童妮．摩里森近年來與她的兒子司雷德．摩里森以及兩位插畫家合作，出版了五本圖畫書，但卻未獲書評的熱烈迴響。童妮．摩里森寫作童書的例子事實上非常值得探究，因為當中涉及了兒童文學的重要議題，如：目標讀者、童書審查制度、道德教育、兒童與成人的權力關係等。本論文將以家長、教師、書評等兒童讀物評鑑者對摩里森童書的批評做為起點，檢視成人對於兒童文學的普遍期待。其次，藉由兒童文學傳統的回顧，我將討論西方兒童文學的典範和意識形態。最後，評估在新世紀的歷史脈絡中，摩里森等人的集體創作對兒童文學的可能貢獻。

In recent years, Toni Morrison and her son Slade, collaborating with two artists (Griselle Potter and Pascal Lemaître), published five books for children that received mixed responses. The Morrison team’s project in the field of children’s literature offers pertinent cases for us to reconsider critical issues involved in this field—readership, censorship, power relations, didacticism, genres and forms, etc. In this paper, I would like to start with a discussion of adult feedback on these storybooks to see what expectations parents, teachers, librarians, reviewers hold for children’s books in general. Then, I will set to examining how the norms and ideologies children’s literature in the past two hundred years have been codified. Finally, with a brief analysis of these storybooks, we may come to a tentative evaluation of the authors’ and artists’ collective contribution to children’s literature in the new millennium. Generally, Toni Morrison and her partners write not only for children. These five picture books and fable comics adopt the strategy of Aesopian writing: they are written ostensibly for young readers, however, under playful banter they communicate nuances of meaning to an audience composed of both children and adults. In these subversive texts, the Morrison team tries to make heard the voices of the child/the weak/the colonized. There are many spaces between the lines, and between word and image, enabling readers of all ages to arrive at different levels of interpretation.