Tuesday 24 February 2015

Why might the study of children's literature be more complex than you imagine?

Children's literature is utterly imaginative but represents ideas in a very simple way. It is not entirely bounded by adults’ rules of thinking, it toys with them, and perhaps, that is why it is more complex.
In the novel Phantom Tollbooth, Milo says: “[t]he least they could have done was to send a highway with it, for it's terribly impractical without one.” 

If Milo complains that the tollbooth is “impractical” without a highway, it is just to involve our logic into the story, otherwise, he doesn’t need a highway as he drives in his imagination. Does our inability to think like children, make children's literature more complex?