Children's Literature

[para. 1]: "Discussions of eighteenth-century children's literature tend often to coincide with debates over the origins of the genre, since many critics and historians have asserted that this century - notably its second half - saw the emergence of a new species of writing directed specificially at child readers. Just what scholars mean by the seemingly intuitive label "children's literature" remains an open, perhaps unresolvable, problems: does the term designate, simply, those texts to which children have had access historically? Should it be more narrowly construed to include only those text expressly written with a juvenile readership in mind? Or, even more narrowly, does the term only properly refer to those books written for the purposes of entertaining and pleasing young readers? The definition under which scholars operate will go some way to determining where and when they locate the origins of this particular literary species."