ABSTRACT
It has been widely argued that children’s literature studies should not ghettoise themselves, but make every use of critical techniques. There is no shortage, as a sceptic might remark, of schools of criticism, nor of books which will outline their principles. But the fact that the work of such schools can be productively applied to children’s literature is demonstrated by Roderick McGillis’s The Nimble Reader (1996), which shows the relevance of schools of thought from formalism to feminism. (General textbooks such as Raman Selden’s Practising Theory and Reading Literature (1989) are also useful.)
In the present book, four chapters (5, 7, 8, and 9) cover the major general areas of literary theory and practice; other particularly fruitful approaches for children’s literature are those concerned with the analysis of narrative, discourse in general, and the cultural structures reflected in texts. ‘Structuralism’, for example, although perhaps somewhat outmoded as a critical fashion, can be very fruitfully employed even if, as Rex Gibson observed in the context of education, ‘it might appear to have little to offer…. Its insistence on systems, wholes, relationships, together with the apparent devaluation of the individual in its “decentring of the subject”, all run counter to the child-centred, individualistic, humanistic assumptions that those working with children might be supposed to share’ (Gibson 1984:105). Yet it is precisely this level of abstraction which is valuable to those concerned with individual reactions of readers to texts.
