International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

one limitation to [many] books, however, is their emphasis on, identification with,

and relevance only to middle class children. For too many black children, they

depict an environment removed from their immediate experience... Identification for

the young black reader rests in the central character’s intimate knowledge of the

black subculture.

Thompson and Woodard 1972:23

But British critic Robert Leeson complicates this type of ‘identification’ as a description
of the central mechanism of the emotional process of reading by pointing out that
although he feels the ‘child’ needs ‘to recognise himself or herself ...it is [also] argued
that the working-class child does not want “only to read about itself” and likes to escape
into a different world in its reading...to escape and have vicarious pleasure and thrills’
(Leeson 1977:43). For Leeson, the good book for the ‘child’ offers not only the ‘child’ back
to itself, but also needs to offer the ‘child’ that which is not itself. ‘Identification’—despite
its widespread and often unquestioned use—remains a problematic concept: it must
assume a ‘child in the book’; even if that ‘child’s’ presence is assumed, ‘identification’
cannot account for reading which is not a perpetual reading of the self; and, finally, it
cannot account therefore for other hypothetical processes in reading such as a possible
learning of the new, or escapism, or what D.W.Harding has called ‘imaginative insight into
what another person may be feeling, and the contemplation of possible human
experiences which we are not at that moment going through ourselves’ (Harding 1967:
7).
The definitions of children’s literature and childhood are thus enmeshed within the
discourse of children’s literature. They mutually qualify each other. Tension and
problems arise within children’s literature criticism because children’s literature critics
implicitly assume that there are independent, essential definitions of ‘literature’ and
‘childhood’ which only meet, to their mutual benefit, within children’s literature and its
criticism. Children’s literature critics reveal this inherent assumption throughout their
writings: besides the inherent contradictions and disagreements that I have touched on,
this becomes most clear when critics attempt to divide themselves, for instance, into
‘book people’ and ‘child people’ (Townsend 1980:199). Townsend argues that

most disputes over standards are fruitless because the antagonists suppose their

criteria to be mutually exclusive; if one is right the other must be wrong. This is not

necessarily so. Different kinds of assessment are valid for different purposes... I

would only remark that the viewpoints of psychologists, sociologists, and

educationists of various descriptions have rather little in common with each other

or with those whose approach is mainly literary.

Townsend 1980:193–207

Townsend’s suggestion, however, has not lessened the problem (for children’s literature
itself!) of differing ‘children’—and thus conflicting interpretations of books—occurring
within even the works of critics who regard themselves as belonging to the same ‘camp’.
Children’s literature and children’s literature criticism define themselves as existing

26 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES