Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial ed. by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial ed. by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl Kara K. Keeling (bio) Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial. Edited by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl. Routledge, 2022. The subtitle of this anthology caught my eye when I first picked it up: "Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial." The claim that Newbery Medal winners would need "rediscovery" seemed curious, for what books are more canonical and well known than those judged each year as "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children"? Bookstores and libraries highlight them in displays, gold medals shining on their covers. Yet the need for such rediscovery, specifically by children's literature scholars, is exactly the claim that Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl persuasively make in the introduction to the volume as they show how much Newbery winners have been ignored in terms of critical evaluation within the academy. Their essay examines the reasons behind this scholarly neglect, [End Page 230] a complex set of circumstances that reflect the ongoing divisions between the "bookwomen" of publishers, booksellers, librarians, and educators of the early- and mid-twentieth century who enshrined the award, and the academic professionals who sidelined children's literature as an area of study until the 1970s, then, as the field gained respectability within the academy, focused first on fairy tales, fables, and Golden Age books as "Literature." Schwebel and Van Tuyl note that while some Newbery winners have received marked critical attention, because of reader popularity and common curricular presence, one third have virtually no extant scholarship on them at all, perhaps because, they theorize, many of the books are "middle-aged": "too new to have the status of Golden Age classics, too old to have been widely read by generations of scholars in the field since the 1970s" (6). As Schwebel and Van Tuyl argue, these unexamined Newbery Medal books are "ripe for attention" on the occasion of the award's centennial, and this critical volume works well to make up for previous disregard (6). The fourteen essays comprising the rest of the book examine novels from every decade since the award's inception, with greater attention to winners from the first three decades of its existence to make up for greater past critical neglect of that era: three essays on books from the 1920s, one from the 1930s, three from the 1940s, and one from each of the subsequent seven decades. Schwebel and Van Tuyl make the point that the Newbery Medal committees' unspecific criterion of literary "excellence" has resulted in a list, over the course of the century, that is predominantly "White in terms of characters, authors, and attitudes" (7). The winning books selected for evaluation within this anthology, however, represent more diversity in terms of cultural identity than a casual glance over the list of Medal-winning titles might lead one to expect. The essays in this volume reveal that older Newbery-winning authors created unexpected portrayals of diverse characters—sometimes revealing and sometimes interrogating assumptions about race, class, and gender in surprising ways. It would be easy to expect an anthology of essays on disparate children's books written over most of a century to have little cohesion beyond the Newbery Medal that each story won, but Schwebel and Van Tuyl through careful editing—and, one suspects, directives to their contributors—have assembled a set of essays that work closely together. Writers within this anthology carefully contextualize their discussions within the Newbery tradition as a whole, especially the authors who examine how early patterns became established in the 1920s. Contributors show the broader historical context surrounding their focal text by examining the socioeconomic forces of the decade it was written and prized in, and how those influences affected the authors in writing their stories as well as the reception of the books by those who shaped the market for children's books, such as publishers, librarians, and teachers. The contributors also frequently make connections [End Page 231] between their focal text and earlier or later Newbery winners and honor books...