Embracing a critical paradigm that holds that children do not participate in the realm of children’s literature and culture has itself caused scholars to ignore what young people have said, written, and done in the realm of children’s literature and culture. This essay contends that the time has come to articulate not only new theories about what it means to be a child, but also a new paradigm for how to do children’s literature criticism, one that builds on but also decisively departs from Jacqueline Rose’s vision of children’s literature as an adult practice.

In the opening pages of her groundbreaking book Dependent States, cultural historian Karen Sánchez-Eppler clears a path for children's literature critics interested in challenging the notion that children function solely as passive recipients of culture. Without dismissing the key insights generated by Jacqueline Rose and other literary critics who treat childhood strictly "as a discourse among adults" (xvi), Sánchez-Eppler nevertheless announces her intention to regard children not merely as objects of socialization but also as "individuals inhabiting and negotiating"societal conceptions of what it means to be a child (xv). She thus sets out to analyze not just how American adults in the nineteenth century represented children but also how children represented themselves. To pay attention to children's diaries and other similar sources, she stresses carefully, "is not to pretend that children are fully independent actors, unhampered by the constraints of adult regulation and desire; but neither is it to see children as incapable of defining their own terms and grounds of power and meaning" (xxviii). As a result, Sánchez-Eppler tends to tack back and forth between the two extremes she hopes to avoid. Keenly attuned (and rightly so) to the primacy and clout of grown-ups, she veers strongly toward the "incapable child" pole: the bulk of Dependent States focuses on "how structural and institutional power is enacted" on young people by their elders (xxiii), often resulting in "the abuse and death of individual children" (151). On the relatively rare occasions when she analyzes children's words and deeds, by contrast, Sánchez-Eppler swings back toward the "independent child" pole, as when she remarks on "the difficulties of disentangling the experiences of children from the discourses of childhood" (xxvii). This formulation suggests that somewhere-underneath all the grown-up interference-a pure signal pulses that originates solely from the child. Yet, since selfhood itself is shaped by language taught to us by others,shouldn't scholars who analyze children's writing resist the temptation to sort out which sentiments expressed in child-authored texts are truly attributable to young authors and which to the adults who surround them? After all, adult discourse is not a cloak that covers up some true, essential child; it is a constituting factor. 2 But if we are barred from speculating about the degree to which adult pressure manifests itself in child-authored texts, then we cannot distinguish between, say, a passionate fan letter in which a child assures an actress she "adores" that "[n]obody knows I am writing to you, not even my mother" (qtd. in Bold 171) and the kind of rote note a schoolchild pens to an author that adheres to a teacher-approved formula.3 That seems problematic, too.

As Roger Sale has wryly observed, “everyone knows what children's literature is until asked to define it” (1). The Reasons WHY this unruly subject is so hard to delimit have been well canvassed. If we define it as literature read by young people, any text could potentially count as children's literature, including Dickens novels and pornography. That seems too broad, just as defining children's literature as anything that appears on a publisher-designated children's or “young adult” list seems too narrow, since it would exclude titles that appeared before eighteenth-century booksellers such as John Newbery set up shop, including the Aesopica, chapbooks, and conduct books. As numerous critics have noted, we cannot simply say that children's literature consists of literature written for children, since many famous examples—Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Little Prince—aimed to attract mixed audiences. And, in any case, “children's literature is always written for both children and adults; to be published it needs to please at least some adults” (Clark 96). We might say that children's literature comprises texts addressed to children (among others) by authors who conceptualize young people as a distinct audience, one that requires a form of literature different in kind from that aimed at adults. Yet basing a definition on authorial intention seems problematic. Many famous children's writers have explicitly rejected the idea that they were writing for a particular age group, and many books that were not written with young people in mind have nevertheless had their status as children's or young adult literature thrust upon them, either by publishers or by readers (or both).

This essay contends that young Americans were so omnipresent as performers and audience members during the nineteenth century that virtually all forms of popular theater from this period—including the pantomime, the extravaganza, the melodrama, and the minstrel show—can profitably be considered children’s theater. Humpty Dumpty, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Rip Van Winkle : many of the century’s biggest theatrical hits were enacted by mixed-age casts for mixed-age audiences, because the general population was not yet convinced that children needed to be shielded from paid labor and provided with their own separate and specially sanitized leisure activities. Too often, we presume that nineteenth-century children were so strongly associated with innocence, dependency, and vulnerability that no significant conflict over this bourgeois ideal took place. Yet as the controversies that swirled around all-child troupes such as the Viennoise Children in the 1840s and child stars such as Buster Keaton at century’s end attest, the nineteenth-century stage was a site of struggle over how to define the categories child and adult. Just as conflicting attitudes about women and African Americans were on display in burlesques and minstrel shows, so too deep uncertainties about what it meant to be a child played themselves out in nineteenth-century productions aimed at “children of all ages.”

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