Sexuality in Children's Literature From a Post-Modemism Viewpoint

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Todayama's study on the receptional history of Little Black Sambo in Japan has shown that in children's literature, the idea of being "literary valuable" has always been deeply interrelated with that of being pedagogically "good."Watanabe then, in relation of Todayama's view, argues that children's literature generically needs not to emphasize the importance of originality, or being independent of the past convention. Furthermore, good children's literature more often than not positively manifests its being inheritor of the past rich convention in terms of forms and standards.Literary theories have already criticized, with much controversy, the political implications of (apparently non-political) "aesthetic values" and the fictionality of the idea of "originality." This study chose to study "children's literature" as the site where those recent criticisms are more clearly and radically interrogated.As Peter Burger argues, the concept of original aesthetic value of artworks is constructed when in the beginning of the twentieth century, high modernism tried to make novels "high art." On the other hand, it is demonstrated in new-historical gender studies, like Elaine Showalter's, that the institutionalization of high modernism results in rendering literature "expression," which is always more or less "sexual" ex-pression, and that above all, the aesthetic of literature is fundamentally a formation of gender configuration.Kawabata and Miura indicate that children's literature is never free form sexuality, seen from the post-queer viewpoint that recognizes the expanded idea of sexuality, that children's literature is also a formation of gender/sexuality dynamics and that when children's literature positively complicates with the standardized, conventional discipline of sexuality, it cannot help ironically revealing the truth of subversive gender/sexuality dynamics.