Roald Dahl’s books have long captivated readers through imaginative stories and memorable characters, securing a persistent and prominent place in primary classrooms. The enduring popularity of Dahl’s works, however, raises pressing professional questions concerning the diversity, appropriateness, and alignment of children’s literature used to enact the primary years English curriculum. This article contributes to scholarship on text selection practices in primary English by addressing the documented dilemma of Dahl dominance, and the tensions it produces for curriculum enactment. Focusing on The Twits (Dahl & Blake, 1981), this article presents a critical literary analysis to examine how the text aligns with contemporary curricular and pedagogical responsibilities. To situate this analysis, the article draws primarily on scholarship examining Roald Dahl’s work within children’s literature studies, as well as research on inherited classroom canons and teachers’ reading repertoires. Specifically, it attends to patterns of characterisation, language use, and representation across the text, bringing into view contentions that arise when familiar classroom favourites are read against current curriculum expectations. The discussion is presented using a palimpsestuous representational form. In doing so, it draws on Nick Bland’s (2009) The wrong book as an interpretive device to create dialogic interplay and to sustain attention on the tensions and discomforts produced through scrutiny of Dahl’s familiar classroom text. In light of curricular and pedagogical tensions, the article concludes by arguing for deliberate circuit breaking in text selection. It offers curriculum-aligned examples of contemporary children’s literature that more effectively support inclusive, critically engaged English teaching in the primary years.
Mellie Green (Mon,) studied this question.