In describing what children’s literature has encompassed over the centuries, Peter Hunt writes that it is ‘everything from a sixteenth-century chapbook to a twentieth-century computer-based interactive device – everything from a folk tale to the problem novel, from the picture-book to the classroom poem, from the tract to the penny dreadful, from the classic to the comic’ (Hunt, 1995, p. ix). While when we refer to ‘children’s literature’ we usually have in mind fiction rather than information texts, I would include literary forms of non-fiction like autobiography and biography. Moreover, while historians of children’s books have generally explored writing they considered to have some literary merit many now reach out beyond the established classics to the more popular children’s fiction.
Fiction, and the response of children to it, will always be central in the English Curriculum. But the emphasis of the current frameworks on genre, on understanding the features of the different types of text, affects priorities in initial teacher education courses so that the careful study of the history of children’s literature may be nudged into a marginal position or ignored altogether. Does it matter? There are two main reasons why intending teachers benefit from such study. First, looking at the origins and development of children’s literature puts current attitudes and approaches in perspective and reveals the stages in the journey children’s literature has made. Second, it helps us to explore concepts of childhood:.........
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