Book Reviews
The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Litera-
ture. By Perry Nodelman. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2008.
Reviewed by Peter Hunt
Just to save a certain amount of time:
all readers of this review should at
once clear a space on their shelves,
buy this book, and read it—or, at least,
read pages 133–244, which alone are
worth $35.00 of anyone’s money. This
is a fundamental, indispensable book
for anyone with any pretensions to
understanding the ideas surround-
ing children’s literature (the body of
texts) and “Children’s Literature” (the
field of study). I think that is clear
enough?
And why? Because, as Nodelman
says, “despite its long history, chil-
dren’s literature criticism . . . has a
habit of forgetting its own past, or
even, sometimes, utterly lacks aware-
ness of that past’s existence” (134).
Worse, criticism “tends to maintain
an innocence of its own by hiding—or
completely forgetting—any awareness
of its past adulthood” (136). Those
who teach children’s literature know
that the downside of an otherwise
challenging and invigorating subject
is having to tramp wearily around the
endlessly repeated series of questions
about what the subject is, its relation
to “literature” and to children, and all
the other undead questions. No lon-
© 2009 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 190–211.
ger! The Hidden Adult is the stake to
lay those vampires. Nodelman’s chap-
ter on defining children’s literature
(133–244) is also a history, a compen-
dium, of what has been thought about
the subject, written by someone who
was not only there when most of it was
being thought and who contributed
a great deal to that body of thought,
but also someone who has read every-
thing. Here are all the arguments and
reasoned discussion of them; for older
readers, they are old skirmishes—with
Jacqueline Rose asserting the “impos-
sibility” of children’s fiction, Karín
Lesnik-Oberstein damning all criti-
cism out of hand, Peter Hollindale’s
“childness,” .. and Peter Hunt’s “child-
ist criticism.” The whole exercise is,
as Nodelman says himself, “a concise
and revealing overview of how adults
over the past century or so in Europe,
North America, and elsewhere have
generally tended to think about chil-
dren and literature” (138), and it is
fundamental. By supplying such an
overview, Nodelman does not close off
debate: rather, he supplies us with the
materials for an informed debate.
But this book is much more than a
review of ideas: it is a magnum opus,
and the essence of such books is that
they should be idiosyncratic. (Nodel-
man has, after all, already written
the most indispensable unidiosyn-
cratic book for students working with
children’s literature: The Pleasures
of Children’s Literature.) And one
idiosyncrasy—apart from the fact
that the remark “At this point in my
argument, one thing should be clear:
children’s literature is not simple” oc-
curs on page 245—is that Nodelman
has a thesis, and he is ready to back
it up meticulously. The thesis is that
children’s books have similarities;
they are not
just an indiscriminate body
of quite different sorts of text
grouped together by adults for
convenience merely because
of their intended audiences . . .
Fictional texts [sic] written by
adults for children and young
people are enough like each other
to be immediately recognizable
as having been intended for their
specific audiences—as children’s or
young adults’ literature. (81)
But in order to fully address his sub-
ject, Nodelman has to start from first
principles—the that principles so
often are unexamined and, as such, are
the root of so much endless and fruit-
less debate. Thus, he examines six texts
and justifies, naturally, his selection
at considerable length. The texts are
Maria Edgeworth’s “The Purple Jar”;
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland; Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Do-
little; Beverly; Cleary’s Henry Huggins;
Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day; and
Virginia Hamilton’s Plain City.
They are all, obviously, children’s
books—but how do we know this?
Unlike the good Dr. Johnson, who,
famously, said: “We all know what light
is; but it is not easy to tell what it is,”
the good Dr. Nodelman is not content
with not being able to say what chil-
Book Reviews
dren’s books are. And so he checks the
six books for similarities—a laborious
process that takes about 70 pages, or
around 30,000 words. Now I men-
tion this without any negative critical
intent at all. In my view, Nodelman
is one of the clearest and most ac-
cessible writers around: you will not
find yourself driven to a critical theory
glossary, or wonder why suffixes are
appearing in unlikely places, or why
everyday words seem to have acquired
unfamiliar or positively perverse
meanings (as in certain Texts That We
Need Not Mention). But what he is
doing here needs to be done seriously
and at length, if it is to be done at all.
Fortunately, sensing, perhaps, that his
readers may be less meticulous than
he, Nodelman provides a summary
at the end of this section, where he
finds, to his own surprise, that he has
accumulated forty-five similarities.
So far, so good: it is the next step
(the next extensively argued step) that
is the most contentious. Reasoning
from the similarities that he has found
in the six texts, Nodelman suggests
that children’s literature “might, in
fact, be a specific genre of fiction
whose defining characteristics seem to
transcend specifics of time and place,
cut across other generic categories
such as fantasy or realism, and even
remain consistent despite variations
in the ages of intended audiences”
(81). In short, children’s literature is
a genre.
Speaking as one who has for
thirty years looked on the vast mass
of children’s literature as a mode or
meta-genre, perhaps, and within that
category identified many genres—sets
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of books that share subject and form
(fantasy novel, narrative verse)—this
comes as something as a shock, es-
pecially because it carries with it the
implication that children’s literature
is a coherent subset of some greater
(that is, more important) whole. By
the same token, adults’ literature is
also a genre, and if that is so, then it
seems to me that the term loses it use-
fulness. Nodelman regards the “shared
characteristics of children’s literature”
(as established so thoroughly in his
first chapter) as a sufficiently useful
category for this level of argument.
He may be right, because his category
or schemata (whatever it is called)
functions well in the remainder of his
discussion. Whether, were he discuss-
ing what some of us might regard as a
genre (for example, the fantasy novel
or the fantasy short story) he might
find himself lacking a useful term, is
open to debate.
But, a genre children’s literature is,
in this book, and, having quite bril-
liantly explored its definition, Nodel-
man goes on to place it in its field. His
concept of “field” follows Bourdieu in
The Field of Cultural Production; it is
an area of human interaction, and so
“books for children . . . are sociological
phenomena that can be accounted for
in terms of operational characteris-
tics and structural principles they
share with other social activities”
(117). That the distinction between
“genre” and “field” is a useful one is
demonstrated in the final chapter of
The Hidden Adult, which explores
this rich contextualizing, namely, how
children’s books fit into and relate to
other media, adult texts, and so on:
192
“Why might children’s literature be
what it is? How might the nature of
the field . . . and its relationship with
other fields help to account for its
characteristics and stability?” (245).
This is also explored (although a little
more polemically) in Jack Zipes’s most
recent books, notably Relentless Prog-
ress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s
Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytell-
ing. In the final chapter, Nodelman
explores it through ‘sameness’, and
the effects of of personality, history,
and nationality.
And the title? Where is this hid-
den adult? Pessimists about the vi-
ability of the project of “children’s
literature” have tended (Rose and
Lesnik-Oberstein, for example) to
suggest that there is inevitably an
adult driving force in the production
of both the text for children and the
child created by and for it, and that
this presence is, per se, sinister. (This
is despite the awkward fact that such a
hidden power and such constructions
exist in every fiction—and probably
in every act of communication. It
is the fact that adults and children
are involved here that is actually the
issue, not power or constructing of
“subjects.”) Nodelman does not have
the sunny, Pollyanna-ish optimism of
your reviewer about this relationship,
but he sees the complexity produced
by the relationship as essentially
positive—as the essence of the differ-
ence of children’s literature:
The simplicity of texts of children’s
literature is only half the truth about
them. They also possess a shadow,
an unconscious—a more complex
and complete understanding of
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
 the world and people that remains
unspoken beyond the simple
surface but provides that simple
surface with comprehensibility. . . .
That something might well be
identified as nonchildlike or beyond
the ken of childlike consciousness
. . . so children’s literature can be
understood as simple literature
that communicates by means of
reference to a complex repertoire
of unspoken but implied adult
knowledge. (206)
His conclusion is equally measured:
Children’s literature always tries above
all else to be nonadult, and it always,
inevitably, fails. Yet it always tries
again, and fails again, in terms of the
patterns of variation I have described
and the rich ambiguities they can
engender. This means that the texts of
children’s literature can be and often
are as complex as texts for adults—but
the complexity is of a very specific and
quite different sort (340).
It is through such books as The
Hidden Adult, if they get to the right
people, that disciplines move on. This
is what we can stand on, build on: we
don’t have to keep re-inventing the
wheels.
This is a massively important book.
Go buy it.
Works Cited
Nodelman, Perry. The Pleasures of
Children’s Literature. White Plains,
NY: Longman, 1992.
Zipes, Jack. Relentless Progress. The
Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature,
Fairy Tales, and Storytelling. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Book Reviews
Peter Hunt is professor emeritus in children’s
literature at Cardiff University, UK. His
latest book is the four-volume Children’s
Literature: Critical Concepts in Literary
and Cultural Studies (London and New
York, Routledge 2006).
Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepre-
neurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s
Literature. By Leonard S. Marcus. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Reviewed by Philip Nel
Minders of Make-Believe is the first
comprehensive history of the Ameri-
can children’s book business. Up until
now, one could have only cobbled
together a partial history from vari-
ous sources—notably Barbara Bader’s
American Picturebooks from Noah’s
Ark to the Beast Within (1975), Beverly
Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: The Cultural
Construction of Children’s Literature
in America (2003), back issues of The
Horn Book, and reference compendia
by Peter Hunt, Anita Silvey, and Jack
Zipes. Synthesizing the work of such
predecessors (yes, I read the endnotes,
too) and adding considerable new
archival research, Leonard Marcus has
created an essential work for scholars
and anyone serious about children’s
literature.
Packed full of information, Mind-
ers of Make-Believe is a book to linger
over. Interweaving biographies of
major figures (librarians, editors,
authors), Marcus chronicles the rise
and fall of publishers, children’s maga-
zines, and technologies of the book.
For anyone working in the genre, it is
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