Families, like schools - and for many of the same reasons - have been a constant presence in children's literature, but the way they have been represented has changed considerably over time in line with shifts in cultural needs and expectations about both families and children. The following discussion traces these changes by examining the way the nuclear family is introduced in early children's fiction, consolidated and repositioned during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, falls into disrepute in the mid to late twentieth century, and is tested for obsolescence at the start of the new millennium.

Meet the family: families and children in early children's literature

Other contributors to this volume discuss parent-child relationships before the eighteenth century, providing glimpses of the way families were organised in the pre-modern period. In Centuries of Childhood (1960), the French historian Philippe Ariès describes this as a movement from the communal model, in which the 'family' incorporated networks of dependants who were not always linked by blood, which prevailed from the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, to the small, intimate nuclear family familiar today.

Throughout the world, literature for children originates with retelling and adapting the familiar stories of a culture - folktales, legends and stories about historical and fictional individuals memorialised for their heroism or holiness, adventurousness or mischief. When English-language children's literature emerged as a visible entity from the seventeenth century, it followed this route, with the publication of various fairy (or folk) tale collections and religious texts. Subsequently, the principal domains of retold stories in children's literature expanded to include myths and mythologies; medieval and quasi-medieval romance, especially tales of King Arthur's knights; stories about legendary heroes such as Robin Hood; oriental tales, usually linked with The Arabian Nights; and modern classics, from Shakespeare to Kenneth Grahame and L. Frank Baum.

A story retold for children serves important literary and social functions, inducting its audience into the social, ethical and aesthetic values of the producing culture. Retellings are thus marked by a strong sense that there is a distinct canon within any of the domains. The tendency for children's literature to evolve as both separate and specialised is very pertinent here: its dominant concerns, especially social issues and personal maturation, make retellings for children a special area, which cannot be simply covered by implication in studies which do not explicitly discuss writing for children. Only a couple of the principal domains of retellings can boast a study dedicated to this writing, however.

There is a Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) for almost any critical history of the English novel that you care to mention: Hardy the last Victorian or the proto-modernist, the rural idyllist or the social-problem novelist, bearer of the last vestiges of the folk-tale or pioneer of the feminist heroine and the working-class hero. Whether you are looking for a historical novel or a Bildungsroman, a tragedy or a social satire, there is at least one among Hardy's fourteen novels that can be pressed into service. At the beginning of his career in the early 1870s, when his first novels were published anonymously in accordance with a common convention of the time, reviewers were apt to compare him, whether in admiration or by way of reproof for a perceived excess of indebtedness, to George Eliot: this was particularly true of his first major success, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). By the end of his time as a writer of fiction, his challenging last novels were seen by some of his contemporaries as fifth columnists within the solid ranks of English literature, subversively opening the way for the invasive forces of French naturalism, Scandinavian 'Ibscenity', or other foreign influences, most notably the case with Jude the Obscure (1895). Despite the often unsympathetic reviews that dogged his career, Hardy's reputation, both with the general reading public and with his successors, seems to have been less subject to vicissitudes than some. His work remains continuously in print in multiple editions, and novelists with as little in common as Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and John Fowles, have found much in him to praise and from which to learn.

Caryl Churchill's drama shows a sustained and deepening engagement with ecological issues from her 1971 radio drama Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, through Fen (1983) (developed for the stage with the members of the Joint Stock theatre company), to the collaborative combination of dance, song and drama Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), the more recent plays The Skriker (1994) and Far Away (2000), and her 2006 choral work We Turned on the Light. Her focus moves from localized environmental concerns (as in Fen) to the ecological effects of globalization and the alienated consumerism of late capitalism (for example, in Far Away and The Skriker), but there is not so much a simple progression in her work as a recursive, intense dialogue in which elements of her earlier plays are repurposed and complex issues are revisited. In particular, Churchill returns to the idea of the commons - which can be understood both as a localized place, a plot of land unenclosed and of equal access, and also as a planetary concept of shared resources, where the nature of the sharing (perhaps beyond the human?) is open to philosophical inquiry. Churchill works with time as well as place in her ecological dramaturgy, deploying temporal shifts which hint at the multiple rhythms of biology and of capitalist exchange, exploring conceptual legacies of the past which inform current understanding of our relationship to the natural world, and historicizing in the Brechtian sense as she shows paths not taken.

Two decades of intense experimentation and revision preceded the publication of Jane Austen's six major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818). Constantly playing off the tradition, she merges the dramatic interiority of Samuel Richardson with the authorial voice of Henry Fielding to expose characters' minds while prompting the judgement of readers. That flexible narrative voice would catch the attention of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, among others. Even in her last unfinished fragment, Sanditon, Austen was still evolving new techniques and subjects. But her affection for irony, satire, and parody derives just as clearly from Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. Thus Austen, poised between two centuries, writes novels that are as compact, witty, and incisive as plays. Austen's relation to predecessors and contemporaries may be traced through the books she owned, says she has read, alludes to, or seems to echo. Even that may represent a mere fraction of what she knew, for as F. R. Leavis remarks, 'she read all there was to read, and took all that was useful to her - which wasn't only lessons'. Like most authors, Austen made books out of other books as well as out of life. If readers are active rather than passive consumers of texts, so too writers poach freely from other writers. Thus Austen's appropriations signify not lack of imagination, not plagiarism, not submission to 'influence', but sheer competitiveness. Her rewriting of fellow novelists particularly implies critique, for comparisons reveal her irresistible literary-critical impulse to improve upon them.

In 1706 Daniel Defoe was spying in Scotland. A year before the Union of England and Scotland, he wrote to his employer, Robert Harley, Queen Anne's Secretary of State, from Edinburgh: “I have faithfull Emissaries in Every Company And I Talk to Everybody in Their Own way . . . With the Glasgow Mutineers I am to be a fish Merchant, with the Aberdeen Men a woollen and with the Perth and western men a Linen Manufacturer, and still at the End of all Discourse the Union is the Essentiall and I am all to Every one that I may Gain some.” / Let us hope that Harley was amused as well as informed. 'I Talk to Everybody in Their Own way' - and everybody talks to me. This is good training for a writer of some sort, a dramatist perhaps and a journalist certainly. Not that Defoe was a novice: born in 1660, he was in his mid-forties, author of satirical poems and pamphlets including The True-Born Englishman and The Shortest Way with Dissenters (the latter landed him in jail). But a new - and safer - kind of writer was about to emerge. While the word 'novel' had been available throughout the seventeenth century to describe certain kinds of stories in print, especially in its later decades, the idea of 'the novelist' was about to leap into existence. The first date recorded by the OED of the word for an author of novels is 1728. The phenomenal success of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) had something to do with this.

Even before she was enshrined among the most important women writers of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf fretted that such might be her fate. 'One does not want', she insisted in a diary entry from 1921, 'an established reputation, such as I think I was getting, as one of our leading female novelists.' Be that as it may, that is the reputation she possessed then and still enjoys, although on different and ever shifting grounds, today. At the time she voiced this worry, her reputation was based on two novels, the adventurous but ultimately abortive female Bildungsroman, The Voyage Out (1915), the more conventional, but socially shrewder Night and Day (1919), and a volume of experimental short fiction, Kew Gardens (1919). The revolutionary modernist works - Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941) - were yet to be written. Nor could their innovative forms have been predicted of the writer whose protests against the 'masculinist' conception and domination of life were more ideological than artistic. The Voyage Outand Night and Day were eloquent in denouncing the hypocrisies and inequities that buttressed patriarchy, but their feminism was not yet allied to a revolutionary programme for the novel. Her apprentice works did little to confute the assumption widely held then - and arguably still prevalent today - that women novelists, whether conservative or radical in their conception of society and women's role and destiny within it, are unlikely to join in the more aggressive assaults on tradition spearheaded by the combative male modernists of the day.

It is a truth still insufficiently acknowledged that our finest children's books are hybrid constructs that combine a child's perspective with the guarded perspective of the former child we call 'adult'. Pliable and elastic, such mixed texts allow both perspectives to coexist. They may rely on a fictional child/adult amalgam, or an animal/human composite, such as a Sendakian Wild Thing, as a mediating agent. Or they may require a transformative space that is both mundane and fantastic, as ordinary as a smelly barn and as magical as the mysterious advertising slogans that a tiny spider called Charlotte has spun on her threshold web.

Since it has become routine for critics to scrutinise adult values embedded in juvenile texts, we may no longer need Jacqueline Rose to remind us that children's literature is not 'something self-contained' or exclusively self-referential. Nonetheless, our scrupulous attention to cultural and political frames has hardly moved us beyond Rose's dialectical emphasis on generational binaries. The overlaps and frictions that make most children's books such an interactive meeting ground for readers of different ages still require a much closer attention.

“[F]iction, or indeed any book, if good, is not lying, it is a world, a life of its own. Marginal, perhaps, but the marginal, or oblique, has great value.” Henry Green, The Times, 1961 /“'I can't seem able to express myself but there you are.'” Raunce, in Loving, 1945 / 'What is wrong with this picture?' It is a question with which generations of late twentieth-century British children became familiar, as they scanned treated photographs in magazines, trying to place the trim missing from a policeman's uniform, or locate an invisible football; it is also a question pertinent to Henry Green, English modernism's most evasive and idiosyncratic talent. (He was born Henry Vincent Yorke in 1905 and died in 1973.) Reading one of his elliptical yet precisely pitched novels, we might well find ourselves becoming gradually aware that something more, less, or other than straightforward 'representation' is going on. In its most overt form, this displacement of attention involves literally leaving things out - notably the articles which go missing from Green's work in the late 1920s, such as the unpublished 'Saturday' ('Noise came from streets but only murmuring. Sun shone on flowers' (S, 53)) and his second novel, Living: “As Mr Dupret and Bridges walked through the shops Mr Tarver followed them. This man was chief designer in Birmingham factory. He was very clever man at his work.” (LLPG, 211)

Girlhood and boyhood, at least until quite recently, have often been treated as separate, different and unequal in children's literature. Eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century children's books are full of strong, active boy characters, and much more submissive, domestic and introspective girls. But equally prevalent, even if sometimes less immediately obvious, has been a recurrent expression of the flimsiness and artificiality of the division between boys and girls, and of the desire of many protagonists to contravene the gender identities enjoined on them. Many favourite characters from children's books either long to defy the simple gender categorisation imposed on them as members of the Anglo-American middle classes, or actually actively transgress the roles assigned to them. Here, for instance, is Georgina, speaking out in the first of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books:

George epitomises both the sharp division between the social construction of girls and boys and the longing to cross the divide. Wearing shorts, with cropped curly hair and refusing to answer to her given name, this dogged eleven-year-old is determined to dodge the female role in which biology has cast her.

Confronted by calamity on a scale 'impossible to describe, or indeed conceive', the narrator of Defoe's fictionalised memoir of the Great Plague, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), zooms in on an individual case: that of two brothers who flee the city to maximise their chances of survival. Shunned by wary villagers, and shunning their fellow refugees, the brothers typify the indigent, solitary state of displaced Londoners who scatter themselves across the fields in isolated, improvised shacks. 'Nor is it unlikely', adds Defoe's narrator (whom we know only by his initials, H.F.), “but that some of the unhappy Wanderers might die so all alone, even sometimes for want of Help, as particularly in one Tent or Hutt, was found a Man dead, and on the Gate of a Field just by, was cut with his Knife in uneven Letters, the following Words, by which it may be suppos'd the other Man escap'd, or that one dying first, the other bury'd him as well as he could; / Om I s E r Y! / W eB o T HS h a L LD y E, / W o E, W o E.” ( JPY, 151) / With its faithful, even fussy transcription of an utterance pitched somewhere between elemental cry and grunting bathos, the passage flirts with absurdity in ways already acknowledged by Defoe's narrator. As he uneasily recognises, there are comic as well as tragic aspects to the incongruous condition of these early modern urbanites, torn by catastrophe from their humdrum world, 'who liv'd like wandring Pilgrims in the Desarts' ( JPY, 57).

Many of the most celebrated children's books have a famous origin story attached to them. Lewis Carroll made up 'the interminable fairy-tale of Alice's Adventures' (as he called it in his diary) while he was on a boat-trip with Alice, Lorina and Edith Liddell in 1862; Peter Pan grew out of J.M. Barrie's intense friendship with the five Llewelyn Davies boys; Salman Rushdie, following the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa, wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories for his son, Zafir, for Zafir, like Haroun, had helped his father recover the ability to tell stories. The veracity of these stories, and many others like them, is open to question. But their prevalence and endurance is nevertheless important. We seem to demand such originary myths for our children's classics. What we want, it appears, is the assurance that published children's books have emerged from particular, known circumstances, and, more specifically, from the story told by an individual adult to individual children. C. S. Lewis listed this as one of his 'good ways' of writing for children: 'The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps ex tempore.' Such a creative method is an antidote to what Lewis thought the very worst way to write for children, striving to 'find out what they want and give them that, however little you like it yourself'.

Discussing Henry James’s ghost stories in December 1921, Virginia Woolf paused over James’s use of the adjective ‘unspeakable’ at the eerie climax of ‘The Turn of the Screw’: ‘The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly evening hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.’ It was an unexpected adjective to encounter in the work of such a fastidiously garrulous writer, Woolf implied. But, she went on to suggest, unspeakability was in fact one of James’s most important subjects. In his ghost stories, as in his novels, James was compelled by those moments when ‘some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface’: by those incidents or instants when – in Woolf’s careful phrase – ‘the significant overflows our powers of expressing it’. Readers shudder on encountering these narrative voids or superfluxes, she argued enigmatically, because they afford us a glimpse into ‘the dark’ that is ‘perhaps, in ourselves’. William Golding (1911–93) and Henry James (1843–1916) could not, at the level of the sentence, be more different. James’s sentences are prolonged, filigreed, and devoted – with their delays and recursions – to the subtle revision of implication. His favoured tense is the conditional, his natural mood the subjunctive. His prose cherishes the verb, which most often serves as a loom-end, sending sense shuttling back along a sentence in order to begin another, minutely altered, traverse.

Of all the jingoistic terms characterizing recent US foreign policy, the 'war on terror' has endured, not only because it refers to the unprovoked bombing of Baghdad on 19 March 2003, which led to a brutal and ongoing war, but because it is such an elusive and strange idea. At first it seemed that this was typical 'Bush-speak': meaning 'terrorism', the former president loosely and inaccurately said 'terror'. Yet the OED states that the provenance of 'terrorism' is the 'system of terror' introduced in the French Revolution, and that 'terror' derives from the far older Latin terrorum or 'the state of being terrified or greatly frightened'. Can war be waged on a system of terror and on the affective state of being terrified? Isn't war the cause of terror? Or is terror what feeds war? And what of terror when no war is in view? Since her earliest radio plays, Caryl Churchill has explored these questions, not as ancillary to but as deeply rooted in her work. She dramatizes a provocative slippage between terrorist act and terrorized affect and invites us to discern in her theatre a unique dramaturgy of terror, a shifting aggregate of formal decisions based on the media she writes for and the times she has lived, and is living, through. 'On Churchill and terror' will trace a long arc of representative plays, from The Ants (1962) and Objections to Sex and Violence (1975), to Softcops (1978), A Mouthful of Birds (1986), Thyestes (1994) and Far Away (2000) in order to map the key coordinates of Churchill's career-long concern with both systems and affect, with terrorism and terror.

Most readers of American and British children's literature can easily offer examples of children's literature classics, readily agreeing that, say, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) would belong in that category. As its front-line representatives, classics publicly define the genre - but how does the genre define its classics? In order to answer this question, one must explore the unique forces and processes that affect children's literature and its reception. Children's literature operates differently from adult literature, for the latter offers a consistency of creators and audience: an adult book is written by adults, read by adults, judged by adults and passed on to adults; the people in the position of gatekeepers, selecting and championing particular texts for admission to the canon and lionisation as classics, are themselves inarguably members of those texts' official and intended audiences. The forces behind the approval and canonisation of children's literature constitute a complex Venn diagram, with categories defined by profession (academic literary critic or hands-on practitioner in libraries or schools), fields of study (English department, education department or school of library science), professional status (professional user of children's literature or lay reader of books as parent or interested adult) and age (child or adult), all in dynamic relationship to one another, with categories sometimes overlapping, sometimes acting complementarily, sometimes operating antagonistically.

Imagine, if you will, the following: a boy born to English parents, in Calcutta, during the waning years of the Napoleonic Wars. The boy's father dies four years later, and the boy is soon thereafter sent away from his mother - who had in the meantime resumed a prior attachment to an army captain - to distant England, where he will be schooled. (En route, the young boy catches sight of the exiled Bonaparte, tending the garden in his St Helena retreat.) His schooling is perfectly correct by the standards of his class and time, and perfectly nightmarish; he is initiated into the rituals of English social formation by the tyrannies, physical, moral, and sexual, of the pre- Victorian public school, and memories of these humiliations and the loneliness consequent upon them will follow the boy into adulthood and middle age. Youthful degradation leads to a prolonged period of diffident attempts to start a career and more serious cultural experimentation: an undistinguished period of time at Cambridge; travels to Paris, Weimar, and beyond, where the young man develops tastes for bohemian life; and a rapid dissipation of his patrimony thanks to gambling, unwise investments, and a bank failure. This once-genteel young man then turns to the London Grub Street of his day for a living, and begins to turn out spirited and witty sketches for newspapers and magazines. The list of his published pieces numbers in the hundreds, and the young man has married - unwisely, as it turns out, for his wife inexplicably and inexorably falls into a mental illness that results in her confinement in a series of asylums.