constructed. Then, the claim is, readers will understand, from their responses to the
text, ‘who is doing what to whom’, and thus become ‘critically’ literate.
Even more challenging is Jacqueline Rose’s assertion about the ‘impossibility’ of
children’s fiction...
the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s literature is clearly
about that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristics of being about
something which it hardly ever talks of. If children’s fiction builds an image of the
child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book,
the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.
Rose 1984:1There are ways of countering this view, but none the less it has to be considered. Later,
Rose offers a less controvertible utterance, probably the reason so many adult readers
find solace in children’s literature:
Reading is magic (if it has never been experienced by the child as magic then the child
will be unable to read); it is also an experience which allows the child to master the
vagaries of living, to strengthen and fortify the ego, and to integrate the personality
—a process ideally to be elicited by the aesthetic coherence of the book.
Rose 1985:135Rose’s examination of the textual condition of Peter Pan, the new tone of this criticism
and the different paths she follows have opened up a number of possibilities for the
theoretical consideration of children’s books, even beyond the revelations that come from
her social editing of the texts. One of these considerations is extended in Peter
Hollindale’s ‘Ideology and the children’s book’. Here children’s literature is detached from
the earlier division of those concerned with it into ‘child people and book people’, and
firmly joined to studies of history and culture in the ‘drastically divided country’ that is
Britain. Going beyond the visible surface features of a text children read in order to
discover how they read it, Hollindale insists we ‘take into account the individual writer’s
unexamined assumptions’. When we do that, we discover that ‘ideology is an inevitable,
untameable and largely uncontrollable factor in the transaction between books and
children’ (Hollindale 1988:10). Thus we are bound to accept that all children’s literature
is inescapably didactic.
In the 1980s and 1990s, critics of children’s literature have experimented with the
take-over of the whole baggage of critical theory derived from adult literature and tried it
for its fit. Most now agree that reading is sex-coded and gender inflected, that writers
and artists have become aware that an array of audiences beyond the traditional literary
elite are becoming readers of all kinds of texts. Moreover, before they leave school,
children can learn to interrogate texts, to read ‘against’ them so that their literacy is
more critical than conformist. Some theoretical positions are shown to have more
explanatory power than others: intertextuality is a condition of much writing in English;
metafiction is a game which even very young readers play skilfully (Lewis 1990). There
are also experimental procedures, as yet untagged, which show artists and writers
INTRODUCTION 11