Children's literature, history, cultural memory: intersections

The first nine articles of this year’s issue of Cultural Perspectives deal with the presence and role of history in children’s literature in English . From the very start, our contributors agreed that neither term could be taken at face value. Ideological, cultural and literary intersections demanded a careful unraveling of several knots. Experts on children’s literature agreed that the genre of history and its discourse offered at once a powerful concentration of all that we regard as un-childish in children’s literature, and un-historical in historiography. The variety of approaches, the texts analyzed, the very tools adopted by the contributors, speak of their awareness of the problems embedded in these two relevant terms, which can be described as the literary/visual presence of historical matter in texts performing a significant cultural role. Ideology functions as the hinge between these two dimensions: between the literary uses of the past and the cultural performance of the text in the present.