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Makale Özeti:
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Children’s literature can be argued to expose its child readers and characters to certain
norms because of its conventionally didactic quality, reverberation of adults’ nostalgic
feelings, and tendency to create an image of the ideal child. This, however, creates a
hierarchy between childhood and adulthood, rendering the child silent and passive
both outside and inside the text. Published in 1995, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights
destabilizes the hierarchy between adulthood and childhood, restructures archetypal
renditions, and gives voice to the child that has been supressed in various ways in
didactic children’s books. In this respect, this paper aims to analyse how such issues
as silencing, voice, ideal child are employed in Pullman’s novel. It explores modern
children’s fantasy as a fruitful ground not only for problematizing the hierarchies
between binaries such as adult/child, adulthood/childhood, and maturity/immaturity
but also for providing children with the voice and individuality they were deprived of
in earlier examples of children’s literature.
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