derived meanings, and the actual use of ‘children’ and ‘literature’ within ‘children’s
literature’ in very specific, and often variable and inconsistent, ways. Attempts to define
‘children’s literature’ and the reading ‘child’ thus also operate within this field of
tensions. The British cultural theorist Fred Inglis argues that
it is simply ignorant not to admit that children’s novelists have developed a set of
conventions for their work. Such development is a natural extension of the
elaborate and implicit system of rules, orthodoxies, improvisations, customs, forms
and adjustments which characterize the way any adult tells stories or simply talks
at length to children.
Inglis 1981:101Australian critic Barbara Wall agrees, and bases her whole analysis of children’s books
on ‘the conviction that adults...speak differently in fiction when they are aware that they
are addressing children...[This is] translated, sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously,
into the narrator’s voice...[which defines] a children’s book’ (Wall 1991:2–3). But British
critic Nicholas Tucker points out that Inglis and Wall’s type of view does not avoid the
difficulty that: ‘although most people would agree that there are obvious differences
between adult and children’s literature, when pressed they may find it quite difficult to
establish what exactly such differences amount to’ (Tucker 1981:8).
Because it has been precisely the self-imposed task of children’s literature critics to
judge which books are good for children and why, all children’s literature criticism and
reviews abound with both implicit and overt statements concerning the definitions of
‘children’s literature’, ‘children’ and ‘literature’. When critics state in some way or
another that this is a book they judge to be good for children this actually involves saying
that the book is good because of what they think a book does for children, and this in turn
cannot avoid revealing what they think children are and do (especially when they read).
Joan Aiken, for instance, says she does not purposefully incorporate moral messages
into her books because she feels that ‘children have a strong natural resistance to
phoney morality. They can see through the adult with some moral axe to grind almost
before he opens his mouth’ (Aiken 1973:149), but Rosemary Sutcliff writes that ‘I am
aware of the responsibility of my job; and I do try to put over to the child reading any
book of mine some kind of ethic’ (Sutcliff 1973:306). Pamela Travers, creator of Mary
Poppins feels that ‘You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and
make a book specifically for children for—if you are honest—you have, in fact, no idea
where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one’ (Cott 1984: xxii),
and E.B.White states that ‘you have to write up, not down. Children are demanding...
They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is
presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly...They love words that give them a hard time’
(White 1973:140). Austrian critic Maria Lypp, in line with Travers and White, argues
that the adaptations children’s authors introduce to children’s literature depend on an
‘asymmetrical relationship’ which forms the ‘code of children’s fiction’, but that there is
an ‘ideal of symmetrical communication’ which implies true understanding between
author and reader, and this becomes Lypp’s prescriptive criterion for children’s
18 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES