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Introduction

       Karen Coats, Deborah Stevenson, and Vivian Yenika-Agbaw

      The academic study of children’s literature rests on a diverse set of ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. Scholars, educators, and cultural critics have explored fundamental but often hidden assumptions about what children’s literature is, what it teaches (or hides from) its readers, whose voices and perspectives are heard and valued and whose are silenced or devalued; the search for answers has become as diverse as the questions, sometimes following from, sometimes leading, trends in the literature itself. Children’s literature scholars around the world have been joining in increasingly robust conversations that seek to expand awareness of the richness that can be found in texts for the young, texts that bury themselves deeply in the heart and surely prove foundational to the development of a culture’s sense of what is normal and what is aspirational, what is useful and what is beautiful, what should be preserved and what is best left in the past.

      The criticism of children’s literature has expanded exponentially since Sarah Trimmer began her review journal, The Guardian of Education (1802–1806), to include engaged discussion with nearly every school of literary and cultural theory, making Companions like this one indispensable in navigating the critical landscape. Indeed, the Companion genre has experienced a publishing boom in recent years, but unlike Companions that can limit their focus to literature of a time period, a specific topic, form, genre, or single book, or even a way of thinking, a Companion to children’s literature has a broad remit; one that is too broad, in fact, for comprehensive coverage of all the many ways children’s literature has been defined and thought to matter over time and across cultures. Like the editors of other Companions to children’s literature, we’ve had to make choices to keep the volume focused, manageable, and useful. The chapters in this volume fall into a few broad categories to provide a sampling of the various ways the genres and forms of Anglophone children’s literature have developed over time, followed by some of the ways of reading that have become dominant in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Even within this necessarily limited focus, our parameters and definitions still require some unpacking. Our view of literature comprises poetry, folklore, fiction and nonfiction that has taken the form of prose, picturebooks, dramatic performances on stage and screen, and interactive media. The modifier “children’s” imposes a limit for the chapters in this Companion to works that have been considered suitable for young people from birth to middle or late childhood; that is, we have not included discussion of texts for older readers or young adults, which have come into their own as a distinct area of inquiry. We have also limited our focus to Anglophone literature, though our authors have each accepted the challenge to be attentive to the texts, voices, and perspectives that have been too often neglected or marginalized in other overviews of the literature.

      The first three sections are devoted to the history and development of the various genres and forms of children’s literature from the era before what came to be known as the Golden Age of the late nineteenth century through to the second decade of the twenty-first century. Each chapter attends to a specific form or genre, which enables focused attention to its developments and trends during the time period; reading across the section will enable scholars to see how these separate strands reflect some common assumptions and concerns about how childhood was conceived in the period while still retaining distinctive qualities and appealing to readers with diverse goals, interests, and generic preferences. The chapters that attend to the most recent time period give a useful introductory overview of how technology and global reach are changing the aesthetics and ethical concerns of contemporary children’s literature.

      Following the sweep of historical developments and current trends in literary forms and genres, the chapters in the final section walk readers through ways of approaching children’s literature theoretically and methodologically in the twenty-first century. Foregrounded in these approaches is an intentional ethics of valuing all children’s lived experiences and exposing those implicit mechanisms of power that inflect literary and cultural production; such mechanisms impose a special mandate and opportunity for scholars who study works that constitute young people’s first contact with the complex world of cultural values and implicit norms depicted in images and stories.

      Finally, this companion would not be what it is, or perhaps would not be at all, were it not for our co-editor Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, who passed away just as the completed manuscript was submitted. Vivian was always warm, funny, and frank, with a vast knowledge of people as well as scholarship, identifying talented contributors to this book whose essays attend to many vital subjects. Her own essay here is an example of her superb critical writing, though it cannot on its own capture her impressive versatility. Her commitment to equity, evident in both her scholarship and her considerable service work, bettered both academics and literature. She doubtless would have continued to educate, inspire, and innovate in the future; we hope that this collection will be a contribution to her legacy.

      Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, May 21, 1959–September 30, 2021

      Source: Patrick Mansell/Penn State