Editor's introduction

European and North American children’s literature studies have followed somewhat different paths of development. In the United States and Canada, critical approaches to the study and teaching of children’s literature have proliferated in English departments in colleges and universities in the period since the early 1970s when journals such as Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly were founded and the Children’s Literature Association, allied with the Modern Language Association, came into being. European studies of children’s literature have experienced a similar growth and maturation in the same period, but along rather different lines. Prior to the 1970s, the study of children’s literature in North America was largely the province of schools of education, library science, and folklore. The split between critics concerned primarily with the child and with pedagogy and those primarily interested in texts and literary dimensions, those whom Peter Hollindale calls “child people” and “book people,” respectively, remains very real in Canada and the United States, though it is not unbridgeable—merely embedded in institutional histories.

In Britain and on the Continent, it also exists, but in varied forms in different countries, as the essays in this issue suggest. So, for example, Terri Frongia’s article indicates that theories of pedagogy and aesthetics have traditionally been closely linked to the interpretation of children’s literature in Italy. Hans-Heino Ewers seeks to locate children’s literature in Germany in the contested territory between “literature” and the oral tradition, and in doing so forges links to the influential work of the educator, editor, and critic Heinrich Wolgast (1860–1920), whose essay “Das Elend unserer Jugendliteratur” (1896, “The Misery of our Youth Literature”) influenced the course of German children’s literature criticism. Jean Perrot emphasizes the towering importance to late twentieth-century French children’s literature criticism of Charles Perrault and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who are, in his view, still periodically providing literary criticism with new impetus, and who are both arguably concerned with pedagogy and with aesthetic problems, though in radically different fashions.

It is instructive to reexamine the judgments of Clifton Fadiman, writing a survey of children’s literature (as a subcategory of “The Art of Literature”) for the Encyclopedia Britannica, expressing views largely formulated at the end of the 1960s. Fadiman wrote: “By two criteria—degree of awareness of the child’s identity and level of institutional development—Germany leads the world. It has built a vast structure of history, criticism, analysis, and controversy devoted to a subject the chief property of which would appear to be its charm rather than its obscurity. One estimate has it that in West Germany alone there are over 300 associations dedicated to the study and promotion of children’s literature. Such conscientiousness, nowhere else matched, such a serious desire to relate the child’s reading to his nurture, education, and Weltanschauung, has an admirable aspect. But by attaching juvenile books too closely to the theory and demands of pedagogy, it may have constricted a marked native genius” (EB, 15th Edition, 23:216). Fadiman’s skepticism about academic study of children’s literature aside, his point about the close connection between the theory of pedagogy and literary creation in German culture may be regarded from a more positive angle—not only that German educators have taken children’s literature seriously, but that pedagogy itself, as it has grown more responsive to the needs of the child, has allied itself with children’s writers and critics in search of ways of critiquing and improving society. Tabbert and Wardetzky, writing in this issue, exemplify the concern of German educators and critics to connect literary education, aesthetic questions, and the interests of children.

Fadiman addressed the puzzling question of why Scandinavia, “a group of small, sparsely populated countries,” has displayed such “variety, vigour, and even genius” in its children’s literature. After the influence of Andersen, he named “the appearance in 1900 of the Swedish Ellen Key’s two-volume Barnets århundrede (Eng. trans., The Century of the Child, 1909), pivotal in the history of the discovery that children really exist; a general modern atmosphere of...