Signifying strategies and closed texts in Australian children’s literature

This paper examines children’s literature as discourse and argues that attention to the textuality of children’s literature discloses a network of signifying strategies which serve to confine texts within a narrow band of socio-cultural values. The language of fiction written for children offers conventionalised discourses by means of which content is encoded. While there are many other books can be and are titled, these are culturally representative. They are symptomatic of the frames used in Australian children’s literature, and in effect disclose how that literature is complicit in the ideological construction of Australian childhood (or, in this case, adolescence). This is part of how children are socialized. Hence the mediators of children’s books focus attention on the ‘truth’-value of theme and content and perpetuate the illusion that discourse is merely transparent.