Childhood and Literary Nihilism


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Posted by Alan Hakim on May 10, 1999 at 14:56:48 from sungold1.nl.ibm.com:

The April 1999 issue of "Quadrant" (Australia) has a splendid polemic by Hal Colebatch under this title. It starts:
'It seems that propagating negativity and despair in literature for children and teenagers is a specially valued quality for writers today. The kind of innocent, values-affirming stories thought to be of a previous generation (the Swallows and Amazons stories have been made a sort of anti-icon of these) are held up for ridicule and denigration.'
He goes on to quote examples of recent books for teenagers, and cites reviews of them comparing their bleak pictures of a world of drugs, divorce and HIV/AIDS favourably with the "escapism" of older books. In particular he draws attention to "Junk", the Carnegie Medal winner of a few years ago, which we noted at the time was a far cry from the first winner - Pigeon Post.
After a lament for the "Eagle" comic of the 1950s, he concludes with comment on the BBC's Bookworm poll of last year:
'Among 10,000 children's book readers, "Junk" failed to 'make it', being eclipsed by the positive, affirmative works of C.S.Lewis, Tolkien, "Swallows and Amazons" and classics like "The Wind in the Willows".
'It was a result that drove the literary editor of the London "Observer" to rail against this "bunch of dead authors".... For him the poll result was "strangely at variance with the world as it actually is".
'It is worth remembering the words of Evelyn Waugh, who said (more or less - I quote from memory): "The spirit of the age is the spirits of those who compose it, and the greater the degree of dissent from received opinion, the higher the possibility of diverting it from its present ruinous course."'

This is very reassuring to read.



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