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  • On the Success of Children’s Books and Fairy Tales: A Comparative View of Impact Theory and Reception Research
  • Reinbert Tabbert (bio) and Kristin Wardetzky (bio)

For Walter Scherf

This is a joint article by two people who in spite of different professional backgrounds share an interest in the appeal that literature may have for children. 1 Kristin Wardetzky was employed as a theater pedagogue in a children’s theater in East Berlin during the 1970s and 1980s before doing extensive research into how children in various parts of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) responded to fairy tales. After two years as a professor of culture education at the College of Social Studies in Darmstadt she now teaches in the College of Fine Arts in Berlin. Reinbert Tabbert was trained as a high school teacher and has worked as a professor of English at two Colleges of Education in southwest Germany. Having become increasingly occupied with children’s books in seminars, talks, and juries, he made them a topic of a course of lectures at the College of Librarianship in Stuttgart in the 1980s.

Both of us are interested in the appeal of children’s literature, but whereas one (Reinbert Tabbert) tends to concentrate on the textual conditions of such an appeal, the other (Kristin Wardetzky) is more concerned with the readers and listeners who are affected by it. In the following article we first summarize some of our results, which are based on impact theories on one hand and on empirical research on the other, and we then try to demonstrate the qualities of both of the two approaches by applying our respective criteria to the same piece of literature. Instead [End Page 1] of considering possible ways of integrating the two approaches, as we originally intended to do, we have decided not to deprive readers of the pleasure of attempting this themselves.

What Makes Successful Children’s Books Successful?

Successful children’s books are books that are known to be highly appreciated by a large, statistically verifiable number of children and, possibly, by many critics as well (though the latter is hardly true in such spectacular cases as that of Enid Blyton). In historical terms, successful children’s books are usually called classics.

The way literary success will be considered in this section has been influenced by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, in as far as they concentrate on the structural phenonema of literature and analyze them with regard to their potential impact on readers. Jauss’s and Iser’s theories, with their focus on “horizons of expectations,” “indeterminacies,” and “implied readers,” have been summed up as the “aesthetics of reception.” 2 “Aesthetics of impact” would, however, be a more appropriate term, because it is more concerned with the book’s share in the reading process (impact) than with the reader’s share (reception). Unlike the theories of Jauss and Iser, the following remarks are open to psychological, sociological, and economic ideas. The central concept of identification was indeed borrowed from Jauss, 3 but adapted to a sociopsychological context. Moreover, insofar as a book and its impact are created by a specific kind of cultural sensibility, the author’s role will also be taken into consideration.

And so from method to matter. If there are two major functions of literature, fulfillment of wishes and interpretation of reality, 4 then successful children’s books, similar to fairy tales, tend to favor the first of the two. What is presented as desirable originates in the author’s consciousness, which is fed either by strong memories of childhood (as in the case of Astrid Lindgren) or by a considerable knowledge of what children want (as in the case of Enid Blyton). In addition, the success of children’s books seems to depend on a certain degree of prefiguration of the subject matter by the bond-creating patterns of myths, if not by their more modern equivalent of social stereotypes, both of which may be recognizable either to an international public or to a specific ethnic community only. Thus Astrid Lindgren, though “inner-directed” (Riesman 5), participates in the rich resources of cultural traditions—some national, some universal—and Enid Blyton...

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