International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

social construction of female and male children, especially since the nineteenth-century
middle-class self-definition of gender roles and the family, has guided feminists to
valuable contextual insights into the history of children’s literature and its readers.
A major issue in feminist criticism is the problematics of the female writer’s
precursors which has led Gilbert and Gubar to revise Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’
(Bloom 1973) with ‘anxiety of authorship’ by which the female writer questions her claim
to be a writer (Gilbert and Gubar 1979:48–49). It remains to be seen if the important
role of female writers in children’s literature and the status of children’s literature as a
field of study might be understood as defences against the pressures of the male
dominated literary and critical tradition.

Conclusion

The revisions and transformations by which psychoanalytical theories and criticisms
continue to construct themselves have retained so far the concept of the unconscious
and its powerful influence on the ego’s development and struggle in the world.
Children’s literature, whose language signifies the substitutions and displacements
necessitated in that struggle, intimates and makes acceptable the dream of desire. It is a
great irony of our psychoanalytic age that the psychological self-help narratives for young
readers abandon consideration of the powers of the id in favour of the social adjustment
of the young ego and that they do so, usually, in the language of low mimetic
accessibility where the mode of romance and poetry is gone. That phenomenon is itself
worthy of psychoanalytical interpretations of authors, texts and readers.

References

Applebee, A.N. (1978) The Child’s Concept of Story, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barzilai, S. (1990) ‘Reading ‘Snow White’: the mother’s story’, Signs 15, 3:515–534.
Bettelheim, B. (1976) The Uses of Enchantment, New York: A.A.Knopf.
Bloom, H. (1973) The Anxiety of Influence, New York: Oxford University Press.
Bosmajian, H. (1985) ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other excremental visions’, The Lion
and the Unicorn 9:36–49.
Chodorow, N. (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering. Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cooper, J.C. (1983) Fairy Tales: Allegories of the Inner Life, Wellingborough: Aquarian Press.
Daniels, S. (1990) ‘The Velveteen Rabbit: a Kleinian perspective’, Children’s Literature 18: 17–30.
Egan, M. (1982) ‘The neverland of id: Barrie, Peter Pan, and Freud’, Children’s Literature 10:37–
55.
Franz, M.-L.von (1977) Individuation in Fairy Tales, Zurich: Spring.
——(1978) An Introduction to the Psychology of Fairy Tales, Irving, TX: Spring.
Freud, S., (1908/1963) ‘The relation of the poet to daydreaming’, Character and Culture, trans.
J.Strachey, New York: Macmillan.
——(1913/1958) ‘The occurrence in dreams of material from fairy tales’, Character and Culture,
trans. J.Strachey, New York: Macmillan.
——(1962/1975) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. J.Strachey, New York: Harper
Collins.

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