Children's Literature - Introduction

Introduction

There is no single, widely accepted definition of children's literature. It can be broadly defined as anything that children read, but a more useful definition may be fiction, poetry, and drama intended for and used by children and young people, a list to which many add non-fiction. Nancy Anderson of the College of Education at the University of South Florida defines children's literature as all books written for children, "excluding works such as comic books, joke books, cartoon books, and nonfiction works that are not intended to be read from front to back, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material".

Classifying children's literature is equally confusing. As the International Companion Encyclopedia Of Children's Literature says, "The boundaries of genre... are not fixed but blurred." Sometimes no agreement can be reached even on whether a given work is best categorized as adult or children's literature, and many books are marketed for both adults and children. J. K. Rowling's series about Harry Potter was written and marketed for children, but it was so popular among children and adults that The New York Times created a separate bestseller list for children's books to list them.

When people think of children's literature they probably mean books, or at least print. But narratives existed before printing, and the roots of some best-known children's tales go back to storytellers of old. Seth Lerer, in the opening of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter, says "This book presents a history of what children have heard and read... The history I write of is a history of reception".