Audience in Childrens Literature

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Audience in Children’s Literature
Dominic Cheetham
In 1991 Barbara Wall published her highly influential analysis of
audience in children’s literature. By applying the narrative concept of implied
reader to works in children’s literature she identied a brief typology for the types
of audience implied by different texts. Wall describes three main audience types;
single audience, dual audience, and double audience. A text where the implied
reader is consistently a child can be said to have a single audience; a text where
the implied reader is simultaneously both child and adult can be said to have a dual
audience; and a text where the implied reader shifts between child and adult can be
said to have a double audience.
These categories of audience have proved very useful in the analysis of
children’s literature, so much so that they now are commonly and conventionally
used throughout the enormous breadth and variety of children’s literature study.
They have become so very common that researchers these days rarely even feel the
need to cite Wall as a source, and simply use the terms ‘single’, ‘dual’ or ‘double’
audience; correctly assuming that readers will be familiar with the terms.
This enormous usage and acceptance of the terms is an indication of
their value in literary analysis, but it also creates problems. The very power and
popularity of these concepts leads to the impression that they are complete, true,
and adequate, and this in turn can lead to an uncritical acceptance of the terms.
As with any discipline, in children’s literature we use a common set of terms to
allow us to convey complex ideas with both economy and delicacy. However, as
Wittgenstein famously made clear, the utility of technical terms carries a price;
that of accepting the pre-suppositions upon which the terms are based (48-52).
Wall’s typology, on the surface, appears very clear, almost self-evident, and this
tends to obscure the underlying presuppositions. However, when examined, the
pre-suppositions become clear, and as they do so, it also becomes clear that they
exhibit serious discontinuities with other areas of children’s literature theory. The
pre-suppositions that give the strongest cause for concern are those connected
with the general concepts of ‘child’, ‘adult’, and the narrative concepts of
‘implied reader’ and ‘real reader’. The aim of this paper is to examine these pre-

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Dominic Cheetham
suppositions and to show how they stand in relation to other theory of children’s
literature.
The Concept of ‘Child’: Opposition
Wall’s analysis freely uses the words ‘adult’ and ‘child’ as though they
were mutually exclusive terms. This is not unusual. Shavit (1999) argues that
within Western society the words ‘adult’ and ‘child’ are dened in opposition to
each other, such that adults are dened by being ‘not children’, and that children
are dened by being ‘not adults’. This mode of denition automatically produces
an articial separation, or discontinuity, between child and adult. But if we look
at people as they grow up, we absolutely fail to find any single point where
they cease to be children and start to be adults. The development into adulthood
occurs over a wide range of parameters; physical, educational, social, emotional,
linguistic, to list but a few, and there is usually no clear boundary to be crossed for
any of them, let alone all of them simultaneously. The concepts of single, dual and
double audience carry with them an assumption of a separation between adults and
children which is only evidenced in the extreme examples of very young children
and mature adults. This illusion of separation is not only misleadingly simplistic
but also, by emphasising difference, inherently entails an occlusion of likeness. It
likewise gives the erroneous impression that each of these opposing groups has a
signicant degree of homogeneity.
The Concept of ‘Child’: Homogeneity
Another pre-supposition of the single, dual, double typology is that each
of the categories, child and adult, are homogenous enough to be treated as single
categories. I shall not argue the case of adults, but with children it is startlingly
obvious that the people we call ‘child’ are an extraordinarily heterogeneous group.
If we wished to give a denition to ‘child’ which was not based on opposition, we
could easily argue that children are people who are undergoing rapid and multi-
faceted development. Children aged ve, for example, are clearly very different
to children aged six or seven, and enormously different to ‘children’ aged twelve.
Wall limits her discussions to texts written for children up to age twelve (1), but
the general usage of her terms extends through the whole range of children’s
literature. If we describe a text as having a dual audience of child and adult, it

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Audience in Children’s Literature
becomes unclear as to whether we mean any one particular age or developmental
level/profile of ‘child’, or whether we mean the whole range of children. The
implication, however, is for the whole range, because if we mean a particular
age or type of child, and therefore exclude other child readers from the implied
readership, we are no longer talking about the simple dichotomy implied by the
word ‘dual’.
The heterogeneous nature of the group we call ‘children’ makes the
audience categories of single, dual and double overly simplistic, and potentially
misleading. These problems are exacerbated by the evidence from reading surveys,
which, on top of showing marked differences in reading behaviour based on age,
also repeatedly show powerful gender based differences in children’s reading
choices (Whitehead, Capey, Maddren & Wellings 1977; Millard 1997; Hall and
Coles 1999 and 2002; Lynch 2002; Hopper 2005) so that even if we ignored the
variation between children according to development, the conventional categories
of audience would still be flawed in terms of gender. If we extended the same
considerations to the group we call ‘adult’, we would, of course, nd still more
differences. The danger of this pre-supposition is that as both ‘child’ and ‘adult’
become, by implication, homogeneous groups, with no reference to gender,
social class, or race, and from this a highly unied, stereotypical view of society
entails. This entailment of the pre-supposition of homogeneity privileges a xed,
normalising view of society, antithetical to any multi-faceted views of society, or
any views which attempt to empower or emancipate un-empowered groups. At the
very least, this pre-supposition entails that differences between ‘child’ and ‘adult’
are presented as greater and more significant than the differences within those
groups, a presupposition that is very difcult to support.
Narrative: An Author Generated Implied Reader
The ‘implied reader’ is a judgement about what kind of person a text
is aimed at or is suitable for. Traditional views of the implied reader see it as
something which is coded into the text itself, something which the author has
created. Chatman, for example, explains that the implied reader is “the audience
presupposed by the narrative itself” (150), and Wall, in her introduction (3-7),
seems to accept this view. Wall’s method of identifying an implied reader is based
on close textual analysis to identify changes in narrative voice or textual content
which might indicate a change in audience. This approach, in incorporating

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Dominic Cheetham
primary textual evidence, is very powerful and persuasive, because it creates the
impression that that an implied reader is something encoded into a text by an
author (be it consciously or unconsciously) and something that a careful analyst
can decode and isolate. It makes the implied reader appear to be an unchanging
objective fact of a xed text created by an author and objectively identied by the
capable analyst.
The textual features of a text may be unchanging creations of the original
author, but audiences are not. To claim that a text has, for example, an implied
child audience, is automatically to make judgements about what is a ‘child’. But
since the concept of child is intimately bound up with cultural experience and
expectation, and since culture is constantly changing, there can be no absolute
implied audience to be discovered. In other words, the implied audience of any
text is culturally and temporally variable, rather than xed.
We might, on the basis of textual interpretation, argue that a particular
text addresses a particular category of audience. However, if we do so, we cannot
assume that our arguments will remain valid over a period of time, or that they
are valid between cultures, or even sub-cultures. It is important to remember that
the implied reader, or a perceived audience, is based on judgements. We can only
judge the implied readership of a text in relation to our perceptions of different
kinds of audience, and those perceptions are inescapably culturally grounded.
For example, in 1972 Eleanor Cameron argued that because children cannot
understand satire, and are “literarily unsophisticated” they can only react to “the
level of pure story.” This view of children leads her to state that if Dahl’s Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory is considered a satirical text, then it must be “a book on
two levels, one for adults and one for children” (paragraph 14), or in Wall’s terms,
a double or a dual audience text.
Ideas of what child readers are capable of, or interested in, have changed
over time, and as such, interpretations of the implied readership of texts will
also have changed. A modern analyst might assume that children can understand
satire, and often are literarily sophisticated, and might not judge Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory a double or dual audience text based on those ideas. Even if
we were to imagine that children don’t change, views of children do change, and
when they change, judgements about audience will change with them. There is no
guarantee that concepts of child or child reading, have any basis in reality. We need
only look at the pre- and post-Harry Potter beliefs about children’s ability to read
long books to see that the understandings that shape perceptions of implied readers

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Audience in Children’s Literature
are culture based, curiously impermanent things.
The same effect is also found between different cultures. Even where
cultures share a common language and where linguistic translation is not a factor,
there are still likely to be culture specic ideas about what is for children and what
is for adults, and as such, perceptions of implied readers will differ. No matter
how text-based and scientic an analysis may seem to be, the nal judgement of
‘implied audience’ is a personal judgement, made by a specic analyst, within a
specic cultural environment, and is thereby subjective and variable rather than
objective and xed. Indeed, decisions about the implied audience of a text may
well say more about the analyst, or the culture of analysis, that they do about the
text discussed.
The culture specific nature of ascribing implied readership to a text
is one side of the coin of implied readership. The other side of the coin is the
understanding and definition of the object of analysis; the text itself. Wall’s
analysis and identication of implied readers is based on an interpretation of the
authored text. However, contrary to the view expressed by Chatman and implicitly
supported by Wall, there is no empirical reason to treat the authored text as the
only legitimate object of analysis. Analysis focussed on a fixed and identifiable
text serves to give an impression of a fixed and identifiable implied reader.
However, despite the illusion that analysts can focus only on the text, just as with
any other reader, literary analysts are also inuenced by the extended physical and
textual environment of the text itself. This environment, which Genette (7) calls
the paratext, is made up of a combination of the physical object of publication (the
peritext), conventionally the book, including all the material both on and within the
cover or the packaging of the text, and also connected material outside the peritext,
such as interviews, reviews and homepages, collectively known as the epitext. The
fact that paratextual features change through time and with new editions of texts
makes them unattractive as factors in the objective identication of an unchanging
implied reader. However, since it is both impossible, and an unnatural reading
experience, for either an analyst or a casual reader to completely ignore paratextual
features, and since, cognitive psychology has shown that priming and expectation
have a powerful inuence on reading experiences and interpretations, it would be
unrealistic to assume that they do not have an inuence on the judgement of an
implied reader.
If we accept that the implied reader is not a specific creation of the
author, but rather an interpretation by a reader, then minimally the peritext, and