International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

of the Maori in children’s books: ‘What are we after? Not just cultural trappings—that’s
for sure. The essence of children? Yes...’ (Melbourne 1987:102).
The intimate interconnections between definitions of reading children and children’s
literature are fully evident here: in many ways, critics define them as one and the same
thing, and children’s literature is often spoken of as if it had been written by children
expressing their needs, emotions and experiences. As Lissa Paul writes when she
compares the situations of women’s writing and children’s literature:

as long as the signs and language of women’s literature and children’s literature

are foreign, other, to male-order critics, it is almost impossible to play with

meaning. So one of the primary problems feminist critics and children’s literature

critics have is how to recognize, define, and accord value to otherness.

Paul 1990:150

Paul discusses children’s literature as if it were written by children and as if the
situation were therefore the same as with books written by women, as she writes: ‘But
women make up more than half of the population of the world—and all of us once were
children. It is almost inconceivable that women and children have been invisible and
voiceless for so long’ (150). In this way Paul submerges the fact that children’s literature
(when it is not written by women) may well be written by the very ‘male-order critics’ she
is seeking release from (unless she is assuming, as many critics do, that writing
children’s literature involves becoming a child again). Myles McDowell, too, for instance,
describes his ‘child in the book’ when he claims that

Children’s books are generally shorter; they tend to favour an active rather than a

passive treatment, with dialogue and incident rather than description and

introspection; child protagonists are the rule; conventions are much used; the story

develops within a clear-cut moral schematism which much adult fiction ignores;

children’s books tend to be optimistic rather than depressive; language is child-

oriented; plots are of a distinctive order, probability is often disregarded; and one

could go on endlessly talking of magic, and fantasy, and simplicity, and adventure.

McDowell 1973:51

American critic and author Natalie Babbitt, on the other hand, argues with respect to
these type of criteria—and her ‘child in the book’—that children’s books are neither
necessarily less serious than adults’ books, nor necessarily concerned with ‘simpler’ or
‘different’ emotions: ‘there is, in point of fact, no such thing as an exclusively adult
emotion, and children’s literature deals with them all’ (Babbitt 1973:157). Babbitt then
claims that there is also no genuine disparity in range or scope, ‘Everyman’ being just as
present, for instance, in The Wind in the Willows as in, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Furthermore, to Babbitt, there are few differences in content between adult and children’s
literature: ‘war, disability, poverty, cruelty, all the harshest aspects of life are present in
children’s literature’ (157), as is fantasy.
Language usage does not seem to Babbitt necessarily to distinguish children’s
literature from adult literature either:

DEFINING CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CHILDHOOD 23