Children’s Literature at Postgraduate Level in the United States

Abstract

Until recently, postgraduate study of children’s literature in North American English departments has been relatively rare and somewhat haphazard. For many professors in my generation and the generation before us, studying, teaching, and writing about children’s literature often began by lucky accident. As graduate students, few of us would have been permitted to specialize in children’s literature, but few of us would have even thought to do so. The more fortunate among us may have had mentors sympathetic to the emerging field. (Judith Plotz, for instance, was my dissertation advisor.) But our formal study of children’s literature was either spotty or nonexistent. Because we went to school when children’s literature was still generally considered beneath criticism, most of us experience a shock of recognition when we read the opening sentence of Beverly Lyon Clark’s book Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003): “When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading children’s literature.”