From: Perry Nodelman <perry_nodelman>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:59:09 -0500

On 16-Jul-09, at 9:50 AM, Megan Schliesman wrote:

> Perry, I know your thinking about this and the other ideas you explore
> in "The Hidden Adult" have developed over many years. I'm wondering if
> there were specific texts--perhaps among the six you examine in the
> book, or others you read along the way--that really helped bring this
> idea of children's literature as a genre that in is part about
> conveying
> adult ideas and values to child readers into focus.

In point of fact, the six books I discuss in detail in The Hidden Adult are ones I never looked at all that closely before I began to work on the book. There's a section in the second chapter where I explain how I went about selecting them, and one of the things I say there is that I wanted to focus on books that, while perfectly good books, didn't seem remarkably special or noteworthy, because making an argument about the conventional characteristics of texts based on outstandingly special books was bound to be less convincing. (I need to add, because I know that Monica Edinger is likely to read this, is that I did decide to choose just one very special, very noteworthy book in order to include that category in my group to discuss closely, and so ended up with Alice in Wonderland as one of my six books).

Anyway, as a result of all this, I didn't in fact do a lot of talking in The Hidden Adult about the books that I'd thought most about it before beginning work on this book--the children's books that had most delighted and interested me and were most influential in guiding my thinking about what children's literature is and can be. These books include Sendak's Wild Things, Potter's Peter Rabbit, White's Charlotte's Web, Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy, Stevenson's Treasure Island, a bunch of Dr. Seusses, Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Hutchins' Rosie's Walk, Cormier's The Chocolate War, Hoban's The Mouse and His Child, Brian Doyle's Angel Square. But after working on the six books I did choose and arriving at a sense of what characteristics seemed to recur in them, I realized I did need to look more closely at the question of whether or not the special, distinctive books did also share conventional characteristics of the genre, and how they might be like or unlike more conventional books. As a result, there's a section in the last part of the book about how Peter Rabbit and the Harry Potter series relate to the typical conventions of children's literature

I should add that those books I especially love are especially a challenge for me to think about in terms of the characteristics of children's literature I focus on in The Hidden Adult because I do tend to be suspicious about a lot of writing for children and characteristically obvious and not-so-obvious ways of being manipulative of its implied child readers. I find myself having to admit that some of the things i like about those likeable texts are exactly the ways in which they work to manipulate their readers, including me.

Perry

_____________ Perry Nodelman http://pernodel.wordpress.com/

Book Trailers: The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3t7JAfPQeA The Ghosthunters2: The Curse of the Evening Eye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qapDE1Kwnis The Ghosthunters I: The Proof that Ghosts Exist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0ow7oQV7k
Received on Thu 16 Jul 2009 10:59:09 AM CDT