Telling Children's Stories: Narrative Theory and Children's Literature

Part Three: Narrators and Implied Readers

part three { Narrators and Implied Readers As Chris McGee’s essay in the previous part considers the blending of forms from different times, the opening essay in this part, Holly Blackford ’s “Uncle Tom Melodrama with a Modern Point of View: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” considers the implications for the interplay of a Victorian story pattern of reform with the modernist strategy of using an alienated narrator. The unique combination of courtroom racial melodrama and naive child narration makes To Kill a Mockingbird what it is and keeps the novel both empowering and interesting to contemporary young adult readers. The second essay, Maria Nikolajeva’s “The Identification Fallacy: Perspective and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature,” considers the gap between children’s literature and literature for adults regarding the importance of authorial intention as well as the literary and pedagogical importance of a child reader’s identification with characters in children’s books. Finally, Dana Keren-Yaar’s “The Development of Hebrew Children’s Literature: From Men Pulling Children Along to Women Meeting Them Where They Are” examines the role of gendered narrative voice in Israeli children’s books in the service of recruiting boys for military service. The voice of the narrator is a major topic of discussion in the fields of children’s and young adult literature for the simple reason that who speaks and to whom are the first elements that many people examine in their attempts to determine what constitutes a children’s book. In short, narrative voice and the implied reader of those voices are foundational issues in the poetics of literature for young people. This part variously addresses multivoiced narration, perceptible narration, voice as a distancing tool as well as a device to draw readers in, ironic and melodramatic delivery, real and implied readers, and fundamental questions about child readers’ identification with fictional characters. ...