What Is Children's Literature?

I feel privileged to review this book. It is a big book in every way: number of pages, length of chapters, range of material, and depth of thought. This is a book worthy of its argument. I mean by this that the form of The Hidden Adult manifests the book's themes; it is a scholarly and a creative achievement. One of the features that Nodelman identifies as typical of children's literature as a genre is its insistence on repetition and variation. Children's books demonstrate repetition in a variety of ways: in plots, in recurring character types, in language, in patterns, and so on. They do this in order to educate their readers, repetition being an efficacious pedagogical device, and the variation that creeps into the repetition is a way of deepening what the reader learns. A similar pedagogic use of repetition and variation occurs in The Hidden Adult. Nodelman repeats the main themes of his book over and over, but he does so each time in a different manner, with different theoretical language. And so we read about how the theories of the likes of Bourdieu, Said, Derrida, Lacan, Hardt, and Negri relate to the ambiguity of children's literature as a genre. This is a book that both deepens as it goes along and returns to its beginnings as it closes.

A glance at its contents page will show that this large book contains only four chapters. Each chapter is long; we have chapters of 81, 50, 111, and 97 pages, respectively. True, each long chapter does have sections, but their overall size indicates that Nodelman allows his ideas to develop at length; this is a book that traces a critical mind in the act of thinking through difficult ideas. This explains why we often watch Nodelman come to a conclusion, only to counter that conclusion in the next paragraph. This is a book satisfied with doubts and uncertainties even as it develops its arguments carefully and confidently. That is, Nodelman's argument turns on the fundamental ambiguity of children's literature as a form of literature based on a series of binary opposites that refuse reconciliation—and that ultimately refuses to privilege one half of the binary over the other. For example, Nodelman persuasively argues that children's literature celebrates the innocence and lack of knowledge we attribute to childhood, while at the same time it sets out to give children the knowledge they lack, and therefore end their innocence. Something similar is true of adults themselves: they must exert control over smaller creatures that do not yet have the knowledge for independence; at the same time they aspire to the condition of childhood, in which they would have less knowledge (and less control) than they now have as adults. Adults desire both to end innocence and to preserve it. Such ambiguities necessarily find their way into books for children. And so all books for young readers present their child readers with a world that is simple enough for them to grasp, but this very simplicity implies a condition that is not simple. Simplicity masks a complexity just beyond view in even the most straightforward books for the young. Focalization in children's books may be from the perspective of a child or a young person, but hiding behind that alter ego is the adult who authors the book.

Once again, The Hidden Adult manages to convey its arguments in its form. The book begins with a chapter that is resolutely formal in its approach. We do have formalism tinged with deconstruction here, but deconstruction has always aimed its canny readings squarely at formal features of texts. Nodelman folds his deconstructive readings into a structuralist's interest in binaries; he focuses on what children's literature of a variety of types, and from across its history, have in common. Accordingly, he chooses Maria Edgeworth's "The Purple Jar" (1801), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Hugh Lofting's The Story of Dr. Doolittle (1920), Beverly Cleary...