by Mike Cadden

About Mike Cadden

Mike Cadden is Professor of English and Director of Childhood Studies at Missouri Western State University, where he teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. He is the author of Ursula K. Le Guin beyond Genre (2005) and editor of Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (2010). He is also one of the editors of Teaching Young Adult Literature (2020), a volume in MLA’s Teaching Options series.

Voice

book Keywords for Children's Literature

The first mention of voice as metaphor appeared in 1587, when Golding De Mornay wrote that “there is… a dubble Speech; the one in the mynd… the other the sounding image thereof… vttered by our mouth” (OED). The Dictionary of Narratology defines voice as “the set of signs characterizing the narrator and, more generally, the narrating instance, and governing the relations between narrating and narrative text as well as between narrating and narrated” (Prince 1987, 104). In defining what constitutes literature for children or young people, voice is typically regarded as a key determinant, especially when used to distinguish an adult voice of authority from an implied (receptive) child listener.