Mavis Reimer

Readers: Characterized, Implied, Actual

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 2.2 (2010) In its Fall 2010 issue, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly has published a special section assessing the impact on the study of texts for young people of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction twenty-five years after it first appeared. Reading the essays collected for the section prompted me to remember my first encounter with Rose’s book and the bold claim on its opening pages that

Introduction: The Compulsion to Repeat

There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people: while series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for children and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth century,1 the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people. The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-alone, high-quality texts of literary fiction. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), for example, has occupied critics in the field far more often and more significantly than all of the 46 popular novels about schoolgirls with similar plots that were published by Grahame’s contemporary, Angela Brazil (beginning in 1904 with A Terrible Tomboy). Literary fiction such as Grahame’s tends to be defined in terms of its singularity — the unique voice of the narrator, unusual resolutions to narrative dilemmas, intricate formal designs, and complicated themes -often specifically as distinct from the formulaic patterns of series fiction. Yet, curiously, scholars typically use examples from literary fiction to illustrate the common characteristics of books directed to young readers: it was Grahame’s book, and not Brazil’s books, that appeared in the Children’s Literature Association’s list Touchstones as one of the “distinguished children’s books” the study of which “will allow us to better understand children’s literature in general,” according to Perry Nodelman, who chaired the committee that produced the list (2).