conventions of television, video narrative and cartoons. Attention here can be drawn to
Shirley Hughes’s Chips and Jessie (1985), a book which combines visual and verbal
techniques in a highly original way. Poets, who are always concerned with form, are
often highly innovative when they tackle extended stories. Roger McGough’s The Great
Smile Robbery is a superb example of virtuoso insouciance (aided by the interpolated
illustrations). Sometimes ingenuity can take the book into an uncategorisable area, such
as Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man (1992).
Critical ShiftsOur developing awareness of the kinds of literary competence that children bring to the
early texts they read, and the refined appreciation of the ways these texts ‘work’ for
children, have stimulated new critical awareness and insight.
Until the late 1970s, criticism of children’s books had tended to focus upon the
surface features of texts: plot, action and characterisation. Perspectives from literary
theory, cultural studies, and the kinds of analysis used in the study of adult fiction have
given a fresh charge to critical writing about books for the young (see Hunt 1990).
Chambers’s critical work is significant in that he is a children’s author as well as a critic.
His The Present Takers (1983) was one of the most challenging books to appear in the
1980s and can be appreciated by 9- to 11-year-olds.
A good example of the kind of illumination that new theoretical perspectives can offer
to books for the young is Chambers’s discussion of the concepts of the author’s voice,
and ‘the bond with the author’. First pages are important for this, as children are drawn
in and reassured by the authorial tone of voice. Whereas objections to the work of Enid
Blyton, for instance, had been put down to sexism, racism or class-based attitudes,
Chambers’s shifting to concepts such as ‘side taking’ on the part of an author gives a
much needed critical edge to our discussions. Her ‘subversive charm’ writes Chambers,
is ‘made all the more potent for being couched in a narrative style that sounds no more
disturbing than the voice of a polite maiden aunt telling a bedtime story over cocoa and
biscuits’ (Chambers 1985:45). Chambers writing on Blyton, possibly the most influential
and widely read of writers for the young, gives us a glimpse of the ways of ‘seeing
through’ the manner in which texts do their work upon young children.
That kind of exciting criticism links well with pedagogical concerns. In a seminal work
aptly titled How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, Margaret Meek, a literary critic and
educator, shows how authors for the young create ‘a shared cultural understanding’
with their readers. Writers, she claims, teach reading as something pleasurable, and
help with ‘the early untaught lessons’ that all good readers understand (Meek 1988:31).
That kind of appreciation has shifted quality literature from a reward children get for
learning to read, to the reason for learning to do it in the first place.
More important, the new critical shifts outlined here put an enormous amount of trust
in readers and writers. Adults have always mediated, for both good and questionable
reasons. Perhaps as we come to understand more clearly the ways in which literature
works its spell with the young, the power will be with the writers and with those who are
their true readers.
BOOKS FOR YOUNGER READERS 381