{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02953020134228188, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0087248322147651, 'mean_word_length': 4.964, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Agency?

Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8.1 (2016) Perhaps it is unfair of me to quote this short extract from a much larger argument out of context. While it has the virtue of representing a position with which I wish to take issue, abstracting it from the context of the nuanced and leisurely argument that Perry Nodelman makes in The Hidden Adult or even from the context of the essay by him that inspired this forum threatens to reduce the statement to a convenient straw figure. Furthermore, I have a great deal of respect for Perry Nodelman; I have been reading his work since the mid1980s, when, as a graduate student, I accidentally but happily stumbled into the field of children’s literature studies. Then the editor of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Nodelman was instrumental in helping to define that field. Nevertheless, nearly thirty years later in a review essay in Jeunesse, in which I reviewed The Hidden Adult in conjunction with several volumes of Nodelman’s children’s fiction, I began to delineate some problems I have with his “taxonomy of children’s literature” (“Ambivalent” 140). My primary objection, as I hope to make clear in the remainder of this essay, is to Nodelman’s premise that “[T]he characteristic markers of children’s literature ‘are all variants of and manifestations of the basic opposition between adult and child implied by the very circumstance of adults writing for children.’”