Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

Introduction

Introduction mike cadden To introduce this collection of essays on narrative theory and children’s literature, I’d like your indulgence as I discuss one area of narrative theory that takes on different implications when discussed in the context of children’s literature: the peritext. It’s my way of justifying the intersection of narratology and literature for the young right from the start. The second part of the introduction is more conventional: an explanation of the development of the study of children’s literature as an academic field, the development of its literary theory, and the relatively recent embrace of narratology. You’ll find particular introductions to the collected essays themselves at the beginning of each part. The Peritext and Children’s Literature “This is [. . .] the part where the author tells why the book exists and why the reader might want to read it. And you can skip it if you’re in a hurry.”—Laura Schlitz. These are the first words of the foreword to the 2008 Newbery Medal–winning book.1 It seems like a good way to introduce a book about narrative theory and children’s literature. An editor ’s introduction to any book about narrative approaches should begin with some self-consciousness about two separate matters: the role of the peritext and the nature of the implied reader.2 In fact both matters are discussed in this volume by several essayists. vii viii } Introduction The peritext is a good example of an aspect of narrative theory of special interest to those who study children’s literature exactly because it has so much to do with assumptions about the implied reader, itself a central concern in children’s literature. As I was taking my kids to school one day, my then sevenyear -old daughter interrupted her reading of Barbie’s Fairytopia to ask, “Dad, what does “I—n—t—r—o—d—u—” “It spells ‘Introduction.’” “What’s that?” “Well, that’s the part of the book that explains things that you might want to know before you read so you’ll understand what you read better.” “Oh . . . I guess I won’t read it, then.” “Why not?” “I don’t want to spoil it.” And so she didn’t. Harry Shaw points out that for child readers, “being coerced into playing a role [as a reader] is different from being forced into an actual state of belief” (210). And it seems clear that my daughter was neither coerced by the impetus of the peritext nor a believer in its authority. She read about the Barbieclone fairies of Fairytopia without a concern in the world for what the nice person who wrote the introduction might have wanted her to know. Children learn early, whether through experience or the hasty page-turning by tired parents reading to them, the place of the peritext—both literally and figuratively. A. A. Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, begins his second book of children’s poetry with this meta-introduction: “This bit which I am writing now, called Introduction, is really the er—h’r’m of the book, and I have put it in, partly so as not to take you by surprise, and partly because, having started, I can’t do without it now. There are some very clever writers who say that it is quite easy not to have an er—h’r’m, but I don’t agree with them. I think it is much easier not to have all the rest of the book.” And so it is. In an age of irony, the peritext also gives us a sense of the implied reader of the book. Do children understand and appreciate irony? Is it there for the adults’ consumption while the chil- Mike Cadden { ix dren are meant to get other things? A playful peritext is often the measure of what the author and the publisher in combination believe to be true about the audience(s) of a children’s book. Perhaps the most famous jab at the introduction in a children’s book is that from Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s popular picture-book parody of folktales, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, which ends with the lines: “In fact, you should definitely go read the stories now, because the rest of this introduction just kind of goes on and on and doesn’t really say anything...