogic’ character. Afterwards, the predominantly ‘literary’ juries were the first to recruit this kind of judges. This shift is accompanied by a growing interest of academically trained students of literature in the evaluation of children's books.