Peter Hunt (literary critic) facts for kids
Peter Hunt (born in 1945) is a British expert in English and children's literature. He used to be a professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He also teaches at Dublin City University.
Peter Hunt was one of the first people to study children's books seriously at universities. He helped create a worldwide group of researchers who study children's literature. His courses at Cardiff University, starting in 1985, were the first like them in the UK. He has given talks about children's books at more than 150 universities and colleges in 23 different countries.
He has written or edited 38 books and over 600 articles about children's literature. His books have been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. He has received several important awards for his work. These include the Brothers Grimm Award in 2003 and the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award in 2020.
Studying Children's Books
Peter Hunt's main goal has been to connect how we study regular books with how we study books for children. He also wanted to create easy-to-use resources for this field. He came up with the term 'childist criticism'. This is a way of looking at children's books from a child's point of view.
He believed that when we study children's books, we should understand how children read them. This includes looking at the book's cost, how it affects a child's feelings, and its educational value. He explored these ideas in his books like Criticism, Theory and Children's Literature (1991).
He has also worked on major reference books. These include Children's Literature: an Illustrated History (1995) and the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (2004). He also helped create The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005).
Peter Hunt has edited five classic children's books for Oxford University Press. He is known as a top expert on The Wind in the Willows. He has written two books about it.
His recent work includes a book called The Fabulous Journeys of Alice and Pinocchio (2018). He also wrote three books for the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Writing Stories
Peter Hunt also writes children's books. He tries to make the child reader an active part of the story. His four children's books are a bit experimental. One of them, A Step off the Path (1985), has been called 'the first post-modern children’s novel'. This means it played with how stories are usually told.
In recent years, he has written seven experimental novels for his grandchildren. These books were printed privately.
