Perry Nodelman. the Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Perry Nodelman. Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 2008. $35 paper; $43.95 cloth. Hidden Child: Defining Children's Literature is a definitive discussion of the field and genre of literature. Anyone who has studied literature or has a professional interest in any of the related fields that deal with this complex subject knows that attempts to define what one is dealing with are central and continual and yet answers remain curiously elusive and unsatisfactory as they require seemingly endless qualification and reconsideration. This factor explains the length and circuitous nature of Nodelman's book and its necessary density in many parts. Trying to define literature is how we all start out in the field; Hidden Adult is a testament to the wide-ranging and ongoing nature of such work--in Nodelman's case, the culmination of nearly four decades of prolific scholarly work. Beverly Lyon Clark's statement that The Hidden Adult is arguably his magnum opus neatly sums up the significance and authority of Nodelman's latest critical contribution. While Nodelman strives to be as clear and accessible as possible, his Pleasures of Children's Literature is the better starting place for the uninitiated. Hidden Adult's primary audience is those familiar with or working in the field, as such a discussion demands: it is thorough and comprehensive, particularly the third chapter in which Nodelman engages the major debates and their related concerns that have brought us to the current moment in literature studies. He situates his exhaustive discussion within the broader theoretical context of literary studies and production, drawing on well over four hundred sources and focusing on aspects he argues shape both the field and the genre, which are informed by a matrix of adult social forces forever jostling to maintain some control over the other, the child. wide-ranging discussion throughout the book is helpfully signposted with subheadings and frequent reminders of the point(s) being presented or brought forward from an earlier section. Nodelman approaches his formidable topic in an original and effective fashion over four chapters. In the first, Six Texts, he works through close readings of Maria Edgeworth's The Purple Jar (1801), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Hugh Lofting's (unexpurgated) Dr Dolittle (1920), Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins (1950), Ezra Jack Keats's Snowy Day (1962), and Virginia Hamilton's Plain City (1993), a project that uncovers the common ground these divergent share. Nodelman notes that texts identified as 'children's literature' [are] included in this category by virtue of what the category implies, not so much about the category itself as about its intended audience, which makes it a highly unusual category (3). Tough the involvement of adults in all aspects of literature is in plain view, it is amazing how easily adults themselves lose sight of this basic critical factor in the production and reception of children's books (read books for children). Nodelman's aim is to expose the hidden adult every turn along with such inevitable ironies as the second, hidden text, which he calls a shadow text (8) that say[s] less than it hints at (9), yet which can result in child readers understanding] more than is actually said (9). In this first chapter, the fundamental issues, revisited throughout the book, of binary opposition, of ambivalence, of the doubleness of home and away, and of variation are established--all of these hinge on the opposition of child and adult without which there would be no such thing as literature. forty-five shared characteristics examined are helpfully listed in point form the end and then reformulated in paragraph form the end of chapter 3. Chapter 2, the shortest of the four (forty-five pages), [e]xplor[es] [a]ssumptions and embarks on the central argument that literature is a genre. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".