Introduction: Children's Literature and New Historicism

Abstract

Introduction:Children's Literature and New Historicism Lynne Vallone (bio) In the 1980s, Post-structuralism married Marxism, and gave birth to the "new historicism" (Kelly and Kelly 681). Tony Watkins's essay "Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Children's Literature" carefully enumerates the primary tenets of the various practices of new historicism (and its cousin, cultural studies), especially as they relate to children's literature. It is not my intention here to rehearse his discussion, but rather to remind us of the issues at play and at stake in this type of literary criticism. Many overviews of the practices of new historicism begin with a question: "Are We Being Historical Yet?" "What's So Historical About [New Historicism]?" In the context of this introduction to the special issue "Children's Literature and New Historicism," I would like to ask one, too: "What has new historicism done for you—or children's-literature scholarship generally—lately?" In a properly new historicist way, I would like to begin my answer to the above question by offering an anecdote of personal history. In the spring semester of 1985, I came to new historicism by way of Marxist criticism in a graduate seminar on the industrial novel.1 Although I enjoyed reading Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Benjamin Disraeli, and their novels of social unrest and economic distress, I was well on my way to creating my own surplus value in the form of a child, and was thus engaged in a personal class struggle between my lumpen proletariat body and my bourgeois intellect. The proles won, as Marx predicted they would, and I took an incomplete in the class. As I later cast about for a topic for a catch-up seminar paper, I read some of Harriet Martineau's political writings ("Half a Loaf Is Better Than None," for example), and then Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts. I had found my topic in the "riches" of the latter, and newly sensitized to issues of class, power, and age, and energized to read more "low culture" texts as literature, I wrote my first "children's literature/new historicist" paper on the "industrial child" in More's tracts. The paper became part of my dissertation and eventually the germ of a chapter in my book Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Thus as a children's-literature scholar I see myself as a historicist by temperament, made new by the new historicist 1980s, a combination of nature and nurture that formed my subsequent reading and writing preferences and practices. My anecdote attempts to do double new historicist duty by functioning as both a "historeme," in Joel Fineman's term for history reduced to its smallest unit (qtd. in Zammito 789), and as a self-conscious method to reveal the critic—by tracing personal history within the history of new historicism. But what is the history of new historicism? How is it different from old historicism? Why are these questions so difficult to answer? And finally, what's in it for us? One of the tenets of new historicism, although a literary historicism, is the importance of casting a wide net to include nonliterary texts under the rubric "literature" and reading them in the same way as traditional literature. These pairings of literary texts with "extraliterary" texts (sermons, recipes, pamphlets, institutions, advertisements, and so on) result in explicating by particulars the history or culture that helps to inform and construct the literature, just as literature helps to inform and construct that history or culture. To this end, Gillian Brown reads Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables with the writings of domestic architect and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing (Domestic Individualism 69-77), and the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt reads Thomas Harriot's sixteenth-century missionary text A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia with Shakespeare's Henry plays (Shakespearean Negotiations 21-65). One of the greatest strengths of new historicism is its interdisciplinarity, its sense of play and unlimited possibilities. As the great energy and excitement created by new historicism in the middle 1980s attest, new worlds open up when the...