Children’s Literature Land: A Beginner’s (Anthropological) Survival Guide
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21066/carcl.libri.15.1.1Keywords:
academia, children’s books, children’s literature scholarship, evaluation of children’s literature, mediators, publishersAbstract
Children’s Literature is a flourishing academic discipline worldwide, and an extremely complex one. If we are going to explore it, we must understand
how it has developed, and what it has developed into. I would like to take
you on a fanciful, synchronic, journey. Let us imagine an island – Children’s
Literature Land. It is densely forested with texts, and in the many clearings
live the tribes who all claim to be the true owners of the island. Not only do
they have their own dialects, but they can rarely agree about what is worth
saying about the books around them. They include the books-and-children
people, the educationalists and the librarians, who spend their time
getting real books to real children. At the other end of the island, there are
ancient libraries and multi-dimensional archives, where lurk dust-covered
bibliographers, bibliophiles and rare-book people. They live close to the
antiquarian booksellers, and the bookbinders, and have nothing to do with
children. Then there are the historians, and the wild archivists, and those
most extreme and addictive scholars who form the author-society tribes.
Dominating the island are the publishers and the media tribes, with their
slaves, the authors – although a few are still running wild – and there are
possibly poets for children although nobody knows whether they actually
exist. Or can. But where we must tread most carefully is in the Swamps of
Academia, for the three main critical tribes – the reviewers, the theorists,
and the inclusivists – still rampage freely there. The strangest tribes are the
wandering literary tourists, the most benign, the independent booksellers,
and the most harmless the Professors of Children’s Literature.
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