Literature. Children and innocence

[A.E.B.Bevan at open.ac.uk]

No: HPFGUIDX 25040

The `Independent' on 24 August  had another look at what is it with 
children's literature breaking the boundaries to adult attention.

Links to our discussions on the growth and experience and innocence 
themes here?

Edis

Why shouldn't the Booker prize go to a children's book?
'Most of the literature produced in Britain at the moment suffers 
from a fatal lack of ambition'
By Natasha Walker

See

http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/natasha_walter/st
ory.jsp?story=90301

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>>>
The news that Philip Pullman's novel The Amber Spyglass has been 
included in the longlist for the Booker Prize this year has caused a 
frown of dismay to cross the faces of some commentators. That's 
because The Amber Spyglass, and the trilogy to which it belongs, has 
been marketed as children's literature from its first appearance. 
Where next, ask some. Will Harry Potter's next outing be included? 
Would The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, if published now, be 
eligible to join those Booker stalwarts, Beryl Bainbridge and Ian 
McEwan?

And why not, ask others. Those fuzzy demarcations – literary fiction, 
popular fiction, adult's literature, children's literature, teen 
fiction, faction, memoir-as-fiction – are only lines drawn in the 
sand to try to reassure those who would like to keep literature in 
little boxes. As the recent surge in the popularity of so-called 
children's books such as Harry Potter or The Amber Spyglass suggests, 
people who like reading will read everything, and when they find 
something that shows imagination and energy they will fall on it 
greedily, even if they are, theoretically, 20 years too old for it.

(Snip)

What is so refreshing about Philip Pullman – and also about his 
colleague in the renaissance of children's literature, J K Rowling – 
is that he is crazily ambitious. Both of these writers want to create 
universes that are imagined down to the smallest detail and up to the 
grandest metaphor, and to take their protagonists on quests that go 
all the way from innocence to experience.

(Snip)

Above all, he doesn't – as so many of the great writers for children 
did in the past – try to keep children in a box of innocence. This 
was the imaginative failing of writers such as C S Lewis, J R R 
Tolkien, E Nesbit or Arthur Ransome. For them, childhood was a land 
of perfect innocence. Their characters lived in an eternal state of 
pre-adolescence. For Lucy and Edmund, for Frodo and Bilbo, there can 
be no worldly experience, no sexual knowledge. Such writers had no 
desire to reflect children's complexity. That's one reason why it 
would have felt out of place for such children's books to be judged 
alongside writers for adults.

But writers such as Pullman or Rowling do allow their child 
protagonists to grow up. In the last Harry Potter book, Harry and 
Hermione begin to fancy other kids at school and to get caught up in 
the self-consciousness of adolescence. At the end of The Amber 
Spyglass, Pullman wholeheartedly celebrates sexual experience. In 
such books, childhood is not a separate, becalmed state, but is criss-
crossed by knowledge and experience.

(More text snipped)

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