Children's Literature: Random Thoughts

I have been reading a lot of children's literature lately. Partly because a dissertating mind is not always conducive for complex novels. Partly because I enjoy reading children's books. I have also been thinking about what makes good children's literature. I realized, children's literature is not necessarily simple writing. What one needs to do:

1. Endow children with agency

2. Give primacy to the children's inner worlds

And I keep going back to Winnie-the-Pooh. The way the book plays with words, the way it plays with both the literal and symbolic nature of words and language. And it makes perfect sense. Children, obviously, are in that stage when they are trying to learn the language. So, words assume very different meanings when one is a child. For instance, if we think about the Discovering the North-Pole chapter in Winnie-the-Pooh. It's not impossible to think of all the colonial/imperial implications of that whole thing. But then, those imperial connotations have also been debunked by reducing the North Pole to its very stark literalness. For the child Christopher Robin and his band of animals, the North Pole literally becomes a pole stuck in the ground. So language-acquisition assumes a symbolic meaning here, it gets associated with political socialization, and it becomes so by reducing language to its very literalness.