Preface to Children’s Literature: Changing Paradigms and Critical Perspectives in Ireland and Beyond
Author: Anne Markey (The Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature) and Aedín Clements (University of Notre Dame)
Comments
Rethinking children’s literature lies at the heart of the mutual investigation in which the various contributors to this issue of Breac are involved. Since their emergence as a distinct branch of Anglophone print culture over the course of the eighteenth century, books for young readers have reflected diverse and changing adult concerns and values. While early commentators, including the socially conservative Sarah Trimmer and the more radical William Godwin, were acutely aware of the ideological power of children’s books, it took two centuries for the study of children’s literature to achieve academic respectability. The establishment of the Children’s Literature Association in the United States in 1971, followed by the adoption of children’s literature as a division of the Modern Language Association in 1979, resulted in an increasing acknowledgement of the cultural, social, and political significance of different types of books for children and a concomitant appreciation of the value of the academic study of such texts. Before and since the 1970s, boundaries for what has been considered “proper” for inclusion in children’s books have shifted, and continue to shift considerably, reflecting broader socio-cultural changes and developments. Critical approaches to children’s literature have been similarly influenced by shifting ideological imperatives. In Ireland and elsewhere, the study of children’s literature emerged in institutions involved in teacher-training and is currently guided and shaped by the recognition that it is a complex, challenging, contested, and continually expanding field. With this issue of Breac…