impression rather than a fact. Although their intrinsic worth is judged differently, all
books are packaged to be sold. Publishers are involved in advertising deals, literary
prizes, best-seller lists, and are careful when they select texts to carry their name.
Authors also estimate their worth in pelf as in pages. Copyright laws are organised
internationally but there too changes are current and continuous. It is interesting to
note that when Geoffrey Trease wrote Tales Out of School in 1949, the ‘outright purchase
of juvenile copyright’ (185) was still a common practice.
The number of outlets for children’s books has increased; their locations are also
different. This does not mean that the book in the shopping basket with the grocery
beans is a lesser object of desire than one bought elsewhere. A bookshop may be a
better place to choose from a wider range of books than a supermarket, but the
popularity of books for the very young owes more to their availability than to the formal
institutions intended to establish children’s books as literature.
Academic AttitudesThe first section of the Encyclopedia makes the claim, which the rest of the book is
summoned to support, that children’s literature is worthy of serious scholarly attention.
The implication is that, like its adult counterpart, children’s literature promotes and
invites critical theory, notably in the study of the relation of texts to children’s
development as readers. The essays in this section document some recent moves in this
direction so as to demonstrate the evolution of a discipline fit for academic recognition
and institutionalised research.
Although many serious books about children’s literature throw light on established
ways of studying literature tout pur, conservative scholars and teachers, concerned about
the dilutions of their topic specialisms and the blurring of canonical boundaries, have
declared children’s literature to be a soft reading option, academically lightweight. Once
fairly widespread, this attitude has been increasingly eroded by those who have
demonstrated in books for children both different kinds of texts and distinctive
interactions between texts and readers. Scholars interested in the relation of literature
to literacy, who ask questions about access to texts and exclusion from them, know that
social differences in children’s learning to read are part of any study of literary
competences. Resistance to the notion of the ‘universal child’ and to common
assumptions of what is ‘normal’ in interpretative reading provoke new questions,
especially feminist ones, in ethnography, cultural studies and social linguistics. In all of
these established disciplines there is a context for discussing the contents of children’s
books. But there is also the possibility for new perspectives which begin with books,
children and reading. These have been slowly growing over time, but have not simply
been accommodated elsewhere.
Shifts in this kind of awareness can be seen as far back as Henry James’s recognition
of the difference between Treasure Island and other Victorian novels for children. In
1949 Geoffrey Trease insisted that reviewers of post-war children’s books needed new
categories of judgement. For many years in the second half of this century in Britain,
just to make children’s books visible beyond the confines of specialist journals such as
Junior Bookshelf and The School Librarian was something of a triumph. More support
INTRODUCTION 9