0681506350
CHL2601
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
ASSESSMENT 7
NB PLEASE PARAPHRASE YOUR OWN WORK TO AVOID PLAGIARISM
QUESTION 1
Children’s literature as a separate genre is relatively a new phenomenon since it was considered
subordinate until the middle of the eighteenth century. Only after the system of adult literature had
been fully established, literature for children began to develop as its independent part. According to
Peter Hunt, children’s books began to move from the didactic to the recreational by the 1850s, and
by the 1950s, children’s literature was fully recognized as a distinctive area of the literary world.
Since then, it has developed and expanded significantly. The criticism of children’s literature as an
academic discipline has developed only during the last 30 years. However, the first signs of interest
in the cross-cultural influence and the international spreading of children’s literature appeared much
earlier within the discipline of Comparative Literature. Children’s literature is any narrative written
or published for children and we include the ‘teen’ novels aimed at the ‘young adult’ or ‘late
adolescent’ reader.”
The history of children’s literature is closely connected with the development of the notion of
childhood, and the changes it underwent during the last two centuries were directly reflected in the
production of children’s books. As John Rowe Townsend suggests, “before there could be children’s
books, there had to be children – children, that is, who were accepted as beings with their own
particular needs and interests, not merely as miniature men and women”. Thus, before children’s
literature could develop as a separate genre, two conditions had to be fulfilled. Firstly, the
awareness that childhood is essentially different from adulthood and therefore requires special
treatment; secondly, the social conditions that enabled children to learn to read and be educated.
Nevertheless, children read and enjoyed books long before there were books actually produced for
them. The beginnings of children’s literature lay in times long before the first stories actually meant
for children appeared, and before the first books were written down.
In the medieval times, not specialties of childhood were accepted due to the established theological
concept and the harsh conditions of life. Thus, the differences between the children and adults were
not recognized. In those times, no real distinction was made between the entertainments for
children, so children simply used the adult works that were attractive for them. “In the Middle Ages
‘children’s literature’ … was simply the literature of the entire culture”. Literature existed mainly in
