“The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction”, or the manipulation of a literary genre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Published in 1984, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction is considered one of the most important critical studies in the field of children’s literature. The book assesses J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), in order to make claims about the whole of children’s literature, contesting the assumption that it is written for the child. Instead Rose argues that children’s books satisfy the needs and desires of adults. Rose defines children’s literature as ‘something of a soliciting, a chase, or even a seduction’, claiming children’s books are actually written to fulfill adult desires and to perpetuate adult fantasies about childhood. ‘Authors unconsciously “seduce” or “colonize” the child by writing books that reflect an adult ideal of childhood, which child readers are meant to identify with and emulate’. This level of adult control over children’s reading material casts doubt over the entire nature and function of children’s literature – who is it really for and whose needs does it actually meet: adults’ or children’s? In addition, Philip Pullman, in his 1996 Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, stated that ‘all stories teach, whether they intend to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by’. This talk will therefore investigate the idea of children’s literature as a genre controlled and manipulated by adults who write, illustrate, publish, market and purchase books for the apparent education and/or entertainment of child readers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".