Transcending Boundaries

Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults

Sandra L. Beckett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135685935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults is a collection of essays on twentieth-century authors who cross the borders between adult and children's literature and appeal to both audiences. This collection of fourteen essays by scholars from eight countries constitutes the first book devoted to the art of crosswriting the child and adult in twentieth-century international literature. Sandra Beckett explores the multifaceted nature of crossover literature and the diverse ways in which writers cross the borders to address a dual readership of children and adults. It considers classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Pinocchio, with particular emphasis on post-World War II literature. The essays in Transcending Boundaries clearly suggest that crossover literature is a major, widespread trend that appears to be sharply on the rise.

Part I
Critics, Crosswriting, and the Canon

Chapter 1
Crossing the Border

Authors Do It, but Do Critics? The Reception of Dual-Readership Authors in the Netherlands

HELMA VAN LIEROP-DEBRAUWER

Introduction

Ever since the emergence of a literature specifically meant for children in the second half of the eighteenth century, there have been authors who write for adults as well as for children (henceforth called dual-readership authors¹). In the beginning, when children’s literature was still developing into an independent literary market, there were many dual-readership authors. The reason these authors did not write exclusively for children, but combined it with writing for adults, was mainly financial: The target group of young readers was relatively small. It also undoubtedly had something to do with the low status of children’s literature. A significant number of children’s books were published anonymously.² Particularly for men with a high social status, it was considered inappropriate to write for children. The general view was that women were closer to children and therefore better suited for the task. When, in the course of the nineteenth century, the division between children’s literature and adult literature became sharper and the demand for children’s books increased, the financial argument declined and the number of dual-readership authors went down. The low status of children’s literature, however, did not change.

In the past two decades, the number of dual-readership authors has again increased. This goes for the Dutch-speaking regions, as well as for other language areas.³ In Dutch-speaking regions this increase is explained by the literary emancipation of children’s literature in the 1980s and 1990s. In children’s literature, attention now is paid to the literary form of the text, whereas, in the 1970s, people focused on the engage content. As a consequence of this literary emancipation, the gap between writing for children and writing for adults where form has been stressed since the beginning of the twentieth century⁴ has been diminishing.

Galef divides the group of dual-readership authors into three categories. According to him, the most frequent category is the group of authors of adult literature who, for some reason, begin writing for children during their career. An example of an author with such a career is Roald Dahl. The second category of authors develops a career in the opposite way: They start as authors for children, then decide to write for adults.⁵ Galef mentions Russell Hoban as a representative of this category. The third group of authors is described by Galef with the term “polygraphy,” a designation that indicates that this group consists of authors who have always combined their writing for children with writing for adults. A. A. Milne is one such writer.

Although there has been a substantial number of Dutch-speaking dual-readership authors since the second half of the eighteenth century, only a few have succeeded in being highly valued in both literary systems.⁶ The majority of the authors are canonized in one, but not in the other literary system, or are marginalized in both systems. In the last fifteen years, however, many authors have established themselves in both literary systems.

The question is if, and in what respect, contemporary dual-readership authors influence the relation between children’s literature and adult literature. In what way does their presence change the heretofore low status of children’s literature when compared with adult literature? The answer to this question requires an analysis of the reception of these authors in recent literary studies and contemporary reviews in journals of both literary systems.

Literary Studies

The first thing that strikes one when searching in Dutch literary studies for an answer to the question just raised is that in children’s literature studies done since the 1980s, there is structural attention to the literary emancipation of children’s literature. These developments have led to discussion of whether or not the traditional borderline between children’s and adult literature still exists. In this debate, dual-readership authors are mentioned several times as an illustration of the blurring of these borderlines:

That in the past few years the traditional demarcation between children’s literature and adult literature has been breached several times might best be illustrated by the growing border traffic. From both directions, authors who want to augment their radius of action go on a scouting expedition…..In any case, the number of authors of adult literature who have published one or more children’s books in the past few years, is striking.⁷

A majority of the authors mentioned by Van den Hoven (1994) are authors from Galef’s first category: authors of adult literature who at a certain moment made their debut in children’s literature, for example, Mensje van Keulen, Sjoerd Kuyper, Toon Tellegen, Nicolaas Matsier, and Willem van Toorn.

For some people, especially academics, the developments in children’s literature are a reason to argue that children’s literature should have a position equal to that of adult literature. A few scholars⁸ are even inclined to integrate children’s literature into adult literature.

In the same period, literary critics within the adult literary system have paid little structural attention to children’s literature and the border traffic between children’s literature and adult literature. Occasionally, there is some interest: A single journal devotes a special issue to children’s literature⁹ and, in some histories of literature, the authors do not confine themselves to occasional notes on a single children’s author, but instead give an overview of recent developments in children’s literature.¹⁰ It must be said that the authors of these overviews either are working in the field of children’s literature or working within both the children’s literary system and the adult literary system. In one of the essays, the growing number of dual-readership authors is explicitly related to the literary renovation of children’s literature: “This change of climate appeals to authors who traditionally write for adults.”¹¹

Once again, this situation is not unique to the Dutch language area. In the English language area, for example, the boundaries between children’s literature and adult literature also are mainly explored by the children’s literary system, whereas there is relatively little interest in the border traffic within the adult literary system. A few literary compendia have an entry on children’s literature¹² and now and then a journal on adult literature publishes a special issue on children’s books.¹³

Literary Prizes

Since the end of the 1980s, Dutch children’s literature has two important literary prizes that are awarded annually: the Golden and Silver Slate Pencil and the Libris Woutertje Pieterse Prize. This last prize is a result of the literary innovations in children’s literature. The prize was introduced in 1987 by the Woutertje Pieterse Foundation at the initiative of several well-known Dutch reviewers who wished to see the children’s book as a full literary genre. For that reason, they wanted a prize for a book of Dutch origin for children or young adults with exceptional qualities with respect to language and content as well as image and graphic design.

An overview of the prizes awarded in the last ten years shows that debuts in children’s literature of authors who had previously only written for adults, like Mensje van Keulen, Guus Middag and Toon Tellegen, are often awarded, in any case, more frequently than other debuts. Moreover, these authors also are awarded relatively often for their later books. Dual-readership author Toon Tellegen, for example, is the author who has most frequently won the Libris Woutertje Pieterse Prize.

Although the literary qualities of the prize-winning books have certainly been decisive, it is likely, on the basis of the previously mentioned pleas for affiliation with adult literature, that the need of the children’s literary system to blur the boundaries between children’s literature and adult literature and, subsequently, advance in status, has played a role. Awarding literary prizes to well-known authors of adult literature breeches traditional boundaries and helps to establish a positive image.

The reverse takes place in adult literature. The nomination of a children’s book¹⁴ for an important literary prize for adult literature in the Netherlands, the AKO Prize for Literature, induced several well-known critics to object against such an affiliation of children’s literature with adult literature. A year later, the rules were changed to prevent that from happening again. An “adult” prize for a children’s book is bad for the reputation of adult literature and more far-reaching than a special issue or attention in a history of literature, where children’s literature is carefully distinguished from adult literature. A prize stands for explicitly awarded quality.

Literary Reviews

The weekly reviews in cultural supplements form, together with the literary studies and prizes, a good measure for developments in literature. Therefore, a logical question is whether or not the degree of attention paid to the border traffic and the role of dual-readership authors in literary studies is shared by reviewers in both literary systems. This question will be answered by means of a case study of the reception of the oeuvre of the Dutch author Mensje van Keulen by critics.

Mensje van Keulen had her debut in 1972 with Bleekers Zomer (Bleeker’s summer) as an author for adults. Since then she has written twelve books for adults. Her last novel, Olifanten op een web (Elephants on a web), was published in 1997. Her debut as a children’s author was in 1985 with the fantasy story Tommie Station (Tommy Station). Her most recent children’s book, Pas op voor Bez (Beware of Bez), was published in 1996.

When comparing the reviews of Van Keulen’s children’s books with the reviews of her work for adults, one is immediately struck by the fact that there are fewer reviews of the latter (on the average, thirteen per children’s book and sixteen per book for adults). Moreover, the reviews of her books for children are on the whole substantially shorter than the reviews of her adult books. The reviews of her children’s literature debut average 314 words, whereas critics on the average devote 846 words to her debut in adult literature. Moreover, in reviews of her children’s books, more lines are devoted to a reproduction of the content than in reviews of her adult books. The majority of the reviews of the children’s books describe the content and end with a brief evaluation, most of the time without arguments. The reviews of Van Keulen’s oeuvre seem to indicate that the conclusions of a research study on children’s literature reviews that was undertaken in the 1980s still apply.¹⁵ In this study, the researchers pointed to the poor quality of children’s books reviews as a consequence of the above mentioned imbalance between description of content and argumentation.

Another important difference between the reviews of children’s books and the critiques of adult books is that, in the former, the application possibilities of the books are often mentioned, as well as the appropriate age to read the book and the kind of children that will appreciate it. The increased attention paid to the literary aspects of children’s literature in literary studies is almost absent in the newspaper critiques. The pedagogical approach to children’s literature appears to be still firmly fixed in critical practice. The most likely explanation of this are the readers of these reviews. Critics of children’s literature write their reviews primarily for the “common” buyer of children’s books, that is, children’s care-givers, who are mainly interested in which book is appropriate and interesting for the child that they are raising.

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Critics, Crosswriting, and the Canon
• Part II Ages All? Parents, Play, and Picturebooks
• Part III Oppression, Repression, Subversion, Transgression: Crossover and Censorship
• Part IV Distinctions, Demarcations, and Double Address
• Part V Tradition and Innovation: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Beyond
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Editor and Contributors