came from the London Times Literary Supplement in the 1960s, but children’s literature
remained a kind of appendage to serious publishing until the artists and authors who
transformed it were backed by contracts, distribution and promotion so that they became
socially recognisable. The world inside the books continued for a long time to be
predominantly that of the literate middle classes. Critics thought that their obligation
was to set the standards for the ‘best’ books, so as to separate ‘literature’ from
ephemeral reading matter, comics and the like. If there was no evident body of criticism,
no real acceptance of the necessary relation of literature to literacy, there were prizes for
‘the best’ books in different categories. Among these was ‘The Other Award’ to recognise
what more conventional judges ignored or thought irrelevant: minority interests and
social deprivation.
Academic research in children’s literature is still a novelty if it is not psychological,
historical or bibliographical—that is, detailed, factual, esoteric, fitting into the research
traditions of diverse disciplines, especially those which establish their history, closed to
those unschooled in the foundation exercises of the disciplines of dating. There is, I
know, splendid writing about careful observations of children reading selected texts in
hard-bound theses in some university libraries where education studies admit such
topics. But who, besides competent tutors, admits as evidence the transcripts of
classroom interactions which show readers breaking through the barriers of
interpretation? Peter Hunt, reminding an audience in 1994 that the first British children’s
literature research conference was in 1979, suggested that this research enterprise has
‘followed inappropriate models and mind-sets, especially with regard to its readership’.
That is, ‘we often produce lesser research when we should be producing different
research’ (Hunt 1994:10). He advocates ‘the inevitable interactiveness of “literature” and
“the literary experience’” as worthy of analysis. Readers of the Encyclopedia will
doubtless comment on this proposal.
Meanwhile, the most fully developed critical theory of children’s literature is that of
readers’ responses to what they read. Michael Benton (Chapter 6) provides a full
account of the history and the supporting adult studies of this approach. Most of the
evidence for children’s progress in reading and interpretation of literary texts comes from
classrooms where teachers observe and appraise children’s interactions with books as
they read them. It is clear that individual children reveal ‘personal patterns of reading
behaviour irrespective of the books they read’. Benton’s concern is to ‘explore the ways
in which we can learn from each other how children’s responses to literature are
mediated in by the cultural context in which they occur’. By foregrounding the readers’
constitution of textual meaning, reading response theory has become the most
frequently quoted theoretical position in relation to books for children. What it also
makes clear is the lack of any fully grounded research on the nature of the development
of these competences over the total period of children’s schooling.
In contrast to the notion of ‘response’, critics who, like John Stephens (Chapter 5),
derive their insights from social linguistics, stress the power of authors to make young
readers ‘surrender to the flow of the discourse’; that is, to become ‘lost in a book’.
Sociolinguists are concerned that, having learned to read, young people should be taught
to discern the author’s ‘chosen registers’, so as to discover how a text is composed or
10 INTRODUCTION