The Child-Centred Novel

Abstract

Publishers, reviewers and critics have shown themselves eager to regard any books with young protagonists as children’s books, unless the author’s treatment of sex or violence makes them quite obviously unsuitable. It is in this area, where writers have presented children involved in the activities of childhood, that some way of determining what is a children’s book is most urgently needed. Theories based on subject matter or theme, such as Perry Nodelman’s idea that there is a ‘possibility that children’s fiction may be defined by a specific group of thematic concerns and a specific way of treating them’ (1985, p. 20), are very limiting, since they imply that writing for children is a formula not a genre. It seems likely also that some adult novels would fit that formula. I am suggesting that it is not the kind of topic treated, nor the presence of a child protagonist, nor ‘the child’s eye at the centre’ to use Edward Blishen’s phrase, nor — another point mentioned by Nodelman — the absence of irony, but the relationship of narrator to narratee and to character which is the specific marker of a book for children. In particular, the relationship of narrator to narratee is the one characteristic by which fiction genuinely for children can be distinguished from other fiction.