Children's Literature Criticism: The Old and the New

Understanding Children's Literature sets itself up as an introductory collection of essays about the relationship between literary theory and children's literature. The essays are by well-known, highly respected critics, such as Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Tony Watkins, John Stephens, Perry Nodelman, Hamida Bosmajain, Lissa Paul, and Hugh Crago. These and other critics in the book focus their theoretical lens, as it were, on such important issues in children's literature as definition, history, culture, ideology, linguistics, picture books, psychoanalysis, feminism, intertextuality, and literacy. Placed under the microscope are a wide range of old and new children's texts. The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Hobbit, Low Tide, Where the Wild Things Are, Mr Gumpy's Outing, and Higglety Pigglety Pop! are just some of the closely examined books that give students an understanding of how literary theory might be used to dissect children's literature. The opening essay, "Introduction: The World of Children's Literature Studies," is by Peter Hunt, a critic who as well as anybody can see the complexities that inform an understanding of children's literature.

Understanding Children's Literature has been the central theoretical text in my undergraduate theory class this semester, along with Rebecca Lukens's A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature. I chose Hunt's book because I was reviewing it (what better way to know a book than to teach it). I chose Lukens's book because I didn't want my students to think that the ideas and concepts about children's literature criticism in Hunt's book, indeed the whole concept of children's literature studies, appeared out of nowhere. Quite the contrary. I wanted them to understand the history of children's literary theory, the theories themselves, and the direction in which children's literature criticism seems to be heading today, i.e., toward a much more interdisciplinary mode of interpretation. By reading back and forth between the two quite different approaches to children's literature of which Lukens and Hunt are generally representative, my students, mostly language arts majors though not exclusively so, were able to see precisely how far children's literature criticism has come since the 1970s, when Lukens's book was first published.

In this regard, an important issue both books tackle at the outset is that of definition. Lesnik-Oberstein's "Essentials: What Is Children's Literature? What Is Childhood?," the second chapter in Hunt's book, scrutinizes closely that which Lukens glosses over. Lukens, writing within the Anglo-American, New Criticism tradition of Richards, Eliot, Leavis, and others argues that touchstone literature and children's literature texts—Charlotte's Web, for example—provide readers with fundamental insights into the nature of the human condition, in the case of Charlotte's Web the transformative and transcendent power of love, friendship, and language. Children's literature rewards us with an understanding of what it is and who we are and, by definition, children's literature and the child reader exist. Lesnik-Oberstein, writing from within a poststructuralist tradition, deconstructs these commonsense assumptions. Reiterating the kind of question previously asked by such critics as John Rowe Townsend and Michele Landsberg, Lesnik-Oberstein asks: "But is a children's book a book written by children, or for children? And, crucially, what does it mean to write a book 'for' children. . . . What of 'adult' books read also by children—are they 'children's literature'"? (15). Once the children's literature theorist sharpens the focus on these questions, others come clearly into view. Indeed, Lesnik-Oberstein goes on to address other equally important issues that Lukens ignores. Discussing the work of historians such as Philippe Aries and anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, Lesnik-Oberstein points out that if the definition of what constitutes children's literature is uncertain, so logically must the definition of what constitutes a child and childhood. Indeed, according to Lesnik-Oberstein, drawing on the work of "British theorist Jacqueline Rose" (17), the "'child' is a construction invented for the needs...