ABSTRACT
The critical study of children’s literature has become well established and has explored questions like ‘What is children’s literature?’, ‘How are children shown in children’s literature over the centuries?’, ‘What are the ways in which children’s literature can be studied?’ Professor Peter Hunt, the scholar and critic, has illuminated these questions in his course, one of the first, on children’s literature at Cardiff University and in his many lectures, presentations and books. A good one to start with is An Introduction to Children’s Literature, which covers the history of, mainly, British children’s literature and explains the different ways in which the subject can be approached. Writing here of the power of children’s books he comments that their characters – ‘Cinderella, Pooh Bear, the Wizard of Oz, Mowgli, Biggles, the Famous Five and Peter Rabbit – are part of most people’s psyche, and they link up not simply to childhood and storying, but to basic myths and archetypes’ (Hunt, 1994: 1). So children’s writers both tell a story and transmit cultural values.
