![]() ![]() 2 However, Hoban's text, rather than affirming familiar ideas, in fact reevaluates the status of children and childhood, rejecting ideas of wholeness and innocence in favor of struggle and empowerment. Its theme, a child's longing for a home and family, is familiar enough, while its happy outcome echoes any number of stories in which an inventive and persistent youngster succeeds where adults have given up or have already failed. Russell Hoban's Mouse and His Child appears apt for such a reading. When criticism finds child protagonists to be the site of "hope" or "deep feelings," or when an interpretation credits a child with the ability to reshape or revitalize his or her world simply because he or she is a child, then we are almost certainly in the presence of idealized innocence. This idealization, which reaches back at least as far as Rousseau, still animates certain contemporary ideas of the child and provides a subtext both for fiction written for children and for criticism of that fiction. ![]() ![]() Such a longing often finds expression in an idealization of the child and of childhood itself. The longing for a past of innocence and wholeness haunts many a narrative, not least those that find themselves, either by design or accident, ranked among books for children. ![]()
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