Reviews for Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America

The average rating for Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-07-01 00:00:00 Loretta M. Owen so i assume this is someones published dissertation or something. i didnt expect it to be riveting, but i did sort of expect a cohesive argument. to distill it to one thought: childrens books are not as well respected as this lady would like them to be. done. i just saved y'all a bunch of reading time. the best thing about this book were some nice quotes: from ray bradbury: "baum was, at heart, a little-old-maid librarian crammed with honey-muffins and warm tea. lewis carroll sipped his tea cold, digested ciphers and burped logic gone a teensy bit awry. carroll would have got you out of bed at five in the morning to recite logarithms. baum would have leaped into your bed and done you in with a pillow fight." and anthony holden: "the more popular (or bestselling) an adult book,... the less likely it is to be considered literature, while the popularity of a childrens book sees big literary claims being made on its behalf". this last quote comes after b.l.c. gets whiny about the new york times creating a separate bestseller list right before the release of the fifth harry potter book, because the first four volumes were still on the adult bestseller list, and the assumption was that the fifth one would also make the list, and that would suck for adults who wanted to read books designed for adult tastes. and i dont always agree with the books that make the bestseller list, but good lord - five harry potters at one time? its absurd. i just dont agree with this argument about the victimization of young literature. even though i have recently come to see that the current crop of childrens and teen fiction is much more sophisticated and entertaining than i had believed before i started this class, it still is what it is: literature intended for younger readers. and considering how many adults read teen fiction and harry potter and the like, her argument has no validity. there are tons of critical responses to literature for the young adult, and millions of adults are reading books designed for teens and younger. i suspect more adults are reading twilight this summer than are reading gravitys rainbow. her dissatisfaction with the marginalization of childrens books, and then her dissatisfaction with its "bestseller" status makes me quote my last quote from horace scudder: "we are no doubt unreasonable readers; we object to the blood-and-thunder literature, and when in place of it we have the milk-and-sugar we object again. what do we want?"

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-01 00:00:00 John Keefe I don't know much about kids, but I'm positive that most kids don't give a flying fuck if Harold Bloom cares about the books they are reading, or if he says that their favorite novel is not considered a classic. To be fair to Bloom, kids also don't care what Derrida, Jameson, Fyre, Edmund Wilson, Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, Henry James or any other theorist thinks about their reading tastes. If you don't believe me go up to some Twilight fan and tell them that if Derrida were still alive he would probably never write a single word about the book they are reading and see if they don't do much more than stare blankly at you. This woman cares though. She seems to care a lot about what these types of people think about children's books. But exactly what she wants I have no idea. She doesn't like them being treated as children books, she doesn't like them being 'turned' into adult books. She doesn't like any kind of criticism being leveled at them (for example it's ok to praise early Disney, but as soon as the quality of Disney starts to decline, you better not start taking critical pot-shots at the family industry he has created and is now milking), but she also doesn't want the critical (i.e., academic) world to not mention them either. I think she would be happiest if everyone just smiled a lot and wrote articles about how wonderful books she likes are. There are so many things wrong with this book. She never really proves much about the quality of the books she is arguing for. Instead she relies on things like sales statistics, appearances on librarian's reading lists (and at what number, sometimes to my bewilderment when she gets annoyed at a book only being number four on a list) and the number of times a book has been written about (or not written about) in academic journals. That's fine, but is the book any good? What makes it that attention should be paid to the book? According to her criteria in the future, the late 20th century literature that should be most deserving of being studied is James Patterson and Nora Roberts. The numbers don't lie. (This though might be more true in her eyes than one would think, she also seems to have the opinion that the NYT Best-seller list is a be all end all of cultured readers.) This author suffers from an infantile malady that is not uncommon in our country, and especially not among people of the baby-boomer generation. It's not that she loves children's books, but that she seems stuck in the developmental stage where she can not fathom someone having a differing opinion than her. Children have this. They can't understand why someone doesn't like what they like, or how someone can like something they hate. People stuck in this stage of development really like to be in the majority, they like to see that their favorite records are on best-selling lists, that their favorite authors have best-seller written on them. Popularity to them is synonymous with quality. Not that they choose what they like based on what is popular, but they get angry when what they love isn't universally adored. (As a second experiment, tell a baby-boomer that you think the Rolling Stones (or pick a band) are over-rated, vaguely talented and derivative (this argument works for most bands, because most of them are (that's not to say enjoyment can't be had from over-rated, vaguely talented and derivative bands)), I can almost guarantee one of the first arguments they come sputtering out with is about how popular the Stones (or Dylan, or whatever band or person you choose) is. Try it. To really get someone's goat use The Beatles, even if you don't agree with the criteria, just see if they say something extolling their musical virtues, or rather do they say something about Beatlemania, how many people liked them). There are so many more things I can go off on. I won't though, I almost gave it three stars because it inspired so much rancor in me against baby-boomers, but it's really only a two star book.