The New(er) Critics are Coming

Abstract

New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism, ed. Sebastien Chapleau. Lichfield, Staffordshire, UK: Pied Piper Publishing, 2004. The title made me smile: New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism. The presence of new voices, I realized, necessarily signaled the unspoken assumption of old voices. In the world of children's literature as an academic discipline, the very existence of an older generation of scholars is a novelty. Hence the initial smile. But at this point I would also like to say that I remained cheerful as I read through the entire slim volume (128 pages) of essays. Despite the fact that the fourteen essays in the collection are all very short (less than ten pages each), they demonstrate what is best about the current state of children's literature scholarship. All are well researched and well written, and cover a wide range of contemporary critical discourses: gender and queer theory, feminist theory, race, cultural production (publishing), ideology, postcolonial discourse, textual analysis, constructions of childhood, adult/child relations (stemming from reader response theory), methodologies and translation. Slim as the volume itself is, the essays map quite a large area of the critical landscape of children's literature scholarship as it has been unfolding in these first years of the twenty-first century. Although all the essays are written in English, their authors demonstrate that scholarship in the field is now multinational. Let me begin at the beginning: New Voices opens with old(er) voices—Peter Hunt and Perry Nodelman. Though both have just retired from their respective institutions, Peter from the University of Wales, Cardiff and Perry from the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba—they're not that old. Both are, however (I trust they'll forgive me for saying so), among the "founding fathers" of contemporary literary scholarship in children's literature. Both are literary scholars who spent their working lives in English departments, which have not, until recently, been particularly hospitable places for children's literature scholarship or teaching. There had been scattered courses and programs, and there had been scholarly journals such as Signal, Children's Literature, and The Lion and the Unicorn, but it wasn't until the 1990s that the scholarly apparatus in the field began to acquire [End Page 246] the critical mass necessary to support the academic discipline of children's literature studies. And it appears that within the next few years, there will be several new massive scholarly reference works (currently in production) on children's literature in print. All will take as normal the idea that children's literature studies include scholarship in education, library science, visual literacy, publishing, book history, educational history, and a number of contemporary theoretical discourses including gender theories, cultural studies, semiotics, ideology, and reader response theories. But that "new normal" has been hard won—which brings me to Perry's introductory essay. The title of Perry's essay, "Like There's No Books About Anything," is a quotation from Madonna—an explanation of her reasons for getting into the business of writing children's books. She didn't like what she saw, so she figured it was something anyone could do (rather like being a rock star). Children's literature criticism has often suffered from the same kind of anyone-can-do it attitude—as in, for example, Inside Picture Books (Yale, 1999) by Ellen Handler Spitz. A lecturer by trade in art and psychology, Spitz wrote about picture books, assuming that she didn't have to do any critical reading on the subject—so she didn't bother with work by Perry or by Jane Doonan, for example, on picture books. The newer voices in New Voices make no such assumptions. They do their homework. As Peter Hunt points out in his essay, "The Knowledge: What Do You Need to Know to Know Children's Literature," a children's literature scholar needs to know a lot about a lot of different things—though the "bewildering range of subjects and approaches" (11) may initially be overwhelming...