have kept of how individual children grew up with books (Paley 1981; Crago and Crago
1983; Wolf and Brice Heath 1992). One of the most striking of these is Carol Fox’s
account of the effect of literature on young children’s own story-telling, before they learn
to read for themselves. In her book, At the Very Edge of the Forest, she shows how, by being
read to, children learn to ‘talk like a book’. This evidence outstrips the rest by showing
how pre-school children borrow characters, incidents and turns of phrase from familiar
tales and from their favourite authors in order to insert themselves into the continuous
storying of everyday events. Children also expect the stories they hear to cast light on
what they are unsure about: the dark, the unexpected, the repetitious and the ways
adults behave. Quickly learned, their grasp of narrative conventions is extensive before
they have school lessons. For children, stories are metaphors, especially in the realm of
feelings, for which they have, as yet, no single words. A popular tale like Burglar Bill
(1977) by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, invites young listeners to engage with both the
events and their implications about good and bad behaviour in ways almost impossible
in any discourse other than that of narrative fiction.
Narrative, sometimes foregrounded, always implied, is the most common theme in this
Encyclopedia. Most writers engage with children’s literature as stories, which gives
weight to Barbara Hardy’s conviction, sometimes contested but more often approved,
that for self-conscious humans, narrative is ‘a primary act of mind transferred to art
from life’ (Hardy 1968/1977:12). (The same claim is made in various ways by Eco
(1983), Le Guin (1980, 1981), Lurie (1990), Smith (1990), Bruner (1986), Barthes (1974)
and others.) Stories are what adults and children most effectively share. Although
myths, legends, folk and fairy tales tend to be associated particularly with childhood,
throughout history they have been embedded in adult literature, including recent
retellings as different as those of Angela Carter (1990) and Salman Rushdie (1990).
It is not surprising, therefore, that modern studies of narratology, their accompanying
formalist theories and the psychological, linguistic, structural and rhetorical analyses
developed from adult literary fictions are now invoked to describe the creative and
critical practices in children’s literature. Ursula Le Guin, whose renown as a writer of
science fiction is further enhanced by her imaginative world-making for the young,
acknowledges the continuity of story-telling in all our lives, and the vital part it plays in
intellectual and affective growth.
Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in its origin, an artefact of culture,
an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To
learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.
Le Guin 1989:Narrative is not a genre. It is a range of linguistic ways of annotating time, related to
memory and recollections of the past, as to anticipations of the future, including
hypotheses, wishes, longing, planning and the rest. If a story has the imaginative
immediacy of ‘let’s pretend’, it becomes a present enactment. If an author tells a reader
about Marie Curie’s search for radium, the completed quest is rediscovered as a present
adventure. While their experience is confined to everyday events, readers do not sort
their imagining into different categories of subject-matter. Until they learn different
INTRODUCTION 3