Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research ed. by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research ed. by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte Minjie Chen (bio) Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research. Edited by Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research is a valuable addition to scholarship on the origin and development of Irish children's literature. The twelve essays in the volume grew out of the National Collection of Children's Books (NCCB) project, which culminated in an online union catalog and database of over 250,000 children's books from five libraries in Dublin, dating from the sixteenth century up to 2014. The book's title is suggestive of methodological contributions, but the real focus and strength of this essay collection is that it builds an understanding of the history of children's texts, reading, and education upon a rich heritage of primary materials held in Dublin. The disjuncture between the aspiration of the title words and the essence of the volume is betrayed by the latitude of "approach," used in the introduction section to variously refer to method (how) and foci of inquiry (what) of the studies. The collection engages with children's literature through the lenses of history, education, and literature. A major part of the book traces the origin and evolution of Irish children's literature, highlighting early texts, key publishers, and significant authors and works from the end of the seventeenth century through the twentieth. Máire Kennedy captures evidence of Irish children as readers and target consumers of instructional and educational books during the eighteenth century. She discusses children's exposure to hornbooks and chapbooks; notes the rise of illustrated books; demonstrates her skillful use of a variety of sources such as booksellers' advertisements, publishers' ledgers and subscription lists, guides and advice on reading, and adults' accounts of childhood reading; and helps us imagine young people's access to and interaction with books as child-oriented literature gradually increased. Anne Markey's study is bracketed by two dates: 1696, when the earliest Irish-published textbook specifically aimed at young readers was issued (as discovered by the NCCB bibliographical project), and 1810, the year before the foundation of the Kildare Place Society in Dublin. Kennedy's findings notwithstanding, Markey points out the paucity of children's books in early eighteenth-century Ireland. Using British children's literature as a benchmark, she describes the Irish children's book market as dominated by instructional texts as well as by imported, translated, and reprinted works from England and France. She identifies key publishers and pioneer writers whose works, though modest in quantity, marked the birth of indigenous Irish children's literature and made important contributions to the development of English children's literature. Aileen Douglas's analysis focuses on the works of Maria Edgeworth, the most influential Irish children's author to have emerged by the end of the eighteenth century. Douglas sheds light on the dual nature [End Page 496] of Edgeworth's didacticism and argues that her Early Lessons series presents an innovative literary representation of children's selfhood. In her role as novelist/educationalist, Edgeworth not only imparts factual information and moral teachings but also demonstrates how child protagonists are able to learn and to improve through the process of "gradual instruction," a manifestation of her educational principles. Susan M. Parkes picks up in 1811 where Markey leaves off; she devotes her essay to the significant role of the Kildare Place Society (KPS) in producing widely disseminated reading materials for Irish children and in promoting mass education. Parkes attributes the success of the Society, which admired the Quakers, to the neutrality of its publications in terms of Irish identity and religious persuasion. Several major authors and canonical works from the nineteenth century onward receive close reading, paratextual analysis, and sociopolitical critiques in this volume, yielding insightful (re)interpretations. Ciara Ní Bhroin studies Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, the first collection of oral tales to have been published in Britain or Ireland. She examines how the collection underwent drastic transformations against the backdrop of cultural and political shifts in Ireland, beginning as an...