Imaginary childhoods: Memory and children's literature

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 42-50

  Krips, Valerie ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845277616     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8705.00106     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
2. These suggestions are set out in detail in John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. J. W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).
3. Jack Zipes, Fairytales and the Art of Subversion (Routledge: New York, 1991), 26-7.
4. Iona and Peter Opie (eds), The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 30. Their introduction to the collection provides a very interesting account of the conditions under which fairytales were introduced to Britain.
5. Quoted in Harvey Darton, Children's Books in England, 3rd edn, revised by Brian Alderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 241-2.
6. See Zipes's argument, op. cit., 46.
7. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), p. x.
8. It is worth noting that, given the vast numbers of children's books which have been published, second-hand copies are a relative rarity. In part this may be due to the child's destructive tendencies, but that would scarcely account for the absolute scarcity of first editions of novels for older children published in the twentieth century. It is reasonable to assume that people often hang on to their childhood books, and perhaps even pass them on to their children.
9. Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), 105.
10. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, ed. with foreword by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
11. One of the matters at issue here is the highly charged distinction between books for children understood as 'literature' and books which it is difficult or undesirable to group under that description. Discussion of this vexed topic goes well beyond the scope of the present essay, but it is worth noting that Ladybird books' association with pedagogy and particularly with learning to read marks them as belonging to the 'sphere of sociality' differently from Potter's version. My point would be that the concept of the genre as represented in the term 'literature for children' is not only unhelpful but actually misrepresents what is a very complex and sociologically fascinating genre. But for the present argument the term is retained to mark the difference between books whose primary purpose is to entertain children, as distinct from books which aim to teach.
12. See the discussion of this point in Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), ch. 5, p. 62.
13. Unascribed article, Guardian, 27 September 1987.
14. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (London: Verso, 1985).
15. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 44.
16. The point can be made differently for the very large books we also produce for children, and further for the restricted narratives and representations of the world found in children's books.
17. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255.