I wish I’d written: Peter Hunt chooses The Hidden Adult – Defining Children’s Literature

Peter Hunt on a comprehensive and accessible book on children’s literature that adults should read…

Orbiting around children and their books are hundreds of academic books and courses, puzzling out what children’s literature is, and what it does, and how it works. A lot has been thought and written about this (some good, some bad) – and Perry Nodelman’s brilliantly comprehensive and accessible analysis pulls it all together. No need to keep re-inventing the wheel of defining children, children’s books, response, literature, value, or why and how we talk about these books… it’s all here. Perry is a Canadian critic, one of the founders of the Children’s Literature Association, and he has little patience with the pretentious or the sloppy which sometimes (and rightly) puts people involved with books and children off really useful theory. This book shows the kind of knowledge that I only wish I had – and it’s a model of readability and generosity of spirit. Anyone who wants to know what has been thought about children and books – from the absolutely essential to the rather strange – could not find a better place to start.

The Hidden Adult – Defining Children’s Literature by Perry Nodelman is published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 978 0 8018 8980 6, £16.99 (from Amazon UK). Peter Hunt’s new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glassis published in Oxford World’s Classics (978 0 19 955829 2, £5.99); his editions of The Wind in the Willows and Treasure Island will be published this year.