Why and how to claim ‘intertextuality’? With special consideration of the influence of children’s literature on adult literature

In his 1814 review of Wordsworth’s ‘The Excursion’, Charles Lamb wrote that ‘[Wordsworth’s] verses shall be censured as infantile by critics who confound poetry “having children for its subject” with poetry that is “childish”’, and almost two hundred years later attitudes of this kind - overt or implicit - can still widely be found both in literary criticism in general and in children’s literature criticism. This chapter aims to challenge that view of childhood as either an isolated, special topic within literary studies, of little relevance to wider issues of critical approach or established areas of study about texts, or as anyway simply too obvious and self-evident to write about at any length or with much complexity. This chapter further demonstrates ways in which considerations of childhood are both complex in and of themselves, and how they raise, or join in with, challenges to a whole range of much wider critical assumptions and practices