LITERATURE | On so-called “kid lit” and serious reading. | Q&A interview with Dr. Shelley King. 

Clockwork, by Philip Pullman, 1996

2018: While at Dose, as mentioned in many of my past posts, I wrote a weekly book column. It was called “Words” and ran in what Dose called the “Fix” section (yet another tone-deaf drug reference, because Dose was disgusting, but I digress).

My editors were constantly pushing me to write about things that weren’t actual books.

This resulted in some absolutely terrible columns on celebrity blogs and book clubs, for example, but I often pushed back and wrote traditional book reviews, while also regularly pitching things related to my pet project interests. Often, no one had the time to stop me. I was the prime book contact, and the only person actually reading most of the texts we were being sent.

One of my pet projects was so-called children’s and young adult (YA) literature. To this day, I love YA, often more than books marketed to adults, and I’ve often been subject to a lot of condescending judgement about it. So at the time, I pitched a piece about that – specifically about YA books that were adult-friendly – and interviewed a professor at Queen’s University to fill it out.

Dr. Shelley King (my favourite-ever English lit prof) was and is the best.

During my undergrad, I took four different courses with her, entirely because I wanted to keep studying with her, regardless of course content. I hate Dickens, for example, but the way she taught Bleak House was so interesting, I still think about it sometimes, twenty years later. She would eventually supervise my undergrad thesis. Of late, we have become Facebook friends and she remains a bright, inspirational spot in my reading life and educational history. She’s just great.

But of course, Dose being Dose, after interviewing her, the piece I wrote for my column was gutted. The final work wasn’t terrible, exactly, but it wasn’t good either. And since Shelley gave me so much more that was cut from the published piece, I’ve included my Q&A with her (conducted by email, June 27-28, 2005) here.

Jen Selk: My column for the coming week is about YA fiction that works for adults. Are you up to say a bit on this subject?

Dr. Shelley King: Your mandate of looking at young adult fiction for adult readers ties in very nicely with my current research interests. (If you can find the issue of Children’s Literature that just came out, you’ll find I have an article on Pullman’s Clockwork that looks at the complexity of genre and readership.)

I’ve culled a few comments from a talk I gave at Bishop’s University last spring entitled “Interpretive Faith: MacDonald, Pullman and the Child Reader” that looks specifically at similarities between the Victorian author of fairy tales (perhaps the earliest cross-audience genre) and the contemporary fantasist for young adults in terms of their implicit confidence in the ability of young readers to interpret complex literary texts.

I remember you saying something about how there’s really no such thing as children’s literature. Or that the designation is a marketing question, and nothing to do with substance or quality. Is that right?

Critic Roger Sale points out that children’s literature “is the only literary category that defines an audience rather than a subject or an author” (“The Audience in Children’s Literature” Bridges to Fantasy. Eds. Slusser, Rabkin and Scholes, Southern Illinois UP 1982, p. 78).

Certainly many writers make the claim that they simply write the book and let the publisher decide whether it’s for children, or young adults, or grown ups. But even publishers are fallible when it comes to defining audience.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Adult Cover, 2003

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Kid Cover, 2003

The Harry Potter books proved so popular among adult readers that Bloomsbury re-issued them with “adult” covers to fit that market. According to their customer surveys, adult readers make up about 20% of the market. In 2004, “the publishers [brought] out the hardback adult version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the same time as the children’s edition in response to consumer demand.” Such a move, however, also suggests a broad cultural anxiety concerning multiple audience: the adult who prefers to read a “children’s book” for personal pleasure rather than as a mode of interacting with children apparently also prefers that the book be disguised or modified to indicate an “age-appropriate” status for the text within.

What do you think YA books offer that adult fiction doesn’t? 

This is the most difficult question for me – in part because the term adult fiction embraces so many sub-categories. Fantasy or Detective Fiction, for example, are also literary categories that appeal to a specific readership.

My main interest lies in young adult fantasy, so I may have a slightly biased opinion, but if I were to try to pin down where I think the appeal lies, I would say that most good young adult fiction conveys a sense of possibility, of potential for growth and change.

Though the protagonists of young adult fiction may suffer incredible trauma, the narrative usually demonstrates their capacity for endurance and even personal triumph.

In the midst of an unflinching acknowledgement of the worst that life can do to young people, these books offer assurances that change is possible, and above all of the capacity of the young protagonist to succeed.

What do you think is the biggest misconception about children’s literature?

I’d have to say that the biggest misconception is that because a book is defined as belonging to the children’s or YA category that it is necessarily simplistic in terms of its intellectual content or that it offers a lesser literary experience to the reader.

Two prime examples of this are Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child, which might be considered a primer in existentialism for children, and most recently Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or his lovely fairy tale Clockwork.

In 2002 The Amber Spyglass, the third volume of His Dark Materials, accomplished a feat hitherto unknown in juvenile publishing, when it became the first children’s book ever to win Britain’s Whitbread Prize for the book of the year. That it did so attests not simply to Pullman’s ability to write excellent fiction for children, but also to his mass appeal to both child and adult readers.

When in April 2003, the BBC’s Big Read began the search for Britain’s best-loved novel, readers ranked His Dark Materials number three, just below The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice.

In engaging both child and adult readers Pullman’s trilogy is not unique: rather it is part of a distinct trend in contemporary publishing. Similarly, the increasingly popular graphic novels, such as The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, use the comic book genre long associated with adolescent readers to address sophisticated adult themes and issues.

Critics Mitzi Myers and U.C. Knoepflmacher have dubbed this phenomenon “cross-writing.” In 1997 they edited a special edition of the journal Children’s Literature addressing the topic “‘Cross-Writing’ and the Reconceptualizing of Children’s Literary Studies.” Arguing “that a dialogic mix of older and younger voices occurs in texts too often read as univocal” (vii) the editors urged critical consideration of the ways in which authors engage both child readers and adult readers in their texts. So you can see that the question of categories based on audience is an important and complex issue for the study of these works.

The original column that resulted from this interview with Dr. Shelley King published in Dose on July 4, 2005 and can be seen below. You can also read a version of that piece here.

Published in Dose, July 4, 2005