International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

the gendered roles that serve such interests. The collection as a whole analyses how
such material both constructs and meets the needs of its market in a rich and subtle
exegesis which I shall return to below.
In the meantime it is necessary to explore a further area which has
important ideological implication, and that is the way in which the child reader is
constructed by the texts he or she is reading.

The Construction of the Reader

The initiatives of the 1970s to redress the balance in the bias of children’s fiction took a
straightforward view about the relationship between the text and the reader. At its
simplest an almost directly didactic relationship was assumed. If you wrote books with
positive characterisations of, and roles for, girls, ethnic minorities and the working
class, then readers’ attitudes would be changed and all would be well with the world. I
do not suggest that anyone, even then, thought it would be quite that simple, and since
the 1970s there has been something of a revolution in our understandings of how
readers are constructed by texts. The insights of reader-response theoreticians like
Wolfgang Iser (1978), applied to children’s books most notably by Aidan Chambers
(1980), had alerted us to some of the textual devices by which an implied reader is
written into the text. Iser himself had drawn attention to the fact that texts brought with
them a cultural repertoire which had to be matched by the reader. Macherey (1978)
brought Freudian perspectives to bear on ways in which ideology operated in hidden
ways in the text, and by extension, also in the reader, and Catherine Belsey drew
insights from Althusser, Derrida and Lacan to further explore the ways in which the
subjectivity of the reader is ideologically constructed.
It is Jacqueline Rose (1984) who offers the most thoroughgoing exposition of this view
with respect to children’s fiction. She argues that, by a combination of textual devices,
characterisation and assumptions of value position, children’s books construct children,
both as characters and as readers, as without sexuality, innocent, and denied politics,
either a politics between themselves or within wider society. As such they are seen as
beings with a privileged perception, untainted by culture. More recently, John Stephens
(1992), engages in a detailed analysis of a number of books to show how they produce
ideological constructions of implied child readers. He concentrates particularly on
narrative focalisation and the shifts, moves and gaps of narrative viewpoint and
attitude, showing how such techniques imply certain ideological assumptions and
formulations, and construct implied readers who must be expected to share them.

Implied Readers and Real Readers

When real readers are introduced into the equation, however, the picture becomes more
complicated, and it is here that the educational discourse overlaps with the discourse
about fiction per se, for it is almost always within school that evidence is gathered, and
intervention is proposed. The introduction of real readers has another effect, for it
throws into relief some of the more determinist assumptions of the analysis offered

48 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES