Children's literature (juvenile literature)

The term "children’s literature" encompasses nonfiction and fiction in many genres, some of it illustrated, created to inform or entertain children. The age of the target audience ranges from infancy through early adolescence. Contemporary scholars of Western children’s literature place texts from ancient folk tales and verse that were first part of an oral tradition to post–Harry Potter fantasy and Japanese manga under the rubric of children’s literature. Early children’s literature was intended to teach; books produced for children were designed to advance basic literacy or for moral or spiritual improvement. Even as entertainment overtook instruction as the primary purpose of children’s literature, books remained a means of increasing children’s self-knowledge and their understanding of worlds beyond the self.

Brief History

Prior to the invention of the printing press around 1440, books were luxury items. Few families could afford books at all, so few, if any, were printed for children. Children would have been exposed to stories, but were told folk tales and religious stories. The earliest examples of children’s literature are books that served a practical purpose. In 1658, Johann Amos Comenius published Orbis Pictus, an illustrated textbook frequently identified as the first picture book. The belief that reading the Bible was necessary for a devout life led Puritans to publish books such as John Cotton’sMilk for Babes Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments (1646), the first American book published for children, and A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671) by James Janeway, one of the era’s most popular books for and about children.

Another seventeenth-century influence on the development of literature for children was John Locke’s idea that the mind was a blank slate (tabula rasa) to be filled. Lock advocated pleasure reading for children. In the eighteenth century, books for children began to be published that provided the pleasure Locke promoted. Charles Perrault reawakened an interest in folk tales with his Tales of Mother Goose (1697). An English translation appeared in 1729. John Newbery (1713–1767) published Newbery’s Pretty Pocket Book (1744), complete with gender-specific toys to record good and bad deeds, in 1744. Newbery’s best known book, Goody Two-Shoes, has been called the first children’s novel. He also established the publishing of books for children as a viable profession. He is remembered as the father of children’s literature and memorialized through the John Newbery Medal, an annual award presented by the American Library Association to the author of the most distinguished American book for children from the previous year.

The nineteenth century, especially the latter third, is hailed as the golden age of children’s literature. Victorian stories for children continued to provide moral and religious instruction, but the translation of European fairy tales written by Hans Christian Andersen and compiled by the Brothers Grimm served as a harbinger of the flood of fantasy for children that was published in the nineteenth century, ranging from chapbook versions of the most popular fairy tales to some of the most beloved and enduring works of children’s literature such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1862), and Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem "Goblin Market" (1862). Both Kingsley’s book and Rossetti’s poem were often interpreted as religious allegories, revealing that imaginative texts could also instruct, if indirectly. On the other hand, some novels considered children’s books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) challenged conventional standards of "good" and "bad."

The end of the nineteenth century also saw an increase in literature that specifically targeted children by gender, a trend that continued well into the twentieth and even the twenty-first centuries. Girls’ books focused on the domestic world. Boys’ books were primarily either school stories or adventure tales. Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) by Thomas Hughes, though not the first, is one of the seminal texts of the school story genre. Although precursors stretch back a century, it was Hughes’s image of the British public school as a place that imbued boys with a proper manliness and made them into Christian gentlemen that defined the form. The school story became a staple of children’s literature and continues to be today. Hughes’s influence has reached well beyond his death. For example, scholars have drawn parallels between Tom Brown’s School Days and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Adventure tales were characterized by plots filled with action and thrills. Among the authors finding success in this genre at mid-century were W. H. G. Kingston, R. M. Ballantyne, and G. A. Henty, whose historical adventure novels described as imperialism for boys sold an estimated twenty-five million copies worldwide. In terms of critical acclaim and longevity, Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), written for his stepson, was the most successful Victorian adventure tale. Stevenson not only liberated the genre from didacticism but also created a protagonist who plausibly grows from ordinary boy to romantic hero.

Like Stevenson, Louisa May Alcott joined an established tradition and surpassed it. Little Women (1868) has been termed family drama, romance, and autobiographical novel, but Alcott wrote the book in response to her publisher’s push for a girls’ book. The book offers a detailed view of the domestic world even as it challenges that world in some respects. It was immensely popular from the beginning, and it became an iconic American text. Alcott followed Little Women with Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Lucy Maud Montgomery’s seven-book series which began in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables is another iconic girls’ series. More than 50 million copies have been sold, making it one of the most popular children’s series. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, eight books beginning with Little House in the Big Woods in 1932 and concluding with These Happy Golden Years in 1943, is another perennially popular series.

Overview

By the twentieth century, children’s literature had become big business. Publishing houses formed children’s departments, magazines and newspapers reviewed children’s books, and in 1915 the American Library Association established the School Library Division. In the early twentieth century Beatrix Potter, building on the tradition of picture books established by artists such as Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and Walter Crane, wrote and illustrated a series of animal stories that became classics. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) is perhaps the best known. Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats (1928) is a perennial favorite that has remained in print longer than most other picture books. The Poky Little Puppy (1942), written by Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren is one of the most popular picture books of all time.

The popularity of book series for children continued into the twentieth century. Any discussion of children’s series would be incomplete without a mention of Edward Stratemeyer who founded the Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate in 1906. Stratemeyer and his daughters who succeeded him provided outlines of plots for series books and hired authors to write the books, many of which were then published under a single, fictitious pseudonym. Among the best known of these pseudonyms are Laura Lee Hope (the Bobbsey Twins), Franklin W. Dixon (the Hardy Boys), and Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew). Although critics faulted the Stratemeyer books for formulaic plots and stereotypical characters, they were popular with the public, a popularity that endured through various modernizations.

Though the industry blossomed and began to reach wider audiences, children’s literature remained, in content and authorship, overwhelmingly white well into the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois included material for children in the Crisis, founded in 1910 as the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A decade later, Du Bois began publishing The Brownies’ Book, a magazine often cited as the beginning of African American literature for children. In 1922, Hopi artists Fred Kabotie and Otis Polelonema illustrated Taytay’s Tales (Grandfather’s Tales), a collection of Pueblo folktales collected and retold by Elizabeth Willis DeHuff.

African American representation in mainstream children’s literature tended to fall into racist stereotypes; The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) by Helen Bannerman, which inspired many stories featuring racial stereotypes of African Americans, is perhaps the best known example. Even as changes came in the wake of the civil rights movement, well-intentioned white writers were viewed as perpetuating offensive stereotypes, including William H. Armstrong whose novel Sounder won the Newbery in 1970 and Theodore Taylor whose book The Cay received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for advancing peace and social equality that same year. Books by African American authors such as Virginia Hamilton’s M. C. Higgins the Great (1974), Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962), and Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy (1999) provided realistic portrayals of African American life. All were Newbery Medal winners except The Snowy Day, the 1963 Caldecott winner and the first full-color picture book to feature an African American protagonist. In 2016, Cooperative Children’s Book Center reported that only 243 books were about and 105 books by people of color, out of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2015. The number of children’s books published by other racial minorities were even smaller. The attention given such recent award-winning books as Inside Out and Back Again (2011) by Thanhha Lai, The Crossover (2014) by Kwame Alexander, El Deafo (2014) by Cece Bell, Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña, and Thunder Boy Jr (2016) by Sherman Alexie offers evidence that diversity in children’s literature is an ongoing process.

The social changes of the 1960s brought a trend toward social realism in children’s literature. Some scholars credit Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), with its brutally honest protagonist, eleven-year-old Harriet, and her largely unengaged parents, for inaugurating this new realism. The 1970s brought an exceptional number of books that focused on topics that had been considered taboo in books for children. Among these were Norma Klein’s Mom, the Wolf Man, and Me (1972), whose protagonist, eleven-year-old Brett, is the daughter of an unwed mother who is single by choice; Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977), which deals with childhood death and childhood grief; and Deborah Hautzig’s Hey, Dollface (1978) about sexual attraction between two adolescent schoolgirls. Controversy followed these and other ground-breaking books. The Chocolate War (1974) by Robert Cormier has been controversial since its publication with parents, educators, and librarians criticizing its language, sexual content, violence, and dark theme. Judy Blume is arguably the most controversial of these authors. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), about puberty and religion; Deenie (1973), about scoliosis and wearing a back brace; and Blubber (1974), about school bullying and racism, were all banned. Both Cormier and Blume remained on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently challenged authors into the twenty-first century.

By the late twentieth century, the definition of "book" was shifting. The phenomenal popularity of Japanese anime and manga translated into English pushed mainstream trade book publishers to create graphic novel imprints. Books that combine modes also reached a growing audience. These range from books that come with a compact disc to books such as William Dean Myers’s Monster (1999) that includes handwritten journal entries, a film script, and photographs and Jeff Kinney’s best-selling Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2007) that existed in an online version several years before it was published. Yet in the midst of these new formats, children continue to cherish print books.

Bibliography

Anderson, Ryan K. Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sport Story. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2015. Print.

Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Print.

Fraustino, Lisa Rowe, et al., eds. Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2016. Print.

Levy, Michael, and Farah Mendlesohn. Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge UP, 2016. Print.

Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.

Lundin, Anne. Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

MacLeod, Anne Scott. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994. Print.

Mickenberg, Julia L., and Lynne Vallone, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.