Abstract
The telling of lies is significant in fiction written for children, and is often (though not in all cases) performed by child protagonists. Lying can be examined from at least three perspectives: philosophical, moral and aesthetic. The moral and the aesthetic are the most significant for children’s literature. Morality has been subtly dealt with in Anne Fine’s A Pack of Liars and Nina Bawden’s Humbug. The aesthetic dimension involves consideration of lying’s relation to imagination, fantasy and creativity; Richmal Crompton’s William: the Showman and Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Pack of Lies show this at a complex, metafictional, level.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adventures of Brer Rabbit. (1972). London: BBC.
Alcock, V. (1981). The stonewalkers. London: Methuen.
Applebee, A. (1978). The child’s concept of story: Ages 2–17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bawden, N. (1992). Humbug. London: Gollancz.
Carpenter, H., & Pritchard, M. (1984). The Oxford companion to children’s literature, 5th ed. Oxford: OUP.
Collodi, C. (1944). Pinocchio. Trans. E. Harden. Sydney: Consolidated Press.
Crompton, R. (1937). William: The showman. London: Macmillan, 1986.
Crompton, R. (1950). William the bold. London: George Newnes, 1955.
Cunningham, V. (1994). In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, texts and history. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fine, A. (1988). A pack of liars. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Janosch (1973). Tales of the lying nutcracker. London: Abelard-Schuman.
Kucich, John. (1994). The power of lies: Transgression in victorian fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP.
Lewis, C. S. (2005). The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. London: Harper Collins.
McCaughrean, G. (1988). Pack of lies: Twelve stories in one. Oxford: OUP.
McEwan, I. (1992). The daydreamer. London: Jonathan Cape.
McEwan, I. (2005). Atonement. London: Vintage.
Nietzsche, F. (1979). Truth and lies in the extra moral sense. 1873. In Truth and philosophy: Selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the 1870s. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
Sidney, Sir Philip (1595) An Apologie for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. London, 1965.
Vargos Llosa, Mario. (1997). The truth of lies. Partisan Review, 64.3, 356–65.
Waugh, S. (1993). The Mennyms. London: Julia MacRae.
Webb, J. (2006). Genre and convention. In: Butler, C. (ed.) Teaching children’s fiction (pp. 60–84). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Williams, B. (2002). Truth and truthfulness: An essay in genealogy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP.
Wordsworth, W., & Coleridge, S. T. (1999). Lyrical ballads. London: Penguin Classics.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ringrose, C. Lying in Children’s Fiction: Morality and the Imagination. Child Lit Educ 37, 229–236 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9010-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9010-8