The meaning of children’s literature as ‘books which are good for children’ in turn
crucially indicates that the two constituent terms—‘children’ and ‘literature’ —within the
label ‘children’s literature’ cannot be separated and traced back to original independent
meanings, and then reassembled to achieve a greater understanding of what ‘children’s
literature’ is. Within the label the two terms totally qualify each other and transform
each other’s meaning for the purposes of the field. In short: the ‘children’ of ‘children’s
literature’ are constituted as specialised ideas of ‘children’, not necessarily related in any
way to other ‘children’ (for instance those within education, psychology, sociology,
history, art, or literature), and the ‘literature’ of ‘children’s literature’ is a special idea of
‘literature’, not necessarily related to any other ‘literature’ (most particularly ‘adult
literature’).
Having said this, one of the primary characteristics of most children’s literature
criticism and theory is that it assumes that the terms ‘children’ and ‘literature’ within
‘children’s literature’ are separable and more or less independent of one another, and
that they are directly related to other ‘children’ and ‘literatures’; critics often make use
of, or refer to, theories from education, psychology, sociology, history, art or literature, in
buttressing their opinions. But in every case they transform the material from other
disciplines to fit their own particular argument.
This complexity arises partly because the reading ‘child’ of children’s literature is
primarily discussed in terms of emotional responses and consciousness. Children’s
literature criticism, for instance, actually devotes little systematic discussion (but many
random comments) to cognitive issues such as the correspondence between vocabulary
lists composed by educational psychologists and the vocabulary levels in books, or to
levels of cognitive development thought to be necessary to understanding the content of
a book. These areas are regarded as the province of child psychologists, or as
appropriate to the devising of strictly functional reading schemes which are not held to
fall within ‘children’s literature’. This is the case even with the teachers’ guides to
children’s literature (such as those of Lonsdale and Mackintosh 1973; Huck 1976;
Sadker and Sadker 1977; Smith and Park 1977; Glazer and Williams 1979; and Norton
1983) which purport to be able to draw connections between psychological and
educative investigations and children’s books. (This exercise, even when it is seriously
attempted, is in any case fraught with difficulties, and even in the best cases produces
very limited results—one need only think of the ongoing debates in education on how to
teach children the basic mechanics of reading itself.) In fact, in the actual discussion of
works of children’s literature, the critics’ attention is primarily focused on whether and
how they think the book will attract the ‘child’—whether the ‘child’ will ‘love’ or ‘like’ the
book.
But it is even more relevant to the problems of children’s literature criticism that,
although the idea that ‘children’s literature’ might pose problems of definition is often
accepted and discussed by critics, the idea that the ‘child’ might pose equal—if not
greater—problems of definition is strenuously resisted. This is despite the fact that
historians such as Philippe Ariès and anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and
Martha Wolfenstein (1955) have argued in classic studies that—at the very least—
definitions of ‘childhood’ have differed throughout history, and from culture to culture.
As Ariès writes:
16 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES