Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel Marianne Stecher-Hansen (bio) Children's Literature in the Nordic World. By Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel. Aarhus University Press and University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Children's Literature in the Nordic World serves as a concise introduction to children's reading cultures in the Nordic countries and demonstrates a significant evolution in reading practices, genres, and educational circumstances over the past 250 years. The book is co-authored by scholars at Aarhus University, Denmark: Nina Christensen, professor of children's literature and head of the Centre for Children's Literature and Media, and Charlotte Appel, professor of early modern cultural history. The work is published in the University of Wisconsin's small-book Nordic World series, as a co-publication with the Aarhus University Press; the series seeks to feature top thinkers in the Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland—in order to explore the region's history, culture, and values. Although the title Children's Literature in the Nordic World might suggest content from the entire Nordic region, which would include Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) as well as Finland, Iceland and Greenland, the study rests primarily on Denmark as "the main example" (7), making use of Danish children's books and Danish writers as case studies. That said, there are interspersed texts and examples from Norway (notably, that country was part of the Danish realm until 1814) as well as from [End Page 345] Sweden and Swedish-Finland mentioned in the study. In making use of the term children's literature, the title might also seem to suggest the analysis of literary texts for children; however, the study avoids close readings of the selected texts and media, instead focusing on the institutions, national policies, reading practices, and socio-economic circumstances that shaped the reading cultures of Nordic (i.e. mainly Danish) children. Christensen and Appel include precise descriptions of the material culture of children's literature and include a wide variety of texts, genres, and other media. The book includes good quality, color illustrations that accompany each chapter. The narrative is organized into six short chapters, each framed by the evolving conceptions of childhood in Scandinavia, from the Enlightenment to the present. The content of each chapter is illuminated by the legal, educational, and socio-economic developments in Scandinavian societies which determined children's reading practices, their access to books and materials, and their agency as citizens. The authors' approach involves opening each chapter with individual case studies that describe the reading practices and environments of two or three individual children (historical personages) of the respective eras, who are carefully selected to illustrate socio-economic and gender differences. In the opening three chapters, "Introduction," "Educating Young Hearts and Minds, 1750-1820" and " The Child as a Future Patriotic Citizen, 1820-1900," the authors illuminate the romantic concept of childhood which emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment and, subsequently, inspired the development of children's literature as a distinct genre (particularly via the popularized folk fairy tale) during the nineteenth century. In the opening chapter which explores the period 1750 to 1820, the humble childhood of the celebrated Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the son of an itinerate shoemaker, is effectively contrasted with that of the lesser-known Danish-German writer Friederike Bruun (1765-1835), a product of upper-class birth and private education. Scholars who are seeking a deeper discussion of H. C. Andersen's profound contribution as a radical innovator of children's literature via the fairy tale genre may be disappointed by this cursory treatment of his legacy, especially given that Andersen may be credited as the first modern writer to give voice and validation to the experiential world of the child. Nonetheless, the study does a fine job at painting a historical picture of children (such as young Andersen) as readers who were shaped and often limited by specific socioeconomic and material circumstances. Whereas the first half of the study delineates the gradual emergence of children as a new reading public and books for children as a distinct genre, the last three chapters depict a Nordic...