Covering many acres: the oral and written tradition of tales for children
The HinduVisit the children’s section of your local bookstore, and chances are that you’ll come across works by those familiar from the world of entertainment. He once remarked that whenever he was asked if he’d write a children’s book, he would reply, “If I had a serious brain injury, I might well write one”. In his The Haunted Wood, he emphasises that what we read in childhood endures, and children’s literature offers imaginative possibilities as rich as those found in books for grown-ups. The 21st century canon remains inchoate, despite the “unignorable effect” of Rowling and Pullman, while the Young Adult genre continues to blur the lines between children’s and adult literature. The best children’s books, Katherine Rundell has argued in a striking simile, are like literary vodka: they distill emotions like hope, joy and fear in their “purest, most archetypal forms”.
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