unconsciously, and it is the job of the critic to deconstruct the work in order to expose
its underlying ideological nature and role. Thus, far from being the unique insight of an
individual with a privileged understanding of the world, The Wind in the Willows can be
seen as resting securely within a continuum of escapist response to developing
bourgeois capitalism that stretches all the way from Hard Times to Lady Chatterley’s
Lover.
Peter Hollindale (1988) takes on a number of the perspectives outlined above, and
applies them to his discussion of ideology in children’s books. He distinguishes three
levels of ideology. There is first of all an overt, often proselytising or didactic level, as
instanced in books like The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler (Kemp 1977). Then there is a
second more passive level, where views of the world are put into characters mouths or
otherwise incorporated into the narrative with no overt ironic distancing. (There is a
famous example of this from Enid Blyton’s Five Run Away Together (1944), analysed by
Ken Watson (1992:31), in which the reader is implicitly invited to side with the obnoxious
middle-class Julian putting down a member of the ‘lower orders’.) Finally, there is what
Hollindale calls an ‘underlying climate of belief’ which he identifies as being inscribed in
the basic material from which fiction is built. It is possible to detect a hankering after
the old transcendent certainties in Hollindale’s work. None the less he does
substantially shift the ground of the debate in regard to children’s fiction, recognising
the complexity of the issues.
Circumstances of productionWithin the Marxist tradition it has long been recognised that literature is a product of the
particular historical and social formations that prevail at the time of its production (see
for example Lenin, originally 1908, 1910, 1911/1978; Plekhanov 1913/1957; Trotsky
1924/1974). Children’s books have not received such attention until comparatively
recently. Bratton (1981) traced the relationship between Victorian children’s fiction and
its various markets—stories for girls to teach them the domestic virtues, stories for boys
to teach them the virtues of military Christianity, stories for the newly literate poor, to
teach them religion and morality. Leeson, in his history of children’s fiction (Leeson
1985), suggests that there has always been a conflict between middle-class literature
and popular literature, a distinction which can be traced in the content of the material,
and related to the market that it found. He draws attention to the roots of popular fiction
in folktale, which had political content which survived (somewhat subdued) into the
written forms. Leeson thus raises a question mark over the perhaps somewhat more
determinist analysis offered by Belsey and Eagleton.
More thorough exploration of the issues in contemporary children’s fiction has come
from feminist perspectives, with a collection of studies of popular teen romance fiction
edited by Linda K.Christian-Smith (1993a). Christian-Smith herself (1993b) provides a
particularly powerful analysis of the economic, political and ideological circumstances of
the growth in production of romances for ‘teenagers’ or ‘young adults’, which is now a
global industry, with most of the publishing houses based in the USA. She traces the
relationship between the imperatives of ‘Reaganomics’, the emphasis on family values in
the rise of the New Right in the 1980s, and the need to enculturate young women into
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