Children's literature

   

There is some debate as to what constitutes children's literature. Some would have it that children's literature is literature written specially for children, though many books that were originally intended for adults are now commonly thought of as works for children, for example Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, or Huckleberry Finn. The opposite has also been known to occur, where works of fiction originally written or marketed for children are given recognition as adult books. Witness that in recent years, the prestigious Whitbread Awards were twice given to books marketed as children's books: Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The Nobel prize for literature has also been given to authors who made great contributions to children's literature, such as Selma Lagerlöf and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Often it is hard to reach consensus on the question of whether a certain book is a children's book or not, for example, The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Many authors specialize in books for children. Other authors are more known for their writing for adults, but have also written books for children, such as Alexey Tolstoy's The Adventures of Burratino. In some cases, books intended for adults, such as Swift's Gulliver's Travels have been edited (or bowdlerized) somewhat, to make them more appropriate for children.

Certain characteristics are shared by most works of fiction commonly acknowledged as children's literature, though for each characteristic there are dozens of counter-examples, making it difficult to define children's literature according to them. Works of children's literature often:

  • Have children as protagonists (counter examples: My Friend Mr. Leaky by J.B.S. Haldane is a children's book with an adult protagonist; The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger is an adult book with an adolescent protagonist)
  • Do not contain adult themes (counter examples: Junk by Melvin Burgess is a children's book with adult themes)
  • Are appropriate for children (a problematic criterion, as the definition of "appropriate" is subjective; also, many adult books are deemed appropriate for children).
  • Are relatively short (counter examples: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling)
  • Contain illustrations, in particular books intended for younger children (counter examples: many graphic novels are considered adult books)
  • Are written in simple language (counter examples: Skellig by David Almond)
  • Are plot-oriented (fewer descriptions and ruminations)
  • Deal with themes of growing up, coming to age and maturation
  • Are educational, or else contain tales of fantasy and adventure
  • Have a happy end, in which good triumphs over evil. (counter examples: Katherine Paterson has written books with difficult if not unhappy endings, such as Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins, and Lois Lowry's The Giver ends ambiguously)

Because of the difficulty in defining children's literature, it is also difficult to trace the history of children's literature to a precise starting point, though John Newbery's publication of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in 1744 is considered a landmark for the beginning of pleasure reading marketed specifically to children. Previous to Newbery, literature marketed for children was intended to instruct the young, though there was a rich oral tradition of storytelling for children, and children adopted adult literature that they found diverting. Among the earliest examples found in English of this co-opted adult fiction are Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the Robin Hood tales.

Publishers have attempted to further break down children's literature into subdivisions appropriate for different ages. In the United States, current practice within the field of children's books publishing is to break children's literature into pre-readers, early readers, chapter books, and young adults. This is roughly equivalent to the age groups 0-5, 5-7, 7-11 (sometimes broken down further into 7-9 and pre-teens), and books for teenagers. However, the criteria for these divisions are just as vague and problematic as the criteria for defining children's books as a whole. One obvious distinction is that books for younger children tend to contain illustrations, but Picture books which feature art as an integral part of the overall work also cross all genres and age levels.

The success of a book for children often prompts the author to continue the story in a sequel, or even to launch into an entire series of books. Some works are originally conceived as series: J. K. Rowling has always stated in interviews that her original plan was to write no fewer than seven books about Harry Potter, and some authors, such as the prolific Enid Blyton and R. L. Stine, seem incapable of writing a stand-alone book. In several cases, series have outlived their authors, whether publishers openly hired new authors to continue after the death of the original creator of the series (such was the case when Reilly and Lee hired Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue The Oz series after L. Frank Baum's death), or whether the pen name of the original author was retained as a brand-name-de-plum for the series (as with Franklin W. Dixon and the Hardy Boys series, Carolyn Keene and the Nancy Drew series, and V. C. Andrews and the Flowers in the Attic series).


Some noted awards for children's literature are:

Famous Works of Children's Fiction

See also

External links


de:Kinder- und Jugendliteratur eo:Porinfana literaturo it:Letteratura per ragazzi hu:Gyermek- és ifjúsági irodalom nl:Jeugdliteratuur ja:児童文学 pl:Literatura dla dzieci i młodzieży fi:Lastenkirjallisuus zh:儿童文学

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