[ ] 1 Aesthetics

There is perhaps no more vexing, fraught, and neglected concept in the study of children's literature than aesthetics. No doubt the neglect of a serious, theoretical inquiry into the aesthetics of children's literature stems from our contemporary understandings of the discipline of children's literature itself. The study of children's literature has, historically, been the work of librarians and educators of children. Children's literature came to be seen as an appropriate site of purely literary study only after the rise and fall of mid-twentieth century New Critical and formalist modes of criticism, a state of affairs made possible by the inchoate canon-busting/expanding cultural studies movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the discipline of children's literature was shaped in a theoretical milieu suspicious of objective claims of aesthetic value, suspicious even of the unproblematic category of " literature " itself. Occupying itself, therefore, with ideological criticism, the discipline has largely—but not entirely—elided the tricky issue of aesthetics and the ideological roots of the same. The word " aesthetics " first appeared, in its Latinate form, in Alexander Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750–58). Baumgarten, as Raymond Williams reminds us, uses the term to describe " beauty as a phenomenal perfection " (Williams 1983a). Immanuel Kant complicates and extends Baumgarten's insights in his A Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft; 1790), providing a role for the intellect in the apprehension of aesthetic value. Whereas Baumgarten suggests that the aesthetic affects us solely through the senses, in Kant's view, the beautiful encourages intellectual contemplation. Kant also famously links beauty to taste, a concatena-tion that marks the aesthetic as both subjective and universal. He writes, " Taste is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautiful. " He continues, " [I]f someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked [that holds] for everyone. " Taste, then, is the ability to discern what is and what is not beautiful, and it rests, for Kant, on common sense, a sense that, curiously, is anything but common. Common sense in the Kantian formulation is reserved for the educated elite, for there is a correct and incorrect apprehension of beauty, a quality that, Kant maintains, inheres …