writers to exploit deliberately the bookish nature of books, as in John Burningham’s
Where’s Julius? (1986) and Aidan Chambers’s Breaktime (1978), both of which can be
described as ‘metafictive’.
Few children who have gone to school during the past twenty-five years in the West
have learned to read books without also being proficient in reading television, the
continuous text declaring the actuality of the world ‘out there’. Book print and screen
feed off each other, so there is a constant blurring of identifiable kinds. The voice-over
convention of screen reading helps young readers to understand that the page of a book
has also to be ‘tuned’. Then they discover the most important lesson of all: the reader of
the book has to become both the teller and the told.
Most of the evidence for children’s reading progress comes from teachers’ observations
of how they interact with increasingly complex texts. But to decide which texts are
‘difficult’, or ‘suitable’ for any group of learners is neither straightforward nor
generalisable. Children stretch their competences to meet the demands of the texts they
really want to read.
Distinctive ChangesChanges in the ways children learn and are taught to read indicate other symbiotic
evaluations in children’s literature. Marian Allsobrook describes children’s literature as
one of the ‘numerous semi-autonomous cultures which have always existed alongside
the dominant culture’ (Chapter 34) and it has a continuous and influential history which
is regularly raided for evidence of other social, intellectual and artistic changes.
Encyclopedias are bound up in this tradition. Here, most writers give an account of their
topic over time. This volume also extends the breadth of its subject to include the
diversity of the scene at the time of its compilation. This includes textual varieties and
variations such as result from modern methods of production and design and the
apparently inexhaustible novelty of publishing formats.
Picture books exhibit these things best. However traditional their skills, authors and
artists respond both to new techniques of book-making and to rapid changes in the
attitudes and values of actual social living. The conventional boundaries of content and
style have been pushed back, broken, exceeded, exploited, played with. Topics are now
expected to engage young readers at a deeper level than their language can express but
which their feelings recognise. In 1963, Maurice Sendak rattled the fundamentals of the
emotional quality of children’s books and the complacent idealised psychologies of the
period by imaging malevolence and guilt in Where the Wild Things Are. Some
contemporary critics said he threatened children with nightmares; in fact, Sendak
opened the way for picture-stories to acknowledge, in the complexity of image-text
interaction, the layered nature of early experiences, playful or serious, by making them
readable.
Spatial and radial reading, the kinds called for by the original illustrated pages of
Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are now in the
repertoires of modern children who know Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman
(1986) and all the other works of their contemporaries discussed in these pages.
Children’s imaginative play, the way they grow into their culture and change it, is
INTRODUCTION 5