ABSTRACT
Children’s literature has long posed a conundrum for scholars. Critics working in the field question whether the novels, stories, poems, and plays considered children’s and juvenile literatures—almost unanimously written by adults—are really for young people at all. Others debate whether we could—or even should—identify conventions and tropes that distinguish children’s literature from other literary modes or genres. This chapter explores the history of and the key players in the last half century of scholarly discussions about how children’s literature both enforces innocence and encourages agency, and about how its unique aesthetic markers the recent critical interventions of psychoanalysis, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, animal studies, and ecocriticism, among others.
