Children's Literature Association Quarterly

In 1949, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren observed in Theory of Literature that "Literary theory and criticism concerned with the novel are much inferior in both quantity and quality to theory and criticism of poetry" (212). The last twenty years have shown that they need not have worried in point of quantity.

The mushrooming of narrative theory reflects, rather belatedly, the primacy of narrative fiction in the lives of "real" readers. Narrative has both ancient roots and deep psychological and cultural wellsprings; at the same time, it is the most commonly read literary form, and, of course, is at the centre of children's literature. Unfortunately much narrative theory has tended to the descriptive and classificatory, processes that are not always enlightening. Virtuoso performances such as Wayne Booth's pioneering The Rhetoric of Fiction are the exception; leaden "naming of parts" exercises such as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics are more the rule. At its worst, narrative theory only rehearses the obvious and leads to spectacularly pretentious non-statements such as this one by the narratologist Mieke Bal, quoted (unfortunately with approbation) by Jonathan Culler:

The events [of a novel] have temporal relationships with each other. Each one is either anterior to, simultaneous with, or posterior to every other event.

(171)

That narrative theory should come to this seems to me to be a pity, because it is an obvious area where the child-centred and book-centred critics of children's literature can meet (and we are still in need of such meeting places). Why narrative appeals, how the storyteller tells her story, what keeps us turning the page, how we recognize what is important for the narrative (need-to-know as opposed to nice-to-know), must be the concern of theoretician and practitioner alike.

Six years ago at the ChLA convention in Charlotte, I lamented that "Narrative theory is really rather disappointing. Based as it is upon such rich materials, one might expect it to be as psychedelic as the rhetoric of poetry; too often it turns out to be reductive" (192). I was corrected, a trifle acerbically, by Diana Kelly-Byrne, who pointed out that I was overlooking connections with literary socialization, and contextual factors of the interaction of children and text (196). Indeed I had. Fortunately there have been major strides in cross-fertilization between disciplines over narrative (as well as the examples of lateral thinking that we shall see in this Special Section).

Stylistics, for example, has grown from the straightforward "pre-critical" activity of the analysis of small areas of text to become a partner in discourse analysis; discourse analysis in turn has grown to encompass text rather than oral interchange. We therefore have a valuable tool for considering the cues and structures and motivations within texts—how narrative works. Consequently, we may be able to gain insights into the differing meanings constructed by different readers, which can stand beside empirical studies of children's meanings. The potentials of narrative, therefore, can be understood from their linguistic structures as well as their various realizations. As the stylistician Roger Fowler puts it:

Linguistic codes do not reflect reality neutrally; they interpret, organize, and classify the subjects of discourse. They embody theories of how the world is arranged: worldviews or ideologies. For the individual, these theories are useful and reassuring, making his relationship with the world simple and manageable.

(27)

This means that we may understand narrative in terms of its inbuilt codes; as Fowler says, "in continuous text, sentences are linked together by an intricate system of cohesive ties" (69). The identification of these ties controls our understanding of the narrative. This is relevant not only to story, but to the reading process; Frank Smith, a notable expert on reading, observes in Writing and the Writer that "the more unconventional the reader finds the text, the less the reader is likely to have any relevant expectations about it and the less understandable it is likely to be" (95-96).

Unconventionality and the ways in which both critics and readers deal with it, is one of the themes in this Special Section. Two of...