I argue that, by taking a sideways step from page to screen, and especially by analysing a non-Western work, it is possible to highlight the contingent and arbitrary nature of some of the assumptions that permeate literary critical discussion, and to help bring narratalogical and reception studies into a more productive relationship.īoth address and reception can be viewed as possible approaches to one of the abiding projects of children’s literature criticism, that of providing a satisfactory account of the relationship between children’s texts and their readers. Puella Magi Madoka Magica, a complex work that disrupts viewer expectations and genre assumptions, both destabilises its implied viewership and challenges conventional beliefs about the tastes and capacities of actual viewers, especially the extent to which those viewers can be categorised by age or gender. The figure of the “child reader” is claimed by both traditions, although in one case that reader is a textual construct and in the other a human being yet this ambiguity is not typically addressed within studies of individual texts. This article uses the Japanese television anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the relationship between two prominent traditions within children’s literature criticism: narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address and reception studies, which typically gather data through empirical work with children.
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