Until J.K. Rowling, Enid Blyton (1897-1968) was the most popular children’s writer of all time. Yet she was also one the most condemned and reviled. Critics dismissed or ignored her books, and librarians and the BBC banned her. Only in recent years has she been rehabilitated. In this essay, I trace the changing reception of Blyton, looking at critical writing as well as adaptations and revisions of her work. The different perspectives I explore illustrate some of the wider assumptions that are in play in adults’ responses to children’s popular culture. This essay is part of a larger project, Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. More information about the project, and illustrated versions of all the essays can be found at: https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/.
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Children's Literature Association Quarterly
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Since the end of the seventeenth century in England, literary criticism of Children’s Literature has followed a ‘natural’ cycle of birth, growth, and development that is almost parallel to the birth and development of Children’s Literature which, mainly springing from oral storytelling, became written and spread through seventeenth-century Europe thanks to the works of Gianbattista Basile and Charles Perrault. This field is vast, and thus this article cannot be exhaustive but rather will attempt to retrace a brief history of criticism, in the English language, by examining several books and articles on the subject, published since 1990 but that also refer as far back as 1700, and available at the University of Cambridge Library. Like women’s writing, Literature for Children at its best is an Art whose ultimate goal is to change history by doing justice, and the role of the critic is to spread light on how that is done in a poetic as well as subversive way.
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