Children's Literature Criticism Research Articles

The Uses of Children's Literature in Political Contexts: Bridging the Pedagogical/Aesthetic Divide

The Uses of Children's Literature in Political Contexts:Bridging the Pedagogical/Aesthetic Divide Anna Nordenstam (bio) and Olle Widhe (bio) As we write this introduction, COVID-19 is spreading across the globe. In addition, we find ourselves in a limbo of political transition after the US election, waiting for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be installed. Harris is not only a politician, she is also the author of a picture book, Superheroes Can Be Everywhere, illustrated by Mechal Renee Roe, which was launched in January 2019 and has been widely distributed on social media since the US election. By reading Harris's life story, child readers are encouraged to find their own superheroes and to do what they can to change the world. The message is clear. The power for change resides in the child. Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, is another leader who has made use of children's books to strengthen his political mission. His Exam Warriors was published in February 2018, one year before the general election in India in 2019, in order to reach and inspire the next generation to work hard in their studies and take their individual responsibility seriously. This educational book, intended for students to read when taking exams, consists of specific words of advice for the young readers of India as well as for all those others "across the world" (back cover). It contains illustrations, instructional content, and yoga exercises. In separate contexts, these two books by influential politicians demonstrate the trust placed in children's literature as an important tool for educating the young. They have missions. The following forum essays explore the uses of children's literature in political contexts. In discussing the political uses of literature, we want to focus on the interrelationship between context and aesthetics. This implies that we place ourselves outside the tradition of pure aestheticism in which art needs no justification, no need to serve any political, didactic, or other ends. In children's literature the political [End Page 1] is often a pedagogical and aesthetical venture.The conflict between aesthetic value on the one hand and pedagogical convention on the other permeates the history of children's literature at least since the age of Romanticism (Kümmerling-Meibauer; Mickenberg, "Radical Children's Literature"). The aesthetic-pedagogic divide is so strong and central to children's literature criticism that it has come to obscure the relationship between aesthetic form and pedagogical content, concealing aesthetical dimensions of the pedagogical or political meaning, residing in the historical situations where literature is produced, used, and read. For centuries, the main purpose of children's literature was to offer the reader religious instruction and moral guidance, and its ability to improve or assist the child reader is still seen as one of its most distinguishing traits (Myers; Cross). Many critics, however, understand the dominant characteristic of children's literature to be its presumed capacity to speak to the reading child through enjoyment and aesthetic appeal rather than through primarily didactic messages, which are simply labeled as being too instructive, intrusive, or boring to the child. Furthermore, as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein observes, this liberation from didacticism is frequently seen by critics as proof of the literary quality of a children's book. The essays included in this forum emanate from a conviction that it is important to further investigate the dynamic entanglement between the ideological dimensions of a text or film and its aesthetic and contextual significations. Ideology is in the text but also in the historical contexts. As cultural studies and reception studies compellingly indicate, aesthetic objects may attain very different meanings in different contexts since the transactions between texts and readers are extraordinarily varied, complex, and unpredictable in kind (Felski). That being the case, it is important to pay close attention to the actual uses of children's literature in different places, bearing in mind that political meanings are not to be found entirely in narrative patterns. Focusing on literature for children published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as well as on the incentives and disincentives for writing, publishing, and distributing this literature, Julia Mickenberg...

Ploughing the Field: A Discussion About YA Studies

In lieu of an abstract: <p class="first-line-indent">In 1996, Caroline Hunt asked whether “the theoretical criticism of YA literature [would] ever reach the standard already seen in children's-literature criticism” because, at the time, “it seem[ed] unlikely that this turbulent field [would] ever produce such criticism in quantity; its roots were formed in other soil” (10). Despite her concern, in the nearly two and a half decades that have passed since Hunt made this claim, YA Studies has become a thriving part of academic discourse. With the launch of both the <em>International Journal of Young Adult Literature</em> (<em>IJYAL</em>) and the YA Studies Association (YASA), 2020 marks a turning point. While both organisations are distinct, they seek to propagate, cultivate, and harvest YA scholarship and to continue the work of this rich and fertile field of research. Though our (perhaps overzealous) use of farming terminology offers a light-hearted response to Hunt’s claim, the metaphor is a useful one because not only is YA scholarship organic and blossoming, it is also open to productive disruption in the manner of ploughing, as the following discussion demonstrates. We have collated the perspectives of sixteen scholars (see Table 1) who research, teach, and/or publish work that intersects YA Studies and who have roles in one or more of the Editorial Board of <em>IJYAL</em> and the Executive Board or Advisory Committee of YASA, in order to examine the past, present, and potential future of YA scholarship.

A Literature of Questions. Nonfiction for the Critical Child by Joe Sutliff Sanders

Reviewed by: A Literature of Questions. Nonfiction for the Critical Child by Joe Sutliff Sanders Jutta Reusch and Nikola von Merveldt A LITERATURE OF QUESTIONS. Nonfiction for the Critical Child. By Joe Sutliff Sanders. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 274 pages. ISBN: 1-5179-0301-7 Mainstream opinion holds that nonfiction is a literature of answers—especially nonfiction for children. Accuracy of facts is then allied with didactic intent to produce doubt-proof authoritative books claiming to tell things as they are. In his game-changing study, Sanders argues that books adhering to this creed produce less truthful accounts than nonfiction books that invite critical engagement by asking questions and reflecting the process of inquiry. His argument is not ideological, however, but theoretical. Sanders is the first scholar to propose a theory of nonfiction, along with "a method for examining children's nonfiction from a literary perspective" (7), which "looks for where a text is willing to invite its readers to dialogue, to negotiation, to the testing of information to critical engagement, and where it is not" (12). Following a clear-sighted introduction situating his theory within the relevant literary and pedagogic debates, Sanders develops, tests, and expounds his theory over seven chapters. In the first chapter, he critically considers what it means to understand nonfiction as a literature of authority and makes the provocative claim that nonfiction shouldn't be a literature of facts at all. If it is to truly educate young minds, it should invite them "to the dialogue of intellectual work," "to involve them in the analysis and production of knowledge" (44). Based on this argument, Sanders examines formal and aesthetic aspects of nonfiction, which either rebuff or invite critical engagement. In chapter 2, he considers the literary category of voice and shows how visible first-person authors voicing doubt and allowing for alternative perspectives rupture authority and encourage questions. Chapter 3 focuses on the characters of nonfiction, and thus on its human dimension. By presenting knowledge as something provisional produced by fallible humans rather than a collection of immutable, objective facts, critical nonfiction engages both the reader's intellect and emotion. Having identified the timeless rhetorical hallmarks of a literature of questions and thus provided a useful analytical tool kit, Sanders goes on to consider peritexts (chapter 4) and photography (chapter 5) as potential sites of engagement typical for contemporary fiction. The multiple peritexts, such as sidebars, footnotes, or afterwords, he claims, invite nonlinear reading, which in turn promotes critical engagement. Photographs, commonly believed to be true depictions of reality, can draw attention to their artificiality through captions or layout. In a close reading of Russell Freedman's photobiography Lincoln (1987), Sanders demonstrates how photographs in nonfiction can encourage readers to examine the visual information critically instead of simply seeing through them. The last two chapters offer an in-depth case study of Tanya Lee Stone's nonfiction book Almost Astronauts (2009). According to Sanders, this award-winning US title perfectly illustrates the conflicting cultural conceptions of what [End Page 103] children's nonfiction should be; it attempts a delicate balancing act between the commercial demands of the schoolbook market asking for a literature of answers and the aesthetic and intellectual ambitions of the author who wants to challenge and inspire her readers to ask their own questions. The conclusion addresses the question literary historians prefer to avoid: Are children actually capable of engaging critically with nonfiction? Several empirical studies have found that they are and readily do so, even if not prompted by adults. However, adult guidance encourages and improves critical literacy. This is why, in his last paragraph, Sanders urges us all to "invite critical engagement and foster it where we can because doing so is democratic, respectful, and humanizing" (230). Sanders celebrates the "democratic potential" of nonfiction (231). Sanders's theory makes an important contribution to an underestimated and undertheorized field children's literature criticism is only beginning to discover. His provocative claim that nonfiction shouldn't be about facts at all will help overcome the dead-end debates trying to assess the accuracy of facts. His sound theoretical framework, his practical analytical tool kit, and his celebration of the "democratic potential...

The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes's Writing for Children. Correcting Culture's Error by Lorraine Kerslake

Reviewed by: The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes's Writing for Children. Correcting Culture's Error by Lorraine Kerslake Anto Thomas Chakramakkil THE VOICE OF NATURE IN TED HUGHES'S WRITING FOR CHILDREN. Correcting Culture's Error. By Lorraine Kerslake. Routledge, 2018, 82 pages. ISBN: 978-1-138-57367-3 Keith Sagar, the veteran Ted Hughes scholar-critic, opens The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes (2000) by describing Hughes as the greatest British writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Hughes wrote for children extensively throughout his career; yet, surprisingly for a writer of his stature, there weren't, I think, any book-length critical studies on his writing for children—until Lorraine Kerslake's The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes's Writing for Children: Correcting Culture's Error set a milestone in children's literature criticism. But it is not just for this reason that I feel the book deserves critical attention. Of course, it does generate certain original ideas on Hughes's perception of children's literature. Another noteworthy reason is that The Voice of Nature is included in The Routledge Environmental Humanities series and the book perfectly configures with the objectives of the editors of this series, for it is an original and inspiring venture recognizing global environmental catastrophe resultant of a crisis of culture. Kerslake argues that Hughes's concept of the therapeutic value of nature is more assertive in his children's literature. At times bordering into a biographical reading, Kerslake considers Hughes's works for children as the panacea that aided him to come to terms with his own personal tragic struggles. Further, this study explores Hughes's shamanic experiences and his mythic re-creations, and above all, it delineates the ever-permeating and progressive journey Hughes made into ecoconsciousness. [End Page 75] Therefore, I consider Kerslake's study as the gospel-truth proclamation of Hughes's bonding of ecology with environmental ethics in his writings for young people. In her introduction, Kerslake drives home the necessity to write a full-length critical study that examines in detail Hughes's contributions to children's literature. The aim of the book is to elucidate the eco-therapeutic values that Hughes perceived and portrayed in his poems, plays, and prose for children. Hughes's ecoconsciousness is attributed to a deep sense of environmental responsibility, and I enjoyed reading the text because it provides the discerning reader with a holistic sense of the central arguments that follow, which unravel in two main segments. Part I shapes the background reading, deals with Hughes's childhood, and then presents Hughes as an environmental writer. In chapter 1, "A Life Close to Nature," Kerslake maps Hughes's creative universe onto the geographical makeup of his childhood. Whereas Neil Robert's article "Ted Hughes's Paradise," which appeared in the book Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture (2018), recalls Hughes's early years of hunting and roaming through nature with his brother Gerald, Kerslake gives a more picturesque description of Hughes's childhood and helps the reader visualize Hughes as Rousseau's Emile. The second chapter, "Reconnecting with Nature," presents Hughes's early awareness of environmental degradation. Kerslake convincingly argues that Hughes was profoundly influenced by early environmentalists like Rachel Carson. Having underpinned the ecocritical and ecofeminist theories that persuaded Hughes, Kerslake presents Hughes as an environmental activist engrossed in environmental campaigns in the 1980s and deeply concerned with issues such as river pollution. Part II traces "the seeds of Hughes's children's writing" (chapter 3) and subsequently makes a detailed literary analysis of Hughes's writings for children. Kerslake offers a critical appreciation of Hughes as an eco-playwright (chapter 4), an eco-poet (chapter 5), and an eco-storyteller for children (chapter 6). In the closing chapter, she sums up the major arguments and delineates perspectives for future research especially by exploring the depth of Hughes's educational achievements. What strikes particularly in this study is the author's mission to make the reader perceive all her arguments through the double periscope that enables one to view everything through Hughes's shamanic quest and through his dichotomy of nature/culture or...

Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem

Reviewed by: Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem Naomi Lesley (bio) Frontiers in Children's Literature. Edited by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem. Foreword by Kenneth Kidd. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. This collection of essays grew out of a project by scholars in the Children's Literature Society of the American Literature Association to investigate the concept of the frontier in children's literature. Between 2009 and 2013, panels at the annual conference each addressed a different aspect of the frontier, with the resulting papers compiled into this volume. Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem, together with the contributors, define the frontier broadly and creatively, including such topics as negotiations with unfamiliar, traumatic, or potentially threatening historical knowledge; student resistance to uncomfortable texts; boundaries between humans and nonhumans; and explorations of new techniques in illustration, archiving, and genre. Scholars in a variety of areas will find individual essays or sections of interest; intersecting fields include trauma studies, posthumanism, fandom studies, illustration, and Native American and African American literature. Clark and Salem's thoughtful introduction offers a reflection on the many potential meanings of the frontier. They begin with the premise that "childhood [is] itself a kind of frontier" (1), necessitating exploration and encounters with the unfamiliar. Thus they focus less on how children's literature addresses the experiences of children situated at literal borders [End Page 214] between regions or nations and more on the metaphorical resonances of frontiers and borders—how Romantic models of childhood push up against conceptions of childhood that acknowledge trauma and harsh realities, how children's literature faces the new "territory" of digitized media, and how children's literature criticism continues to stretch boundaries by incorporating new methods of scholarship. In the remainder of the essay, Clark and Salem seek to provide readers with a guide through this wide-ranging volume by identifying three themes shared by essayists across the five sections. The first is a concern with moral vision and hope, in which narrative traditions carry readers across "boundaries of silence" or historical amnesia (3). The second is a shared conception of the experience of liminality as a border region of its own, one that can alter or transform existing hierarchies and realities. Finally, they point to frontiers as sites of trauma and suggest that the shattering encounter with trauma provides a kind of frontier as it edges readers into new ways of seeing. Part 1, "Frontiers in History, Immigration, Trauma, and Resilience," includes a trio of essays. Anastasia Ulanowicz writes about paratext and visual rhetoric in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and her essay offers a particularly interesting discussion of how state-sponsored nationalism depends upon citizens' "remember[ing] to forget" historical conflicts in the name of national unity (15). Oona Hatton's "Defying Definition" provides a timely and nuanced discussion of the contested nature of national borders and identities in the young adult play The Highest Heaven, which takes place during the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s; her essay is a beautiful contribution to scholarship about border control. Melanie Koss and Nance Wilson outline patterns of emotional survival in young adult literature as exemplified by Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Ellen Hopkins's Identical. Part 2, "Frontiers in African American Children's Literature," contains essays by Raphael Rogers, April Logan, Katharine Capshaw, and Kathleen Nigro. Rogers's and Nigro's essays address issues of representation in books about slavery and the Civil War, including questions of how to represent and acknowledge brutal violence without making spectacles of black bodies. Logan provides a fascinating interpretation of an 1890 novel by Mrs. A. E. Johnson that argues for linguistic diversity and African American signifying practices as a type of border zone in which skilled practitioners of more than one dialect can navigate between dominant and subordinate literacy practices. Capshaw's essay is another highlight of the collection, bringing attention to three plays from the 1930s and '40s about female heroes of the Haitian revolution. She points out how the plays ask readers not only to stretch the boundaries of gender, but also to consider the transnational frontiers of the long Civil Rights movement, as Haiti meant...

The Place of Girls in the Traditions of Minstrelsy and Recitation

Children's literature criticism has been enhanced by classic and recent work that considers and analyses the important roles children play in performance, but there is a gap in current scholarship on drama as children's literature. This gap concerns how the place of children – especially girls and notions of girlhood – has changed over time in texts and cultural productions around the traditions of recitation and minstrelsy. 1 Robin Bernstein has argued persuasively that the ‘scripts’ of a racist past inform the cultural constructions of the present and that children's material and popular culture is often its repository: ‘Sentimentalism or minstrelsy may have peaked in the lives of adults in the nineteenth century, but the popular cultures of childhood … delivered, in fragmented and distorted forms, the images, practices, and ideologies of sentimentalism and minstrelsy well into the twentieth century’ (7). This essay attempts to bridge this gap in scholarship by investigating late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American black and white girlhood through readings of recitation pieces and playtexts, important aspects of children's literary culture, broadly conceived

Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature ed. by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris

Reviewed by: Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature ed. by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris Emily Murphy (bio) Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris, eds. Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. Print. This volume, a collection of nineteen essays (including a coda by Chinese children's writer Mei Zihan), is part of a growing body of scholarship on children's literature in Asia. It follows John Stephens' collection Subjectivity in Asian Children's Literature and Film (2013) by just one year, and, as such, effectively answers Stephens' previous call for "a reciprocal exchange of literary theories and methodologies between Eastern and Western scholars of children's literature" (7). The essays included in the collection provide a model for the kind of intellectual exchange that Stephens identifies as woefully absent from the bulk of children's literature criticism and is also a useful starting point for exploring the rich history of Chinese children's literature. Originally intended to create a dialogue between U.S. and Chinese children's [End Page 128] literature scholars, the book identifies its audience as "English-speak[ers]" (3), and thus shifts its purpose to educating this group of scholars about rhetorical traditions and literary movements in the Chinese tradition. Indeed, these aspects of the book are its strongest points and will be the focus of this review. The book is divided into five sections, which include essays on topics ranging from fantasy fiction, picture books, middle-grade readers, and young adult novels. In Section I ("Theorizing Children's Literature: Journey as Metaphor and Motif"), Roberta Seelinger Trites revisits a familiar classic of American young adult literature, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and considers how embodied metaphors related to Huck's physical journey are used to conceptualize his psychological growth. Ban Ma contrasts this motif of "dynamism" (represented by the active, travelling child) with the "quietness" of Chinese children's literature from the mid-Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which often required children to be still and stay within the home (23). Sections II and III primarily contain individual author studies, but the former, which deals with the May Fourth Movement, is broader in scope and considers how Chinese authors participated in this pivotal cultural movement that erupted after a 1919 student protest in Beijing. Section IV is devoted to didactic children's literature and features essays by leaders of Chinese and American children's literature. In "Children's Disposition and Children's Views," award-winning author Cao Wenxuan describes the difference between children's views and dispositions, and resists collapsing these two terms into a single descriptive category. Michelle Martin and Katharine Capshaw write about a different form of resistance, stressing the importance of picture books in challenging what Nancy Larrick, in 1965, referred to as the "all-white world of children's books." Importantly, the need for diverse books is a concern that is shared by Chinese scholars, as is evidenced in Tan Fengxia's essay on American realistic novels for young adults, where she draws upon the American literary tradition in search of inspiration for a nascent body of young adult literature in China and calls for more books that "deal with the challenges regarding the image of adolescents" (218). For me, Section II was one of the most informative and best aided in the editors' goal of educating English-speaking scholars about the rich history of Chinese children's literature. In this section, contributors Wang Quangen, Xu Yan, and Zhu Ziqiang provide a fundamental introduction to the May Fourth Movement, a period that many Chinese scholars agree to be the starting point of modern Chinese children's literature. With over five hundred children's publishers currently active in China, children's literature is now a substantial part of the publishing industry and is meeting new demands of a rising middle class. However, it was in the period of the May Fourth Movement, which flourished in the 1920s, that new ideas about children and literature [End Page 129] written specifically for this age group emerged. At this time, Chinese authors, including Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Bing Xin, and Ye Shengtao, among...

The Poverty of Posthumanism: Evolution and Extinction in Eugene Field's ‘Extinct Monsters’

This article interrogates constructions of posthumanism in twenty-first century children's literature criticism and ecocriticism. Focusing on an unpublished manuscript by Eugene Field, it argues that the concept of species extinction undermines the theoretical usefulness of posthumanism. The paper begins by discussing the uses and shortcomings of posthumanism as a critical tool in children's literature. In doing so, it establishes connections with the challenge to the human posed by technology in the twenty-first century and the new understanding of what constitutes the human at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper documents intersections between Field's illustrated poem and contemporary representations of evolution and extinction circulating in popular and scientific natural histories. It is suggested that Field's text is also mediated by the visual traditions which framed contemporary natural history writing. Further, situating Field's poetry for children in a broader tradition of nineteenth-century American poetics committed to authorising the voice of the poet, it asks how this voice is complicated by the new realities of evolution and extinction. Confronted with these new realities, Field's manuscript traces the waning of poetic authority and, it is argued, thereby calls for a new aesthetics of children's literature in the face of extinction.

Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (review)

Reviewed by: Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers Roderick McGillis (bio) Nikolajeva, Maria . Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. New York/London: Routledge, 2010. Some years ago, a Ph.D. candidate whose thesis I had examined let me know that I was "the pedantic one" among her examiners. I mention this because I am about to launch into what some might construe as unnecessary pedantic musings. Maria Nikolajeva's Power, Voice and Subjectivity for Young Readers is, like all of the author's books, an important addition to children's literature criticism, and deserves close attention on the part of everyone responsible for bringing her work to the public. Nikolajeva's approach to textuality demonstrates her masterful control of narratological criticism. Yet Power, Voice and Subjectivity has been badly served by the editing and copy-editing process, not unlike another Routledge book I reviewed in recent months. Both Routledge titles (which are to some extent representative of much that we see published these days) demonstrate intellectual rigor, yet are weakened by inattentive proofreading and lax standards of linguistic expression. Every book or article contains slips of one kind and another, but when slips multiply, the result is either to dull our sense of the accuracy and cogency of prose style or to weaken the writer's overall presentation, including his or her argument. If such weakening undermines Power, Voice and Subjectivity, this would be unfortunate; Nikolajeva here, as in her work generally, is a perspicacious reader of texts and a provocative purveyor of theory. She is, quite simply, a major voice in Children's Literature Studies. Any author's book is, to some extent, a collaborative exercise, and when this collaboration works poorly, the result can adversely reflect on the scholarly area generally. We have come a long way in securing the acceptance of Children's Literature Studies in the academy, but the effort to maintain and even further the reputation of these studies is ongoing. Publishers ought to show their pride in a work such as the one before us by providing careful editorial collaboration. Nevertheless, I—in rather pedantic fashion—was able to compile an extensive list of typos and lacunae including errors in subject-verb agreement, comma faults, shaky idioms, missing punctuation, missing words, and misspellings. My list takes into account only aspects of the writing that a careful copyeditor ought to notice. Other aspects of the writing such as an abundance of passive verbs, questionable syntax, or matters of word choice pertain to style and might register with readers one way or another. For instance, take the [End Page 176] following two sentences: "The examples already discussed clearly reflect the view on the child and childhood prevalent in their respective time and culture, as well as practiced by their respective authors. All confirm adult power, even though some are slightly subversive" (178). Passive verbs vitiate the first of these sentences, and the strict logic of the syntax states that "the view" of the child and childhood is "practiced by their" authors. Idiomatically, we rarely "practice" a view, although we may express one. More to the point is the fact that "view" is singular and "their" is plural, making its referent less than clear; does it refer to "view" or to "child and childhood"? If the latter, then something has gone askew in the sentence; if the former, then noun and pronoun do not agree. Then we have the second sentence. This one contains a sleight of hand in that the subordinate clause in the predicate undermines the absolute nature of the sentence's subject. My scrutiny of the sentences here, like my assertion that ungraceful prose inhibits the communication of ideas, may or may not strike all readers as fair. But at the very least we should be vigilant about matters of grammar, clarity, and accuracy. As I indicate at the outset, Nikolajeva is a provocative reader and theorist. In this book, her overarching theme is power, and the unequal power dynamic inherent in writing for children, writing that more often than not derives from adults who are in a position of power vis-à-vis their readers. Several of the...

The gothic in children's literature. Haunting the borders (review)

Reviewed by: The gothic in children's literature. Haunting the borders Victoria Flanagan USA Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, AND Roderick McGillis (EDS), The gothic in children's literature. Haunting the borders. (Series: Children's literature and culture; 43) New York [et al]: Routledge 2008 VII + 254pp ISBN 9780415960366 US$ 100.00 Gothic motifs and themes have never been more popular in children's literature, as evidenced by the worldwide publishing success of series such as Harry Potter, Twilight, and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. This engaging and comprehensive study traces the wide-spread impact of the Gothic in children's books and, in the words of editor Roderick McGillis, asks "why a form that we might think inappropriate for young readers is so pervasive in the various forms of textuality produced for them" (p. 27). Part of this volume's appeal is its wide-ranging focus. It tackles subjects as diverse as the relationship between humor and the Gothic, the novels of Neil Gaiman, the role of the family in contemporary young adult fiction, J.K. Rowling's employment of the Gothic mode when representing female development in the Harry Potter series, and the way in which Gothic comics for young readers subvert comic book conventions and open up new and liberating spaces for child and female characters. Many of the ideas canvassed are innovative and intriguing, particularly those expressed in standout chapters by Nadia Crandall (Cyberfiction and the Gothic Novel), Rose Lovell-Smith (the Gothic representation of the beach in The Tricksters, a novel by New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy) and Roderick McGillis's excellent conclusion (which uses M.T. Anderson's vampire novel Thirsty to propose that the Gothic mode can offer positive ways in which to understand and explain human behavior). Aside from the fact that this book is both compelling and interesting, it fills a necessary gap in recent children's literature criticism. Reflecting on the popularity of the Gothic in fictions produced for children and adolescents, this volume also poses questions about changing cultural attitudes towards the innocence of children – because, unlike conventional Gothic heroines, the child protagonists of contemporary children's narratives rarely need rescuing; they are eminently capable of saving themselves. [End Page 71] Copyright © 2010 Bookbird, Inc.

The Precarious Life of Children's Literature Criticism

The Precarious Life of Children's Literature Criticism

The New(er) Critics are Coming

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...

Honoring Our Mothers: The Legacy and Life of Mitzi Myers

Culturing the Child 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. Ed. Donelle Ruwe. Lanham, MD: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2005. Mitzi Myers was unquestionably the founding mother of eighteenth-century children's literature criticism, and her untimely death was a great loss to the scholarship of that important period. Myers's readings challenged and routed the ad feminam attacks on women writers for children by Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Dickens, attacks that influenced children's literature criticism and history for many generations afterward. Because of Myers we admire rather than vilify the accomplishments of those redoubtable women who challenged their periods' assumptions about women and children. At the same time she disputed and revised past assessments, Myers inspired contemporary feminist critics to evaluate women writers not only as feminists but also as writers and thinkers, placing them in context and not succumbing to what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery," the "presentist" assumption that we always know better than persons in the past. Myers's work taught us that we should not uncritically repeat past truisms without considering their source; as well, she showed us that no critical theory, however vast its claims, can replace careful reading and consideration of the cultural and historical contexts in which a text was produced. The essays in Culturing the Child 1690–1914 provide a fitting tribute to Mitzi Myers in their variety, their range, and their methodology. Culturing the Child is divided into four parts, each of which highlights a different aspect of Myers's legacy. The first, "Creating the Contexts of Children's Literature," focuses upon the eighteenth-century writers and publishers of children's books who laid the groundwork for later developments in children's literature. Chapter one, an essay by Ruth Bottigheimer on the usually yawn-inducing topic of bibliography, ought to be required reading in any graduate class in children's literature for the valuable overview she gives of what is and is not known about early children's books, publishers, and popularity. [End Page 218] Bottigheimer not only convinces readers of the rewards of more systematic study of books as objects rather than as simple containers of text (retrievable through microfilms and reproductions), she also provides the conceptual tools needed to perform such study. Next, Karen E. Rowe's article relates a useful history of the discourse and debates surrounding the eighteenth-century fairy tale, its production, and its suitability for children. Contemporary histories of children's literature are well versed in the debates between realism and romance; however, discussions about the role of the imagination, morality, and narrative within the fantasy tradition are not so widely known. Rowe's article provides important background on that debate, beginning with Charles Perrault and culminating in Mrs. Trimmer's repudiation of the form. Last in this section, Julia Briggs's enjoyable and illuminating essay on women, children, and reading in the eighteenth century demonstrates the extent to which the educational theories of John Locke and others were being debated in children's and adult literature of the time, from Samuel Richardson's Pamela to John Newbery's Goody Two Shoes and Sarah Fielding's Little Female Academy. This essay, too, will be valuable reading for any student of the eighteenth century interested in adult-child cross-writing, another important thematic strand in Mitzi Myers's critical oeuvre. Part two of Culturing the Child focuses on the "Rational Dames" so central to Myers's criticism. These chapters build upon her foundation and develop new avenues for further study. William McCarthy's fascinating study of the pedagogy behind Anna Barbauld's Lessons for Children helps us to appreciate the loving sensitivity she had for children's educational needs and does a great deal to recuperate her work for further study. Marjean Purinton's essay on Hannah More is informative and historically situated, albeit too prone to finding More's work insufficiently feminist and therefore wanting. M...

New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: New Voices in Children’s Literature Criticism Ruth Mirtz (bio) Chapleau, Sebastien . New Voices in Children’s Literature Criticism. Staffordshire, England: Pied Piper P, 2004. This slim volume provides a collection of thirteen short essays on such wide-ranging topics as intertextuality, queer theory, race and ethnicity, authorship, publication, and nationality. As Perry Nodelman points out in [End Page 445] the preface, the "new voices" are actually fresh takes and creative perspectives on ideas in children's literature that have been around awhile. Nodelman claims too many new books treat children's literature as some kind of untouched ground, unaware of or not crediting their critical forebears from decades of research and scholarship in children's literature (5). These essays as a whole, then, perhaps evoke a metaphor of planting new seeds in old ground, rather than breaking new ground, in traditional areas of concern to scholars of children's literature. (Incidentally, Nodelman's riff on Madonna's criticism of children's literature that "there's like no books on anything" is the first critical essay I've giggled over in years.) Indeed, each essay does an admirable job of creating either a new borderland in critical space or pointing out a problematic borderland in the critical space of children's literature. Several of the essays delve into the issue of the dual child-adult audience. Peter Hunt, in his essay "The Knowledge: What Do You Need to Know to Know Children's Literature?" posits that critical study of children's literature is necessarily cross- and inter-disciplinary and needs to be "accessible" as a result of "the irreducible core" of children's literature texts: "a negotiation (or a struggle) between author, material, and audience" where the audience is always children and authors always adults (10). Not all of the essays after Hunt's opening follow his suggestion to be accessible, but most of them approach questions about that tantalizing irreducible core, and several move from core concepts to predictions about the future of children's literature. Most of the essays in New Voices explore this issue of the tension between child reader and adult writer in children's literature. Several selections focus on the continuing power of adults over what children read and how children are portrayed in books. Laura Atkins, in "A Publisher's Dilemma: The Place of the Child in the Publication of Children's Books," adds another interesting narrative of the publishing process to our small store of such stories. Her essay questions what drives the publishing industry and where the child reader comes into play in the publishing process. Her answer, that the adult readers (teachers, librarians, parents) are the stronger forces in what gets published and how, comes through two stories: one of how Sammy and the Dinosaurs was published in English (written by Atkins) and then revised for American audiences; and second about DeShawn Days, a book of poetry by Tony Medina. Atkins's essay is echoed later in the book, when Gabriele Thomson-Wohlgemuth describes what happened to children's literature in translation in East Germany before reunification. Thomson-Wohlgemuth explains that while East German texts for children had to [End Page 446] conform to the enterprise of creating children who fit in with the political doctrines of the socialist government, Western countries also have didactic and ideological goals for children's literature which creates limits and censors certain books in predictable ways. The adult power over children's literature thus may result in less interesting and diverse selections available in all Western cultures. Likewise, Ann Alston's essay, "There's No Place Like Home: The Ideological and Mythological Construction of House and Home in Children's Literature" sent me back to my picture book collection, looking for what she identifies as the essential "home" in children's literature: a family sitting at a table covered by a tablecloth with a bureau in the background. Alston's point is that, even though families and homes have changed drastically, the image of home in children's books is still a Western "static middle-class perspective," now a myth that adults are trying to sell, emphasizing again that adults control children by...

New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism (review)

New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism (review)

The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain (review)

Reviewed by: The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain Mavis Reimer (bio) The Presence of the Past: Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain. By Valerie Krips. New York and London: Garland, 2000 Valerie Krips' The Presence of the Past is among the most important books of children's literature criticism published in the past few years, a significance recognized by its designation as the Honor Book of 2000 by the Children's Literature Association. Its importance consists not only, and perhaps not primarily, in the new insights it brings to children's texts published in postwar Britain, the so-called second Golden Age of British children's literature. Rather, Krips' book is important for its exploration and modeling of a new method for studying children's texts as artifacts of the culture in which and by which they are produced. Many critics claim an interest in the culture that surrounds the production and reception of children's literature. Indeed, the defining fact of children's literature—that it is written across the gap of adult author and child audience—seems to require that some attention be paid to its situation of enunciation. But such attention often amounts to an introductory sketch of the historical, social, or biographical background of the foregrounded book, a context in which the text is set and against which it is measured. Frequently, the most prized books of children's literature are shown to rise above their particular circumstances and to point to such widespread values—sometimes construed as timeless values—as tolerance, empathy, and growth. For Krips, to the contrary, the culture of postwar Britain is as much her object of study as are the children's texts of the period, as the subtitle of her study, Memory, Heritage, and Childhood in Postwar Britain, suggests. While Krips speaks of "focusing [her] discussion upon novels for children"(xii), in fact foreground and background repeatedly change places as she focuses now on a particular book or group of books, now on a festival, now on the changing philosophy of museums. Also unlike historical critics who use context as setting for text, Krips rarely produces full readings of specific books. By this practice, she refutes the implicit claim of realistic fiction—including most children's fiction—to represent a coherent and complete version of the world. The emphasis of Krips' study can be seen in the organization and titles of her chapters. In the first chapter, "Arrears of Memory," Krips defines the historical period she has chosen as her subject as one characterized by the turn to heritage and commemoration. The second chapter, "Lieux de Mémoire," identifies some of the theorists and theories of memory through which Krips reads postwar Britain, notably those of Pierre Nora and Raphael Samuel. Chapter 3, "The Trace of Old Characters," argues that adult remembering "intersects with, and in part attempts to constitute, the memory of the child reader" (32), and uses the response to the Ladybird 1987 re-issue of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit as a demonstration of such an attempt. In Chapter 4, "Forgetting the Past," Krips reads two novels by Philippa Pearce as illustrating the importance in postwar British children's books of "[achieving an appropriate orientation to the present in terms of the past"(52). In Chapter 5, "The Taint of History," Krips uses novels by Rosemary Sutcliff and Susan Cooper, as well as the nonfictional I-Spy books, to define the difference between "empirical, scientific historiography"(74) and the "epiphanic, atemporal" notion of "living history" (86). In "The Memory of Objects," the sixth chapter, Krips demonstrates how "the object becomes a prop in the processes of the mimetic formations of heritage"(193) and traces Alan Garner's "route to the everyday object"(99) through a number of his novels published between 1960 and 1976. Krips' study does not so much conclude as stop at the end of Chapter 6. Her central contention—"that Britain's reckoning with the past is anatomized in fiction written for children postwar" (1)—has been stated on the first page of the introduction, and the rest of the study is given over...

"Irony?—But Children Don't Get It, Do They?": The Idea of Appropriate Language in Narratives for Children

"Irony?—But Children Don't Get It, Do They?"The Idea of Appropriate Language in Narratives for Children Sue Walsh (bio) In 1991, in his Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature, Peter Hunt noted "a neglect of language itself" in children's literature criticism, which he saw in the context of an "emphasis placed on the use of children's literature. This has led to concentration on affect, which has led in turn to some very simplistic models of the reading process, and concentration on thematic analysis" (102). I would argue that what Hunt noted then is still largely in operation now, for, if we look at the most recent issues of The Lion and the Unicorn, Children's Literature, Children's Literature in Education, or the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, we still find that the field is dominated by thematic studies concerned with, for example, "violence" in children's literature, "fathers" in children's literature, or depictions of "race" and "gender" in children's literature. Furthermore, these thematic studies do not engage with the methodological issues of thematic criticism, that is to say the question of a text's "aboutness," or the grounds on which we read the "presence" of certain themes. Nor do they consider the way thematic criticism generally implies a certain kind of relationship between language and a purported "reality"; rather, the themes explored by critics in the journals named above are explored as self-evidently there, possessing an ontological status independent of representation, and so the "representations" are critiqued precisely as re-presentations of greater or lesser accuracy, and consequently of greater or lesser political/social/pedagogical desirability.1 Similarly, when language does become the issue, it is not infrequently discussed in terms of its "appropriateness" or "suitability" for the child reader.2 In 1991, Hunt remarked that "There seems to be a 'register,' a set of words thought to be appropriate in writing for children" (104), and in his more recent work on fantasy fiction he refers to "a certain linguistic set" that marks a text out as perhaps "for children" (Hunt and Lenz 95). Thus, even those who, like the editor Elizabeth Law, decry "the idea that, if something is for children, it had better be obvious," nevertheless retain the notion that simplicity is what is appropriate to the child whereas an "art [that] suggest[s] multiple meanings" is conversely "suitable for adult tastes" (15).3 In her account of the making of a picture book using the text of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," she writes: [I]n the recently published Both Sides Now (1992), in which Joni Mitchell's 1968 song, a bittersweet musing on the nature of life and love, is depicted by illustrator Alan Baker as a love story between two caterpillars.... The dark underside of the song is completely ignored. For example, the line "So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way" appears against the sunny backdrop of a rainbow after a storm. Where is the irony? Where is the pathos? The problem is that the song was written for an adult audience; the publisher should have used a sophisticated, innovative artist with a hipper look...whose art would have suggested multiple meanings and been suitable for adult tastes. (17) The assumption of a critical position that implies "appropriateness" or "suitability" necessarily involves the critic in bringing to bear an assumed knowledge of the "child": of its needs, its likes, and its linguistic or narrative competence. Frequently this "knowledge" is based on an appeal to memory—which, somehow in such accounts, becomes certain, immutable, generalizable and unmediated—either of "my own experience as a child" (Wall 88), or of experiences gained as a professional who has worked with "real" children (for example a librarian or a teacher, see again Wall 88). And one of the things known about the "child," or the "child" masquerading as a plurality of children, is that irony and/or satire is beyond its grasp.4 For instance, alongside Barbara Wall's statement that "My own experience as a child, a teacher, a reader and a researcher suggests that the language and the ironies of Huckleberry Finn...

Beyond the Grammar of Story, or How Can Children's Literature Criticism Benefit from Narrative Theory?

Beyond the Grammar of Story, or How Can Children's Literature Criticism Benefit from Narrative Theory?

Carnivals, the Carnivalesque, "The Magic Puddin'," and David Almond's "Wild Girl, Wild Boy": Toward a Theorizing of Children's Plays.

This article seeks to extend current children's literature criticism into children's plays and children's theatre. The article uses Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding as a prose introduction to an idea of a theatrical carnivalesque. Building on the practical experience of being involved in a large program of original drama for children, written and produced within the university context, it develops a theory of plays-as-the-performance-of-texts, relating this to the current debate on performance and performativity. It adopts the idea of performativity as performative belonging and identifies some distinguishing characteristics of children's plays. Applying some of these ideas to David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy, it notes the idea of moral psychic reorganisation as part of the essence of carnival.

Introduction

Introduction Maria Nikolajeva The purpose of this new column is to introduce a wider perspective on international scholarship in children's literature to the audience of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Recently the International Committee of the Children's Literature Association has taken some steps to bring more international research and criticism to the attention of its members. These steps include special panels and sessions at the annual conferences, a travel grant intended to bring one distinguished international scholar to each conference, and various other endeavors. A vast amount of research carried out in European countries and elsewhere is basically unknown in the English-speaking world. The language barrier is just one reason. It is also the relatively deliberate self-isolation of some nations, often due to historical and political reasons. As a result, scholars focus consciously on their national children's literature and thus develop a sense of self-sufficiency in regard to the development of theory and criticism. There are some obvious parallels within general criticism. For instance, the French and Anglo-American feminist theory developed in happy, almost mutual ignorance. However, by now the two directions have not only discovered each other, but successfully incorporated each other's achievements. It is to be hoped that children's literature criticism can also benefit from a broader acquaintance with scholarly results from other countries and cultures. Starting the column with a survey of German research was a very deliberate decision to highlight the enormous diversity of approaches and priorities within our discipline. From Hans-Heino Ewers' essay we can clearly see that the predominantly text-oriented, decontextualized study of children's literature in the wake of New Criticism, which I find prevalent in English-language criticism, is not the only possible strategy. It is illuminating that the enormous corpus of still uncollected and uncatalogued children's literature written in German stimulates almost obsessive bibliographical and historical research. In fact, annotated bibliographies and historical surveys seem not only to comprise the bulk of scholarly publications, but they also enjoy in the first place a higher status than generic or thematic studies. Peter Hunt has repeatedly questioned children's literature scholars' focus on "books that were for children" rather than "books that are for children" (see e.g., Hunt, "Dragons"). His skepticism is still more relevant for German research that obviously neglects contemporary and popular children's books in favor of old and forgotten texts. Given the political history of Germany in the twentieth century, this scholarly strategy is hardly unexpected. (It reminds me of Mikhail Bakhtin, who preferred to theorize around Rabelais as a way to avoid contemporary ideologically charged literature.) At the same time, the relatively low prestige of children's literature research apparently precludes considering the history of children's literature in a broader context of the mainstream, as do some recent Anglo-American publications, for instance, Introducing Children's Literature, by Deborah Cogan Thacker and Jean Webb. The question that has preoccupied most of the leading children's literature scholars in the English-speaking world, such as Alison Lurie, Jacqueline Rose, Perry Nodelman, Peter Hunt, Rod McGillis, or John Stephens, concerning the definition and essence of children's literature, appears extraneous to German research. Instead, the objective is a meticulous classification and description of a corpus of predefined texts. Thus, German children's literature criticism, as Hans-Heino Ewers himself comments, lacks the diversity of approaches notable in Anglo-American research and gives some directions priority over others. This is perhaps the result of a conscious self-isolation of German scholarship that refrains from acknowledging and utilizing the achievements of international research. But as a result, it appears considerably more consolidated and purposeful, as if working toward the same well-defined goal. In this light, it is remarkable for me as a Swedish scholar to see how influential the Grand Old Man Göte Klingberg seems to be in Germany. Klingberg was the pioneer of children's literature studies in Sweden in the '60s and early '70s, completing the first Swedish Ph.D. dissertation in children's literature, and paving the way for the first generation of serious scholars. While he is still highly acclaimed for...