Children's Criticism Research Articles

CHILDREN EDUCATION IN THE BOOK OF TARBIYATUL AULAD FIL ISLAM BASED ON ABDULLAH NASHIH ULWAN'S AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION PERSPECTIVES

The purpose of this study is to determine the concept of children's education in the Book of Tarbiyatul Aulad Fil Islam which includes the basics of children's education according to Abdullah Nashih Ulwan, the goals of children's education, materials and methods of children's education according to Abdullah Nashih Ulwan. This research method uses a qualitative approach and the type of research used is library research. While in data collection the author uses the method of documentation. In analyzing the data the author uses qualitative data analysis type, then the data analysis that the author uses is a descriptive method. The results showed that the concept of Children's Education according to Abdullah Nashih Ulwan includes Basic Education which includes the Principles of Bonding in the form of Akidah and Spiritual Ties which emphasizes the balance between individual needs and community needs. The materials for Children's Education include: Nurturing the Noble Psyche, Maintaining the Rights of Others, Maintaining Supervision and Criticism of Children's Education Methods by Using Education by Example, Education with Customs, Education with Advice, Education with Attention/Supervision, and Education with Punishment.

«Степка-Растрепка» в протоколах заседания Библиотечной комиссии Общества содействия дошкольному воспитанию (по материалам архива Показательной библиотеки по детском чтению)

“Stepka-rastrepka” in the Minutes of the Meeting of the Library Commission of the Society for the Promotion of Preschool Education (based on Materials from the Archive of the Demonstration Childhood Reading Library) The article is devoted to the publication of the minutes of the meeting of the Library Commission of the Society for the promotion of preschool education, reflecting a lively exchange of views on “Stepka-Rastrepka”. On the one hand, “Stepka-Rastrepka” was banned for a long time by teachers, who categorically refused to recognize its literary and educational value. On the other hand, professional writers and artists (A. Blok, Z. Gippius, A. Remizov, A. Benoit, A. Ostroumova-Lebedeva) spoke out in defense of “Stepka-Rastrepka” and urged not to deprive children of such fun and entertaining reading. The article also provides brief information about the activities of the Society for the promotion of preschool education and the work of its Library Commission, which discussed a wide range of issues related to literature for preschool children. The original protocols are stored in the Fundamental library of the Herzen State Pedagogical University and are available to all categories of researchers. Keywords: Stepka-Rastrepka, children’s literature, children’s reading circle, Society for the promotion of preschool education, Library Commission, children’s literature library, Demonstration library for children’s reading, discussion about children’s literature, criticism of children’s literature

The Works of Lidiia Charskaia in the Eyes of Contemporary Critics

ABSTRACT Relying on a wide range of literary history sources covering the first third of the twentieth century, especially publications in pedagogical and literary periodicals, this article examines the reception Russian critics gave to one of the most popular female Russian children’s writers, Lidiia Charskaia. Attitudes of prerevolutionary and Soviet critics toward Charskaia’s works are compared, and an analysis is offered of the main principles and techniques applied in criticism of children’s literature.

1960s in Scandinavia

This article, based on extensive source material from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, is about the changing norms for children’s media, childhood and art in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis demonstrates how changes within welfare state institutions converged with the youth rebellion’s wider criticism of children’s low status in traditional power hierarchies, and contributed to new definitions of the role of media in children’s lives. After establishing a wider historical contextualisation, the article moves on to show how the criticism of existing norms in the realm of children’s literature in the mid-1960s grew into a critique of the prevailing ideologies and existing narratives in all children’s media (including film, theatre and television) at the end of the decade. A key figure in the redefinition of norms for children’s media was the Swede, Gunilla Ambjörnsson. Her 1968 book, Trash Culture for Children, led to discussions about the role of media in children’s lives all over Scandinavia. Her core belief in the innate social and political interests of children had a great impact on the ways in which the possibilities for an explicit political agenda in children’s media were conceptualised in Scandinavia at large.

Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature by Blanka Grzegorczyk (review)

Reviewed by: Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature by Blanka Grzegorczyk Clare Bradford (bio) Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. By Blanka Grzegorczyk. New York: Routledge, 2015. As Blanka Grzegorczyk notes, scholarly work on the postcolonial significances of contemporary British literature for children and young people has lagged behind postcolonial investigations of the literatures of other Anglophone nations, notably Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. [End Page 422] Instead, research has focused, in the main, on texts of imperialism, particularly studies of adventure novels for boys (see works by critics Joseph Bristow, Martin Green, and Jeffrey Richards, for example). More recently, Michelle Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and others have published books focusing on the extent to which canonical and popular texts for girls during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rehearse and reproduce colonial discourses. Karen Sands-O’Connor’s Soon Come Home to This Island: West Indians in British Children’s Literature (2008), one of the few book-length studies of discourses of race in British literature, covers the long history of representations of West Indians in texts for the young but does not draw upon postcolonial studies in its approach and methodology. Grzegorczyk’s study promises, then, to address an important and neglected topic: how contemporary texts published in what was formerly the center of British imperialism represent the historical and the cultural legacies of the colonial past as well as new forms of imperialism. If Discourses of Postcolonialism does not quite live up to the ambition articulated at the end of chapter 1—to “recognize the general trend that the criticism of children’s literature is now failing to address” (32)—it offers thought-provoking readings of some key British texts of the last two decades. Chapter 2 addresses novels thematizing migration and the subject-formation of protagonists from ethnic minorities, drawing attention to reformulations of ethnic and national identities. In chapters 3 to 5 Grzegorczyk turns, respectively, to historical fiction, fantasy, and adventure novels, employing a genre-based division of texts that results in a somewhat patchy coverage of ideas; for instance, tropes of exoticization are discussed in three of the book’s five chapters, but a definition is not offered until the final chapter. Nevertheless, Grzegorczyk’s analysis of texts is lively and engaging, focusing to good effect on telling instances of the narrative strategies and implications of texts. In particular, the third chapter (while too brief for the topic it addresses) offers a nuanced account of the complex relationships between history and fiction as modes of truth-telling. A shortcoming of the book is that its scope (by my calculations, less than seventy thousand words) is quite simply insufficient to address the complex theoretical and analytical questions it raises; another is that it presents as a series of essays rather than a coherently argued whole. Each of its five chapters is followed by a Works Cited list, rather than the consolidated list usual in monographs, and the chapters rarely refer to ideas or texts discussed elsewhere in the book. Further, Grzegorczyk never elucidates her approach to postcolonial studies, explaining that she prefers that “the texts, rather than a predetermined critical framework . . . take center stage” (2). This approach to the writing of Discourses of Postcolonialism has two effects. First, by referring to theorists and critics merely to bolster her readings of texts (and often to prosecute her argument) Grzegorczyk does not develop a sense of the larger concepts that frame her approach, so [End Page 423] that key terms and ideas (including postcolonialism, transnationalism, and globalization) float in something of a vacuum; thus phrases such as “the dominant tropes and formal characteristics of postcolonial fiction” (38) have no referent in the absence of a systematic discussion of such tropes and characteristics. Secondly, Grzegorczyk’s approach affords little scope for any explication of the debates and tensions that characterize postcolonial studies, which, in Graham Huggan’s words, is “not a field one is likely to look to for methodological coherence or consensual politics” (Huggan 22). Instead, Grzegorczyk too often provides a reductive account of postcolonialism; for instance, she compares her study of British postcolonialism to a list of scholarly works on children...

Literatura infantil: entre a infância, a pedagogia e a arte

O artigo tem por objetivo discutir dois conceitos fundamentais para a teoria e a crítica da literatura infantil: a concepção de criança sobre a qual se constroem as obras infantis e a função social atribuída à literatura infantil. O texto analisa como importantes teóricos da literatura infantil brasileiros trataram da questão e como as diferentes concepções de infância determinaram o percurso da literatura infantil no país.

Barnlitteraturforskningens arkeologi

Criticism of children’s literature is not, although it too often may seem so, a phenomenon of the later half of the 20th century. The contradiction between didactics and aesthetics, for many established as an axiom in modern children’s literature research, has been contra productive when it comes to differences between older and modern literature. While older has become representative for the didactic, the simple and the single-minded, modern has become representative for the aesthetic, the complex and the multifold (the ambiguous). Beginning with an analysis of the very early research in the field of children’s literature, the article points at several inconsistencies in the principles of later research. A presentation of international studies of importance for later surveys and historical works, among them the American scholar William Sloane and his comparative studies of children’s literature in the 17th and 20th centuries, is conducted in order to contextualise links between different kind of historical perspectives on literature, art and childhood. The bottom-line is what primarily counts in the history of research. Paradigms in some works easily get the status of established truths and are passed on without discussion, while others simply vanish from the bibliographies without comments. On basis of an extensive material of texts, theories and pictures (comparisons with pictorial art are taken in) the article analyses from a constructional perspective long lived assumptions and paradigms and argues for a new methodology – the archaeology of children’s literature research - that includes both the research itself and the researcher. Examples from recent research (Penny Brown, Beverly Lyon Clark, Marah Gubar) clearly show that contextualising literature within history, criticism and debate may result in new and corrective approaches. Motifs, passions and goals of the researcher are all part of the research. Self-reflection is the central keyword.Keywords: criticism of children’s literature, history of children’s literature, childhood, didactics, aesthetics, research, paradigm, context, self-reflection.

Le rapprochement de la Littérature Comparée et de la Littérature pour enfants

Although theory and criticism of children’s literature has greatly evolved up to the present day, the transfer of comparative literary theory to the domain of children’s literature has not been nearly as promising. Recently, however, Emer O’sullivan’s study broadened our scope of knowledge in the domain of children’s literature by proposing a theoretical plan that consists in transferring and applying the principles of comparative literature to texts intended for children. In my article, I will attempt to test some of these theoretical systems by applying them to fairy tales, and more specifically, their modern adaptations: comparative poetics, intertextual and image studies along with studies in other comparative fields.

Professoras moralizadoras, normalizadoras ou ausentes - a literatura infantil retratando as diferenças

Due to a increase of children’s fiction addressing the subject of ‘differences’ in the last few years in the Brazilian context, this study proposes a reflection on the way these books represent differences related to minority groups and gender. The analyses are focused on the character roles that are played by the teacher as she/he is faced with differences. Ten books published in Brazil by different authors and publishing houses between 2004 and 2008 were analyzed. The main argument of the analyses is based on the assumption that the increase of the issue of ‘difference’ in recent Brazilian children’s books is in accordance with various state policies relating to minorities rights, on the one hand, and to a broad development of criticism of children’s fiction from the 1970s until the present day as to stereotypical representation of gender and minority groups in the British and North-American context, on the other hand.

New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: New Voices in Children’s Literature Criticism Ruth Mirtz (bio) Chapleau, Sebastien . New Voices in Children’s Literature Criticism. Staffordshire, England: Pied Piper P, 2004. This slim volume provides a collection of thirteen short essays on such wide-ranging topics as intertextuality, queer theory, race and ethnicity, authorship, publication, and nationality. As Perry Nodelman points out in [End Page 445] the preface, the "new voices" are actually fresh takes and creative perspectives on ideas in children's literature that have been around awhile. Nodelman claims too many new books treat children's literature as some kind of untouched ground, unaware of or not crediting their critical forebears from decades of research and scholarship in children's literature (5). These essays as a whole, then, perhaps evoke a metaphor of planting new seeds in old ground, rather than breaking new ground, in traditional areas of concern to scholars of children's literature. (Incidentally, Nodelman's riff on Madonna's criticism of children's literature that "there's like no books on anything" is the first critical essay I've giggled over in years.) Indeed, each essay does an admirable job of creating either a new borderland in critical space or pointing out a problematic borderland in the critical space of children's literature. Several of the essays delve into the issue of the dual child-adult audience. Peter Hunt, in his essay "The Knowledge: What Do You Need to Know to Know Children's Literature?" posits that critical study of children's literature is necessarily cross- and inter-disciplinary and needs to be "accessible" as a result of "the irreducible core" of children's literature texts: "a negotiation (or a struggle) between author, material, and audience" where the audience is always children and authors always adults (10). Not all of the essays after Hunt's opening follow his suggestion to be accessible, but most of them approach questions about that tantalizing irreducible core, and several move from core concepts to predictions about the future of children's literature. Most of the essays in New Voices explore this issue of the tension between child reader and adult writer in children's literature. Several selections focus on the continuing power of adults over what children read and how children are portrayed in books. Laura Atkins, in "A Publisher's Dilemma: The Place of the Child in the Publication of Children's Books," adds another interesting narrative of the publishing process to our small store of such stories. Her essay questions what drives the publishing industry and where the child reader comes into play in the publishing process. Her answer, that the adult readers (teachers, librarians, parents) are the stronger forces in what gets published and how, comes through two stories: one of how Sammy and the Dinosaurs was published in English (written by Atkins) and then revised for American audiences; and second about DeShawn Days, a book of poetry by Tony Medina. Atkins's essay is echoed later in the book, when Gabriele Thomson-Wohlgemuth describes what happened to children's literature in translation in East Germany before reunification. Thomson-Wohlgemuth explains that while East German texts for children had to [End Page 446] conform to the enterprise of creating children who fit in with the political doctrines of the socialist government, Western countries also have didactic and ideological goals for children's literature which creates limits and censors certain books in predictable ways. The adult power over children's literature thus may result in less interesting and diverse selections available in all Western cultures. Likewise, Ann Alston's essay, "There's No Place Like Home: The Ideological and Mythological Construction of House and Home in Children's Literature" sent me back to my picture book collection, looking for what she identifies as the essential "home" in children's literature: a family sitting at a table covered by a tablecloth with a bureau in the background. Alston's point is that, even though families and homes have changed drastically, the image of home in children's books is still a Western "static middle-class perspective," now a myth that adults are trying to sell, emphasizing again that adults control children by...

"Captain Underpants Is My Hero": Things Have Changed—or Have They?

"Captain Underpants Is My Hero":Things Have Changed—or Have They? Roderick McGillis (bio) First an anecdote. On Saturday 16 June 2001, I happened to be in a McDonald's restaurant in Red Deer, Alberta. I hadn't been in one of these fast food places for a long time, probably three or four years. Anyhow, as I entered and passed through the restaurant to the counter, I noticed the play area. It did not look the way I had remembered such play areas. I remember the colorful plastic scenery with small slides and hoops and such, alongside the enclosed pen of many-colored hollow plastic balls in which kids burrowed and flopped. Apparently, these mini-playgrounds are now a thing of memory, and in their place is a "Play Station," a central hub with a number of computer screens. I couldn't help reflect on the irony: we in North America are a culture of obesity, and here in this mecca of calories and carbohydrates, we have a space for a bit of physical effort on the part of kids replaced by a space for them to sit and gaze at the ubiquitous screen. Things have changed. Or have they? Baudrillard reflects on the city of New York as a "world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence." And yet, he says, he "cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe" (23). I feel something of what these words portend when I reflect on McDonald's and its "Play Station." And I reflect that what Baudrillard says describes things pretty much as they have always been. We have always felt ourselves on the threshold of a world evermore about to be. Oh, brave new world that holds the old world in its arms. Change and renewal: the more things change, the more they remain the same. Or do they? Have books for children changed these past so many years? Has the way we deliver stories to children changed? Do we really value reading or do we just think we do? Are we reconfiguring our notions of the child or does she play as usual? Who is this "we" anyway? Can we speak as a collective? Should we speak collectively? Does globalization manifest itself in children's books, or does the "children's literature in different countries," as Maria Nikolajeva argues, have "little in common" (43)? Is homogenization of the child and child culture the danger Jack Zipes says it is? Has criticism of children's books changed along with the books produced for the young, or does it remain the same, anchored in its concern for the child's moral and social well being? How far have we come, really? To focus that list of questions, I'll turn the glass to Captain Underpants, superhero for six to ten year-old children, mostly boy children, or so they say. This diaper-clad defender of the world, this waistband warrior, appears in a series of books by Dav Pilkey, and I intend to ask whether the Captain Underpants books can help us approach answers to some of my questions. I'll use these books to address questions of change and renewal under the following headings: audience and narrative voice, the figure of the child, multiculturalism, and the question of socialization. These four headings ought to bring us into the vicinity of the questions I posed above. But before I begin to address each heading, I am going to slip in a comment on the books as examples of the only clear-cut change in children's literature these past ever-so-many years. I refer to their existence within a literary system that no longer exists soley of books. A glance at the Captain Underpants books will reveal that they are acutely aware of themselves both as products in an ecomonic system and as products that inhabit a world in which dialogue between media is the condition of survival. Like a book such as The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, the Captain Underpants books have covers that draw attention...

The Delights of Impossibility: No Children, No Books, Only Theory

The Delights of Impossibility:No Children, No Books, Only Theory Roderick McGillis (bio) Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary in "theorizing," in making sense out of what was happening. —bell hooks My title refers to impossibility. Let me explain. We have convincing studies of children's literature that demonstrate the non-existence of children, their books, and writing about their books. Children are non-existent because the notions of childhood we have are constructions of adults who cannot recall precisely what it was like to be a child; all definitions of the child and childhood are made by those who are not children, and therefore these definitions do not speak of something absolute, but rather of something relative that satisfies the desires and hopes of the adults who make the definitions. Children's books do not exist because, once again, adults write books for children, and in doing so seek to draw children into the world as the adult perceives it; children, whatever they are, do not (or only rarely) write the books they read. And the criticism of children's books does not exist because it cannot exist if there are no children's books to criticize; indeed, even if there were such things as children's books, the criticism of them would still come from those adults who occupy positions of authority within the institutions that offer commentary on books: the popular press, the more specialized journals, and the universities. In other words, what we call children's literature is an invention of adults who need to have something to write about, something to play with, something to help them construct a vision of the way things are and ought to be so that the present generation, and more importantly, the next generation will behave according to standards those adults who write children's books and publish them feel comfortable with. The previous paragraph echoes, rather faintly, the work of Jacqueline Rose (The Case of Peter Pan; or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, 1984) and Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child, 1994). I evoke these writers not to sanction their theories or to criticize them, but rather to raise some of the problems we have with children's literature. The first problem is, then, definition. Rose and Lesnik-Oberstein problematize the definition of children's literature by arguing that such a literature does not exist. For those who think that it does exist, another problem arises: how do we define children's literature vis-à-vis its audience? In other words, when we speak of children's literature, do we speak of books marketed for people of a certain age, and if so, then what age? Are fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds children? Are people who wear diapers children? Just whom do we refer to when we say "children"? At what age does one stop being a child? Is there such a creature as an "inner child" in each of us? And even if we can decide the answer to these questions, we have another problem, one that Peter Hunt keeps insisting on: how do we incorporate a sense of history into what we mean by children's books? If the term "children's books" refers to those books that children read, then what does this say about all those books long forgotten, but perhaps recently dredged up by literary scholars of a historical bent who snoop about the by-ways of literary history for the likes of Eliza Fenwick or Mary Martha Sherwood or Catherine Sinclair or Lucy Clifford or L. T. Meade or Evelyn Everett-Greene? Who reads these authors any more? Do books that once may have been children's books cease to be what they once were? Do they become something else? But let me return to another perennial problem in the study of children's books. How do we take seriously books written for an audience of juveniles who have hardly acquired the skills to read anything beyond the most rudimentary stories, written in the most rudimentary language, and dealing with the most rudimentary subjects? If we have a children...

Hatchet Job

Hatchet Job Perry Nodelman (bio) Karín Lesnik-Oberstein , Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child is like the little girl with the curl in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem: when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad it's horrid—just about as bad a book about the criticism of children's literature as one could imagine. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein has important points to make and some axes to grind that are very much in need of being ground. But she's so busy, grinding away with boundless passion and energy, that she sometimes doesn't seem to notice it's a saw or a hammer she's handling and not an axe at all. She seriously blunts the edge of her argument and weakens her case by misrepresenting and mis-shaping the evidence she presents for it. According to Lesnik-Oberstein, children's-literature criticism, like children's literature itself, is based on two key ideas: one, that children are different from adults—different enough to need a special kind of literature; and two, that adults can know enough about the different nature of children to write books for them and/or to recommend which of the books written for them they ought to read. For Lesnik-Oberstein, both these ideas are false. "Western society," she says, "has an ever-growing, complex, and ambivalent attachment to the concept of the child. It is the central argument of this book that that child does not exist. For the purposes of children's literature criticism, so closely involved with children's supposed emotions and states of mind, I am arguing that the 'child' is a construction, constructed and described in different, often clashing terms" (9). As constructed, the "fictional child" of criticism relates more to critics' desires about what children could be or should be than to real knowledge of what any given child or group of children might actually be like—a knowledge Lesnik-Oberstein believes to be impossible to obtain. Lesnik-Oberstein concludes that "if children's literature criticism depends on, and is defined by, its claim to the existence of the 'real child'. . . . then it is indeed dead" (163). That's right, dead. Deceased. Extinct. Moribund. Children's-literature criticism has kicked the bucket. This journal is a mortuary, apparently, and we who write in it are undertakers. "As children's literature criticism operates at present," Lesnik-Oberstein asserts as her finely ground axe descends vengefully downward for its last triumphant stroke, "I can only conclude it makes non-statements, for its own purposes. In making judgments and criticisms on behalf of a 'real child' who does not exist, its writings are useless to the fulfillment of its own professed aims" (163). Well, as a children's-literature critic, I obviously want to quarrel with that conclusion. I think it's wrong—and not just wrong, but bad and horrid, for reasons I will point out later in this review. Meanwhile, though, I'm surprised at how often I agree with Lesnik-Oberstein's assertions. Her axe sometimes drops on some specific critical necks I'd like to see it drop on. There are parts of this book I might have written myself. Indeed, I have written them myself, albeit in other words and in other contexts—a fact Lesnik-Oberstein seems blithely unaware of. In the world of children's-literature criticism she describes, Perry Nodelman does not exist—although, speaking about death and grave-robbing and other spooky things, Lesnik-Oberstein quotes the exact words from Jacques Derrida about children as Other that Nodelman quoted in a piece that appeared in the Quarterly as far back as 1990—and in relation to exactly the same idea. She also pursues almost the same argument about the deficiencies of Peter Hunt's work regarding the unity of the child reader that Nodelman presented in a Quarterly review in 1992. In the light of this mysterious, almost magical, coincidence of agreement between Lesnik-Oberstein, axe-murderer of children's-literature criticism, and me, a children's-literature critic who imagines...

Hunt with a Canon

Hunt with a Canon Perry Nodelman (bio) Hunt, Peter , ed. Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Hunt, Peter , ed. Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. These two books are not what they appear to be. They are, however, very entertaining; and they are entertaining exactly because they are not what they appear to be. They are not, despite the claim made in the subtitle of the first volume, a history of the development of children's literature criticism—nor even of "the way in which the criticism of children's literature—and indeed, the subject itself—has developed, particularly in the last forty years" (Development 1). Hunt rather dismissively covers pre-1945 children's literature criticism in about twenty pages of excerpts and represents the entire next quarter century by just one essay. He justifies this practice by asserting that his book "is not a history of criticism, or a history of children's literature. It is not intended to be comprehensive, or to suggest any particular partisan route to the understanding of the field of children's books. Rather, it attempts to give some characteristic points of view. The texts and extracts printed here either clear the ground or provide a foundation for future work" (13). In the rest of the first volume, then, and all of the second, the focus is on still-current concerns—which raises a question about why any history was included at all. This focus pleases me—I have to admit that I find the contemporary issues more interesting than the history seemingly promised but never delivered. A second thing these books are not—or at least, not exactly—are the anthologies of previously published essays that their tables of contents and back jackets seem to suggest, and that I had first thought they were. Much of their content is, in fact, reprinted articles. But three of the eight essays in the second volume are new: one by C.W. Sullivan III on folklore and fantasy, one by Nicholas Tucker on psychology, and one by Tony Watkins on new historicism. Furthermore, one of the other essays, a piece on picture books by Geoff Moss that appeared earlier in the Quarterly, has an entire second half added. Again, I'm glad I was misled; the presence of these new materials makes the second volume a more stimulating intellectual experience than would have been provided by the collection of reprints it first appeared to be. Meanwhile, six of the thirteen pieces listed in the table of contents of the first volume are not complete pieces, only excerpts—and that table doesn't even mention a number of other lengthy excerpts from a variety of other writers. Despite the table of contents' silence, some of these excerpts, from writers such as Geoffrey Trease, Dennis Butts, Myles McDowell, Brian Alderson, Michael Benton, and Jane Doonan, are just about as long as some of the ones listed. There is both less and more for your money here than first appears. In volume two, the habit of excerpting expands prodigiously. Hunt's sixteen-page introduction includes a page and a half of Perry Nodelman (a brilliant page and a half too, I might add), a page of Samuel Pickering, a page and a half of Mitzi Myers, another page and a half of Nodelman (also brilliant), two pages of Aidan Chambers, and a page or so of shorter quotes—and only about eight pages of Hunt to hold all the rest together. The excerpts take over entirely in the poetry piece in the second volume. It consists of extended quotes from a variety of sources loosely held together by Hunt's commentary: "I have been unable to find a single essay that adequately explores the problems of discussing—or even defining—verse and poetry for children. Similarly . . . there is a lack of any extensive theoretical discussion of the links between children's literature and education. In an attempt to partially remedy this, I have edited together a series of extracts" (14-15). It is exactly all these extracts, and the contexts that Hunt provides for them, that makes...

Fairy Godmothers or Wicked Stepmothers?: The Uneasy Relationship of Feminist Theory and Children's Criticism

Fairy Godmothers or Wicked Stepmothers?The Uneasy Relationship of Feminist Theory and Children's Criticism Beverly Lyon Clark (bio) Now there is no woman, only an overgrown child. (Margaret Fuller, 1844) The cultural myth of cocooning suggests an adult woman who has regressed in her life cycle, returned to a gestational stage. It maps the road back from the feminist journey, which was once aptly defined by a turn-of-the-century writer as 'the attempt of women to grow up.' (Susan Faludi, 1991) My first mistake was in thinking "children" instead of "child. " My second was in seeing The Child as my enemy rather than the racism and sexism of an oppressive capitalist society. My third was in believing none of the benefits of having a child would accrue to my writing. (Alice Walker, 1979) Why is it that I still—like Fuller, like Faludi—react so vehemently to being called a girl? Why, if I want to revalue childhood and children and children's literature, do I persist in seeing associations with childhood as negative? The fact is that I, like other feminists, am spoken by a discourse of maturity that devalues children. My feminism and my commitment to children's literature exist in an uneasy relationship—if the relationship is maternal, then there is a constant slippage in the feminism between being a fairy godmother and being a wicked stepmother. The lack of parallelism between the two modifiers in my subtitle—the adjectival "feminist" and the possessive "children's"—is symptomatic of the uneasy relationship between the two fields.1 Of course it is true that there are affinities between feminist theory and children's criticism—that, further, if feminist criticism is more "mature," at this point, then it may have more to offer children's criticism. It can be argued, as Perry Nodelman has, that children's literature is a kind of women's writing, writing that responds to repression or, better yet, finds "an alternative way of describing reality," writing that is often nonlinear and contradictory, writing in which "adjustments are made to societal responsibilities" (33, 34). It can be argued, as Lissa Paul has, that the common ground between women's and children's literature "lies in a shared content (the enclosed, interior scenes of the action); and in a shared language (of otherness)" (187)—in entrapment and deceit. Certainly, most of those who write, edit, buy, and critique children's literature—at least in this century—are women. That precedence contrasts strikingly with the situation of women who have written for adults: as of 1992, only 32 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes awarded for fiction had gone to women and only 8 percent of the Nobel Prizes in Literature. Yet women had won some 66 percent of the Newbery Medals. So it should not be surprising if children's literature has addressed some women's concerns. Not that most feminists have noticed. At the risk of being unsisterly, I want to point to the profound ambivalences that mainstream feminists have about children's literature.2 If Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that women have suffered not so much from a Bloomian "anxiety of influence" as a more primary "anxiety of authorship," a fear that they cannot create, that writing will destroy them (49)—then I would add that women (and other) critics also suffer from an "anxiety of immaturity." They fear that literary creation will be so associated with procreation, and with that which is procreated, that they themselves might be considered childish. And thus they—we—become anxious to dissociate ourselves from immaturity. Much of the feminist ambivalence about children has been related, I think, to an ambivalence about motherhood. In the early seventies a working-class feminist mother like Tillie Olsen could point out how rare it was for a woman who is a mother also to be a writer (31-32). Other feminists, like Kate Millett, were more specifically resisting male theories and theorists, especially Freud—for whom, with respect to maternity: "It is as if ... the only self worth worrying about in the mother-child relationship were that of the child" (Suleiman 356). Even now an...

A Notable Irrelevance: Class and Children's Fiction

Class, Fred Inglis says, at once too obvious and too irrelevant a term to apply to children's fiction. Its (whatever it is) has to be faced and grasped. But I think that children's reading, whatever class messages may be carried to the class-conscious adult, is always and endlessly capable of being relocated in the classless paradise (50). This is a remarkable comment coming from a critic as aware of the interrelation of the literary and the social as is Fred Inglis. Class is, we notice, at once obvious and irrelevant—that is, so blatant as to need no critic to draw a reader's attention to it, and of no relevance anyway. It is beside the point. What is it that moves Inglis here? Since he is concerned only with the child's reading, Inglis feels licensed to ignore a potentially disruptive adult interpretation and to concern himself instead with what he assumes to be the child's ability to relocate what she or he reads, to respond to the undoubted presence of class in such a way as to erase it. This confident certainty about how children interpret texts, and that the re- sponses of adult and child can be distinguished unproblematically, ef- faces two major issues in the criticism of children's books. First, it is no easy matter to assess the response of any reader, adult or child, and it is therefore implausible to imagine that children's reading will relocate any aspect of a text, including class.1 Second, Inglis forgets that the books children read are, generally speaking, written, published, and provided by adults and that the sleight of pen by which they then become the child's possession—children's fiction—obscures the fact that these books are the creations of the necessarily class-conscious adult.2 What seems to be at stake here, then, is not children's reading as such, but an adult's desire to think of children as reading in a certain way. To put it in Jacqueline Rose's terms, we can suggest that this is the result of an investment made by the adult in the child and a made by the adult on the child as the effect of that investment, a demand which fixes the child and then holds it in place.3 As a result, children's fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child ... sets up a world in

The Relevance of Children in the Criticism of Children's Literature

The Relevance of Children in the Criticism of Children's Literature

Children's choice and critical acclaim: A unified perspective for children's literature

Abstract The term “children's literature” implies a fusion between literary quality and child appeal, though this unity is lacking in many books classified as “children's” or in books that children read. The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of children's books that do meet both criteria—those that received critical acclaim from adults and were named “Children's Choices—and to compare them with books that received critical acclaim only. These two groups of books were analyzed for themes, style, and structure. The results then were compared both within and between the two groups. The stylistic and structural differences identified between the two groups were more apparent than variations in themes. These findings have Implications for the study and criticism of children's literature and for bringing children and books together.

Why Bettelheim?: A Comment on the Use of Psychological Theories in Criticism

Why Bettelheim?A Comment on the Use of Psychological Theories in Criticism Michael Steig (bio) As an erstwhile psychoanalytic critic, I am increasingly skeptical about the uncritical use of psychological grids in literary interpretation. Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment in particular often seems to be taken as Truth rather than as the views of one psychiatrist holding one set of values. Accepting Bettelheim's basic model of the use of fairy tales by children to externalize and (in fantasy) resolve their unconscious conflicts and anxieties is one thing—though even that model can be questioned; accepting his moralizing tendencies is something else. Thus, although I find "Unlocked by Love" a very insightful discussion of the particular appeal of four of William Steig's picture books with child protagonists, I must express some concern about the way in which Bettelheim is used. Arlene Wilner's suggestion that William Steig's Sylvester is transformed into a rock as a punishment seems to derive from Bettelheimian assumptions about misconduct and justice in stories for children. Or does she assume that all calamities in children's stories are viewed by child readers as punishments? In either case, we are distanced from the experience of reading when the critic fails to describe her own relation to either the theory or the interpretation. There is nothing new in the unquestioning acceptance and application [End Page 125] of psychological precepts: literary critics have been doing it for years, whether the source of undisputed wisdom is Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, or Lacan. (A recent example: Michael Reed's piece in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 11, on the female Oedipus complex in Outside Over There—an interesting article that nonetheless gives no sense of the author's basis for accepting Freud's theories.) The special problem with Bettelheim (also true of Freud to an extent) is that his supposedly scientific view of child development is fraught with values that can be called political and moralistic, a fixed set of ideas about how children should develop. "Unlocked by Love" does communicate some sense of the author's feelings about the appeal of the stories by William Steig, and no doubt Bettelheim's basic model was a necessary starting point for the article. But this critic and all too many others keep the works they interpret at a distance by choosing to apply "well-accepted" views of child development without considering that any theory of a universal pattern of development is open to serious doubts—if only by the fact that it claims universality. What I am suggesting is that the criticism of children's literature needs greater awareness both of the possible weaknesses in particular psychological theories and of the processes of reading and interpretation. [End Page 126] Michael Steig Michael Steig teaches at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Dickens and Phiz (1978) and Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (1989). Copyright © 1990 The Children's Literature Foundation, Inc.

Talking About, and Teaching About, Pleasure

Talking About, and Teaching About, Pleasure Perry Nodelman The topic for this issue of the Quarterly—teaching children's literature both to children and to university students-has attracted more submissions than any other topic in our history. I am delighted by the large amount of interest that reveals, for I believe that our efforts in the criticism of children's literature are pointless unless they show us ways of helping other human beings to a better appreciation of it. As editor of this journal, I've tried to offer a forum for discussions that either reveal important or interesting aspects of the relationships between literature and its readers, or else suggest something important or interesting about a literary text itself that might be taught to readers of any age, including children, and so increase their literary awareness and pleasure. And one of the major thrusts of my own teaching of children's literature is to persuade my students that the appreciation of literature is to a great extent a learned ability—that we cannot expect children to be able to understand and enjoy aspects of literature that we have not taught them how to understand and enjoy. For the most part, the university students I teach happily accept this basic principle, often because they are not themselves avid readers of literature, and are relieved to suppose that their own lack of interest represents inexperience rather than a basic, inherent incapability. For my assertion that literary appreciation is a learned ability often leads them to conclude that they themselves read literature now more or less as they did as children, and indeed, as most children do—and meanwhile, they assume that I (and other English professors) read quite differently. I, like other English professors, am what the jargon of my course allows them to identify as a "sophisticated reader"; and since the aspects of literature that I myself notice and want to discuss are often surprising; to them—things they say they never would have noticed on their own—they conclude that they must be unsophisticated readers, much like the children we discuss in class. In other words, their own ability to arrive at my kinds of perceptions persuades them that their own kind of reading is what people automatically and naturally do until they come to college and have some smartass intellectual tell them that it's wrong. Having accepted the smartass intellectual's assertion that literary appreciation is a learned ability, my students work hard to know more about children's literature, so that they can themselves be more effective in teaching children the skills required to appreciate it. Unfortunately, however, the same acceptance of their own lack of experience that allows them to embark so willingly on what is for many an entirely new way of reading and thinking often hampers their ability to learn that new way. For in fact, contrary to their own perceptions of themselves and despite their admitted lack of experience of literature, my students are not actually innocent, unsophisticated readers. Unlike the young children new to reading with whom they so readily identify themselves, most of my students have learned from their previous education how to read literature in a way quite different from both the one research reveals to us as characteristic of young human beings and the one my teaching tends to take for granted. That particularly hampers them, I believe, because the way young human beings read and the way I myself read have more in common with each other than might be supposed -and both are quite different from the way my students tend to read. Unless I can persuade those students that what they do is neither unsophisticated nor necessarily characteristic of young readers, and that what I do is neither necessarily sophisticated or uncharacteristic of young readers, they will continue to approach children with the assumption that the children intuitively share their own learned skills—skills of somewhat questionable utility. A few months ago, I had a practical demonstration of varieties of literary assumptions in conflict with each other. The various assumptions were those of my students, those of a child, and my own; they came...