revisions of Written for Children (1965/1990), a text kept alert to change; it is still a
starting place for many students. Over a period of forty years, Margery Fisher’s
contribution to this field included both a series of finely judged comments on books as
they appeared, and a unique vision of why it is important to write about children’s
books, so that writing them would continue to be regarded as serious business. Better
than many a contemporary critic she understood how, and why, ‘we need constantly to
revise and restate the standards of this supremely important branch of literature’
(Fisher 1964:9). The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Carpenter and Prichard
1984), however, shows how acts of definition are upheld by editors and their friends.
Collectors, cataloguers, bibliographers and other book persons stand behind all works
of summation, including those of the single author-as-editor-and-commentator.
By virtue of its anthologising form, this volume replaces the tour d’horizon of the
classical encyclopedia with something more characteristic of the culture of its epoch, a
certain deliberate untidiness, an openness. The writers brought together here are
currently at work in different parts of the field of children’s literature. Encompassing all
their activities, their individual histories and directions, children’s literature appears not
as something which requires definition in order to be recognised or to survive, but as a
‘total text’, in what Jerome J.McGann calls ‘a network of symbolic exchanges’ (1991:3), a
diverse complexity of themes, rites and images. There are many voices. Each writer has
an interpretative approach to a chosen segment of the grand design, so that the whole
book may be unpacked by its searching readers, or dipped into by the curious or the
uninitiated. Some of the writings are tentative and explorative; others are confident,
even confrontational. As the counterpoint of topics and treatments emerges, we note in
what is discussed agreement and difference, distinction and sameness. Thus the
encyclopedia becomes not a series of reviews, but a landmark, consonant with and
responsive to the time of its appearance.
Children’s literature is not in this book, but outside, in the social world of adults and
children and the cultural processes of reading and writing. As part of any act of
description, however, a great number of different readers and writers are woven into
these pages, and traces of their multiple presences are inscribed there. This introduction
is simply a privileged essai, or assay, of the whole.
Common Themes and Blurred GenresOur constant, universal habit, scarcely changed over time, is to tell children stories. As
Iona Opie tells us (see Chapter 15), children’s earliest encounters with stories are in
adults’ saying and singing. When infants talk to themselves before falling asleep, the
repetitions we hear show how they link people and events. As they learn their mother
tongue they discover how their culture endows experience with meaning. Common ways
of saying things, proverbs, fables and other kinds of lore, put ancient words into their
mouths. Stories read to them become part of their own memories. Book characters
emerge in the stories of their early dramatic play as they anticipate the possibilities of
their futures.
The complexity of children’s narrative understandings and the relation of story-telling
to the books of their literature become clear from the records many conscientious adults
2 INTRODUCTION