The Implied Reader. Response and Responsibility: Theories of the Implied Reader in Children’s Literature Criticism

Abstract

As long ago as 1990 ‘The Reader in the Book’ by Aidan Chambers was included in Peter Hunt’s anthology of Children’s Literature Criticism with the warning that it ‘was written […] in the very early days of response/reception criticism—at least in terms of its availability to a general audience. In this sense, the article has certain limitations, and Chambers has taken his arguments further since then.’1 Michael Benton, in his 1996 survey-article of developments in ‘reader-response criticism’ within children’s literature, however, still also sees Aidan Chambers’s work as groundbreaking in particular respects, writing that Chambers’s article is ‘regarded as a landmark’, but also that ‘this lead has been followed so infrequently’.2 Benton’s explanation for this is that ‘criticism has moved on’.3 This chapter will argue instead that ‘The Reader in the Book’ is still relevant to the study of Children’s Literature because contemporary criticism is still laboring under the same assumptions such texts make about the child and its reading, and employ many of the problematic moves made by that text. This ‘Childist’4 criticism may be read as an attempt to move away from what it regarded as the reductive simplicity of contemporary Children’s Literature Criticism, seeking to ‘break the power attributed to the text itself by the intrinsic criticism which dominated literary studies throughout the twentieth century, and empower the reader instead’.5KeywordsReading ProcessClose ReadingTrue MeaningChild ReaderReader ResponseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.