Zohar Shavit,
Poetics of Children's Literature,
The University of Georgia Press,
Athens and London, 1986 ©
PREFACE
Children's literature will be discussed here not within
the traditional pedagogic or educational frame of refer-
ence, but rather within that of poetics. Only a short time
ago, children's literature was not even considered a legit-
imate field of research in the academic world. Scholars hardly re-
garded it as a proper subject for their work, and if they did, they were
most often concerned solely with its pedagogic and educational value
and not with its existence as a literary phenomenon. This tendency
developed mainly as the result of two factors: first, the cultural con-
ception of childhood in society and the attitude toward children's
literature resulting from it; and secondly, the traditional evaluative
criteria for the selection of objects for research.
As a result of society's concept of childhood, children's literature,
unlike adult literature, was considered an important vehicle for
achieving certain aims in the education of children. This belief, how-
ever, meant that children's literature could not be accepted by high-
brow society as having a status equal to that of adult literature; con-
sequently, children's literature suffered from an inferior status within
the literary polysystem.
As long as the main criterion for selection of subjects for research
was normative and based on the text's evaluation, there was no room
for research of texts that were considered inferior or of little literary
merit. This is perhaps most tellingly revealed in the amount of space
devoted to children's literature in various national histories of liter-
ature and culture, in encyclopedias, and in curricula of university
literature departments. Without exaggerating, children's literature is
almost totally ignored by such cultural institutions. Still, children's
literature has not been altogether neglected by scholars and critics,
since some disciplines have dealt with it, such as librarianship, edu-
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cation, and psychological studies. The main questions that con-
cerned those fields were: What is a good book for a child? What is the
influence of a book on a child? How can it contribute to the child's
development?
Such important questions, essential as they may be for those fields,
have undoubtedly limited the scope of research to a large extent. In
order to free research of these limitations and allow room for new
and different questions, two drastic changes must take place in the
research of children's literature. First, scholars must indicate their
readiness to accept children's literature as a legitimate field of re-
search; secondly, they must be ready to regard children's literature as
literature per se, that is, to regard it as a part of the literary system,
which does not mean, of course, that the evaluation of the texts must
change as well.
These needed changes have already begun to occur in the hitherto
closed field of literary research. During the last ten years or so, new
interest has arisen in the field of children's literature, and important
work has been done, notably in the compilation of national histories
of children's literature. Unfortunately, the fact that a new field of
research is in the process of developing has not been fully exploited
by scholars. Instead of applying the latest achievements in literary
scholarship (in both the Eastern and Western worlds) to this new
field, most scholars have preferred to study children's literature
strictly within the context of traditional and overworn questions.
In this study I relate this newly developed field to the latest
achievements of poetics and semiotics, areas that are quite new to the
English-speaking world. I believe that the time has arrived to extri-
cate children's literature from the narrow boundaries of the past and
to place it in the foreground of literary scholarship, facing the future.
Hence, the point of departure in my study is the assumption that
children's literature is part of the literary polysystem, that it is a
member of a stratified system in which the position of each member
is determined by socioliterary constraints. Thus, it is an integral part
of society's cultural life, and only as such, should it be analyzed. This
conceptual change in the understanding of children's literature re-
quires the total exclusion of normative or ideological questions (such
as the contribution of a certain book to the child's welfare); moreover,
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it challenges the scholar to raise new and previously undiscussed
questions. With the help of these questions, I explore not only the
inherent nature of children's literature, but also general patterns of
behavior in the literary polysystem, as well as the particular cultura]
context in which children's literature has developed.
The study of both literature and culture can greatly benefit from
an in-depth examination of children's literature, for children's liter-
ature, much more so than adult literature, is the product of con-
straints imposed on it by several cultural systems, such as the educa-
tional, the ideological, and so on. Nevertheless, my approach to
children's literature, while aiming at an improved understanding of
its structures and patterns, does not aim to change the status of chil-
dren's literature within the literary polysystem; my primary aim is
simply to engender a better comprehension of this status and its
implications.
While I have deliberately avoided traditional evaluative questions
in this study, I have tried to raise new ones concerning the rela-
tionships between cultural concepts, images, and consciousness and
texts produced for children.
Thus my study endeavors on the one hand to analyze the way
society's changing concepts of childhood are responsible for diferent
texts for the child in different periods, while on the other, to examine
how the cultural position of children's literature imposes certain pat-
terns of behavior, such as a tendency to self-perpetuation, a read-
iness to accept only well-established models and reject new models,
the need to appeal to two contradicting audiences, and others.
It is not the isolated text I am interested in, nor the cumulative
history of any specific national children's literature. The issue at stake
is rather the universal structural traits and patterns common to all chil-
dren's literatures, taking into account the periods in which they occur
and the different rates of their development.
This study deals with issues and not with individual texts, with
historical processes and not with chronological descriptions, and fi-
nally, with structures and not with interpretations. The texts (mostly
English and Hebrew) have been chosen because they exemplify the
issues discussed and thus serve as the best test cases. The issues
appear to be cardinal as well as recurrent in the field; thus, their
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study addresses itself not only to scholars of children's literature, but
also to those concerned with semiotics, poetics, and the history of
culture. Therefore, my purpose here is two-fold: to contribute to the
research of semiotics and to open a new and fruitful direction in the
study of children's literature.
Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature
Tel Aviv University
IYL, Munich
April 1983
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