Border Crossings Towards a Mixed Readership

The 'impossibility' of children’s literature was the provocative consideration that Jacqueline Rose formulated in 1984, in her Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Is such literature children’s fiction or is it just an adult projection of what children’s fiction should be like? The same can be argued when it comes to young adult(s’) fiction. How much of it is theirs? Scholarly writing about children’s literature is anything but simple or childish, as many critics have discovered; critical analysis of children’s stories presumes knowledge of many codes of interpretation, of historical developments, and of an enormous body of literature in general. Besides the difficulty of adults to understand the world of childhood and youth, it is even more difficult to grasp the rapid changes in their appreciation of stories, and keep up with such changes. In other words, it is difficult to assess and probe the implication of the addressee, the imagined child or the imagined youth and their relationships with texts addressed to them. Their appreciation of these texts should be of paramount importance.