settings and characters even as they learn the basic conventions of how story
works.
Thomas’s illustrations provide one single and small example of the way in which
little readers learn the need to deal with plurality.
Mackay 1995:44General agreement that picture books exemplify and adorn the domain of children’s
literature is countered by arguments about the nature and worth of novels written for
adolescents. This age group is usually subdivided into those who are discovering,
usually at school, the kinds of writing related to ‘subject’ learning, and the pre-higher
education teenagers (a word now less in use than it was when books were first
deliberately written to distinguish them as readers) engaging with more complex
subjective and social issues and making deliberate life choices. By this later stage, boys
are often differentiated from girls in their tastes and reading habits. Critics of the
bookish kind and teachers concerned that their pupils should tackle ‘challenging’ texts
emphasise the importance of ‘classic’ literature, usually pre-twentieth century.
Adolescents choose their reading matter from magazines commercially sensitive to the
shifting identities of the young, and from the novels that connect readers’ personal
growth to a nascent interest in the world of ideas and beliefs, their nature and
relevance. Adolescents are prepared to tackle sophisticated texts in order to appear ‘in
the know’, adult fashion. At other times, both boys and girls, pressurised by
examinations and the social complexities of their age groups, take time out to read the
books they came to earlier, and to ponder the kind of world they want to live in.
To account for the range of texts, the diversity of topics, the differences between
readers, and the vagaries of critical reactions in literature for adolescents, is to write a
version of the history of social events of the last thirty years. It is also to to engage with
the issues that emerge, including hypocrisy in social and political engagements, and
global debates about how to protect the universe. As they confront incontinent streams
of information in world-wide communication networks, young adults want to read about
what matters. Dismayed by the single economic realism of their parents’ generation,
they salvage their imaginations by reading the chilling novels of Robert Cormier, where
they discover the complexities of intergenerational betrayal in a book like After the First
Death (1979). With some tactful help to encourage them to tolerate the uncertainties
induced by unfamiliar narrative techniques, teenagers rediscover reading as an
intellectual adventure. They learn to ask themselves ‘Do I believe this? How reliable is this
storyteller? What kind of company am I keeping in this book?’ Good authors show them
characters confronted by indecisions like their own in making choices. Happy endings
are less in vogue than they once were.
Perhaps the most significant of the distinctive changes implied and dealt with in this
Encyclopedia are those which differentiate readers and books in terms of gender, class
and race. These issues and their ideological attachments go well beyond children’s
literature, but they have a part to play in books for readers more interested in the future
than the past. As readers’ responses are part of the adult involvement in writing for
adolescents, and ‘positive images’ are now expected to be text-distinctive, then the
influence of current thinking about these matters on authors of novels for adolescents is
INTRODUCTION 7