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  • Childhood Revisited:On the Relationship between Childhood Studies and Children's Literature
  • Nina Christensen (bio)

The different positions of scholars working with children's literature creates rich opportunities for critical analysis. In this article, the focus is on the interaction between children's literature both as literature and as a representation of childhood, on scholars' awareness of the relationship of such representations to ideas of childhood in a certain historical period, and finally on the self-conception of scholars in relation to the object of study.

This discussion is designed to help scholars think about keeping a balance between different forms of awareness. First, they must be aware of the fact that children's literature is literature, that it is, among other things, fiction, which needs no legitimization outside itself. Second, scholars must have an awareness that children's literature, like literature in general, is created and shaped under certain conditions and exists within a certain reality influencing the final product. Although children's literature can be discussed in its own right without focus on factors external to the text, "real" children read the books, and discussions concerning children in society, for instance, influence the portrayal of the characters. Discussions of "real" and "ideal" children are required of us, which points to the necessity of metacritical awareness in the researcher or scholar of children's literature.

Different Countries, Different Research Traditions

Recent theories within a number of fields reflect a turn from a focus on the interpretation of specific texts to an interest in the construction of texts in the broadest sense of the word. One consequence of this is that words such as history, identity, and reality are put in the plural or in quotation marks in order to reflect the writer's awareness of the impossibility of stable meaning. This turn has been both rejected and welcomed in children's literature criticism: it is rejected by critics who primarily see children's literature as a useful and unproblematic tool in making the child connect subject and object through representation in language and images, while other critics see it as a most welcome opportunity for discussing such fundamental concepts as reality, child, and identity. In children's literature criticism, this turn has led to a growing interest in the implications of integrating childhood studies into children's literature criticism, and the subject has been widely discussed, especially among English-speaking academics.

Only to a very limited extent has this been the case in Denmark, where the theoretical foundations for the study of children's literature are still under construction and where children's literature is rarely taught or acknowledged as a serious object of study at universities. This is probably due to the fact that children's literature was accepted at universities for a brief period in the seventies as part of ideological criticism, where its pertinence to the integration of literatures had been previously neglected in literary departments. In the beginning of the 1980s, when academics were quick to turn their backs on ideological criticism, the study of children's literature was abandoned. When the Centre for Children's Literature was inaugurated in 1998, it was established as an independent unit at the Danish University of Education. This independent status can, of course, be seen as a strength, but it can also be read as a sign of the marginalization of the field. Either way, the small size of the research community in Denmark adds to the necessity of dialogue with the international research community in the field. Here the researcher will have to engage in theoretical discussions concerning the relationship between childhood studies and children's literature in a foreign language, and the debate will be based on different historical developments, different academic traditions, and different primary source material and canons. The possibility of asking questions that arise on the basis of another perspective can be regarded as a challenge.

My interest in these subjects is based on reflections arising from my Ph.D. thesis, Den danske billedbog 1950-1999. Teori, analyse, historie (The Danish Picture Book 1950-1999. Theory, Analysis, History). In a central argument of my thesis, I argue that the development of Danish picture...

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