The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature

403 Pages·2008·1.57 MB·English

by  Perry Nodelman

The Hidden Adult
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The Hidden Adult
Defining Children’s Literature
S
perry nodelman
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
∫ 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2008
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nodelman, Perry.
The hidden adult : defining children’s literature / Perry Nodelman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8018-8979-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-8018-8980-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8018-8979-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8018-8980-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. 2. Children—Books and reading.
I. Title.
z1037.a1n625 2008
028.5%5—dc22 2007049673
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The little child is supposed to be pure and innocent. . . . The chil-
dren alone take no part in this convention; they assert their animal
nature naively enough and demonstrate persistently that they have
yet to learn their ‘‘purity.’’
—Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and pro-
found. I remember my own childhood vividly. . . . I knew terrible
things . . . but I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. . . . It would
scare them.
—Maurice Sendak, in Art Spiegelman’s In the Dumps
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contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Six Texts 1
Di√erent Texts, Same Genre 1 / Language: The Text and Its Shadows
8 / Focalization: Who Sees and What They Know 18 / Desire Confronts
Knowledge 33 / Home and Away: Essential Doubleness 59 / Variation
68 / Summary 76
2 Exploring Assumptions 82
Reading as an Adult 82 / Making Choices: Exploring Representative-
ness 90 / Assumptions about Genre 106 / Genre and Field 117 / Genre
and Genres 127
3 Children’s Literature as a Genre 133
Defining Children’s Literature 133 / No Genre 138 / Di√erent but Not
Distinct 142 / Literature and Children 146 / For the Good of
Children 157 / Literature for Boys and Literature for Girls 173 / Middle-
Class Subjectivity 176 / Doubleness 179 / Specific Markers 188 / About
Children 190 / The Eyes of Children 191 / Simplicity and
Sublimation 198 / The Hidden Adult 206 / Narrator and Narra-
tee 210 / Showing, Not Telling 214 / Happy Endings 216 / Achieving
Utopia 222 / Binaries 227 / Repetition 232 / Variation 235 /
A Comprehensive Statement? 242
4 The Genre in the Field 245
Sameness and Di√erence 245 / The Sameness of Children’s
Literature 245 / Di√erent Children’s Literatures: The E√ects of Personality
and History 265 / Di√erent Children’s Literatures: The E√ects of
viii Contents
Nationality 287 / The Genre in the Field 305 / Distinctive Texts in the Genre
315 / Conclusion: Children’s Literature as Nonadult? 338
Notes 343
Bibliography 359
Index 379
acknowledgments
I thank Jayne Hildebrand for her careful work on the manuscript of this book.
Jayne’s work was funded by Mavis Reimer, Canada Research Chair in the Culture
of Childhood, and the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Culture at
the University of Winnipeg. The University of Winnipeg also supported my own
work on the book by means of a number of study leaves. Leslie McGrath, head of
the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books at the Toronto Public Library,
provided me with information. My thanks also to Joe Abbott for his careful work
as manuscript editor.
I have been thinking about the matters I discuss in this book for some decades
and have presented earlier versions of aspects of them in Children’s Literature
Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, CCL/LCJ:
Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, CREArTA,
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Children’s Literature in Education, and the Jour-
nal of Children’s Literature; in my earlier books, Words about Pictures: The Narrative
Art of Children’s Picture Books and, in collaboration with Mavis Reimer, the third
edition of The Pleasure of Children’s Literature; in papers presented at conferences
of the Children’s Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, the
National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Reading University, and
the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota; and in keynote addresses at
conferences of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature in
Stockholm, the Children’s Book Council of Australia in Canberra, the Austral-
asian Children’s Literature Association for Research in Sydney, the Center for the
Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College in Boston, the conference on
Modern Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature in Nashville, the Center for
Børnelitteratur in Copenhagen, and the Minnesota Conference on Cultural Em-
blematics at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. My thanks to the editors