The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (bio) The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature. By Nancy Watson. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. In his foreword to The Politics and Poetics of Irish Children's Literature, the distinguished Irish critic Declan Kiberd observes that "Nancy Watson is not exaggerating when she suggests that the re-examination by our younger contemporary historians of painful themes in Irish history, from the Great Famine to the Easter rebellion, was rehearsed first of all in books" for children (vii). Based on the first doctoral dissertation about children's literature ever produced at University College Dublin, Watson's fascinating book is "helping to open up the academic study of children's literature in Ireland," according to Kiberd (viii). Watson explains why she focuses on novels for children and young adults written during the second half of the twentieth century. She contends that before 1950, Irish authors writing for adults—such as Yeats, Joyce, Synge, and Beckett—were subversive enough that children's authors didn't need to be (166). In addition, Watson refers to critics who argue that the children's book market in Ireland was too small before 1950 for authors to rely on it; as a result, early Irish children's writers targeted readers in the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1946 Kenneth Reddin said writing for a foreign market forced those books to become "completely stage-Irish" and, hence, of limited interest today (Watson 165). Drawing mainly on postcolonial theory and the Frankfurt school, Watson discusses realist, historical fiction and fantasy novels by Eilis Dillon, Marita Conlon-McKenna, Cormac MacRaois, Mark O'Sullivan, Siobhan Parkinson, and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. She also devotes a chapter to poems for children by Matthew Sweeney. Watson starts by discussing childhood; she asks how it differs from adulthood and briefly surveys Irish writers' such as Joyce and Frank McCourt's attempts to represent childhood. Watson analyzes Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's 1999 novel The Dancers Dancing, contending that in the wild raspberries scene the novel manages "to recapture the authentic sensation and the emotion of that moment for the child in it"—a rare achievement of poetic language (14). The child's Wordsworthian freedom from convention will be the basis for Watson's argument throughout her study that recent Irish children's novels contain revolutionary ideas. Eilis Dillon sets her books in post-colonial Ireland; Watson posits that "just as most of the child protagonists in Eilis Dillon's stories are on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, so the new Irish state at the time … is learning how to move from dependence to independence, from nationalism to true liberty. The nation too is growing up" (20). In The Sea Wall (1994), the islanders of Inisharcain are reluctant to bring in an engineer to repair the old sea wall: "Colonialism has become so ingrained that they have difficulty adapting to a new way of living and are prepared to put their island at risk" (21). In novels such as The Cruise of the Santa Maria [End Page 405] (1991) and The Singing Cave (1992), Dillon tries to "reconcile for Irish children their European identity with an understanding and admiration for their own Irish identity" (31). Marita Conlon-McKenna's Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990) concerns children trying to survive the Famine of the 1840s. Watson argues that the novel deviates from the traditional view of peasants as victims of Anglo-Irish and English landowners; Conlon-McKenna thus "encourages Irish children to change from being the victims of Irish history to being the authors of it" (46). Watson compares Eily as the novel's "main focalizer" to Huckleberry Finn, since both children stimulate the reader to form a nontraditional perspective on controversial events (48). In Wildflower Girl (1992), the sequel to Under the Hawthorn Tree, Eily's younger sister Peggy emigrates to the United States to become a maid, as many thousands of women did around the time of the Famine (57). Watson points out that Conlon-McKenna celebrates Irish women's history that scholars often overlook (58). Conlon-McKenna's final book in her trilogy, Fields of...