ABSTRACT
All literary works contain ... sub-texts, and there is a sense in which they may be spoken of as the 'unconscious' of the work itself. The work's insights, as with all writings, are deeply related to its blindnesses: what it does not say, and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal or ambivalent about it may provide a central clue to its meaning. (Eagleton 1983, p. 178)
The realisation of a text, and especially of a text for children, is closely involved with questions of control, and of the techniques through which power is exercised over, or shared with, the reader. Many of the confusions over the status and quality of children's books and literature stem from the assumption that they must necessarily be, in Barthes's terms, lisible rather than scriptible, readerly rather than writerly (Brooke-Rose 1981, p. 41 ), 'closed texts' which the skilled reader reads 'below capacity'. By attempting to control the text in certain ways, writers 'require' readers to read only within both implied and defined limits, and texts become, in Bakhtin's terms, 'monological' rather than 'dialogical' or 'polyphonic' (Seldon 1985, p. 17). Generic expectations are consequently self-fulfilling: children's books are as they are
because writers assume, from what they write, that that is how they should be. Hence children's books are very frequently perceived as being of poor quality by definition, because the mode or genre is primarily defined unconsciously by the textures of implication within the text (most clearly seen in the stylistic features which this chapter will examine), and consciously by content items or overt relationships with the audience. Texts which challenge these assumptions commonly find themselves in the noperson's land between writings for adults (so-called) and writings for children (so-called).
