Ideology and Children’s Books

Abstract

Ideology emerged as a concern of children’s literature criticism during the late 1970s, as discourses interrogating social assumptions about gender, race, and class began to impact upon the production and reception of children’s literature. The fi rst major study was Bob Dixon’s (1977) Catching Them Young, which set out to examine “the ideas, attitudes and opinions which authors convey to children through novels and stories” and “the ways in which this is done” (Vol. I., p. xiii). A decade later, Peter Hollindale (1988) argued that analysis needed to move beyond a focus on explicit negative content to analyze the unaddressed assumptions of texts and the propensity for ideology to inhere in language itself. Underpinning these approaches themselves was a Marxian assumption (largely mediated through the works of Louis Althusser [1971])that ideology was invariably negative in impact. That this is a limited perspective in relation to children’s literature was argued from a critical discourse studies approach by John Stephens (1992), who pointed out that there cannot be a narrative without an ideology: “Ideology is formulated in and by language, meanings within language are socially determined, and narratives are constructed out of language” (p. 8). Whether textual ideology is negative, positive, or more or less neutral will thus be determined by the ideological positioning of a text within culture. Our purpose in this chapter is to explore such positionings from the perspective of the critical discourse studies which have developed over the past two decades, as seen, for example, in Teun Van Dijk’s (2001) evolving project on discourse and ideology.

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