Looking at animals and objects in Deirdre Madden’s children’s books and some adult fiction

Abstract

While Deirdre Madden’s twenty-first-century children’s books recall the Big House subject matter found in the earlier occasional ventures into children’s literature by Edith Somerville and Elizabeth Bowen, they also reflect more broadly her own vision about childhood explored in some of her adult fiction, such as Remembering Light and Stone (1992). This chapter examines the interaction of Madden’s adult and children’s fiction while situating Snakes’ Elbows (2005), Thanks for Telling Me, Emily (2007), and Jasper and the Green Marvel (2011) in the context of children’s literature on the discursive nature of childhood. The chapter argues that Madden’s ironic and parodic children’s writing reflects notions of childhood as being unfixed, a kind of shifting terrain. At the same time, her strong interest in material reality and in game playing reflects some of the central themes of much children’s writing. Her children’s books also respond to Irish reality during the Celtic Tiger period, and they concentrate on animals or pictures in ways that, on the one hand, recall earlier texts for children by Irish women writers but, on the other, are very much concerned with contemporary arguments about animals and their treatment as merchandise or as objects in a capitalist world. Both the adult novels and the children’s books show the potency of objects and animals: their ability to invoke childhood memory or to suggest a much larger past.