Childhood and Literary Nihilism


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Posted by Alan Hakim on May 12, 1999 at 07:25:04 from sungold1.nl.ibm.com:

In Reply to: Let me clarify what I said... posted by Anne LeVeque on May 11, 1999 at 16:08:10:

Robert is right. Good books for children are not just a preserve of the middle class. Those of you who were at the 1995 Literary Weekend will remember Norman Willis making a similar point, and he went on to be head of the Trades Union Congress.
What the "intelligentsia", who applaud "Junk" and that kind of book, cannot bear is that young people who are not middle class should choose to prefer reading about life outside their own surroundings, especially if their parents are less conscientious than Anne. This preference for the gutter is part of human nature, but what seems new in recent years is the tendency for the older generation to encourage the young downwards.
I am a little doubtful of Anne's reference to a Canadian site about book awards. Maybe the judges aren't Canadian, but you may remember the TARS Literary Rescue Party (reported in Moss 1996), when we had to defend a student in Edmonton, Alberta, against her professor, who wanted her to treat S&A as a feminist tract. At the time, we learned that Canadian academics were particularly prone to this sort of excess. They seem unable to judge a work by anything other than modern standards, even when they are irrelevant.


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