strong. Consider the effect of feminism on literature. ‘Children’ are no longer a
homogeneous group of readers; they are constituted differently. In this volume Lissa
Paul (Chapter 8) shows how the situated perspectives of boys and girls have now to be
part of the consciousness of all writers and all readers. Girls have always read boys’
books by adaptation, but boys have shown no eagerness, or have lacked
encouragement, to do the same in reverse. Their tastes are said to be set in the
traditional heroic tales of fable and legend and their reworkings as versions of Superman
and other quest tales. Boys also seem to be more attracted to the portrayal of ‘action’ in
graphic novels. Ted Hughes’s modern myth, The Iron Man (1968) has a hero more
complex than the Iron Woman, who, in her book of that name (1993), has little effective
linguistic communication. She relies on a primeval scream.
At the end of the twentieth century, the most distinctive differences in children’s
books are those which reflect changes in social attitudes and understandings. In the late
1960s and early 1970s, the dominant white middleclass elite of children’s book
publishers in English-speaking countries was forced to acknowledge the presence in
school classrooms of children who could not find themselves portrayed in the pictures or
the texts they were given to read. In Britain, the Children’s Rights Workshop asked
publishers how many books on their lists showed girls playing ‘a leading part’, and let it
be known that there were very few.
First attempts to redress the balance, the inclusion of a black face in a playground
scene or an indistinct but benign ‘foreigner’ in a story, were dismissed as inept tokenism.
In post-imperial Britain, two revisions were imperative: the renewal of school history
texts to include the perspectives of different social groups, and the welcoming of new
authors with distinctive voices and literary skill to the lists of books for the young.
Topics, verbal rhythms and tones all changed, especially when a group of Caribbean
writers went to read to children in schools. Consequently, as part of a more general
enlightenment, local storytellers emerged, as after a long sleep, to tell local tales and to
publish them. Now in Britain, children’s literature represents more positively the
multicultural life of the societies from which it emerges. At the same time, however, it is
also the site for debates about ‘politically correct’ language to describe characters who
represent those who have suffered discrimination or marginalisation.
Books of quality play their part in changing attitudes as well as simply reflecting
them. But we are still a long way from accepting multicultural social life as the norm for
all children growing up. Too many old conflicts intervene. Year by year, the fact that
more and more people move to richer countries from poorer ones becomes evident. The
next generation will encounter bilingualism and biliteracy as common, and the
promotion of positive images of multicultural encounters is consequently important.
Perhaps the isolation of monolingual readers of a dominant language such as English,
who read ‘foreign’ literature in translation or not at all, will be less common.
Changes in the creation, production and distribution of children’s books do not
happen in a vacuum. They have been linked to the mutability of their economic
environment at least since John Newbery offered A Little Pretty Pocket Book for 6d, or
‘with ball or pincushion’ for 8d in 1744. Publishing is as subject to market forces, take-
over bids, the rise and fall in fashionable demand as other trading. ‘Going out of print’ is
believed to be a more common occurrence now than ever before, but this may be an
8 INTRODUCTION