Ideologies of Childhood and the History of Children’s Literature
Ideologies of Childhood and the History of Children’s Literature
Histories of childhood and children’s/YA literature are constructed by considering:
What counts as literature?
What do we mean by “children” and “YAs”?
How does literature fit into broader cultural, ideological, and historical contexts?
The answers to these questions guide what is included in a literary genre's history. History is always influenced by conscious and unconscious perspectives and biases.
Why History Matters to the Study of Children’s Literature
Every reader has an ideology of childhood or adolescence, influencing how they read and understand literature. This ideology includes conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs, and values. These ideas often seem like common sense or truth.
Studying the history of youth literature reveals that ideas about childhood have changed over time. Current attitudes are only the tip of a large iceberg. What people believed about children in the past differs significantly from current beliefs.
Icebergs and Ideologies
Ideology acts as a framing device, enabling and limiting what we see, like a window. It includes consciously and unconsciously held beliefs and values that structure our attitudes and actions. It is challenging to look at the ideologies that inform our actions.
Consciously held ideologies are easier to locate and explain. Unconscious ideological positions are absorbed to the point they seem like common sense, related to how we think about ourselves in relation to others. These include racial and ethnic attitudes, prejudices, attitudes toward gender and family structures, and expectations for a good society and happy life.
It is essential to examine how ideologies appear and are reinforced in youth literature to understand child culture. We need to look at the window rather than merely through it and examine the motivations behind our thoughts and emotional reactions. As you read, look for shifts in cultural attitudes toward childhood.
Evolution of Ideologies of Childhood
Children need practical training for their social roles, without special stories.
Children are immature adults who need to be hurried into adulthood.
Children are gifts from God, needing cherishment, correction, and instruction according to religious dictates.
Children are born with aggressive tendencies and need stories showing consequences for antisocial actions to develop morals and self-control.
Children are blank slates, influenced by surroundings and education, which should emphasize human superiority and protection of the natural world.
Children are born good, with justice and compassion, needing protection from negative influences and ambiguous morals.
Young people are the hope to save the world.
Children are diverse and capable of learning with the right approach. They need positive representation to understand their communities and realize their potential. Adolescence is a distinct stage of life.
Newer ideas dialogue with older ones, refining, challenging, reinforcing, or transforming them. Thinking historically allows us to recognize connections and disruptions and consider the conditions that enable our attitudes. It is important to consider if children have changed or if our interpretations of them have.
states that “The history of children’s literature is inseparable from the history of childhood, for the child was made through texts and tales he or she studied, heard, and told back.”
The culture has to have a sense of who the audience is and what they need to know as they grow into adulthood. The contemporary idea that we should also consider what will make them happy is a more recent notion, as is the claim that children are somehow made through stories.
The concept of childhood as a separate stage of life didn’t exist in traditional Western societies before the Middle Ages, according to French historian Philippe Aries. In his 1960 book, "Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life," he stated that “In medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist” . This statement has been challenged. Hugh Cunningham argues the translation lacks the meaning of “sentiment” in the original French.
Eva M. Simms elaborates that the issue was a lack of a sense of adulthood. Before the eleventh century, adults and children participated in communal rituals evenly. The advent of the Crusades and spiritual pilgrimages marked the first time people left their villages. Simms argues that only when YAs began to loosen their ties to their families and communal traditions to follow such private destinies that a new psychological awareness of individual personality and maturity developed.
Children become children when adults become more ‘adult’ ” .
World historian Peter N. Stearns notes that there is now a general agreement among historians that all societies in all times have had some way of designating a fundamental difference between childhood and adulthood. Aries inaugurated the scholarly study of children in society, his work prompted scholars to view childhood as a social construct that draws from and influences the entire range of discourses that define a culture. We must ask:
What do children mean to a culture politically, economically, and spiritually?
How should they be educated?
What should their lives look like, and what responsibilities should they bear with respect to the welfare of the family?
How complex are their emotions, memories, and inner lives?
When do they become adults, and what markers distinguish childhood from adulthood?
Are the teenage years special in some way, and if so, what are the expectations for those years?
Are the concerns of childhood so fundamentally different from those of adulthood that we perceive children themselves as wholly “other”?
Do children themselves have any influence, agency, or voice in how they are perceived, or are they wholly subject to what adults imagine them to be?
To formulate scholarly, critically informed answers to such questions, we will begin by considering how they have been answered in the context of historical developments. What follows will contain a lot of generalizations, both about the sweep of history and the function of stories and storytelling.
For hundreds of years when alphabetic literacy was limited or nonexistent, ideas and traditions were shared property, and any innovations required the approval and uptake of the whole group
Development of Children’s and Young Adult Literature from the Pre-Print Era to the Early Twentieth Century
Before Print: From Cave Paintings to Agrarian Folklore
Children have always needed special attention, care, and training to prepare for adult roles in their communities. Much of that training comes through stories, poems, and songs, conveyed orally or through drama, dance, and visual art.
Our story starts with hunter-gatherer societies. Cave paintings and other artifacts suggest a tradition of representational storytelling. Barbara Kiefer speculates these paintings served a similar function to picturebooks, combining the visual and verbal. R. Dale Guthrie argues some paintings depicting scary hunting scenes and sculptures of females were created by adolescent males, making them a proto-YA literature, expressing fears and longings.
Stearns argues that birth rates were likely low because children drained limited resources and couldn’t contribute much to their welfare. Children weren’t involved in hunting until around fourteen, and work for the entire group was only a few hours a day, leaving time for community play. There probably wasn’t much division between adults and children during leisure, so it’s safe to speculate that little thought was given to creating separate stories for children. Children would have learned and perhaps even contributed to the stories of their group alongside their adults, implying that children’s and adolescent literature started long before print culture developed and alphabetic literacy became widespread.
Agrarian Societies
Stearns notes that agriculture around 9000 BCE marked the first significant change in human economies. Agrarian life was the most common lifestyle for most of the world’s children until the 1800s. The summer months of vacation were originally freed up to enable children to work in the fields. We associate the condition of being young with the early days, or “childhood,” of culture itself. Many people idealize a rural lifestyle as simpler, purer, and more natural, adjectives we associate with the contemporary ideas we hold of childhood.
Rural life was an existence of hard work in which children were expected to participate as fully as they were able. Unlike hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies feature tasks children as young as four or five could manage. As people realized the potential for children to contribute useful work on farms and in-home manufacturing, birth rates went up, and parents had to figure out ways to keep older children emotionally tethered to home as well as economically dependent so that they would continue to contribute their labor to the family.The growth of agriculture marks, then, the true birth of adolescence as an extended period between childhood and adulthood.
The agricultural context also involved greater task differentiation between males and females. In hunter-gatherer societies, the work of females was just as important as the work of males to the daily life and survival of the family. Men took on the economically more productive outside work and gained power through laws of property ownership, resulting in the growth of patriarchal attitudes in family life. Children, particularly girls, were viewed as property that the father could dispose of as he liked, and neither boys nor girls had much power to resist the fates their parents mapped out for them. Over time, an economy grew up based on land ownership, the threat of conquest, and the subsequent need for protection, resulting in the development of a rigid class hierarchy
The stories that grew out of this environment were thus aimed at legitimating gender roles and distinctions as well as, possibly, meeting psychological needs of escape from the clutches of grasping adults through fantasy scenarios. Instead of a rigid division between stories for adults and stories for children, the chief distinction was between stories for the lower classes and stories for the wealthy, each aimed as representing the world in such a way that class distinctions were confirmed and naturalized.
Many fairy and folktales that we give to very young children today center on adolescent concerns like leaving home, defeating giants and ogres, seeking one’s fortune, and finding a mate or being forced into marriage with a beast or a stranger. These stories were likely shared with children of differing ages to reconcile them to the lives and restrictions that they had little choice but to just accept.
The Growth of Education from the First Century BCE to the 1500s
With the advent of the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean came formal education for a small minority of elite children who could afford to enter the tuition based schools, often taught by educated slaves. Literature was still transmitted through the temporal arts, such as oral poetry, drama, music and dance, and through visual storytelling in murals, tomb and vase paintings, frescoes, bas-relief sculptures, carvings, and mosaics. The key purpose of education was moral and practical.
Moral instruction came through classical literature featuring the exploits and failures of great men and women, as well as mythology and the animal fables of Aesop; students would have learned such classical texts as Horace’s Odes , Ovid’s Metamorphoses , and Virgil’s Aeneid as well as the earlier Homeric epics, the Illiad and the Odyssey, which are still taught in today’s secondary schools.
Young scholars would also learn literacy and numeracy in the service of rhetoric, political history, geography, law, rigorous critical thinking, and proper conduct. Socrates was officially tried and put to death for the crime of “corrupting the youth” by teaching young men to question the belief systems and authority of their parents.
There was general agreement among the Greeks and Romans that young people, while aesthetically pleasing, needed strict adult guidance and should be pushed to adopt adult perspectives as soon as possible. Such an attitude militates against the development of a literature specifically aimed at children, either for instruction or entertainment; to learn to think and behave like an adult, after all, you must read what adults read. Because of the cultural disparagement and legal disenfranchisement of youth and the often harsh treatment of children as part of their education, very few adult writers looked back on their childhoods with fondness.
The religions of the book that grew in the midst of Mediterranean culture--Judaism, Islam, and Christianity--were profoundly important to the spread of literacy as well as instilling a new, more positive attitude toward children in general, making them essential to the development of Western children’s literature. Stearns notes that these religions “all highlighted the pride and responsibility of parenthood, and particularly fatherhood (though Christianity, uniquely, also had the strong image of the loving mother of Jesus).”
Children were perceived as a gift from God rather than a financial boon or burden; they possessed a unique soul from birth, and the responsibility to instruct them in the beliefs and traditions of their religion became an imperative act of stewardship for which parents were accountable to God. Juliana, the Roman banned Christians from teaching the classical curriculum at all. Christian teachers thus increasingly turned to allegorical stories and plays that built on biblical texts.
Children and adults would have learned the stories of the Bible and the saints through the iconography of Catholic and Orthodox churches, which often related the narratives in sequential panels rich with symbolism, much like contemporary wordless picturebooks or comics. The Pauline injunction to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” necessitated the ability to read and understand the scriptures for oneself, thus prompting the growth of literacy and translation, despite lethal consequences for translating the scriptures from Latin to the ordinary languages of the people .
For instance, the Roman Catholic Church burned John Hus, an advocate of individuals having access to the scriptures in the language they actually used, at the stake in 1415 using manuscripts of John Wycliffe’s English translations of the scriptures as kindling.
Parents were committed to teaching their children to read and memorize scripture, as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records that seven people were executed in 1517 for teaching their children to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than Latin. And during the various Inquisitions that began in the twelfth century and lasted through the early nineteenth, Jews, Muslims, and Christians whose beliefs were deemed heretical in the affected countries continued to teach their children to read and memorize their sacred texts in secret. But whether officially sanctioned or dangerously private, the upshot for children and their literature was that nearly all schooling after the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, whether at home or through the church, was undertaken under religious auspices; the idea of secular education didn’t reappear until universities at Bologna and Padua were established in the late twelfth century, and much later in England and the United States.
This early background helps us understand the contexts that conditioned the development of children’s literature. People needed to have a compelling reason to learn to read, and a culture of schooling needed to be in place. Additionally, attitudes toward children and young adults had to reach a point where they were seen as being in need of teaching, worth teaching, and teachable. Further, the instruction of children had to be cast as a political or religious duty so that children would be given the time away from other work to pursue learning. High-born children bore the special responsibility of establishing and/or maintaining friendly relationships with others of their rank in order to maintain the strict delineations of class in the feudal economies of medieval Europe. Books of courtesy, manners, and conduct thus supplemented religious texts for young royals and nobles, often directly linking courtly manners with religious piety, as does The Babees Book . But conduct and manners were also taught through Aesop’s Fables and the romances found in works like the Gesta Romanorum (Acts of the Romans) and the Welsh tales that would later form the Mabinogion and the Arthurian romances. While these tales had an ostensibly moral purpose, their draw for children was probably based on their exciting plots, which featured a lot of magic, fighting, and tests of honor.
Development of Print Texts for Children from the 1400s till 1600s
Hand-copied books of courtesy were only circulated among the upper classes. The next development necessary for the evolution of a recognizable youth literature was a new technology: mechanized printing. In the time periods we have canvassed thus far, books were not the primary education materials, even in schools. Books were rare, expensive and precious, and for good reason: a single hand-copied edition of the Bible could take up to three years to produce, and children’s hands are often sticky. Prior to the development of print technologies and the invention of paper, literacy was taught through the use of wax tablets, and even when printed books became more readily available after the invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1400s, they weren’t generally allowed in the hands of children. Instead, schoolchildren would use hornbooks, which typically contained an alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, common vowel and consonant combinations, and Roman numerals.
It wasn’t until 1658 that a book of words and pictures was written and published especially for children to be used in schools, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures), by Czech educator John Amos Comenius . Comenius was incredibly important to the development of children’s literature not simply because this particular text established the tradition of using illustrated books for children for educational purposes, but also because of his general philosophy of education, which included a commitment to universal instruction, the teaching of reading through ordinary or vernacular language, and the idea of starting with pictures of objects familiar to children in order to introduce new words and concepts. He wanted children to enjoy their studies; in short, he introduced the idea that children needed materials specifically designed for their experiences and abilities so that learning would be intrinsically motivating. This makes him a relatively unsung hero in the history of children’s literature, even though the US National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) does give an award in his name for the best nonfiction books for children each year.
Comenius established the progressive organization of schooling from kindergarten through university that we use today, wrote textbooks for various age groups, and championed a model of education that would enable all students to gain a comprehensive knowledge of their world and its history. His early textbooks were thus among the first printed works especially designed for young audiences.
Comenius shared with the Puritans and other Reformation thinkers like John Calvin the belief that children were made in the image of God, but tainted by original sin from birth and in need of salvation. The most important task of education, then, was to make children aware of the consequences of following their natural inclinations toward sin and to encourage them to seek salvation through grace and then pursue good works.
John Locke’s New Way of Thinking About Children
While the emphasis on moral and religious instruction dominated children’s literature in the 1600s, the development of print enabled secular texts to be more widely circulated as well. Children had access to horror stories as well as traditional tales and ballads through the stories told by exasperated nursemaids anxious to scare their charges into compliant behavior, as well as through the circulation of chapbooks and broadsides.
Chapbooks were short, poorly made pamphlets sold by peddlers in Britain, usually for a penny, starting in the sixteenth century. They contained poems, abridged versions of popular works, and woodcut illustrations. Broadsides were large sheets of paper printed on one side that sometimes contained news, but more often ballads, poems, and woodcut illustrations. The tabloids of their day, the cheap publications aimed to titillate their readers with stories about brave knights, dangerous fairy folk, and monsters such as “Rawhead” and “Bloody Bones.”
English philosopher John Locke objected to the sharing of such stories with children, not just because they were secular or irreligious but because they went against the project of the European Enlightenment, which sought to encourage reason and individualism over and against tradition and superstition. Unlike the Puritans, Locke rejected the idea of original sin, and believed instead that children’s minds were what he called tabulae rasae—blank slates.
Locke believed that, like the soft wax tablets on which former children had been taught to read and write, the minds of children were susceptible to impressions given to them through stories; therefore, it was imperative that those stories did not perpetuate the superstitions that would make children fearful. Instead, children should be introduced to the natural world without fictionalizing, fantasy, or superstition, and made to understand that their distinctly human minds made them naturally superior to lesser beings. Locke followed Comenius in advocating for simple books that would charm children as well as educate them. They should learn about and care for their environment, but not be subject to it, and they should be taught that any problems they encounter could be solved through knowledge and reason. They must always seek to make progress in understanding the natural world and facilitating better social structures and institutions that promote the education and well-being of more and more people.
Locke’s basic idea, that children are born blank slates, has come to dominate contemporary thinking about children. Today we call this a social constructivist position, meaning that children are largely products of their environment. Contemporary positions differ from Lockean principles in the positive value given to imaginative literature. Locke’s emphasis on a completely naturalistic and rational education for children disallowed any metaphorical explorations of fear and inordinate desire, which he believed would not exist in children’s minds if they weren’t implanted by stories. By contrast, our current understanding of children leads us to consider that they may be attracted to stories of the sort Locke would not approve because such stories meet some innate psychological need. There is also a subtle but important difference in outcome between Locke’s notion of the tabula rasa and the traditional Christian idea of original sin.
Interestingly, Christian belief in original sin has more in common with Sigmund Freud’s positions about innate aggressions, desires, and jealousies than Locke’s; while all three positions contend that childhood experience is crucial to the development of the kinds of adults each considers healthy and well adapted, both the Freudian and Christian positions agree that children have some inborn problems to confront and overcome. Locke, on the other hand, held the optimistic belief that proper educational methods would prevent irrational fears and superstitious beliefs from existing in the first place.
Rousseau radicalized the notion of human nature even further by suggesting that children were born with a carefree, innocent goodness that is ultimately corrupted by adult society: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; but everything degenerates in the hands of man” .
Rousseau believed that children’s minds are in between those of animals, who act in their own self-interest and can’t be considered good or bad, and the decadence of a depraved adulthood which once again chooses self-interest but does so out of pride and envy, in the full knowledge of right and wrong, and is thus culpable.
In Emile, or On Education , Rousseau laid out his ideal education plan for a fictional child, arguing against childhood reading as burdensome and proposing instead that children should be reared in the company of a tutor who would answer questions and encourage the child’s natural curiosity. Rousseau’s equations of childhood with nature, innocence, and peaceful pleasure formed the basis of the Romantic view of childhood.
Effects of Industrialization on the Children’s Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
A belief in natural human goodness began to take precedence in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A belief in human nature as naturally good subtends the faith that it is possible to make the world a better, more just place if only we can preserve and augment that goodness through proper education methods.
Matthew O. Grenby points out that, beginning in the early 1700s, a new way of thinking emerged that encouraged the sentimental attachment between middle- and upper-class mothers and their children; such a shift in parenting practices away from harsh discipline toward more tender treatment would certainly make recollections of childhood sweeter for the economically privileged, literate child
Increasing industrialization had a lot to do with changing attitudes toward childhood. Beginning around 1760, new manufacturing methods spurred the growth of factories and afforded families the opportunity to improve their incomes, at least in theory, if they moved to cities. Industrialization brought with it a sense of alienation. Birth rates went up, though child mortality was still quite high. Child labor became a valuable commodity The living and working conditions were horrific for children. Additionally, pollution was a major concern in cities; cities were grimy and smelly, and the soot-laden air was hard to breath.
Early Children's Publishing
Such nostalgia is an important impetus to take up writing for children in the first place, whether it be in fond, fuzzy remembrance of a childhood untainted by the effects of industrialization, or in a desire to invent such a childhood as an alternative to present horrors. The growth of industrial practices generally made children’s publishing something you could make money doing.
Publishers found that oral folk and fairy tales sold well in print, increasing the availability of fiction of a nonreligious variety. In fact, the success of pleasurable books for children, including English-language versions of Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose in 1697 and The Arabian Nights Entertainment in 1706, led to a backlash of moral and didactic work. Leading the charge was Sarah Trimmer who became the first children’s book reviewer with her aptly named publication The Guardian of Education . Trimmer was joined in her efforts to improve the moral and educational quality of children’s literature by Anna Laetitia Barbauld , Hannah More , Maria Edgeworth , and Mary Martha Sherwood . White children of various social classes were portrayed in everyday situations within domestic stories that included children's ordinary language.
Child Labor Reforms
The attention paid to the voices and virtues of ordinary children in literature made the spectacle of child labor that much harder to bear. Sunday schools were established in the 1780s to educate factory children, often alongside their parents, on their one day of the week off. But the ideology of the Romantic child set against the actual lives of urban children inspired public outrage and activism that resulted in the first child labor laws being enacted in England. The Cotton Regulation Act of 1819 set the minimum working age at nine, with paid inspectors coming on the scene through the Regulation of Child Labor Law of 1833. Later, the Ten Hours Bill of 1847 set a limit of a ten-hour workday for women and children. Twenty-eight of the then forty-five United States had laws regulating child labor by 1899. The period from 1760 to 1870 saw significant growth in the middle class and sustained growth in per capita income in such countries, and the addition of steam technology to printing processes meant greater availability of books for all classes of people.
Despite the efforts of Trimmer and her like-minded contemporaries to remove fantasy from children’s books, folk and fairy tales continued to find their way into children’s hands.
Inspired by the Grimms, later collectors such as Joseph Jacobs and Andrew Lang in England and Peter Christen Asbjǿrnsen and Jǿrgen Moe in Norway searched the countrysides of their native lands for folktales. Hans Christian Andersen pulled motifs from the folktales of Denmark to create his own original literary fairy tales, which set Christian themes in fantasy settings. It is probably more precise to consider many of these folk and fairy tales as YA rather than children’s literature, but writers over the years have drawn from this rich source material to produce new work for a range of ages
The Golden Age of Children’s Books
A rising middle class, a flourishing publishing industry, greater levels of literacy, an inflamed social conscience, a more pronounced distinction between the sacred and secular, and increased nostalgia for an idealized childhood all combined to create a robust children’s book trade that has come to be referred to as the golden age of children’s books. A wider variety of books appeared, some supporting and others challenging the overt didacticism of their predecessors.
For older readers, humor, parody, and nonsense appeared on the scene, with Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House poking gentle fun at family life in the tradition of Jane Austen, Heinrich Hoffmann’s outrageous Struwwelpeter developing and the first texts specifically focused on teenagers as well. A strong emphasis on manliness and selfreliance threaded through the European, Australian, and North American ideal of character.
Despite her loss of the American colonies, England was still invested in maintaining an international empire, and the infant United States had troubles of its own with the Barbary pirates; such conditions necessitated inspiring young men and women with a patriotic love of country and a taste for adventure and the glories of battle. Captain Frederick Marryat thrilled young readers with his semiautobiographical accounts of swashbuckling battles. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island took place during this time.
Adolescent literature was growing in America as well, with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women , both taking their teenage characters’ moral development, as well as their country’s moral health and need for reform, as their subject. New printing technologies prompted some of the most prominent illustrators of the day to turn their attention to illustrating children’s books. Children’s poetry and nursery rhyme collections appeared in illustrated editions. New kinds of fantasy emerged as children fell down the rabbit hole with Alice in 1865, traveled with Dorothy to Oz in 1900, and flew away to Neverland with Peter Pan in 1904.
Gentler messages were found in the realistic texts of the period, which focused primarily on girls healing their communities through their cheerfully tenacious optimism. But while this spate of girls’ titles set against boys’ adventure tales makes it seems as though the line between gendered reading was firmly drawn, Edward Salmon noted that girls “don’t care for Sunday-school twaddle; they like a good stirring story, with a plot and some incident and adventures—not a collection of texts and sermons and hymns strung together.” Children’s magazines flourished during this time as well, the most famous, perhaps, being St. Nicholas. Master storytellers Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and Kenneth Grahame all contributed to this truly golden period of enduring and beloved children’s literature.
The ideological projects, if not the character depictions, carried through youth literature in the nineteenth century were becoming more diverse. Imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiments found their way into young people’s books, with religious sentiments pressed into service on both sides. Nonwhite characters were occasionally represented in the texts, but almost always in positions of inferiority, as was the case with characters who were Jewish or Irish. Works of this ilk, such as Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes, show indigenous characters working cooperatively with the white protagonists, but ultimately emphasize the superiority of Western civilization and Christianity. More ambiguous is the position taken in a text like Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses . Tracing ideologies of the period through these texts, then, requires care and subtlety as they reflect both explicit and implicit attitudes circulating at the time regarding race, class, ethnicity, and gender. Given the class-driven economics of publishing, print youth literature remained, however, a primarily white, middle-class enterprise.
Divergent Views of Adolescence in Children's Literature
There is an implicit acknowledgment throughout literary history that the changes that come between childhood and adulthood require some sort of special attention, even if that attention is framed in negative terms. The term “adolescence” comes from the Latin adolescere, which means to mature or become established, as a plant does. It didn’t come into the popular vocabulary in reference to people, however, until the publication of American psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s two-volume study called Adolescence: Its Psychology and its relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Religion in 1904.
Like Aries, Hall deserves some pride of place for opening an interdisciplinary conversation about adolescence. For instance, Hall coined the phrase Sturm und Drang, “storm and stress,” to refer to the mood disruptions, conflict with parents, and risky behavior associated with the teenage years. There is, of course, some biological basis for moodiness and risk-taking during the teen years, but authors have long believed in the power of literature to actively socialize and redirect rather than merely reflect and enforce what comes naturally.
As economies and social hierarchies change, the need for certain types of personalities and values change as well, and this may be one way to understand Lerer’s idea that the child is made through stories.. Teenagers are especially vulnerable to personal exploration through external models, teenagers are overwhelmingly competent in adventure tales, They don’t spend their time moping or fighting with their parents, and their risky behavior is championed as necessary and nearly always rewarded with success. the empire was flourishing, New worlds were waiting to be discovered. Battles were glorious. Dragons were conquerable. Villains were easily thwarted.
Children’s and Young Adult Literature from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present
The golden age of children’s texts is generally considered to have ended around 1915. They imagine more and sometimes differently than the histories or realities out of which they are born. They operate according to a logic of desire rather than fact. In particular, the literature a culture produces for and about its young reflects more than its current state of scientific and theoretical knowledge; instead, it functions as a barometer of its fears, beliefs, and aspirations for itself. Conquest, human and environmental abuse and oppression, and war always require stories to inspire and justify participation.
decades during and after the world wars offered such havens through the fantasies of A. A. Milne, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, the historical fiction and alternate histories of Rachel Field, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Geoffrey Trease, Arthur Ransome, and Joan Aiken, and the family stories of Noel Streatfeild, Elizabeth Enright, and Eleanor Estes.
Diversity in Youth Literature: An Ongoing Quest
there has also been a growing recognition that all children are not equally served by the children’s and YA literature on offer. In fact, children of various ethnic and racial heritages and/or non-normative genders, and those who have physical disabilities or neurological differences, if they are represented at all, are more likely to be confronted with either belittling or romanticized stereotypes than fully realized character representations.
To counteract the persistently negative imagery that black children were faced with in their daily lives as well as their literature, W. E. B. Dubois started a children’s magazine for black children in 1920 called The Brownies’ Book that listed the following purposes.
Despite these and other standouts, and despite continued efforts of librarians and critics to champion books that featured non-stereotypical depictions of indigenous and non-European characters written by authors who hailed from these groups, though, children’s literature of the early twentieth century retained its publishing origins as a mostly white, middle-class enterprise, as Nancy Larrick noted in her landmark 1965 article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books.” the focus that surfaces in multicultural literature shines a light on the relative value of the group versus the individual.
Oppressed and underrepresented people groups tend to have a strong sense of their corporate identity, resulting in you will find more emphasis on history, intergenerational memory and respect for elders and traditions, and narratives of strong community responsibility in books from minority cultures. Such individualistic notions of both the possibility of fame and recognition and personal responsibility for one’s own behavior inform discourses of one-person-one-vote majority-rules governance, capitalism, private property, family structures, child development, and personal aspirations to stand apart from the group
The literature directed specifically at teenage readers that emerged in the 1970s has a slightly better track record in terms of diversity, featuring more nonwhite writers as well as texts that frankly explore the problems of class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender. Rather than construct adolescence as an apolitical world inhabited by energetic and resourceful heroes, these newer texts responded to the social problems of their day and admitted that justice doesn’t always prevail, and not everyone survives. Today’s YA literature continues in this mode , featuring books that focus on intersectionality. the IDEOLOGY OF CHIILDHOOD may be responsible for the lack OF DIVERISTY.
Conclusion
This chapter explored the ideological, economic, and social conditions that enabled literature for children and adolescents. What we believe about children and ourselves determines what we write and buy for them. Sharing the world with young people are indicators of what we hope for them, and what