| Focusing on contemporary children's literature, this study takes as its starting point texts ranging from picturebooks for the young pre-reading child through early novels for the primary-grades reader to fictions of near-adult complexity; most texts discussed, including Jon Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Beverly Cleary's six Ramona titles, are widely recognized by practitioners of children's literature. By examining the polarized responses provoked by certain phenomena in these texts---artistic innovation in the postmodern picturebook, arousal and control of emotion in neosensational texts, the pervasive underestimation of the everyday-life story, the cultural position of children's literature classics, and the nonacademic nature of the literature's dominant canon---I seek to place these debates in the historical and cultural contexts from which they are often severed. The issues these texts raise, issues of art, issues of quality, issues of morality, issues of definition, are children's literature's most provocative, and responses to them offer implications for larger views of children and of literature. More than looking at texts for children, I look at us looking at such texts, examining the basis of the establishment of children's literature criticism and situating it in the larger cultural debate as well as in overall literary discourse. I have also drawn on research and practice in library science, education, history, sociology, and art, synthesizing work in disciplines that have in the past tended to remain discrete despite frequent commonality of purpose and even of scholarly approach. My enterprise is to analyze what assumptions each point of view implies and what, ultimately, these arguments suggest is the work of children's literature in contemporary culture. |
