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• W2047777214 abstract "Questions of Power Gary D. Schmidt (bio) Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature, by Peter Hunt. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism, ed. Peter Hunt. New York: Routledge, 1990. As a critic of children's literature, I have recently written about two books that were childhood favorites: Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings and Hugh Lofting's Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. That each had won the most prestigious award in their genre was of no moment to me as a child. I loved them for the way they were. And if you were to go with me now, hand in hand, I could still take you down the stairs of the Hicksville Public Library—I am not making up the name—to where they stood and, I hope, remain on the shelves. Writing in the last year, I detailed McCloskey's use of the island as a metaphor for wholeness, Lofting's portrayal of the gentle doctor as an emblem of peace and tolerance, and both writers' circular structuring of a journey motif so that the very form of the work pointed toward the thematic concern of the security engendered by a family, however broadly defined. Now Peter Hunt's work asks me to rethink these interpretations. As an adult critic, I read The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle carrying with me one bag full of critical concerns and another loaded with the weight of criticism—mostly negative—that Lofting's novel has accrued. But when I plucked it from the Hicksville Public Library's shelves—when I was, in Hunt's terms, a peer reader—no such folderol mattered. The tension of the spine; the dry feel of the pages; the smell, the wonderful smell of an old book—these mattered. The adventures, the delight of a man who could talk to animals, the poignant ending, the identification with Tommy Stubbins—these mattered. How shall I, as an adult critic, ever reconcile my non-peer reading with my peer reading? Is such a reconciliation possible? [End Page 167] For that matter, is it even possible to reconstruct that peer reading? These are precisely the kinds of foundational questions Peter Hunt asks in Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature. Beginning with the observation that criticism and theory can help us understand not what we read but actually how we understand what we read, Hunt proposes to establish methods by which we might see what happens when we read, and at each stage . . . qualify what is happening with what may be happening with a child (3) This may give some pause. It does this reviewer. Is audience reception and perception necessarily the business of the literary critic? Some may believe that a critical focus which concentrates on how the child perceives rather than on the work itself can become a siren's call, leading further and inevitably further from the work itself. Yet just such a focus leads, instead, to Hunt's fascinating and incisive analysis of how we can understand children's literature. Hunt begins his exploration with the astonishing claim that contemporary literary criticism has broadened access to children's literature, so that all specialists—from teachers in nursery schools to university academics—now contribute vitally (10). Modern literary criticism—particularly those schools that have come under so much recent attack—are more often damned for speaking to a smaller and smaller audience, an audience that, for example, is privy to the jargon of the deconstructionist or the structuralist, or that finds affinity with the ideology of the feminist or Marxist. But here Hunt suggests the opposite: modern criticism has broadened the audience that tries to understand how literature does what it does. But this is not the only astonishing claim. Two pages later, Hunt poses the question, Is Jane Austen a better writer than Judy Blume? His response might dispose nineteenth-century specialists to raise an eyebrow. And hardly three pages later Hunt asserts that all canons—the work of the Children's Literature Association's Touchstones Committee notwithstanding—are idiosyncratic; one's perceptions of any canon are based on mere personal responses. Depending on which preposition one chooses, one will be..." @default.
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• W2047777214 title "Questions of Power" @default.
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