What is Children’s Literature? Review of Karín Lesnik-Oberstein’s article as in: Understanding Children’s Literature

Is a children’s book written by children, or for children? What does it mean to write a book for children? What if a book written for children is read by an adult and vice-versa?

What should good books for children do? Be good in terms of emotional and moral values. Expand horizons and instil in children a sense of wonderful complexity of life.

What is childhood? “It corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguished the child from the adult, even the young adult”. Ariés 1973:8, 125.

What is first… the child’s need or the child’s book? Jacqueline Rose states that “the child is a construction invented for the needs of the children’s literature, authors and critics, and not an observable, objective, scientific, entity. This process of constructing the child, or books for it, can-or should-simply be stopped”.

Do writers use a special language to address children? Australian critic Barbara Wall agrees, and bases her whole analysis of children’s books on ‘the convention that adults… speak differently in fiction when they are aware that they are addressing children… This is translated, sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously, into the narrator’s voice… which defines a children’s book’ (Wall 1992:2-3)

Should language for children be simple? E.B. White states that ‘you have to write up, not down. Children are demanding… They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly… They love words that give them a hard time’ (White 1973:140)

Should adults select how and what to write or should children discriminate that information? Gillian Avery believes that the child has his own defence against what he doesn’t like or doesn’t understand in the book… He ignores it, subconsciously perhaps, or he makes something different from it… Children extract what they want from a book and no more. (Avery 1976:33)

What is a ‘good book’ for children? Joan Glazer and Gurney Williams, for instance, first state that good children’s books are characterized by strong materials-good plots, rich settings, well-developed characters, important themes, and artistic styles… bold and imaginative language and that this freshness comes from the author. And in the author it begins with an understanding of who the child is. (Glazer and Williams 1979:34, 19)

Style Children’s literature becomes defined as containing, both in form and content, the needs of children, and, therefore, this is how children’s books – written, published, sold, and usually bought, by adults-come to be spoken of as if the child were in the book.

Characteristics Children’s books are generally shorter, they tend to favour an active rather than a passive treatment, with dialogue and incident rather than description and instrospection; child protagonists are the rule; conventions are much used; the story develops within a clear-cut moral schematism which much adult fiction ignores; children’s books tend to be optimistic rather than depressive; language is child-oriented; plots are of a distinctive order, probability is often disregarded; and one could go on endlessly talking of magic, fantasy, and simplicity, and adventure (McDowell 1973:51)

How should writers write? Writers have become aware that, for the child, a book is a source of satisfaction that derives from identification and participation, and an expansion of his own experience. They provide him with an opportunity for catharsis, self-knowledge, and broadening his psychic experience. The process of reading, identification, participation and relating brings the reader into the reality of the book in dynamic fashion (Cohen 1988:31).

Identification Donna Norton describes identification as a process which requires emotional ties with the model; children believe they are like these models and their thoughts, feelings, and characteristics become similar to them (Norton 1983:20). …although Robert Leeson feels the child needs to recognise himself or herself… it is also argued that the working-class child does not want “only to read about itself” and likes to escape into a different world in its reading… to escape and have vicarious pleasure and thrills” (Leeson 1977:43)

Activity Read Oscar Wilde’s short stories “The Selfish Giant” and “The Nightingale and the Rose” and answer the questions below: What is the moral of each of these stories? Are these stories written up or down? Justify. How could a child feel identified with the characters of these stories?