This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). Ovaj je rad licenciran pod Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licencom (CC BY 4.0).
UDK: 821-93.09
Peter Hunt
Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK and Dublin City University, Dublin, Eire
Children’s Literature Land:
A Beginner’s (Anthropological) Survival Guide1
Izvorni znanstveni rad / original research paper
Primljeno / received 30. 6. 2025. Prihvaćeno / accepted 9. 10. 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21066/carcl.libri.15.1.1
Children’s Literature is a flourishing academic discipline worldwide, and an extremely complex one. If we are going to explore it, we must understand how it has developed, and what it has developed into. I would like to take you on a fanciful, synchronic, journey. Let us imagine an island – Children’s Literature Land. It is densely forested with texts, and in the many clearings live the tribes who all claim to be the true owners of the island. Not only do they have their own dialects, but they can rarely agree about what is worth saying about the books around them. They include the books-and-children people, the educationalists and the librarians, who spend their time getting real books to real children. At the other end of the island, there are ancient libraries and multi-dimensional archives, where lurk dust-covered bibliographers, bibliophiles and rare-book people. They live close to the antiquarian booksellers, and the bookbinders, and have nothing to do with children. Then there are the historians, and the wild archivists, and those most extreme and addictive scholars who form the author-society tribes. Dominating the island are the publishers and the media tribes, with their slaves, the authors – although a few are still running wild – and there are possibly poets for children although nobody knows whether they actually exist. Or can. But where we must tread most carefully is in the Swamps of Academia, for the three main critical tribes – the reviewers, the theorists, and the inclusivists – still rampage freely there. The strangest tribes are the wandering literary tourists, the most benign, the independent booksellers, and the most harmless the Professors of Children’s Literature.
Keywords: academia, children’s books, children’s literature scholarship, evaluation of children’s literature, mediators, publishers
When I first began to work on children’s literature in the English Literature department at the University of Cardiff, Wales, in 1970, there were very few courses on the subject in higher education in Britain, and those were in Education Colleges and Library Schools. There were also very few books that took the subject seriously; there was one somewhat eccentric history – Children’s Books in England, by a publisher and book collector, F.J. Harvey Darton, which took the history only into the 1910s, and was, significantly, subtitled Five Centuries of Social Life (1932).
Otherwise, the first writers about children’s books were either librarians or educators trying to fit the right book to the right child – and they all shared the unspoken standards of quality and value of the day.
Today, despite the recent widespread decline in the Humanities subjects in general in the UK (and the Anglophone world), there are vast numbers of courses, international organisations, conferences and prizes, and an unmanageable corpus of texts about children’s books. As Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva observed in The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature in 2017: “Today children’s literature research has reached the dilemma of Shakespeare studies: nobody can even remotely have a full overview of the field”. What happens is that “we specialise in a theory, a genre, a theme, a historical period, or a particular author” (2). Or perhaps the answer is, as Eugene Giddens suggests in the same volume, in “Distant Reading and Children’s Literature”, not to attempt to read the mass of critical material at all. This may, he concedes, seem like an undesirable technique for a literary scholar, but in the era of big data we may need to use big-data handling techniques, and remove the idea of “close reading” from its traditional eminence. He seriously addresses “the practical possibilities of not reading children’s literature while also attempting to give readings of it” (306, emphasis in the original).
To see how complex the current situation is, one needs only to look at the list of topics for the 2025 conference of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL). Examples include: “Intersemiotic and Interlingual Transgressions in Children’s Literature: The Polish Example”; “Cross-Genre Youth Literature as a Tool to Examine and Express Liminal Identities”; “Entanglements of Medial and Narrative Liminality”, and “Navigating Borders in British Children’s Literature: Imperialism, Identity, and Integration”.
Nevertheless, three broad periods of Anglophone children’s book criticism can be distinguished: pre-theory, theory, and post-theory.
It is, perhaps, worth re-reading some of the earliest attempts, pre-theory, if only to realise how strong personal opinions were acceptable in those days. Here is an extract from another, more comprehensive history. John Rowe Townsend, a novelist and journalist rather than an academic, wrote in the first edition of Written for Children (1956), discussing J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (86):
To make adult witticisms in a book for children is, to my mind, bad practice.
I dislike the (essentially adult) saccharinity of some parts of this book, notably in Wendy’s mothering of the lost boys. I believe also that the kind of fantasy in which the children’s nurse is a dog and in which Father banishes himself to the dog-kennel is a different sort of fantasy from that of the Neverland, and the two do not mix. And the treatment of Neverland is inconsistent: as it is a children’s dream world it could, and I think should, have been given the dream treatment, in which it would be made clear that that the children had never in reality been away from their parents. As it is, the supposedly real world of Mr and Mrs Darling is never real, while the supposedly unreal world of the Neverland is not unreal enough to make an effective contrast.
Until recently, such confident opinions have been supressed in favour of more abstract ideas: from the 1980s there was a period when children’s book scholars adopted literary theory, and their work became inaccessible, and alien to many children’s book practitioners.
The book which marked the beginning of this phase might be Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984). Although the book was primarily a cultural study of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, it began by shattering any cosy relationship between adult writer and child reader (1–2):
Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between […]. If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.
There is in one sense, no body of literature which rests so openly on an acknowledged difference, a rupture almost between writer and addressee. Children’s fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in. (Emphasis in the original.)
This rather negative view had some followers, which was ironic, because Rose, in a rather sneaky footnote, put children’s book scholars in their (inferior) place (154):
[…] the ultimate fantasy, perhaps, of children’s book criticism that it should come of age and do what the adults (that is, adult critics) have been doing all along.
There can be little doubt about the (unintended) influence of this book: directly or indirectly it led to the theorist phase. Opinions of the importance of Rose’s book have varied. In 2006, John Stephens dismissed it in (appropriately enough) a footnote (142–143, n. 3):
The Case of Peter Pan […] has probably been the most often cited book about children’s literature over the past twenty years, and it is perhaps evidence of the failure of children’s literature scholarship to engage with “theory” that the book’s wrongheaded assumptions, grounded in standard poststructuralist clichés concerning indeterminacy of reference and in Althusserian conceptions of subjectivity, have been left uninterrogated.
There is, in both these comments, the rather uneasy implication that children’s book scholars were too simple to understand the theory – rather than seeing them as the children in Hans Andersen’s “The King’s New Clothes” who recognise pretentiousness when they (don’t) see it. (For a satirical reflection on this, see my “The Case of Canons and Classics: The Impossibility of Definitions” (Hunt 2017: 15–19)).
Nevertheless, there was, for several decades, a change in tone – and it is instructive to compare the language and preoccupations of Rowe Townsend with that of a book written nearly 50 years later: David Rudd’s study of Lacan and, almost incidentally, children’s literature (2013: 48):
In terms of Lacan’s three orders, then, Peter Pan stands at the edge of the imaginary, on the border of the Symbolic, but refuses to take that ontological leap into the realm of existence. He ex-sists instead. The former offers him a place as a signifier but only in exchange for his being, his jouissance. The symbolic will also condemn him to mortality, of course, whereas, as long as he is celebrated for being Peter Pan (virtually guaranteed), he can reign immortal in the imaginary.
But by then, the tide of theory was turning, and Rudd himself could look back on those years rather sceptically (3):
I don’t want to lose sight of the excellent work that came out of that period, and a whole toolkit of useful concepts and approaches… But I fear that the excitement of those earlier days has gone, and there is a certain predictability in much that appears in our journals as yet another feminist, postcolonial, ecocritical, or “fill-the-gap” reading is undertaken.
Today, post-theory, things are a little more as they were fifty years ago. Academic abstraction is not fashionable. The high-theoretical social involvement of Roberta Seelinger Trites (for example, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (2000)), or Christine Wilkie-Stibbs (The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature (2002)) has transmuted into an involved, activist trend. (See, for example, the review section of the 2025 edition of the journal Children’s Literature, Volume 53 (Fraustino 2025: 149–203).)
But as we have seen, what is most striking about the literary-critical landscape today is its very diversity, and to map that, I would like you to leave this sober survey and come with me in your imaginations on a tour of Children’s Literature Land. After all, using our imaginations is the key to children’s literature: so imagine that you are going to visit an island which contains everything that is to be said about children’s books.
As I used to say to my students, like most people who arrive here, you have probably been lured by reports of how wonderful it is – and may I assure you that they’re not wrong! This country is covered with dense forests of texts, rich in fictional flora and fauna: it is mostly uncharted, so your individual explorations will be fascinating, stimulating and original. It is without doubt the most complex, influential, bewildering, and rewarding literary land – a critic’s, enthusiast’s, and intellectual adventurer’s paradise. You’ll be glad you came!
Before we go any further, might I be allowed a personal reminiscence? When I first arrived in Children’s Literature Land, I foraged among its trees and picked the low-hanging fruit for a modest anthology – Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism (1990), which ran to 195 pages. Fourteen years later, I was able to produce the second edition of the International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature (2004) in two volumes and 1,374 pages. Two years after that, I assembled Children’s Literature: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies in four volumes and 1,629 pages – this time almost entirely on theory. And the forests are still growing!
Children’s Literature Land is a much odder place than it looks at first sight. It is a floating island, which is sometimes offshore of Mainland Literature Land, sometimes drifts over it, and sometimes collides with it. Its boundaries are slippery and keep changing. Time does odd things here: some stories live forever; a lot of the inhabitants live permanently in a past that never existed; and writers and readers and texts occupy different time-zones. Often simultaneously.
Most of all, it is not uninhabited. In the many clearings in the forest live The Children’s Literature Tribes, and within each Tribe, there are many (often warring) factions. You will not be able to avoid them. You may well be tempted to join one of them. You will find some of them friendly, some stand-offish, some wildly stimulating, some hostile, some annoying, and some downright stupid. (Like life, in fact.) Some wouldn’t, it seems, recognise a child if they saw one; others wouldn’t recognise a book if they tripped over one. Not only do most of them have their own dialects, but they can rarely agree about what is worth saying about the books around them. However (also as in life in general), they have one thing in common: they all know that the way they do things is CORRECT!
At one end of the island are the generally sunny lands of the Books-and-ChildrenPeople, who spend their time getting real books to real children at home and in the classroom. These can be teachers or librarians or philanthropists, or hybrids of those disciplines, and are perhaps exemplified by the work of IBBY – the International Board on Books for Young People, which, last time I looked, operated in over 70 countries. IBBY has its own journal – Bookbird – and a yearbook. The Books-and-Children tribe members may have many differences as to why they do what they do, which are always ideological, sometimes overtly political, sometimes sentimental, and often educational. In Anglophone terms, this tribe is best represented by the journal Books for Keeps – a miraculous phenomenon available free on-line: anyone who really wants to be an expert on this part of the island of children’s literature and its inhabitants in the shortest possible time could not do better than to take a month and read all 272 (as at May 2025) issues (Books for Keeps).
The sub-tribe of Educationalists have fun with small-scale reading and literacy projects, valiantly fighting the widespread disease of thinking that grand theories are superior to observing individual reactions. Among the most notable individuals in this tribe are, and have been, Geoff Fox and Mike Benton (for example, Teaching Literature, Nine to Fourteen (1985)) and Aidan Chambers (for example, Introducing Books to Children (1973)): their liberal-humanist heyday may have been the 1970s and 1980s, but their ideas continually resurface. A more specialist sub-tribe is represented by the journal Children’s Literature in English Language Education, edited by Janice Bland (CLELE), and its many associated books (for example, Bland, My History (2022)).
Lots of librarians live here, too, including those who think that children should be the judge of what is good to read, and have the temerity to actually ask them.
At the other, far – very far – end of the island, there are ancient libraries and multi-dimensional archives, where lurk dust-covered bibliographers,bibliophiles and rare-bookpeople. These are (next to the Author-Society Tribes, who we shall meet in a moment) the most erudite creatures in the universe, charming people with portraits of themselves hidden in their attics, who periodically publish beautifully-produced pamphlets with titles such as The Children’s Books Published by Joseph McPhardle and Nephew between 12th and 14th November, 1766. (I am afraid that I made that up…) They live cheek by jowl with the antiquarian booksellers, who know the price of everything, and live in very posh shops with rare children’s books in bullet-proof glass cases.
Neither would allow a child, or even the idea of a child, anywhere near their books, let alone suggest that children can make intelligent value-judgements. (There is an even more exclusive and skilled group, the bookbinders, who live on offshore islands, and who bind (beautifully) children’s books that must never be touched at all, let alone by children.) Brian Alderson has stated the case for these “book people” (1969: 11):
It may be objected that to assess children’s books without reference to children is to direct some absolute critical standard relating neither to the author’s purpose nor the reader’s enjoyment. To do much less, however, is to follow a road that leads to a morass of contradictions and subjective responses, the most serious result of which will be the confusion of what we are trying to do in encouraging children to read.
The Historians who live near here (such as Lissa Paul, with her exploration of the eighteenth-century book trade, The Children’s Book Business (2011)) are not to be confused with the Historians who write General Historiesof and Guides to Children’s Literature. Whereas there is a small sub-tribe which is dedicated to unearthing new facts (such as Kimberley Reynolds’s exploration of radical publishing in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, Left Out (2016)), these worthies can be seen wandering the forest with notebooks, and sometimes venture into the lost realms of the archives (where they are usually eaten by the Wild Archivists). These generalist historians are like historians everywhere, generalising from very patchy evidence, setting up (often retrospectively) Significant Landmarks, and recognising (or creating) trends from what they hope is intelligent guesswork. (If this seems unkind, consider that the corpus of English Language texts for children must, conservatively, number twomillion titles – added to annually in the UK alone by 8,000 more. So Historians have to make some shortcuts somewhere…) But, as Lord Vetinari remarks of historians in Jingo, one of Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” series, “we can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands” (1998: 404).
There is also a magic, cloud-shrouded hill in the centre of the island – magic because few people recognise how powerful it is. This is where the Publishers and Media Tribes live, in their palatial penthouses, and they actually manage the forests. There they commission the vast, overwhelming, majority of children’s books, clone titles, plot narrative arcs, commodify children and childhood, and keep their slaves, the authors.
It is said that authors are now hired as much for their performance potential in schools and at book fairs as for their books, and many authors can be seen pontificating on soapboxes throughout the forests, oblivious of the fact that just because you can write children’s books, that doesn’t mean that you know anything about children’s books.
(There are also rumoured sub-colonies of Poets for Children around these parts, although nobody knows whether they actually exist. Or can exist.)
But where you should tread most carefully, as you may have already noticed before you arrived, is in the Swamps of Academia. Sixty years ago these were virtually empty, with a few picturesque, thatched cottages on the banks. There, as we have seen, critics sitting in front of a cosy fire would gently decide which children’s books were good and which were not good, secure in the knowledge that Standards Were Standards and that Everyone Knew What the Standards Were. These critics are now more or less extinct (except a few that have escaped to review children’s books in “mainstream” newspapers, and one or two who write cheerfully inaccurate histories), having first been ravaged by The Theorists (of whom more in a moment) and finally ousted by the ravenous Inclusivists. Unlike the in-front-of-the-cosy-fire critics, who would have regarded themselves as un-political or a-political, the Inclusivists are nothing but political: they are intent on revising all texts and how we think about them, and redressing ancient imbalances (or, possibly, settling some old scores). This active and vocal tribe has managed to make inroads into almost every enclave (especially the land of the Historians, who can, naturally, grasp the advantage of re-writing everything), and even the all-powerful Publishers have seen a (perhaps infinitely) lucrative side to their activities.
At one point, the historian Brian Alderson entered the fray by submitting a spoof abstract of a paper, “Envisioning Hegemony”, for an (unnamed) children’s literature conference. Apart from citing a fictitious journal and a non-existent author, he suggested that “the connotative semiotics of the printed image […] may lead […] towards the unexplored territory of pictorial content as subliminal discourse in this instance on the hegemony of the imperial ethic”. The paper was accepted. “You see”, Alderson concluded gleefully, “that is the joy of critical theory […]. Nobody knows what you’re talking about, but it really sounds terrific” (Alderson 1997: 248).
As for The Theorists – well, as we have seen, thirty years ago, these monsters ruled the Academic Swamps, often having imported complex weaponry from the Literary Theory Tribes on the Mainland. But, perhaps because their language was too alien, or possibly because in Children’s Literature Land, Emperors are less likely to get away with having no clothes, they are not the force they were. (As Jonathan Swift put it, some wells are thought wondrous deep because they are wondrous dark.) They have retreated to a few strongholds (where, it must be said, some intriguing material is still produced), but they have left behind shrines to their late gods, many of which have (as ruins have always) been quarried to produce useful materials. Indeed, the astute explorer will be a pragmatist and will generally do well to make use of them. As Roderick McGillis put it (2010: 15):
The moment of high theory […] appears to be behind us […]. Is, then, theory dead? […]. Have we somehow come through this fall from innocence that theory initiated none the worse for wear? Can we return to the days of close reading? Can we just enjoy literature for its own sake? […]. Or is theory shambling after us with hunger in its eyes? Theory had the force of disruption; it did away with easy certainties […].
While all of these Tribes have their attractions, and can be addictive, none are more so than the Author-Society Tribes. These are, of course, universal phenomena, but in Children’s Literature Land they are particularly virulent (if that’s the word I want). Here you find fans of Lewis Carroll, or Arthur Ransome, and a hundred others: these are real fans, fans who own those authors, and know all there is to know (and often a good deal more) about their lives and books. Such immaculate and dedicated scholarship does not exist elsewhere, but although they are almost invariably amiable and eccentric (not to say insane), they are easily offended. (There is an even more curious sub-species – those who promote literary tourist destinations – although these (it would seem) tend to manage without much knowledge of actual books.)
Now, by this time you may be thinking that you’re in a Wonderland where (as the Cheshire Cat observed in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) everyone is mad, so I should point you to two oases of (relative) sanity.
One is the enclave of the Booksellers: not the antiquarian or big commercial chain store, but those quiet souls who value books and children and know something about both. And care.
And then there are those rather bedraggled and sad figures you may meet wandering the forests, rather pathetically trying to make sense of it all. These are the Professors and Lecturers in Children’s Literature that you may also glimpse (for they are shy creatures) at conferences like this. It is worth being patient with them, and they always respond to a kind word: after all, they have had more years of being confused than you have. However, don’t be fooled, because beneath their mild exteriors, they are all tough rebels – leaders of a literary revolution that is still going on. For that is the secret of Children’s Literature Land – ALL its inhabitants – even the antiquarians – are part of a subversive, anti-establishment movement. Children’s Literature is different, and we are all, mad or not, champions of that difference.
It’s a great place. And you really will be glad you came. Enjoy your stay.
References
Alderson, Brian. 1969. The Irrelevance of Children to the Children’s Book Reviewer. Children’s Book News 4 (1): 10–11.
Alderson, Brian. 1997. How to Get Your Ph.D. in Children’s Literature, Horn Book Magazine 73 (4): 437–441, reprinted in 2006 in Children’s Literature (Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies), vol. II, edited by Peter Hunt, 246–250. London and New York: Routledge.
Beauvais, Clémentine & Maria Nikolajeva, eds. 2017. The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bland, Janice. 2022. My History: Compelling Stories for English Language Learners. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bookbird. < https://www.ibby.org/bookbird>.
Books for Keeps. <https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/>.
Chambers, Aidan. 1973. Introducing Books to Children. London: Heinemann Educational.
CLELE. <https://clelejournal.org/>.
Darton, F. J. Harvey. 1932/1982. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Third edition, edited by Brian Alderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fox, Geoff & Mike Benton. 1985. Teaching Literature, Nine to Fourteen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fraustino, Lisa Rowe, ed. 2025. Children’s Literature 53. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Giddens, Eugene. 2017. Distant Reading and Children’s Literature. In The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Clémentine Beauvais & Maria Nikolajeva, 305–313. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hunt, Peter, ed. 1990. Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism. London and New York: Routledge,
Hunt, Peter, ed. 2004. International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature. London and New York: Routledge.
Hunt, Peter, ed. 2006. Children’s Literature: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge.
Hunt, Peter. 2017. The Case of Canons and Classics: The Impossibility of Definitions. In Canon Constitution and Canon Change in Children’s Literature, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Anja Muller, 15–19. London: Routledge.
IRSCL. <www.irscl.org>.
McGillis, Roderick. 2010. “Criticism is the Theory of Literature”: Theory is the Criticism of Literature. In The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd, 14–25. London and New York: Routledge.
Paul, Lissa. 2011. The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century. New York and London: Routledge.
Pratchett, Terry. 1998. Jingo. London: Corgi.
Reynolds. Kimberley. 2016. Left Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, Jaqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan Press.
Rowe Townsend, John. 1965. Written for Children. London: Garnet Miller.
Rudd, David. 2013. Reading the Child in Children’s Literature: An Heretical Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Trites, Roberta Seelinger. 2000. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Stephens, John. 2006. Theory and Critical Practice. Canadian Children’s Literature, 32 (1) 132–144.
Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine 2002. The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature. London: Routledge. 2002.
Peter Hunt
Sveučilište u Cardiffu, Cardiff, Wales, UK, Sveučilište grada Dublina, Dublin, Irska
Zemlja dječje književnosti
(Antropološki) vodič za preživljavanje za početnike
Dječja je književnost diljem svijeta uspješna, ali i izvanredno složena akademska disciplina. Želimo li ju istražiti, moramo razumjeti kako se razvijala i u što je prerasla. Pozivam vas na maštovito putovanje kroz jedan sinkronijski vremenski odsječak. Zamislimo otok – Zemlju Dječje Književnosti. Gusto je pošumljena tekstovima, a na mnogim proplancima žive plemena koja tvrde da su pravi vlasnici otoka. Ona ne samo da govore različitim dijalektima, nego se rijetko mogu složiti oko toga što vrijedi reći o knjigama koje ih okružuju. Obuhvaćaju ljudekoji-se-bave-knjigama-i-djecom, pedagoge i knjižničare, koji provode vrijeme nudeći prave knjige pravoj djeci. Na drugom kraju otoka nalaze se drevne knjižnice i višedimenzionalni arhivi, gdje vrebaju prašinom prekriveni bibliografi, bibliofili i ljudi-koji-se-bave-rijetkimknjigama. Oni žive blizu prodavača antiknih knjiga i knjigoveža i nemaju nikakve veze s djecom. Zatim su tu povjesničari, divlji arhivisti te oni najekstremniji i o knjigama najovisniji znanstvenici koji čine plemena društava pisaca. Otokom dominiraju nakladnici i medijska plemena, sa svojim robovima, piscima – iako ih nekolicina još uvijek trči uokolo neukroćena – a moguće je da su tu i dječji pjesnici iako, nitko ne zna postoje li oni uistinu. Ili mogu li (postojati). Ali, najpažljivije moramo koračati kroz Akademske Močvare, jer u njima još uvijek slobodno tumaraju tri glavna kritička plemena – recenzenti, teoretičari i inkluzivisti. Najneobičnija su plemena lutajući književni turisti, najbezazleniji su neovisni knjižari, a najneopasniji su profesori dječje književnosti.
Ključne riječi: akademija, dječje knjige, istraživanje dječje književnosti, nakladnici, posrednici, vrjednovanje dječje književnosti