“The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction”, or the manipulation of a literary genre

Published in 1984, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction is considered one of the most important critical studies in the field of children’s literature. The book assesses J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), in order to make claims about the whole of children’s literature, contesting the assumption that it is written for the child. Instead Rose argues that children’s books satisfy the needs and desires of adults. Rose defines children’s literature as ‘something of a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction’, claiming children’s books are actually written to fulfill adult desires and to perpetuate adult fantasies about childhood. ‘Authors unconsciously “seduce” or “colonize” the child by writing books that reflect an adult ideal of childhood, which child readers are meant to identify with and emulate’. This level of adult control over children’s reading material casts doubt over the entire nature and function of children’s literature – who is it really for and whose needs does it actually meet: adults’ or children’s? In addition, Philip Pullman, in his 1996 Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, stated that ‘all stories teach, whether they intend to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by’. This talk will therefore investigate the idea of children’s literature as a genre controlled and manipulated by adults who write, illustrate, publish, market and purchase books for the apparent education and/or entertainment of child readers.