Microsoft Word final-current Developments at the Intersection of British Children-online-version doc

Gillian Avery 
examines the long-term development of main characters in children’s 
fiction in order to reveal an inherent structure and regularity.
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John Rowe Townsend also 
published one of these pioneering works in 1971, when children’s literature and its criticism 
was generally still considered unfit for serious research, academic or otherwise. With 
“Standards of Criticism for Children’s Literature”
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he introduces a structure to the then 
mostly unregulated field of criticism. By setting up rules for criticising the genre, Townsend 
constructively bundles and clarifies it. Thus giving children’s literature criticism a theoretical 
basis and a direction, Townsend supplies the necessary tools for future concerted action.
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Another important study, The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading
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testifies 
to the growing self-confidence of the genre’s critics. Focussing on children’s reading, among 
other things The Cool Web examines the issue of texts and their readers. Assuming a universal 
nature of narrative, the contributions pursue the question why children and adults appear to 
read and to respond to the same texts differently. Together with Victor Watson, Margaret 
Meek
also inquires into a sensitive topic of children’s literature, namely its end. In Coming of 
Age in Children’s Literature
,
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one of the genre’s core subjects, the authors analyse the 
representation of an irreversible process in literature. In respect of the current phenomena of 
children wanting to come of age and adults trying to remain young, this topic concerns the 
entire spectrum of children’s literature. Therefore it requires further studies in order to cover 
larger parts of the genre and compare the various forms and interpretations of coming of age.
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Gillian Avery. Childhood’s Pattern: A Study of the Heroes and Heroines of Children’s Fiction, 1770-1950. 
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975.
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John Rowe Townsend. “Standards of Criticism for Children’s Literature”. In: Hunt (Ed.), Children’s 
Literature: The Development of Criticism
, pp. 57-70. With his Standards of Criticism, Townsend suggests that 
critics ought to accept any texts’ inherent meaning and respects its own quality independent of its addressees. 
Even today this realisation has not yet managed to gain general acceptance.
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He has also coined a memorable definition of the term “children’s book”; claiming that the decision to market 
a book either for children or for adults is up to the publisher. Cf. Townsend in: Hunt (Ed.), Children’s 
Literature: The Development of Criticism
, p. 197.
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Margaret Meek; Aidan Warlow, Griselda Barton. The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading. London; 
Sydney; Toronto: The Bodley Head, 1977.
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Margaret Meek; Victor Watson. Coming of Age in Children’s Literature. Growth and Maturity in the Work of 
Philippa Pearce, Cynthia Voigt and Jan Mark. 
London; New York: Continuum, 2002.

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Among the psychoanalytical approaches to children’s literature criticism are for 
instance Nicholas Tucker’s The Child and the Book and his developmental psychological 
approach to the definition of the term “child”,
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and Rosemary Jackson’s psychoanalytical 
approach Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion.
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Illustrated by her examination of The Case 
of Peter Pan
,
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