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

Literature
. 
29
Hunt; Ray (Eds.) The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, and Jack Zipes; Lissa 
Paul; Lynne Vallone; Peter Hunt; Gillian Avery. The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The 
Traditions in English
. New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. 
30
For instance Peter Hunt; Millicent Lenz. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. London; New York: 
Continuum, 2001.
31
Cf. Hunt, The Development of Criticism, p. 6. This amateurism is strongly opposed by Nodelman. According 
to him, as far as children’s literature is concerned, “everyone’s an expert. Everyone knows already.” Perry 
Nodelman. “There’s Like No Books About Anything”. In: Sebastien Chapleau (Ed.) New Voices in Children’s 
Literature Criticism
. Lichfield: Pied Piper Publishing, 2004, pp. 3-9, p. 3.
32
See Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature, p. 17.
33
Ibd., p. 6.

---

72 
assets. According to him, issues like the definition and interpretation of the terms “literature” 
and the “value” of a publication, reader-response criticism or multi-disciplinary approaches 
had already been long since the basis for the practitioners before they were eventually 
accepted by the academic apparatus.
34
An advocate of “DIY criticism”,
35
yet without 
“suggesting educational anarchy”,
36
Hunt requires an adequate term for his own approach to 
children’s literature criticism which takes into account its uniqueness, potential and its being 
of equal rank with any other adult approaches. This term he finds in childist criticism, which 
enhances the child-oriented aspect whilst retaining the academic claim to quality and status by 
a transfer of “arguments for ‘feminist’ reading to the area of children’s books”.
37
With his 
demand for an opening of theory and practice towards the child and all its interests in 
literature, the demand for a shift of relative importance from the book towards the reader,
38
and the call for a comprehensive poetics of children’s literature,
39
Hunt gives impulses for the 
further development of children’s literature as well as its criticism. As we will see in the 
following, this opening of the genre towards current publications which Hunt propagates
40
is 
one of the points of departure for the present study.
In North America, Canada and Australia children’s literature criticism also applies 
approaches and theories from adult criticism to children’s literature, thus acknowledging the 
genre’s claim to equality. In 1986, when modern children’s literature criticism was still 
struggling for acceptance, Zohar Shavit published the Poetics of Children’s Literature.
41
Yet, 
her stocktaking of the genre and a historical survey of its canonisation lack the poetic aspect 
announced in the title of her work. This is why authors and critics today are still demanding a 
poetics of children’s literature, preferably on an international basis, which actually lays down 
aesthetical, formal and content-related elements of the genre.
34
Compare Hunt, The Development of Criticism, p. 6. 
35
Ibd., p. 8.
36
Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature, p. 199.
37
Ibd., p. 192. In The Hidden Adult, Nodelman criticises this approach by claiming that adults cannot possibly 
read as children would, since they cannot fade out their adult knowledge. Compare Nodelman, The Hidden 
Adult
, p. 84. 
38
Compare Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature, p. 198.
39
Ibd., p. 14.
40
Such an opening concerns any non-canonical children’s literature, the existence of which Hunt denies. 
Compare Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature, p. 116.
41
Zohar Shavit. Poetics of Children’s Literature. Athens/ Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1986.

---

73 
Marxist critic Jack Zipes,
42
co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s 
Literature
, focuses on social aspects and structures in children’s literature. In Sticks and 
Stones: The Troublesome Success of
Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry 
Potter
, 
43
Zipes traces the development of landmark publications within a “post-industrial 
consumerist culture”.
44
Feminist criticism is represented for example by Roberta Seelinger 
Trites
’ Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Literature,
45
Reading
Otherways
46
by Lissa Paul and by Lynne Vallone, co-editors of The Norton Anthology of 
Children’s Literature
. Compiled by Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, the study guide 
The Pleasures of Children’s
Literature
47
presents a detailed cross-section of the many aspects 
of the genre’s criticism, covering illustrated texts, feminist, ideological, psychoanalytical, 
metafictional, intertextual, structuralist, narratological, ethnical and reader-response 
approaches.
The historical development and origin of most of the above-mentioned approaches and 
theories is analysed by Roderick McGillis’ The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and 
Children’s Literature
.
48
In Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial 
Context
,
49
he pursues the forms otherness can take in the genre. Studying other cultures and 
ethnicities can reveal valuable insights in and new views of structures – social, political, 
religious, economical, ecological or other - values and morals. Such comparative approaches 
are especially interesting with regard to fantasy, since otherness – worlds, beings, value 
systems etc. – plays an important role there. Otherness is for instance also taken up by Brian 
Atteberry’s Strategies of Fantasy.
50
The highly topical areas of crossover literature are for 
42
Compare Watson, The Cambridge Guide, p. 186; Lissa Paul. “Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory 
Knows About Children’s Literature”. In: Signal 54 (September 1987), pp. 186-201. In: Hunt, The Development 
of Criticism
, p. 156.
43
Jack Zipes. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry 
Potter
. New York; London: Routledge, 2001.
44
Daniela Caselli. “Reading Intertextuality. The Natural and the Legitimate: Intertextuality in Harry Potter”. In: 
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.) Children’s Literature: New Approaches, p.172.
45
Roberta Seelinger Trites. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Literature. Iowa City: 
University of Iowa Press, 1997.
46
Lissa Paul. Reading Otherways. Stroud: Thimble Press, 1998. Honig’s study on the development of feminist 
issues in 19th century children’s fantasy traces the historical conditions for present approaches. See Edith 
Lazaros Honig. Breaking the Angelic Image: Woman Power in Victorian Children’s Fantasy. New York; 
Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1988.
47
Perry Nodelman; Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. Boston et al.: Allyn and Bacon, 2003. 
[1992]
48
Roderick McGillis. The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. New York: Twaine, 1996.
49
Roderick McGillis. Voices of the Other. Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context. New York; 
London: Garland, 2000.
50
Brian Atteberry. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.

---

74 
instance analysed by Sandra Beckett
51
and Rachel Falconer
52
respectively, while an 
internationalisation of children’s literature, particularly by means of translation, is treated for 
example by Gillian Lathey.
53
The Australian John Stephens investigates the linguistic aspect of children’s literature 
criticism in Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction,
54
focussing on polyphonic 
discourse, narrative structure and its implications on the enculturation of children, whilst in 
Retelling Stories, Framing Culture
55
, he and Robyn McCallum deal with fantastic 
metafiction.
56