ABSTRACT
It will be clear by now that both the range of children’s books and the ways in which they can be studied are very extensive. Just as children’s books are part of the ideological structures of the cultures of the world, so their history is constructed ideologically (some of these issues are dealt with in Chapters 4, 5 and 9). The two most obvious constructions of history are from an Anglocentric viewpoint, and from a male viewpoint (although, of course, those ‘viewpoints’ are far from stable). Other constructions of history-such as a feminist, a feminine, or a ‘childist’ approach-wait to be written. (Some progress is being made with books such as Lynne Vallone’s Disciplines of Virtue. Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Kimberley Reynolds’s Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880-1910, and, more theoretically (and evangelistically) Roberta Seelinger Trites’s Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels).
