ABSTRACT
Literature written, published, and marketed for the benefit of the young audience has throughout centuries been employed as an instrument of power for socialization of a particular social group. Similarly to histories and literatures featuring disempowered groups, such as women, working classes, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, and indigenous people of colonized territories, children's literature is produced by those in power and thus reflects the empowered view of the disempowered. However, unlike other disempowered groups that have recently resisted oppression through writing their own histories and literatures – feminist, queer, postcolonial – children still occupy an inferior socio-economic position, and children's literature is therefore written, marketed, and consumed within the unequal power hierarchies. The interrogation of this asymmetrical power structure can only come from the empowered, which arguably makes the dilemma of children's literature more complex than that of any other marginalized category. Every book addressing a young audience inevitably has its shadow text that reflects the beliefs and opinions of the adults behind it. In most children's books, these are overt, but even books that seemingly take the child's part cannot fully deny adult authority. Heteronormativity has been strongly interrogated in queer studies. Children's literature, on the other hand, with very few exceptions, inevitably creates and maintains aetonormativity, that is, adulthood as norm. This fact is the most important premise for any consideration of children's literature and its connection with childhood.
