Peter Hunt (literary critic)

Peter Hunt (born 1945) is a British scholar who is Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature at Cardiff University.

Hunt's books include works of criticism, novels, and stories for younger children. The Children's Literature courses that he ran at Cardiff were the first to treat children's literature as a subject of academic study in the UK. He has lectured on the subject at over 120 universities in 20 countries, from Finland to New Zealand; the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts presented him with its Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1995, and 2003 he won the International Brothers Grimm Award for services to children's literature from the International Institute for Children's Literature, Osaka. He has edited or is editing the Oxford University Press World's Classics editions of Bevis, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and The Wind in the Willows. His books have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Persian, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

An Introduction to Children's Literature (1994) begins in the Preface by asking essential questions about children's literature: "what is it, how is it used, how can we approach it, [and] how the study of it has developed." Yet almost immediately Hunt finds himself struggling with the first question, noting that books 'written for' children are sometimes only understandable by adults, or are much more appreciated by adults (such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), while books 'read by' children could potentially include any book which exists (for "surely sometime, somewhere, all books have been read by one child or another?") Joined with this is the difficulty of defining 'children', although Hunt soon gives a satisfactory definition: "[C]hildhood is the period of life which the immediate culture thinks of as being free of responsibility and susceptible to education." Although Hunt never neatly answers the questions he posed in the Preface, he does make some progress when he discerns that "children's literature is obviously what people think it is," and is content to leave it at that while he flutters through time from the 18th century onward.

...
Wikipedia