Narrative theory and children’s literature

Abstract

This chapter explores some applications of narrative theory to children’s literature – narrative: plot, character and perspective – to show what tools narratology offers, and how these tools have to be adapted to the specific needs of children’s literature criticism. Narrative theory is perhaps the area of critical enquiry least explored by children’s literature scholars. Certain children’s literature scholars go so far as to maintain that action-orientation is one of the foremost aesthetic characteristics of children’s literature and the main source of the pleasure in reading children’s books. The characters of children’s literature have been in the focus of scholarly attention from a variety of viewpoints: socio-historical, psychological and psychoanalytical, gender-related and biographical. There is a broad continuum between a detached witness-narrator and a self-reflective – and in children’s literature often solipsistic – personal child narrator, and an equally broad variety of impersonal narrators, from omniscient to introspective.