by Kenneth Kidd

About Kenneth Kidd

Kenneth Kidd is Professor of English at the University of Florida and the author of Theory for Beginners, or Children’s Literature Otherwise (2020), Freud in Oz (2011), and Making American Boys (2004). He is a co-editor of Queer as Camp: Essays in Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019), Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards (2017), Over the Rainbow (2004), and Wild Things (2004). He is also the co-editor of the third volume of Cambridge History of Children’s Literature, now in preparation, and with Elizabeth Marshall, he co-edits Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series, the oldest-running monograph series in the field.

Classic

book Keywords for Children's Literature

Classic refers not only to texts but to ideals and aspirations. As Deborah Stevenson says of Lewis Carroll’s Alice: “Eventually, a children’s literature classic masters being beloved without actually being read… you do not have to read Alice, but you will be deemed culturally illiterate should you not acknowledge it as a children’s literature classic” (1997, 126). The classic is imagined variously as a gift, a bribe, a promise, a legacy, and a contract. Classic stands for the past but claims relevance for and demands accommodation to the present. It claims continuity across translation in language or form. The classic represents selectivity but circulates widely. The classic binds together time and timelessness, the exceptional and the typical, the historical and the contemporary, the organic and the manufactured, the universal and the personal.