Children's and Young People's Literature

The creation of a literature generically conceived for an audience of children and young people is a recent phenomenon. The new psychological and educational theories of the twentieth century see childhood and adolescence as stages that are distinct from adult life. The school, space for an individual's development along the road to adulthood, uses the text book as an element that conveys knowledge. The book, then, becomes an educational tool created to codify the most appropriate content through writing and reading. Again, literary reading has managed to find its way into the schoolroom and to become considered as a fundamental part of learning for young children and adolescents with its contribution of dealing with universal themes and, in particular, pleasure in aesthetic values. Literature becomes an enjoyable and also personal and creative activity, requiring of the reader an involvement in the imaginative re-creation of its contents. Finally, the young child and adolescent exercise their critical faculties vis-à-vis the text, a skill arising from the incipient capacity for abstraction that will characterise them as adults.

The first steps in the search for appropriate texts for the youngest readers go back to the nineteenth century, in particular to the new rationalist approaches in the sphere of education. The spirit of the romantics and their work in recovering popular folklore was the main fount of resources for these early readings. Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, along with many others, set about retrieving and writing up texts – folktales, stories and songs – from the oral tradition. This kind of storytelling is highly standardised with clear moral and didactic content. A simple structure facilitated transmission and a growing popularity so that these stories quickly became a tool for entertainment and learning. At the same time, certain works of European literature, while they were not addressed to any particular readership, were very successful among younger readers. The adventure story (Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas) and the modern tale (Lewis Carroll, Carlo Collodi, J.M. Barrie) are the more outstanding genres and some of these books (Treasure Island, Peter Pan, and The Three Musketeers, for example) were to become classics that went into many editions in collections for young people. In no case are these works lacking in literary merit, but the fantastic elements of the genre and the structure of the initiatory journey – as metaphor for the stages the young person goes through on the way to maturity – were sufficient in themselves to make these books appealing to a younger readership. Again, these novels are based on historical settings and scientific and cultural knowledge, and thus conveyed information from these fields under the pretext of the pleasure of reading.

However, the concept of a branch of literature specifically addressed to children and adolescents was a phenomenon that characterised the twentieth century. The social changes that came with industrialisation, a different social model that advocated schooling as a right for all and the appearance of new ideological and pedagogical trends stimulated interest in producing texts that responded to the needs and possibilities of readers. Although fantasy and adventure were still recurring, sought-after genres, even though they were not exclusively aimed at young readers – Michael Ende, Roald Dahl, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, J.R.R. Tolkein – historical and social changes coming about with the Second World War, urban marginality and racial conflict gave rise to the current of critical realism. The genres of "adult" literature were adapted and reinterpreted with children and adolescents in mind. Hence, young readers learned to understand the world for themselves at the same time as they were taking as their literary references texts that, in their codification, would to prepare them, in due course, for embarking on more demanding reading. Continue reading...