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Children's Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic Maria Nikolajeva. Children's Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic New York and London: Garland, 1996.
Although the title of Maria Nikolajeva's study refers to the coming of age of children's literature itself, the book's sophistication also indicates a coming of age in the criticism and theory of children's literature, and Nikolajeva's semiotic approach is as clear as one could wish for. She has brought semiotics in the service of our understanding of children's books to a fine point. Previously, we have had several important studies of children's literature which employed some form of semiotics: Shavit's Poetics of Children's Literature (1986), Nodelman's Words About Pictures (1988), and Golden's The Narrative Symbol in Childhood Literature (1990) come to mind. But none of these, I think, has the particular slant or perhaps even ambition of this book. Like Shavit and any critic who comes to her task from a semiotic or structuralist perspective, Nikolajeva sees literature as a polysystem, a structure of words coherent and dynamic in its growth and movement. An insistent metaphor in the book is that of a "mechanism"; the literary system works like a machine. For her, literature is a systematic process; the machinery of culture turns out work that grows in complexity and sophistication as time passes and writers build upon the work of their precursors. For Nikolajeva, children's literature has come of age because its forms have become difficult to distinguish in terms of genre conventions, because its messages are less imperative than they once were, and because it "has grown more 'literary' and artistically elaborate" (6).
I confess that this notion of growth and maturity in literature seems dubious to me because it is necessarily connected to a notion of value: recent literature for children is better than earlier literature for children because of its "convergence of genres" (9) and its undoubted sophistication (7). Why we are more ready to pass such a judgement on children's literature and not on other literature remains unclear to me. To pass judgement, however, allows us to relegate early works of children's literature-say the work of Sarah Fielding or Anna Laetitia Barbauld or Mary Wollstonecraft-to the dust heap. Even more unsettling is the possibility...