project also illustrates the extent to which differences of opinion exist and threaten the
coherence of children’s literature criticism: in other words, how and why the definitions
of children’s literature and childhood matter so much to children’s literature critics.
The first and most basic step critics take in defining ‘children’s literature’—and one
which still receives primary emphasis in discussions around children’s books— is to
differentiate books used for didactic or educational purposes from ‘children’s literature’.
F.J.Harvey Darton classically outlined this split that critics make between didactic
books for children and children’s ‘literature’: ‘by “children’s books” I mean printed works
produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure and not primarily to teach
them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet’ (Darton 1932/
1982:1). To the children’s literature critic the outstanding characteristic of ‘children’s
literature’ is that it is supposed to speak to the reading child through amusement and
inherent appeal, and not through primarily didactic messages, which are described as
being merely instructive, coercive, intrusive, or dull to the reading child. This also often
comes to be the main means of indicating the ‘literary’ qualities of children’s books. As
Margery Fisher writes:
We should not expect children’s stories to be sermons or judicial arguments or
sociological pamphlets. As independent works of art they must be allowed to appeal
to the imagination, the mind, the heart on their own terms... If a writer cannot say
what he really feels, if he cannot be serious in developing a theme...[If he has in
any way to minimise] that approach to books for the young must eventually dilute
their quality as mainstream literature.
Haviland 1973:273This is how ‘children’s literature’ defines ‘literature’: as something that in itself is good
for children—that affects children better or more than non-literature—and this of course
implies a world of assumptions about what the reading ‘child’ is and how it reads.
Charlotte Huck sums up this view when she writes that ‘good writing, or effective use of
language...will help the reader to experience the delight of beauty, wonder, and humor...
He will be challenged to dream dreams, to ponder, and to ask questions to himself’
(Huck 1976:4). This concept of the ‘literary’ causes many children’s literature critics
considerable problems in its own right. In attempting to preserve both an essential,
coherent, consistent, ‘child’, and a concept of ‘literature’, critics find themselves
struggling with statements which in their self-contradiction inadvertently betray the
ways in which the ‘child’ and ‘literature’ mutually qualify and construct each other
within children’s literature criticism. Joan Glazer and Gurney Williams, for instance,
first state that good children’s books are characterised by ‘strong materials—good plots,
rich settings, well-developed characters, important themes, and artistic styles...bold and
imaginative language’ (Glazer and Williams 1979:34, 19), and that this ‘freshness...
comes from the author. And in the author it begins with an understanding of who the
child is’ (22). Then they continue, however, by arguing that even if children don’t like
these books which are good for them, they may still be ‘good literature...built of strong
materials...the likes and dislikes of children do not determine the quality of literature...
DEFINING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CHILDHOOD 21