Didacticism and Morality in the Novel and Children's Literature

The three books I have been asked to review share some concerns relevant to the history, writing, and criticism of children's literature. All three represent an implicit or explicit rejection of a purely formalist analysis of literature and emphasize the necessity of viewing literature within its historical, intellectual, cultural, social context. In addition, Steiner and Gardner stress the social and moral responsibility of the literary artist and critic. Especially since children's literature as we understand it only occurs within certain cultures and eras, its existence and character can be fully understood only by examining the specific features of those cultures and eras: a purely formalist approach is inadequate. Moreover, since children's literature grows out of the responsibility one generation feels to pass its heritage to the next—or, to put it more narrowly, since the didactic impulse always has been and probably always will be a significant influence in the writing and criticism of children's literature, the insights on morality and didacticism, criticism and censorship to be found in these books are worth attention.

The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature is an early work by Lukacs, written in 1915 before his criticism was significantly informed by Marx; accordingly, its reissue in 1963 was prefaced by Lukacs' partial disclaimer.¹ Put briefly, Lukacs' essay argues that the epic is the creation of a homogeneous world, a world in which the integration of the self with the social and natural world invites little emphasis on individual identity and allows actions to have self-evident meaning. The novel, on the other hand, is the product of a world in which the self feels discontinuous with society and nature; the meaning of experience is no longer self-evident but must be sought; the self develops an expanded interior life and an increased awareness of an individual identity. Thus, the "form-determining intention of the novel is . . . the psychology of the novel's heroes: they are seekers" (p. 60)

Since Lukacs' essay, critics such as Erich Auerbach (Mimesis, 1946) and Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel, 1957) have expanded this discussion of how the development of the novel and the larger realistic movement are expressions of the modern era. Moreover, the ties between these movements and the development of children's literature are now being recognized and spelled out—see, for example, articles on realism and children's literature by Felicity Hughes² and, in a recent issue of the ChLA Quarterly, by Corinne Hirsch and Elizabeth Segal.³ To this discussion I want to add a few observations about how the "historico-philosophical" explorations of the novel's origins by Lukacs, Watt, and Auerbach help us understand the simultaneous development of children's literature.

Watt points out that the development of the novel was accompanied by a more objective study of history, which reflects an increased awareness of time and place as significant determinants of human experience. Auerbach uses the term "historism" to describe this trend, and by that term he means a belief not only that different epochs and socieities are crucially individualized but also that they must be judged primarily by their own unique premises rather than by some a priori or universal scheme. This "historism" when applied to the individual pushed the novel toward biography. It also probably contributed to that increased awareness of childhood as a distinct epoch which historians of childhood suggest occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jean Jacques Rousseau, that spokesman for the new era, had as a chief aim in writing Emile (1762), the establishment of childhood as a stage which must be judged in its own rather than adult terms, and he discriminated several unique stages within childhood. A more general acceptance of such ideas...