ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship of children’s literature scholarship in the wider contexts of literary history and literary theory. The growth of childhood studies programmes, which include children’s literature, suggests that the richness and variety of the subject has been fertilised by the incorporation of theoretical perspectives from psychoanalytical criticism to narratology. The importance of cultural theory to Masters programmes in children’s literature indicates that the future of the subject rests in an understanding of the multiple discourses – of education, family, book supply, media influence – which surround children’s books. The absence of children’s literature in studies of twentieth-century literature is more obvious and also, perhaps, more surprising. While children’s literature specialists have begun to acknowledge the significance of modernism and modernity to the texts produced for children, mainstream literary studies of modernism remain ignorant of texts for children.
