In this Oxford World's Classics audio guide, Peter Hunt, Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature at the University of Cardiff, who was responsible for setting up the first course in children's literature in the UK, introduces the newcomer to reading critically texts written for children.

Click on the links below to hear Peter's thoughts on the field and then explore The Wind in the Willows in more detail.

Peter Hunt introduces The Wind in the Willows

Introducing Children's Literature

• Is it possible to say when children's literature as a recognizable genre started? [0:30]
• "All children's books, even now, are didactic in some way."
  Peter Hunt explains why. [0:56]
• When, where and why did the academic study of children's books begin? [1:13]
  
• When Peter Hunt set up the first children's literature course in the UK, what was his intention? [0:58]
• What advice does Peter Hunt have for someone embarking on the study of children's literature for the first time?
  
  Do you have to learn to read in a different way?[1:35]
• When studying children's books, is it important to remember that they are often first encountered by being read aloud by an adult?[1:02]
• Peter Hunt reflects on the fact that the classics of children's literature have been extraordinarily productive of other texts, sequels, prequels, adaptations as well as films. [0:41]
• When children's books first appeared on university courses, they were regarded as non-canonical texts. Has that changed in the past forty years?
  
  Is there now a canon of children's literature? [1:16]
  
• Biographical and psychological criticism seems to be particularly popular in discussing children's texts. Peter Hunt discusses this. [1:24]
• Are children's books able to address an adult and a child audience simultaneously, thereby becoming vehicles for satire and social comment?[1:26]
• When did a market for children's books develop?
  
  Was that an early nineteenth-century phenomenon?[1:23]

About The Wind in the Willows

• From the outside, Kenneth Grahame, a senior employee in the Bank of England, looked like a pillar of the establishment
  
  But he was a much more complex character than first impressions suggest. [1:14]
• Peter Hunt describes Kenneth Grahame as a "dilettante writer".
  
  What did he mean by that?[1:22]


• As with Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island, a myth has grown up about the writing of The Wind in the Willows.
  
  And as with its predecessors, the myth includes the presence of a real child as first listener to the story.[2:14]
• Grahame described himself as "a high Victorian".
  
  What anxieties about a changing world do his texts exhibit? [2:21]
• Unlike writers today, Grahame never set out to be a children's writer.
  
  Peter Hunt explains some of the popular genres which helped shape The Wind in the Willows. [4:00]
• What has given The Wind in the Willows its extraordinary staying-power as a classic? [1:57]
• Was there also an element of commemorating a lost domain of pre-first world war childhood and innocence which contributed to its success?[2:40]
• Grahame wrote in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt that "that book contained no problems, no sex, no second meanings".
  
  Peter Hunt discusses if that was disingenuous[1:29]