Signs of Childness in Children's Books

by Peter Hollindale

Peter Hollindale suggests that children need to construct their own childhoods of the mind through encounters with imagined childhoods, and contemplates the effect of this idea on adult readings of children's books.

Genres: Nonfiction, Adult, Literary Criticism

140 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1997

Reviews

[Mathew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterfully written and engaging throughout. When you're reading this, you know you're in the pages of someone who has a far greater understanding of a field of literature than you do. Hollindale always borders on being an accessible read if you are willing to take your time and read each sentence with great care - this isn't a book you can skip through so, fortunately, it's under 150 pages long.

The main objective of the book is to signify what we really mean when we say children's literature, what is means to be a child reader reading a book written by an adult and what it means, as an adult, to read a children's book. The subject matter and its delivery is deeply engaging and the references Hollindale uses from other author experiences opened up, for me, a new understanding of what it is that the writer might bring to the children's book as well as what it is that attracts them to its writing.

[Melissa Sara Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this particular text hasn't really stood the test of time, I thought there were a lot of good ideas and there was some nice background for my diss work. It is frustrating to me, though, that child lit scholars keep trying to define the genre, the field, but no one really notices what the others have done. Honestly, I think we need to get over ourselves a little bit. None of this is really Hollindale's fault, though, since this comes well before a lot of the other stuff I have been reading.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short but dense. Academic and boring. The central idea is a good one: authenticity or "childness" in textual representations of children. Hollindale asserts the terms "childly" and "childness" are preferable to "childlike " and "childish".

[Paulina · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I don’t have to read it, I would have stopped part way through. Though the definitions and questions of definitions in children’s literature are interesting, the content felt very repetitive and not informed within scientific contexts (psychology) of childhood.