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

Jacqueline Rose concludes that fiction for children is absolutely impossible 
due to the incompatibility of adults and children in respect of their literature and the 
imbalance of their relationship. Analogous to Rose’s argumentation, any criticism of 
children’s literature should be null and void as well, as – with the production, publication and 
marketing - it is adults who judge children’s books, not the children themselves.
The experimental novelist
17
Aidan Chambers represents a narratological approach to 
children’s literature criticism. Transferred from its adult equivalent and applied to children’s 
literature, this kind of criticism focuses on the development and the effect of the
use of 
various narrative modes, whilst underlining “the constructedness of texts.”
18
Joanne Marie 
Golden
also examines narrative discourse in children’s literature, inquiring into discourse 
analysis, the structure and purpose of narration, the kind of narrator and the relationship 
between author and reader.
19
The role of the narrator in children’s literature is analysed by 
Barbara Wall
in The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction;
20
the dilemma 
consisting of the issue of its addressee. A linguistic approach on ideology and narrative for 
children is undertaken by Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjær’s Language and 
Control in Children’s Literature
.
21
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein
, Director of CIRCL,
22
pursues Jacqueline Rose’s approach 
of a discrepancy between children and adults further. However, she discusses the relation 
between criticism on the one hand and the construction of the term and addressee child on the 
14
Nicholas Tucker. The Child and the Book: A Psychoanalytical and Literary Exploration. Cambridge; New 
York; Port Chester et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1981; Nicholas Tucker. What is a Child? London: 
Fontana/ Open Books, 1977. 
15
Rosemary Jackson. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London; New York: Routledge, 2003. [1981] 
16
Rose, The Case of Peter Pan.  
17
Watson, The Cambridge Guide, p. 186.
18
Ibd.
19
Joanne Marie Golden. The Narrative Symbol in Childhood Literature: Explorations in the Construction of 
Text
. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990.
20
Barbara Wall. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. Basingstoke; London: Macmillan, 
1991.
21
Murry Knowles; Kirsten Malmkjær. Language and Control in Children’s Literature. London; New York: 
Routledge, 1996.
22
CIRCL is the abbreviation for the Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture and 
Media, based at Reading University.

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71 
other in Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child.
23
As the editor of Children 
in Culture
,
24
she compiles approaches to childhood from various angles, such as 
deconstructionism, psychology, pedagogics or linguistics. With Children’s Literature: New 
Approaches
25
Lesnik-Oberstein acknowledges the fact that not only the literary genre has 
developed, but also its criticism. These new approaches by a second generation of critics 
comprise literary theories transferred from adult literature criticism to that of children’s 
literature; for example reader response theory, intertextuality and otherness.
Peter Hunt from the University of Cardiff is a specialist on children’s literature and an 
established authority in the field. His studies comprise theoretical as well as practical 
approaches to a definition of children’s literature,
26
its history,
27
the development and 
importance of criticism in children’s literature,
28
the co-editorship of extensive compendia on 
children’s literature
29
as well as contributions to adjoining fields of research.
30
Hunt 
distinguishes between theorists and practitioners of children’s literature and its criticism, the 
latter of which he gives his preference. Notwithstanding the tendency of academia towards 
theory, Hunt supports hands-on approaches and even goes one step further by his unorthodox 
acceptance of the wide-spread amateurism in both children’s literature and its criticism.
31
Despite all the seriousness of research in the extensive and important field, Hunt points out 
the fun factor in children’s literature.
32
Thus relaxed about the subject and its proceedings, he 
works out the strong points with self-confidence. Whereas to some academics children’s 
literature “is a non-subject”
33
due to its fuzziness, Hunt justifies its popularity with its many 
23
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
1994.
24
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.) Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood. Basingstoke; London: 
Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998.
25
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein. Children’s Literature: New Approaches. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2004.
26
For example in Hunt, An Introduction to Children’s Literature.
27
Hunt (Ed.), Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History. 
28
Hunt, Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism; and Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s