kinds of writing conventions for different school subjects, children make narrative serve
many of the purposes of their formal learning. The words used by scientists, historians,
geographers, technologists and others crop up in biographies and stories before formal
textbooks separate them as lessons.
Quite early, however, children discover that adults divide books into two named
categories: fiction and non-fiction, and imply that books with ‘facts’ about the ‘real’
world are different from those that tell ‘made up’ stories. In modern writing for children
this absolute distinction is no longer sustainable. Both novels and ‘fact’ books deal with
the same subjects in a wide range of styles and presentations. Topics of current social
and moral concern—sex, poverty, illness, crime, family styles and disruptions—
discovered by reading children in newspapers and in feature films on television, also
appear as children’s literature in new presentational forms. The boundaries of genres
that deal with actualities are not fixed but blurred. Books about the fate of the
rainforests are likely to be narratives although their content emphasises the details of
ecological reasoning.
Although stories are part of young children’s attempts to sort out the world, children’s
literature is premised on the assumption that all children, unless prevented by
exceptional circumstances, can learn to read. In traditionally literate cultures, learning
to read now begins sooner than at any time in the past. Books are part of this new
precocity because parents are willing to buy them, educators to promote them and
publishers to produce them. At a very young age, children enter the textual world of
environmental print and television and soon become at home in it. Encouraged by
advertising, by governmental and specialist urgings, parents expect to understand how
their children are being taught to read, and to help them.
They also want their children to have access to the newest systems of communication
and to their distinctive technological texts. In England, the national legislation that sets
out the Orders for literacy teaching begins with this sentence: ‘Pupils should be given an
extensive experience of children’s literature.’ No account of the subject of this
Encyclopedia has ever before carried such a warrant.
Over the last decade the attention given to how children learn to read has
foregrounded the nature of textuality, and of the different, interrelated ways in which
readers of all ages make texts mean. ‘Reading’ now applies to a greater number of
representational forms than at any time in the past: pictures, maps, screens, design
graphics and photographs are all regarded as text. In addition to the innovations made
possible in picture books by new printing processes, design features also predominate in
other kinds, such as books of poetry and information texts. Thus, reading becomes a
more complicated kind of interpretation than it was when children’s attention was
focused on the printed text, with sketches or pictures as an adjunct. Children now learn
from a picture book that words and illustrations complement and enhance each other.
Reading is not simply word recognition. Even in the easiest texts, what a sentence ‘says’
is often not what it means.
Intertextuality, the reading of one text in terms of another is very common in English
books for children. Young children learn how the trick works as early as their first
encounter with Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Each Peach Pear Plum, where they are to play
I Spy with nursery characters. The conventions of intertextuality encourage artists and
4 INTRODUCTION