#And the fact that it's male dominated isn't all that surprising especially for adult literature | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

the-busy-ghost · 1 year

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No need to worry, the screams of fury emanating from her room are just because she made the terrible decision to read someone else’s list of the ‘100 Best Classic Fiction Works in English’

#Usually it wouldn't bother me that we disagree on some of the items on the list- that's a good thing!#And the point in looking at lists like this is to find out other people's opinions and recommendations #And you always know they're going to be biased #And the fact that it's male dominated isn't all that surprising especially for adult literature #However #What really got to me was this particular individual this utter HAM included children's literature #And that's where the gender bias not only became obvious; but it also became clear that this wasn't a list of classic books #This was just a list of the only books this guy had read #Female writers wrote a hefty portion of what we traditionally call children's classics #I know this because I actually read fiction as a child (adulthood less so)#And unlike this journalist I was diagnosed with Little Girl and therefore expected to read books by both men AND women #I'm not angry at this guy; he's obviously made the attempt to unlearn some of his assumptions #Especially with adult fiction #I'm more saddened by how obvious it is that boys of his generation were expected to only read books about boys; by men #And then we wonder why they grow up with a bias towards works by men as adults?#I just thought children's classics had to be an exception; even if they read stuff by men in other areas SURELY they'd read classics #like the Secret Garden or the Railway Children or Black Beauty especially in cases where the woman only used initials so you couldn't tell #It was a stupid fucking idea to put children's literature on the same list as adult classics anyway as children's lit is such a huge genre #But I'm sorry I read Robert Louis Stevenson (loved it) and Jack London and Mark Twain and Kenneth Grahame just like this guy #So I don't understand how he managed to miss out on everything except Little Women (which is sometimes marketed to adults which may explain)#It's not news of course that boys are often not expected to read books that aren't about boys we know this #What really got me is a) I would have thought the books often (rightly or wrongly) marketed as 'classics' would have been exempt from this #And b) now I know this dude didn't do his due diligence when creating this list because he clearly didn't think he needed to go back #and expand his knowledge of children's literature before throwing his list together based on what he personally read as a boy #Like personally if I was going to make the controversial decision to add children's lit to an already controversial list of classics #I for one know that I should go back and read the things I missed out on as a kid #For example my knowledge of children's classics is thoroughly determined by mid-twentieth century British views #Hence I read a lot of stuff from the Edwardian era #Hence I also didn't read many books by non-white writers- something which I now know to have been dictated by outside circumstances #So I would be very hesitant to just list off as 'the best children's books' all the ones I alone had read

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