Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark
My rating: 2/5 cats
so i assume this is someone’s published dissertation or something. i didn’t expect it to be riveting, but i did sort of expect a cohesive argument. to distill it to one thought: children’s books are not as well respected as this lady would like them to be. done. i just saved y’all a bunch of reading time. the best thing about this book were some nice quotes. from ray bradbury:
Baum was, at heart, a little-old-maid librarian crammed with honey-muffins and warm tea. Lewis Carroll sipped his tea cold, digested ciphers and burped logic gone a teensy bit awry. Carroll would have got you out of bed at five in the morning to recite logarithms. Baum would have leaped into your bed and done you in with a pillow fight.
and anthony holden:
The more popular (or bestselling) an adult book…the less likely it is to be considered literature, while the popularity of a children’s book sees big literary claims being made on its behalf.
this last quote comes after b.l.c. gets whiny about the new york times creating a separate bestseller list right before the release of the fifth harry potter book, because the first four volumes were still on the adult bestseller list, and the assumption was that the fifth one would also make the list, and that would suck for adults who wanted to read books designed for adult tastes. and i don’t always agree with the books that make the bestseller list, but good lord—five harry potters at one time? it’s absurd. i just don’t agree with this argument about the victimization of young literature. even though i have recently come to see that the current crop of children’s and teen fiction is much more sophisticated and entertaining than i had believed before i started this class, it still is what it is: literature intended for younger readers. and considering how many adults read teen fiction and harry potter and the like, her argument has no validity. there are tons of critical responses to literature for the young adult, and millions of adults are reading books designed for teens and younger. i suspect more adults are reading twilight this summer than are reading gravity’s rainbow. her dissatisfaction with the marginalization of children’s books, and then her dissatisfaction with its “bestseller” status brings me to my last quote, from horace scudder:
We are no doubt unreasonable readers; we object to the blood-and-thunder literature, and when in place of it we have the milk-and-sugar we object again. What do we want?
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