Adultness in Children's Literature
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Adultness in Children’s Literature: Toward the Awareness of Adults’ Presence in Children’s Literature Yukino Semizu, MA. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2013 ABSTRACT This study focuses on the notion that adults’ response to children’s literature is profoundly different from that of children, and aims to identify a pattern in texts by which adults’ response can be systematically explained. The study suggests that adults respond to certain elements in the text that resonate with their assumptions about children’s literature. On this basis, the concept of adultness is introduced to refer to these textual elements, and the way in which they can be identified in the narrative is investigated. This study concentrates on literary books, mostly published after 1960, since the issues discussed are more directly relevant to literary works than to popular fiction or classic children’s literature. Brief surveys of historical development of children’s literature and changes in the social perceptions about the relationships between adults and children are undertaken in order to understand the backgrounds of adults’ assumptions about children’s literature. Discussions about adults’ perceptions of children’s literature today are also reviewed. Texts from a wide range of children’s literature are examined within the theoretical framework of narratology with a particular reference to the functions of the narrator. The examination has identified two types of adultness: direct adultness which is largely related to adults’ ideas about childhood, and indirect adultness which is related to adults’ interest in what may be relevant to the child readers of the book. The third type of adultness is termed as Haddon’s ring, which refers to the textual features that are used by authors to keep the narrative safe for child readers. It can be used without losing the narrative integrity or it can be used to manipulate the narrative development. The study concludes that adults’ response could be explained by referring to the three types of adultness. Adultness can be broadly understood in terms of the textual signs that indicate the presence of the mutual understanding between the author and the adult reader on what has been left out from the text and why the author has held it back. ACKNOWLEDGMENT First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Paul Thompson for his unfailing support throughout my writing process with instructive feedbacks and kind encouragement. He had an unenviable job of keeping a mountain goat of my thinking in a pen in a tidy garden. I cannot thank him enough. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Surrey Translation Bureau who, for more than two years, have been reassuring me that they would always have me back when I become available. This is a privilege not normally available for freelance translators. And I would like to thank my family for their forbearance. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………...1 Rationale and scope of study ………………………………………………..1 Overview of the study ……………………………………………………...20 CHAPTER 2 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ……………………………………………………………………………………29 CHAPTER 3 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: CHILDHOOD ……………...40 Dependable adults and stable home ………………………………………42 Becoming being …………………………………………………………….46 The standard no longer ……………………………………………………53 Adults in children’s literature today ……………………………………...55 CHAPTER 4 ASSUMPTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS ……………………..68 Perceptions about children’s literature …………………………………...69 Adults’ approach to children’s literature …………………………………73 CHAPTER 5 AUTHORS’ VOICE ……………………………………………...84 CHAPTER 6 HIDDEN ADULTS ……………………………………………..100 Addressing adults …………………………………………………………100 Shadow text ………………………………………………………………..113 Not so hidden adult ……………………………………………………….127 CHAPTER 7 NARRATOR’S VOICE ………………………………………..138 The narratee of children’s literature …………………………………….144 Narrator, focaliser and adult audience …………………………………..152 Narrator’s adult voice: a first person narrator …………………………160 Narrator’s adult voice: a third person narrator ………………………..189 Haddon’s ring ……………………………………………………………..214 CHAPTER 8 TEXT ANALYSIS ………………………………………………258 CHAPTER 9 DISCUSSION …………………………………………………...293 Children’s literature and adults ……………………………………...293 Adultness in children’s literature ……………………………………302 CHAPTER 10 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………..320 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………326 Notes 1. Authors of novels are referred to by their full names but when the author is referred to as a critic or a reviewer, and when they are repeatedly referred to in the discussion, the convention of referring only to the last names is applied. 2. The quotes from picture books have no page numbers provided, as the books are not marked with page numbers. 3. The terms ‘the child reader’ and ‘the adult reader’ are used when discussing a particular book, and ‘child readers’ and ‘adult readers’ are used when the discussion is about reading in general. However, where this distinction is not critically important either set is used depending largely on the structure of the sentence, i.e. mainly to avoid the use of the pronouns, s/he and her/his. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Rationale and scope of the study I imagine the perfectly achieved children’s book something like a soap-bubble: all you can see is a surface – a lovely rainbow thing to attract the youngest onlooker – but the whole is shaped and sustained by the pressure of adult emotion, present but invisible, like the air within the bubble (Jill Paton Walsh in Hollindale 1997, p.40). This description of children’s literature leaves little to argue against except for the use of ‘you’. When this ‘you’ is an adult, what is inside the bubble is by no means invisible. Paton Walsh’s choice of metaphor is apt in that, colourful they may be, soap-bubbles are transparent and adults cannot help but see the ‘adult emotion’ at work through their rainbow-coloured surface. Moreover, if adult readers are able to see what is meant to be invisible to child readers, it can be speculated that the same text of children’s literature is likely to produce different responses in adult and child readers. Few would argue against the notion that, when reading literature, children and adults read differently and the difference is often considered to reside in the quality of reading skills: children have not yet fully developed skills in reading literature (Rosenblatt 1965, Postman 1982). This further implies that children can be helped 1 by adults to understand what adults appreciate. This may be the case with general literature, which in this study refers to the literature that is not classified as children’s literature. In the case of children’s literature, it has been pointed out that the difference is not a matter of degree but of the nature, in that adults cannot read children’s literature as children do (Hunt 1996, Hollindale 1997, Nodelman 2008). Adults may occasionally think or even believe that they are reading a children’s book as a child does, but this is a misperception. Since texts of children’s literature are created in a particular way, as Paton Walsh’s description suggests, adults cannot read children’s literature as children do, any more than they can be children. Despite the awareness that there is a difference, in what way adults’ response to children’s literature differs from that of children, and how the difference influences adults’ views about the book they read, have so far not been given a great deal of attention. Since criticism and reviews of children’s literature are almost entirely based on adults’ reading, it is essential to understand adults’ response if children’s literature criticism is ultimately to serve children for whom the books are written. Based on this belief, this study asks the question: When adults read and evaluate children’s literature with the aim of mediating the book to children, how do we take into account the fact that we are adults?’ The italicised phrase defines the scope of this study: it focuses on adults’ response 2 to children’s literature when they are reading on behalf of children, since it is this particular reading context that demands a distinct approach to evaluation. Adults may read children’s literature as a piece of literary work for their own interest or they may read it for the purpose of social, historical or other fields of academic research. These reading situations are outside the concern of my study, since each case is likely to require its own critical criteria, and the question of different response between adults and children may not be a relevant issue when children’s literature is read for these purposes. It is also out of the scope of this study when adults read a work of general literature even if their aim is to mediate the book to children, since established methods of evaluating literary works with appropriate modifications are likely to be sufficient for this purpose. How adults read texts that are not designed for them is one of the key issues in children’s literature criticism. The aim of this study is to identify in texts of children’s literature a pattern of textual elements by which adults’ response can be explained, and the identified pattern will be formulated into a model by which adults’ responses may be examined when they read children’s books on behalf of children. It is hoped that the model will provide a new perspective from which children’s literature can be studied with particular reference to adults’ response to the text. The first significant critical work that drew attention to the idea of dual response to children’s literature was Wall’s The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Literature (1991) which argued that the narrator of children’s literature could 3 address adults while talking to children. Wall classifies the narrator’s voice into single, double and dual address, and traces the historical development of narrator’s voice in children’s literature.