International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

the question of the role that this liberal humanist discourse plays ideologically in a late
capitalist world, and it is such a challenge that an ideological critique inevitably raises.
However, before moving on to such considerations, it is necessary to add that Inglis’s
book also marks a peak in the educational debate which has filled the pages of such
journals as English in Education throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, and which is
also a debate between the Leavisites and the exponents of newer developments in
structuralism and semiotics. As I have indicated above, the discourses of children’s
literature and education continuously overlap. Felicity Hughes (1976/1990) highlights
Henry James’s concern that the universal literacy that would follow from universal
schooling would endanger the future of the novel as an art form, leading to inevitable
vulgarisation, as the novel itself catered to popular taste—and children’s literature itself
catered to an even lower common denominator. As a result, and in order to try to return
some status to children’s literature, it was, and often still is seen as the training ground
of adult literary taste. From such a perspective the distinction conferred by the term
‘literature’ is crucial, since by that means the Jamesian distinctions between the novel
as an art form and other fiction as commercial entertainment is promoted.
It is perhaps ironic that the criticism of children’s fiction should come of age at
precisely the point when the newer perspectives of structuralism, semiotics, and
Marxism were beginning to make their mark in literary criticism in Britain, and to
undermine those very certainties after which Inglis was searching.

The Ideological Debate in Literary Studies

Character and action: structuralist insights

As already noted, the work of New Critic Northrop Frye (1957) had been influential in
establishing a structuralist tradition in the criticism of children’s fiction in the USA in
the early 1970s. From Europe a different tradition began to make its influence felt in
Britain in the later 1970s and 1980s, particularly with regard to the treatment of
character and action. The Russian formalist, Vladimir Propp (1928/1968), suggested in
his study of the Russian folktale that character was not the source of action, rather it
was the product of plot. The hero was the hero because of his or her role in the plot. One
can go back to Aristotle for similar insistence that it was not character but action that
was important in tragedy (Aristotle 1965:39) and such views were echoed by the pre-war
critic Walter Benjamin (1970) and in Tzvetan Todorov’s work (1971/1977).
The Leavisite tradition had, by contrast, tended to emphasise the importance of
psychological insight in characterisation, and had seen characters themselves as the
source of the action of the story, and it is easy to see how the work of authors such as
Philippa Pearce, Nina Bawden, William Mayne, Maurice Sendak, Anthony Browne or
Aidan Chambers, to take a list not entirely at random, lends itself to such approaches.
By contrast the work of popular authors, such as Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl, more
easily lends itself to structuralist analysis: their protagonists are heroines and heroes
primarily because that is their plot role, not because there is anything in their
psychological make up that makes them inherently ‘heroic’.

44 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES