On the Political Work of Children's Literature

Abstract

Children's literature studies has been around for almost 50 years, its organizations, journals, and conferences dating to the early 1970s. The field continues to expand, drawing on and contributing to diverse critical and theoretical pursuits, and intersecting with fields such as folkloristics, comparative literature, Victorian literature, US literary and cultural studies, and interdisciplinary childhood studies. For better and for worse, the “professionalization” of children's literature scholarship has involved a rhetorical de-emphasis of its links to ostensibly more applied fields. “Children's literature,” remarks Francelia Butler disapprovingly in the inaugural issue of Children's Literature (which she founded), “is almost entirely in the hands of those in education and library science, who emphasize the uses of literature in the classroom, methodology, biographies of current writers, graded reading lists, book reports—good things but not the concern of those in the Humanities” (8). Butler and her colleagues energetically championed children's literature as bona fide literature worthy of serious attention. Summing up the scene in 1980, John Rowe Townsend saw a division between “book people,” or those interested in children's literature as literature, and “child people,” those interested in the kids themselves.1