Childrens lit

• Stereotypes about children


  • Children are innocent and imaginative
  • Children are greedy and selfish
  • Children are vulnerable and easily manipulated
  • Children are consummate manipulators of adults
  • Children are shy and timid
  • Children are loud, hyper and obnoxious
  • Children need more freedom
  • Children need more discipline
• These stereotypes may or may not be accurate – they are certainly contradictory
• In this course, we will not attempt to find out the "true" answer to the question of what children are like – because we are not studying children, only books written by adults for children – and those books will reflect adults' changing and often contradictory views of what children are like, what they need, and what they can cope with
• Puritans (1500s)


  In England, some of the earliest works for children were endebted to Puritan ideas about sin. The doctrine of Original Sin states that we are born sinful, resistant to God and training. As a result early English children's tales emphasized the need for disciplining children, often harshly, and provided more cautionary tales and tales of Christian martyrs than cheery optimistic fairy tales. The Puritans thought of children as small, sinful adults. During the period there were also high mortality rates, so children's tales also offered preparation for the after life. Indeed, the afterlife was as important or more to many, so the literature privileged religion over education.
• Often the poems and stories in this period are heavily didactic. That is, they are designed to teach, and there is very little attempt to entertain; the idea that children need to be entertained had not really entered into the landscape of child-rearing and ideas about childhood at that time.
• Locke's essay (1690)


  Offered the concept of tabula rasa (a blank slate), and in doing so, he suggested children were not sinful, but very impressionable. This is probably a more familiar concept to many of us, and it also suggested that rather than innately sinful, children might be shaped entirely by environment. Locke's ideas began to change the way people saw children, and put new emphasis on the importance of childhood experiences.
• Rousseau's Emile (1762)


  Took Locke's ideas a step further, arguing that children are not miniature adults, but instead are innocent, naturally good and benevolent until they are corrupted by society. Rousseau believed that the source of evil is not Original Sin but instead society itself.
• Do Rousseau's ideas still contribute to our popular stereotypes about children?
• Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (1807)


  Explored the idea that before we are born our souls exist in heaven with God, extending the idea of childhood innocence (Rousseau) to an idea of a closer connection to the divine, a connection lost in adulthood. Wordsworth suggested that as we grow up, we lose our faint memories of heaven, our spiritual nature is trampled on, and we lose our imagination, spontaneity, and creativity. Therefore, adults can actually learn from children – an extreme position, but one that is still popular today.
• By the middle of the 19th century, these new ideas about childhood started to trickle into children's literature – people begin writing books specifically for children, and not just manuals on moral behaviour or tales of Christian martyrs.
• Children's literature is a recent historical phenomenon, though not as recent as the evolution of the idea of adolescence.
• Freud's Psychology


  The twentieth-century saw a bit of a backlash against the excessive idealization of children encouraged by the ideas of Rousseau and Wordsworth. Sigmund Freud's work explored the darker side of childhood. His theories assumed that children possess deep-seated rage and resentment of their parents. By the mid- to late twentieth century, works for children began to incorporate this perspective, depicting children as troubled, angry, and sometimes violent.
• Recent Studies of Childhood suggest that children are agents of change, should be allowed independent thought, decision-making etc. perhaps returning to the idea of children as "adults" but not in any simple way.
• The purpose of this historical survey is to demonstrate that our "common-sense" ideas or assumptions about children are in fact very much open to question and debate.
• As you begin to consider the works on this course, resist the temptation to analyze children's literature by making grand generalizations about what "children" are like and therefore judging literature on its "accuracy." Remember that we are studying children's literature, not children themselves!
• We don't have at our disposal the methods to conduct reliable sociological research on children's actual responses and engaging in it is antithetical to this course. Instead, we will be learning and applying methods of literary analysis to engage in interpretations about this year's particular set of novels, poems, and stories.
• Nursery rhymes


  The happy, rhythmic verses of early childhood. They often accompany skipping play and games, such as "Cinderella dressed in yella," "Red Rover, Red Rover, We call Sarah over." They include riddles, chants, and tongue-twisters. When they focus on the incongruous or unexpected, they become more nonsensical, and so we tend to call them nonsense rather than nursery rhymes.
• Nursery rhymes are often the first songs we learn and remember in Western culture.
• Some older nursery rhymes have been cleaned up, but once they featured acts of abuse such as people being kicked downstairs, kept in cupboards, or being soundly beaten for minor infractions.
• Older nursery rhymes with violence

  • There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children she didn't know what to do; She gave them some broth without any bread; She whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
  • Tom, Tom, the piper's son, Stole a pig and away he run; The pig was eat, And Tom was beat, And Tom went howling down the street.
• Exaggerated punishments and random violence were once hallmarks of such nursery rhymes, but perhaps no longer.
• Oral literature and written literatures form a hierarchy with the oral seen as "lower" than the written. Such hierarchies are often linked to class and gender, issues that will come up with some frequency over the course.
• Oral tradition of nursery rhymes

  Invites absurdity. Nursery rhymes and songs can come out of desperation rather than inspiration. If a nurse is trying to calm a screaming baby or child, they will sing the first thing that comes to mind, and if it works, it gets repeated.
• The songs that stick in our heads are those we've heard. They may come from a movie, a tv program, an ad. Hundreds of years ago, they may have come from ballads and street songs, cleaned up, queered and out of context.
• Characteristics of successful nursery rhymes and more literary poems

  • Economy
  • Concreteness
  • Musical devices
• Economy


  Nursery rhymes express their ideas and images in extremely few words, which makes them easy to remember, and focuses the ear on the rhyme
• Nursery rhyme with economy, concreteness, and musical devices

  • Cross-patch, Draw the latch, Sit by the fire and spin; Take a cup, And drink it up, Then call your neighbours in.
• Musical devices in nursery rhymes

  Rhyme, assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), consonance (repetition of consonant sounds), and repetition (of words or images) to create a visceral pleasure
• There's a joy in language play that disregards any sort of message. In fact, due to the lack of message, the pleasure comes from the pattern of sound alone.
• Aspects of nursery rhymes and simple poems

  • Patterns are exaggerated
  • More obvious than in other prose or poetry
  • Attention focuses on pattern due to the absurdity and meaninglessness
  • Pleasure comes from physicality of language
• Tongue twister


  • Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers
  • A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
  • If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
  • Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
• Mother Goose


  A name attached to many different rhymes and stories from different nations and periods. Most scholars agree that it's an excellent marketing ploy, not much more than that.
• While biographical details can be interesting, and I'll occasionally give you some background if I think it's applicable, for the most part we'll focus on the works themselves and how they can be interpreted.
• Edward Lear


  Together with Lewis Carroll, invented "nonsense" as a literary genre for children in the 19th century
• In everyday speech, "nonsense" may describe something unintelligent or unintelligible
• Literary nonsense


  Carefully crafted, absurd, and usually has its own sort of logic. It is not simply unlikely or improbable or unintelligent, but a genre of its own that draws our attention to language in addition to absurdity
• Nonsense has been linked to children's culture from its earliest appearance in the nonsense syllables of some nursery rhymes
• Nonsense in nursery rhymes

  • "Lavender's Blue, dilly, dilly"
  • "Hey Diddle Diddle"
• Literary Nonsense really began to flourish as a genre when it was taken up and pursued in a concerted way by Lear and Carroll
• Lear's nonsense verse


  • Often written off the cuff for individuals
  • Became a major body of work with enormous impact on generations of children