Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature Susan R. Gannon (bio) Robert Bator , ed. Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature. Chicago: American Library Association, 1983. Children's literature studies have all too often "run aground on the sandbar of apologetics," says Robert Bator. "The critics continually have had to maintain the necessity for and the propriety of the criticism before gaining clear passage to the actual territory." Still, some of the questions which have pre-occupied the critics seem important: What is children's literature? How has it been perceived in the past? How should it be approached now? In this new anthology, Bator offers a selection of essays from past and present which attempt, in various ways, to answer these questions. Bator has deliberately chosen "assertive and analytical articles" representing a wide range of opinions. Some have clearly been chosen not for their intrinsic merit, but rather because they represent some position he wished to include. The selections, therefore, "not equal in length," "nor equally valued," "range from the commonplace to the unique." But all the pieces subscribe to the view that "children's literature can and should be subject to serious critical scrutiny," and the result is a very useful book, which both documents the recent past of children's literature criticism and suggests directions for its future. In the first part of the book, Bator has collected essays centering on the definition of children's literature, its status, and the range of critical approaches to it. The second part presents discussions of the various genres of children's literature in order to "map the territory" in some detail. Brief introductions to each section and sub-section allow Bator the opportunity to offer a kind of running commentary on critical priorities and strategies and to set each piece in a critical context. Defining children's literature is not as easy as it looks. Bator reprints Clifton Fadiman's comprehensive "Case for a Children's Literature" which focuses on significant characteristics of children's books and "demonstrates that literature's lineage and its contributions," as well as John Rowe Townsend's brief and more pragmatic definition of children's books as those consigned to the children's shelves by a consensus of adults and children. Though it would seem likely that the testimony of children's writers should help us to define and delimit children's literature, Bator notes the surprising number of children's writers who "profess not to write consciously for children." He suggests that the low status of children's literature is an important reason why so many authors are reluctant to see themselves as writing for a child audience. But he believes a refusal to admit that children's books are different from adult books is a serious mistake, one which makes real criticism of juvenile books impossible. Bator urges greater critical attention to those aspects of children's literature which are unique to it. If children's books are to be understood properly as "'a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them'" critics will have to consider carefully the nature of the literary constraints authors assume in writing for children. Bator calls for the kind of careful critical work which might "lead to a much-needed theory of composition for the juvenile book." Bator's survey of critical approaches to children's literature "spans almost two centuries of critical scrutiny" and touches on a variety of issues, but the selections accurately reflect his view that children's literature criticism has been self-consciously pre-occupied with problems of definition and status. Bator gives what at first glance seems more space than it deserves to a tiresome disagreement between Lillian Gerhardt and Ethel Heins about the relationship between children's literature and "mainstream" adult literature. But this exchange epitomizes the sort of dead-end discussion which long absorbed the energies of intelligent critics. The memorable address to the Children's Literature Association in which Susan Cooper lamented the nature and quality of recent criticism is reprinted here, as is Lois Kuznets' ringing and eloquent reply. (Anyone who reads at all widely in children's...