appear on English syllabi in schools and colleges. Crises of identity and courage are
explored in works like Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Hemingway’s The Old Man
and the Sea, prejudice and personal danger in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking-Bird, the
fragility of relationships between human beings and animals in Kes, and the nature of
evil in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Such works
are adopted by a society as being suitable for children and young people to adopt for
themselves. So mediated through teaching curricula, they become part of a common
framework of cultural reference in the mind of the ‘educated’ adult.
Many such works are selected for their portrayal and analysis of growing up.
Huckleberry Finn, with its rich mixture of the picaresque and the ironic, its exposure of
humbug and its self-awareness, is a good example of this. McCullers’s The Member of
the Wedding moves into a world where the central character half-understands the
complex actions and motivations of the others, observing adult affairs with a mixture of
bravado and unease. Henry James’s What Maisie Knew superimposes on the act of
observing an autodiegetically styled barrier of understanding, reflecting what the heroine
can actually know, and know she knew, layers of discourse which only a sophisticated
reader can penetrate.
This refracted view of events, the reader watching the characters as they watch
themselves watching the other characters, moves into emotional and sexual dangers in
Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and L.P.Hartley’s The Go-between. Research
is needed to define the extent to which exposure to such books, in the context of
education, leads young people to adopt them, or to reject ‘children’s books’. Here,
adoption may consist of anything from an opportunistic absorption of what young
people think they need to say in order to pass academic courses to a deeply experienced
internalisation of the events and emotions and their resonances. It is also useful to
consider what so-called children’s books are used in schools alongside these works—for
example Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Long Way from Somewhere Else or James Vance
Marshall’s Walkabout, and the influence of reading materials wholly outside adult
culture.
Thus adoption cannot be fully understood without comparing what children and
young people are formally asked to read with what they choose to read. Surveys of
reading and popular taste often highlight large differences: between being asked to read
Lord of the Flies while reading The Silence of the Lambs in private; studying The War of
the Worlds for an exam and understanding it better for having seen Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.
It is valuable to examine popular cultural trends among children and young people,
and trace them through to what adoptions are made: movie hits tell us much about
texts which get adopted. The concept of ‘a good read’ is now that of an encounter with a
multi-representational package: book, film-of-book, book-of-film, television adaptation,
graphic novel, cartoon, computer game, interactive program. CD-I (interactive compact
disk) and virtual reality films are now becoming commercially available. Computer game
heroes are being adopted as favourites by children and adults alike, and increasingly
evident in successful popular books for young people are inter-textual references to
these other media and characters in them, or even representations of themselves in
TYPES AND GENRES 425