Identity Crises

The question that has been put to me most often in the last few months by people with an interest in children's literature is: what do you think of the Harry Potter phenomenon? It's a question that has returned to me repeatedly as I read Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults and Text, Culture and National Identity in Children's Literature. At first glance, it might seem that Harry Potter is irrelevant if not beside the point, since neither text refers to him. And they are none the worse for that, of course. Instead they offer insights about and analysis of works from many cultures and subgenres, and the conditions under which literary work for children is produced. To the extent that the range of works they discuss constitutes a boundary that is operative both for the genre and the child addressee and, importantly, the child portrayed in and by the books, they also deal in questions of identity. The literary works through which they examine this theme range from picture books to recent novels, many of the latter existing on (or sustaining—the question remains open) the boundary between fiction for children and fiction for adults. These books frame, delineate, and affirm identity; whether they question it, or are in fact capable of such questioning, is another matter. Do the Harry Potter books do so? These collections have helped me to think carefully about that, whether they meant to or not.

Both collections assume to a greater or lesser extent that children's literature exists. Of its existence per se there can be little doubt, but its relationship to literature—whatever we decide that is—and children—whatever we decide they are—poses perennial problems. Writing for a dual audience or "cross-writing child and adult," a term Beckett, in Transcending Boundaries, attributes to U. C. Knoepflmacher, assumes that we can make some distinction between child and adult, however difficult that may be nowadays. A literature for children only makes sense in terms of that distinction, of course, and in producing books for children and young adults we materialize our concepts of childhood. That this is our, adult, concept Zohar Shavit affirms in her contribution to Beckett's volume. She goes so far as to ask us to consider whether "children's literature is not reaching a point where the childreader is not being abused in favor of the child's parents" (Beckett 95). There are many texts (many more than was once the case, she implies) that address adults over the shoulder of children. Importantly, it seems that many of these are addressed to the very young. Some of the books she thinks of in this way, "rife with pseudophilosophical and pseudopsychological statements, which adults allegedly like to find in books for children" are written by Maurice Sendak and Shel Silverstein (Beckett 94). Books such as these writers produce appeal to adults, in her view, because they "repeatedly try to recall the illusion of experiencing childhood time and time again" (Beckett 95). Writers, readers, and critics use the "cultural differences" between adults and children strategically, and do so at the expense of the child, she argues. In brief, she argues that even though childhood today is different in many ways from that of in earlier periods, a book for children will not "stand a chance" of being evaluated as "good" if "only" children like it or find it a "good book"; to this end, it always needs to be authorized by adults (Beckett 95).

No matter how we argue otherwise, this is surely as true now as it has ever been; perhaps more so in the age of simultaneous, or near simultaneous publication of books for children, particularly of picture books, in many places. But what would a book for children that did not "abuse" them look like? Carole Scott, writing about picture books, helps the reader think...