What Is Research in Children's Literature Studies?
What is research in children's literature studies? First, a word about the term children's literature studies. The range of inquiry into aspects of children's literature is astonishing. Children's literature has been approached through literary theory, child development, cultural history, childhood studies, gender studies, queer theory, critical multiculturalism, linguistics, literacy, pedagogy, reader response, interest surveys, human cognition, narratology, psychoanalysis, bibliotherapy, sociology, anthropology, historical and archival studies. In order to account for this range, these interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, scholars have recently taken to using the term children's literature studies to include all of the varied perspectives and approaches to doing research around some aspect of children's literature. This is an exciting time for children's literature.
To give you an idea of the range of research that is available, you will be reading three different reviews of the research that attempt to pull this wide-ranging research into some kind of coherent statement:
- Margaret Meek is a well-known scholar of language, literacy, and children's literature and writes from a view of literacy as a cultural construct. She is perhaps best known for looking at children's literature as lessons authors give children on how to read their stories.
- Peter Hunt is now retired from Cardiff University in Wales, where he taught children's literature in the English department. Literary and Cultural theory lay at the foundation of his thinking about children's literature.
- Lee Galda, Gwynne Ash, and Bea Cullinan are well-known proponents of literature-based reading. When they think about children's literature, their concerns tend toward classrooms. Though each scholar is attempting to accomplish a similar project, their visions are quite different.