Editor's Introduction

A recent issue of another journal in the field, Children’s Literature in Education, lamented the apparent lack of academic articles on contemporary British writers for children and asked the directors of four thriving M.A. courses (including the one at the University of Reading) to indicate how far their degree programs explore the work of living writers and if students elect to study and write about these authors (Reynolds et al. 1). It was a pleasure for us to report that such work is alive and well within the M.A. in Children’s Literature at the University of Reading, and we hope that the articles in this issue of The Lion and the Unicorn will make a further contribution to research in contemporary British children’s literature.

But what does it mean to analyze, write about, or even edit a journal issue on “Contemporary British Children’s Literature” in the late 1990s? For us, the task was very problematic, and here we raise a number of questions that arose from our discussions as editors. For example, what theoretical frameworks or perspectives operate (should operate?) when we think through the issues and problems involved? Perhaps one should begin with the terms themselves, but these throw up more questions. For example, what does “contemporary” mean? Does it refer to children’s literature published within a chronological period from a particular year to the present? If so, when did that period begin? 1970? 1980? 1990? 1998? Or does “contemporary” refer to some special qualities of recently published British children’s literature that marks it off from the past in some way? Does such literature, for example, engage with particular “issues”? Does it exhibit literary characteristics that are different from children’s literature of the past? Does it construct children and childhood differently? Does contemporary children’s literature exhibit the dissolution of boundaries and categories that are said to be a feature of “the postmodern condition”? How far, for example, does such writing dissolve the distinction between adult literature and children’s literature? Or, how far does it challenge the categories of “high culture” and “popular culture” for children?

Contemporary children’s literature is a cultural practice operating within certain economic structures at a particular historical moment. How are changing cultural practices shaping contemporary children’s literature? For example, in publishing and in media production and transmission? How do we carry out the academic study of contemporary children’s literature now that it includes films, television, comics, and computer games?

To study contemporary British children’s literature raises questions of national and cultural identity. ¹ What distinctions, if any, should we make among English, Scottish, and Welsh children’s literature? How does contemporary children’s literature represent the divisions of gender, class, and ethnic diversity of contemporary Britain? All these questions arise in addition to the long-running debate on what do we mean by “children’s literature”—a topic that obviously preoccupies a wealth of books and articles.

To discuss some of these questions, we first refer (very selectively, we must admit) to some recent writing that deals with contemporary British children’s literature in terms of its “historical relevance,” its politics, and its literary qualities. We then raise more questions—this time about the articles included in this issue of The Lion and the Unicorn.

Peter Hunt, in a recent article (“Passing”) in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, argues that contemporary literature should be at the center of any study of children’s literature. He is “out of sympathy with a view that venerates [the past] and holds its books to be more valuable than those of the present” (201) and suggests that the study of children’s books of the past has received more attention within the study of children’s literature “because literary and historical studies have generally had academic status, and ‘Children’s Literature’ has generally found it necessary to attach itself to the ‘respectable’ in order to survive” (200). But, he suggests, we should reverse this situation and say “the study of books that are for children is the primary, interdisciplinary, intercultural, intellectually challenging, innovative, and unselfconscious center of our study...