Poetics and Practicality: Children’s Literature and Theory in Britain Peter Hunt (bio) One of the fundamental differences between the theory of children’s literature and of almost any other literature is that it cannot be “pure” theory. Other literature might be theorized in the abstract: children’s literature actually involves children. The poetics of other literatures aspire to the universal: the poetics of children’s literature are bound to the practical, the local, the concrete. Thinking about other literatures can be done with the assurance that the act of thinking is going to be accepted without question by the thinker’s peers: with children’s literature the thinking is quite likely to be greeted with suspicion or derision, regardless of the quality of the thought. If you are going to theorize about children’s literature you must be prepared to face a good many people who think that it should not be theorized about at all. (See the exchange between Michael Steig and Perry Nodelman in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 18.1.) And—as if that weren’t enough—the theory of children’s literature is bound up with sex: to be precise, the fact that the overwhelming majority of practitioners in the field are female (Hearne 111), just as the majority of writers and prizewinners and leaders of dominant movements in the field have been female. As the female in the late twentieth century is redefined, rewritten, reasserted, so this feeds into the way in which children’s literature is redefined. And being redefined it is: over the last two years there have been radical practical changes in British academia, which add to the radical theoretical changes in the humanities. Together, these will allow a redefinition of children’s literature, the writing of a new theory and a new poetics, which [End Page 41] is true to what emerges clearly as the real nature of the subject. What is most striking is that this rewriting of the subject is virtually the opposite of the way things stand today. What is now thought of as peripheral to serious study—“popular culture,” will, I think, move toward the center, and what is now the core of most courses, the “classics” of children’s literature, will move out to the periphery. Children’s literature will, at last, be of children and with children, rather than being defined by adults; the culture will come from within, rather than being imposed from without. The old, which was validated by a literary culture that valued the past, will be superseded by the new, and a culture that looks to the future. The hierarchical male structure will be replaced by the holistic female structure. If all of this is both radical and abstract—as befits theory, I would like to demonstrate how it is coming about, and that involves some very concrete events. My original title for this essay was: “Children’s Literature and the Decline and Fall of English Literature”—because, in British higher education the old hegemony of “Eng Lit” in the humanities is collapsing, both theoretically and practically. As a result, children’s literature is repositioning itself: it is being freed from intellectual and practical shackles, and is able to find not only an individual voice, but practical support and status. Similarly, its “femaleness” is at last beginning to recast the subject area. But to understand how children’s literature came to define and theorize itself in quite inappropriate terms, we need to glance back at its development as a subject area. (There are many similarities between the developments in Britain and those in the United States, although Britain tends to lag behind.) Children’s literature has traditionally been taught in university departments of education, and in teachers’ colleges. As a result, it has had low status in the academic hierarchy, being associated with pragmatics, education, and (of course) women. In order to move it into English departments, it has been necessary to load it with the panoply of academic respectability. Numbers and resources in Britain have not been sufficient to generate a society like the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) or “high-level” journals like Children’s Literature, but there...