The Canon of Historical Children's Literature For Warren W. Wooden

Introduction

Warren W. Wooden, who died on December 27, 1983, originally proposed and planned to edit this special section on "The Canon of Historical Children's Literature." A scholar of the English Renaissance, Woody had been involved in research and writing about early English children's literature for many years. Aware of the need for a full-scale, comprehensive treatment of children's literature during its formative period in England, Woody was at work on a book-length study of the origins of children's literature in England, ca. 1500-1700, when he died. He had received support for the project from the Children's Literature Association and the American Philosophical Association, and had been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship for 1983-84 by the American Council of Learned Societies.

Woody believed strongly that a canon of early children's literature had to recognize, as Margaret Gillespie says, that "the world of children's literature has been and continues to be one that is dominated by children's choices" (Literature for Children: History and Trends) and, consequently, that Sheila Egoff's definition of a children's book as "simply one in which a child finds pleasure" (The Republic of Childhood) is the most apt and functional one, especially for the early period. It is a fairly simple matter to identify the didactic and pedagogical books overtly and clearly written for children in comparison with identifying works that children chose to read or listen to for their own pleasure. A large part of the problem arises, of course, from the fact that prior to the eighteenth century, very little non-academic, non-didactic publication specifically for children was done. Instead, children read "adult" literature and appropriated it for their own pleasure. What, then, did give them pleasure? What did they choose to read and why? Were some works more readily available to children than others, and did their authors deliberately try to make them so? Where does one look for the roots of English children's literature? This special section grew out of a concern for these issues. Woody's idea was for a series of advocacy essays which would argue for inclusion in the canon of historical children's literature literary works not traditionally thought of as belonging to children or, if within the existing canon, not fully recognized for their importance. Woody chose the essays presented here. In each case, the writers are dealing with a "major" work of English literature and arguing that its role as children's literature gives it added significance.

In "The Juvenile Audiences of Sir Orfeo," Bennett A. Brockman shows that Sir Orfeo, a fine Middle English romance, is a kind of paradigm of medieval literature for children both by virtue of the poem's formal accessibility to children—its theme, tone, and structure making it amenable to children's interests and capacities—and by virtue of its physical accessibility to children. In "Not for Adults Only: The English Corpus Christi Plays," D. Thomas Hanks, Jr. argues that children, as an assumed part of the audience, not only must have enjoyed the Corpus Christi plays but also were being taught by them a revolutionary view of their overlords. Meradith McMunn also deals with early drama; in "Children as Actors and Audience for Early Scottish Drama and Ceremony" she presents a survey of evidence for children's participation in and attendance at both sacred and secular dramatized productions, given for both local and royal patrons. In "Erasmus's 'First Reader': The Colloquies in Early English Pedagogy," Dennis M. Gilkey presents an interesting reversal of the usual pattern of children appropriating adult literature; Erasmus so successfully blended the school-colloquy with the entertainment of a good story that adult readers, ignoring the educational nature and function of the work, appropriated the school-text for themselves. Paradise Lost is not a poem most of us today would give our children to read; but as Joan F. Gilliland shows through numerous examples of children's editions, excerpts in anthologies, and usage in grammar and rhetoric texts, children from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth...