What is children literature.

childrens literature, the body of written works and accompanying illustrations produced in order to entertain or instruct young people. The genre encompasses a wide range of works, including acknowledged classics of world literature, picture books and easy-to-read stories written exclusively for children, and fairy tales, lullabies, fables, folk songs, and other primarily orally transmitted materials. Childrens literature first clearly emerged as a distinct and independent form of literature in the second half of the 18th century, before which it had been at best only in an embryonic stage. During the 20th century, however, its growth has been so luxuriant as to make defensible its claim to be regarded with the respectthough perhaps not the solemnitythat is due any other recognized branch of literature.

Definition of terms ChildrenAll potential or actual young literates, from the instant they can with joy leaf through a picture book or listen to a story read aloud, to the age of perhaps 14 or 15, may be called children. Thus children includes young people. Two considerations blur the definition. Todays young teenager is an anomaly: his environment pushes him toward a precocious maturity. Thus, though he may read childrens books, he also, and increasingly, reads adult books. Second, the child survives in many adults. As a result, some childrens books (e.g., Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland, A.A. Milnes Winnie-the-Pooh, and, at one time, Munro Leafs Story of Ferdinand) are also read widely by adults.

LiteratureIn the term childrens literature, the more important word is literature. For the most part, the adjective imaginative is to be felt as preceding it. It comprises that vast, expanding territory recognizably staked out for a junior audience, which does not mean that it is not also intended for seniors. Adults admittedly make up part of its population: childrens

books are written, selected for publication, sold, bought, reviewed, and often read aloud by grown-ups. Sometimes they seem also to be written with adults in mind, as for example the popular French Astrix series of comics parodying history. Nevertheless, by and large there is a sovereign republic of childrens literature. To it may be added five colonies or dependencies: first, appropriated adult books satisfying two conditionsthey must generally be read by children and they must have sharply affected the course of childrens literature (Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, the collection of folktales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the folk-verse anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boys Magic Horn], edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and William Blakes Songs of Innocence); second, books the audiences of which seem not to have been clearly conceived by their creators (or their creators may have ignored, as irrelevant, such a consideration) but that are now fixed stars in the childs literary firmament (Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Charles Perraults fairy tales; third, picture books and easy-to-read stories commonly subsumed under the label of literature but qualifying as such only by relaxed standards (though Beatrix Potter and several other writers do nonetheless qualify); fourth, first quality childrens versions of adult classics (Walter de la Mares Stories from the Bible, perhaps Howard Pyles retellings of the Robin Hood ballads and tales; finally, the domain of once oral folk material that children have kept alivefolktales and fairy tales; fables, sayings, riddles, charms, tongue twisters; folksongs, lullabies, hymns, carols, and other simple poetry; rhymes of the street, the playground, the nursery; and, supremely, Mother Goose and nonsense verse.

Five categories that are often considered childrens literature are excluded from this section. The broadest of the excluded categories is that of unblushingly commercial and harmlessly transient writing, including comic books, much of which, though it may please young readers, and often for good reasons, is for the purposes of this article notable only for its sociohistorical, rather than literary, importance. Second, all books of systematic instruction are barred except those sparse examples (e.g., the work of John Amos Comenius) that illuminate the history of the subject. Third, excluded from discussion is much high literature that was not originally intended for children: from the past, Jean de La Fontaines Fables,

James Fenimore Coopers Leatherstocking tales, Sir Walter Scotts Ivanhoe, Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre, Alexandre Dumas Three Musketeers, Rudyard Kiplings Kim; from the modern period, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Yearling, J.D. Salingers Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of Anne Frank, Thor Heyerdahls Kon-Tiki, Enid Bagnolds National Velvet. A fourth, rather minor, category comprises books about the young where the content but not the style or point of view is relevant (Sir James Barries Sentimental Tommy, William Goldings Lord of the Flies, F. Ansteys [Thomas Anstey Guthrie] Vice Versa). Finally, barred from central, though not all, consideration is the nonfiction, or fact, book. Except for a handful of such books, the bright pages of which still rain influence or which possess artistic merit, this literature should be viewed from its socioeducational-commercial aspect. Defining childrens literature is unexpectedly tricky. To begin with, what is a childrens book?" asks F. Gordon Roe. It is not, it seems, simply a book written for children. Talking of childhood reading in Victorian times, Roe continues: Some of the works I shall mention were not primarily written for children at all. So far from the works of Scott and Dickens being looked upon as impositions, they were read eagerly by many juveniles, though some of their elders were doubtful about Mr Dickens, who wrote about quite vulgar folk even pickpockets! (90) Just as adult" books like Redgauntlet, say, or Oliver Twist were appropriated by children, books written for children reached an adult audience too, and not only through the business side of things, either. Having been selected by the publisher or his reader, books were then selected by parents and teachers for individual children (certainly until the later decades of the century), and often read aloud to the youngest of those children. Childrens writers have always been very much aware of the adults reading over childrens shoulders. Then, books that enthralled in childhood stayed with their readers into adulthood. Thackeray explains, The boy-critic loves the story: grown up, he loves the author who wrote the story. Hence the kindly tie is established between writer and reader, and lasts pretty nearly for life" (De Juventute"). Thackeray is talking mainly of Sir Walter Scott here, but he also refers to Frank" in Maria Edgeworths Moral Tales for Young Children (1801). Perhaps most importantly, some of the greatest childrens books of the mid-nineteenth-century onwards seem to have been written, at least subconsciously, to satisfy

the needs of adults. U. C. Knoepflmacher feels that Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti and Mrs Ewing all owed much to Ruskin, explaining that: The double perspective of child and adult he had implanted in his 1841 text [The King of the Golden River] would be perfected in their more complicated fantasies for young readers of both sexes. By turning to such child readers, these writers tried, as had Ruskin, to confront their own self-division between adult and child selves. (6) Books that addressed such a fundamental psychological dilemma inevitably appealed to adult readers as well as children. An example here is Rossettis Goblin Market (1862), which was quickly perceived to have two levels of meaning for the two distinct audiences (see Knoepflmacher, Ch. 9). The parameters of childrens literature are blurred in another way. When can this amorphous body of literature be said to have begun? In the later medieval period, perhaps, with hornbooks (which carried The Lords Prayer or sometimes a religious verse), or conduct books for young courtiers? Or in the sixteenth century, with chapbooks, however bawdy and probably forbidden? Chapbooks were still circulating into the nineteenth century, by which time some were being specifically put out for children, an interesting proof that children could drive the book market even then. These cheap popular tales were precursors of the Penny Dreadfuls. Or did childrens literature start, in the same century, with the publication of the old romance, Sir Bevis of Hampton, which Bunyan loved as a child? A version of Sir Bevis of Hampton was published for children in 1846; Richard Jefferies young hero in the childrens classic Wood Magic (1881) and its sequel Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882), is nicknamed Sir Bevis" as a small child (Wood Magic, Ch. 1). Or did childrens literature really take off later in the seventeenth century, with James Janeways A Token for Children and Henry Jessey and Abraham Chears A Looking-Glass for Children (both of which appeared in 1672)? Some might prefer to point to Bunyans much-loved Pilgrims Progress (1678): the preface to Part II (1684), in which Christians wife Christiana and their four sons set out to follow in Christians footsteps, suggests that Bunyan had child readers in mind by now. He went on to write A Book for Boys and Girls (later entitled Divine Emblems) in 1686. But the legacy of instructional writing faded

in the later Victorian period, while Britains strong nursery rhyme tradition proved to be an important influence on future nonsense writing, so might not the appearance of Tommy Thumbs Song Book in 1744 mark a better starting point? Most childrens literature researchers settle on the two sets of religious tracts published in 1672, for they set the tone for what Sylvia Kasey Marks describes as the first real burst" of writing for children and a grim, moralistic tone it was too. The difficulty here is that their legacy did fade. According to Marks herself, in 1839 this type of writing for children came full circle" (12) with the publication of Catherine Sinclairs Holiday House. Not everyone would agree with the placing of Holiday House at the end of that tradition; it can be put instead at the beginning of another. But at any rate it was clearly pivotal. For by now the whole concept of childhood was in flux. As one social historian has said, thanks to the "veritable explosion of information about this period of physiological and cognitive development in human beings [i.e., childhood]," the material used in the literary child figure was changing irrevocably, enabling it to function as "a central vehicle for expressing ideas about the self and its history" (Steedman 5). Like any new departure, this one "established itself by publicly annihilating its predecessors. This meant Victorian moralism generally, and the exemplary children of religious tracts in particular" (Keating 219). Different critics may choose different books to illustrate this "annihilation," but the appearance of fantasy probably dealt the fatal blow, with Lewis Carrolls Alice driving it home: here is a child character unlike any who had gone before, who had once, we are told, "really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, Nurse! Do lets pretend that Im a hungry hyaena, and youre a bone" (Through the Looking Glass, 1871, Ch.1). It must be admitted, however, that this kind of thing gets much of its charge from its rebellion against the past. In other words, the voices of the earlier moralists were, in a sense, still being heard (see Bratton 208). As regards dating, there is also the commercial aspect. John Sutherland says that "It was not until the 1850s that a stable commercial infrastructure for childrens fiction was established." He would date the enterprise of childrens fiction, as an enterprise, from the setting up of

magazines such as the RTSs Sunday at Home and the emergence of name novelists such as George E. Sargent whose Roland Leigh, The Story of a City Arab (1857) pioneered a string of similar chronicles of ragged but indomitably virtuous heroes. The 1850s also saw the emergence of Charlotte Maria Tucker (ALOE), the most gifted writer of childrens fiction to date. (122-23) This overlooks some earlier commercial successes, such as Mrs Sherwoods, but it is certainly true that sales of childrens books now became an important part of the publishers trade. From 1875 to 1885, for example, the average number of new adult fiction titles appearing each year was 429, while the figure for "juvenile works" was 470 (Keating 32). Interestingly (and substantiating my earlier point about adults reading childrens books), in 1894 the Publishers Circular announced that it would stop counting the juvenile titles separately, because "so-called juvenile works are nowadays so well written, that often they suit older readers quite as well as those for whom they are primarily intended" (qtd. in Keating 32). Finally, how do we categorise childrens literature? Can it really be called a genre, when it includes so many different types of writing for such a wide range of ages, from toddlers on the brink of comprehension to teenagers on the brink of adulthood? As the inside front-jacket blurb of the indispensable Oxford Companion to Childrens Literature, by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard, puts it: The range of literature covered includes traditional narrative materials such as legends and romances; fairy tales; chapbooks; genres such as school stories, adventure stories, doll stories, and science fiction; ABC and other learning books; childrens magazines, comics and story papers; picture books; teenage novels; childrens hymns And so on. Animal stories, nonsense writing, poetry and plays are not even mentioned here, though well represented in the book itself. Hard as it is to define, childrens literature is now recognized as an important field of study, both in itself and for the insights it yields into literature as a whole as well as into the family life, society and thinking of any given period, and the minds of the many major authors influenced by it. On all counts, it is a fascinating and rewarding subject.