Children's Literature Criticism Research Articles

Children's Literature Criticism: The Old and the New

Understanding Children's Literature sets itself up as an introductory collection of essays about the relationship between literary theory and children's literature. The essays are by well-known, highly respected critics, such as Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, Tony Watkins, John Stephens, Perry Nodelman, Hamida Bosmajain, Lissa Paul, and Hugh Crago. These and other critics in the book focus their theoretical lens, as it were, on such important issues in children's literature as definition, history, culture, ideology, linguistics, picture books, psychoanalysis, feminism, intertextuality, and literacy. Placed under the microscope are a wide range of old and new children's texts. TL· Wind in tL· Willows, TL· Secret Garden, TL· Hobbit, Low Tide, Where tL· Wild Things Are, Mr Gumpy's Outing, and Higglety Pigglety Pop! are just some of the closely examined books that give students an understanding of how literary theory might be used to dissect children's literature. The opening essay, Introduction: The World of Children's Literature Studies, is by Peter Hunt, a critic who as well as anybody can see the complexities that inform an understanding of children's literature. Understanding Children's Literature has been the central theoretical text in my undergraduate theory class this semester, along with Rebecca Lukens's A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature. I chose Hunt's book because I was reviewing it (what better way to know a book than to teach it). I chose Lukens's book because I didn't want my students to think that the ideas and concepts about children's literature criticism in Hunt's book, indeed the whole concept of children's literature studies, appeared out of nowhere. Quite the contrary. I wanted them to understand the history of children's literary theory, the theories themselves, and the direction in which children's literature criticism seems to be heading today, i.e., toward a much more interdisciplinary mode of interpretation. By reading back and forth between the two quite different approaches to children's literature of which Lukens and

Child/Animal: It's the 'Real' Thing

This paper is concerned with parallel positionings of animal and child in the discourses of animal rights and children's literature criticism respectively. It suggests that animal and child are often constructed in such texts as 'real' and therefore impervious to discourse. In analysing the ways these discourses nevertheless construct their object, alternative constructivist attempts to remain self-reflexive about their own discursive assumptions are discussed. Examples of outright resistance to constructivism are selected from animal advocacy, whilst the co-option of constructivism to a liberal humanist agenda is noted in current children's literature criticism. I argue that both positions fail to recognize their own mastery of the animal/child on whose behalf they claim to speak.

'Holiday House': Grist to 'The Mill on the Floss', or Childhood as Text

In his 1814 review of Wordsworth's `The Excursion', Charles Lamb wrote: `[Wordsworth's] verses shall be censured as infantile by critics who confound poetry children for its subject with poetry that is childish', (1) and almost two hundred years later attitudes of this kind, overt or implicit, can still widely be found both in literary criticism in general and in children's literature criticism. This volume of the Yearbook of English Studies aims to challenge that view of childhood as either an isolated, special topic within literary studies, of little relevance to wider issues of critical approach or established areas of study about texts, or as simply too obvious and self-evident to write about at any length or with much complexity. The articles in this volume, whether on children's literature or `adult' literature, differ in their focus and method, but they are similar in that they all argue and demonstrate ways in which considerations of childhood are complex in and of themselves, and also how they raise, or join in with, challenges to a whole range of much wider critical assumptions and practices. At issue here is the way childhood has hardly been conceived of in the humanities as a construction of identity. (2) There are already available in other areas critical approaches hinging on theories of identity (feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory) which are not just widely circulated, but are, to a greater or less extent, seen as having a relevance to questions and issues beyond any narrow concept of `special interest' groups. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests with regard to her use of queer theory, `modern homo/ heterosexual definition has become so exacerbated a cultural site because of an enduring incoherence about whether it is to be thought of as an issue only for a minority of (distinctly lesbian or gay) individuals, or instead as an issue that cuts across every locus of agency and subjectivity in the culture'. (3) Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, similarly, argue with reference to developments in feminist theory: `The categories of man and woman (in all their complexity and multiplicity) currently remain constitutive of our identities, and in hierarchically inscribed ways. [...] It would seem unlikely that any disciplinary division between feminism (which excludes men) and gender (which does not) will be sustainable.' (4) Even if, then, these theories of identity are seen to raise general problems around, for instance, cultural meanings, hierarchies and consciousness, perspectives and politics, childhood, meanwhile, as Charles Lamb feared, usually remains a field regarded with anything from mild amusement to derision, judged either too simple to be serious, or too pure to be touched. The studies that have been devoted to it have equally been seen, and often see themselves, as strictly specialized and local, if not positively marginal. Children's literature criticism is hardly related, and hardly relates itself, to `adult' literary criticism or theory, (5) and children or childhood are largely written of as a `separate' focus or topic among a more encompassing `adult' literary thematics. (6) In fact, childhood seems in many ways not to be registered as a `subject' as such at all: it may be noted as an instance of this that `childhood' or the `child' are rarely included as a `topic' or `subject' in indices, even when discussed in some way in a text. I want here to look further at the dynamics and implications of several of the claims I have sketched above concerning both a separate status of the `child' in literary studies, and some of the fundamental challenges this area may be argued as raising, in defiance of its critical marginalization or isolation. In order to do this I will turn to discussing the `childhood' sections of George Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss. (7) For if there is anything critics seem to agree on, and that therefore directs much of the criticism of these sections of the novel, it is that Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss, was preeminently successful in describing childhood, the girl Maggie Tulliver and her relationship with her brother Tom, and that this success moreover is the result of these episodes being autobiographical and of intense personal significance to George Eliot herself. …

Editors' Introduction: Celebrating Our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, Celebrating Children's Literature Criticism

Editors' Introduction: Celebrating Our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, Celebrating Children's Literature Criticism

Beyond the Image: Adolescent Girls, Reading, and Social Reality

While even some mass-market girls' fiction now depicts girls who triumph over sexism, the liberal feminism of many such novels presents a limited analysis of sexism. Like much feminist criticism of children's literature, the focus on positive images in these novels emerges from sex-role theory. Whether arguing that picture books socialize children into traditional roles or that children's literature can, by presenting non-traditional images, liberate them, the assumption that children simply mimic what they see fails to account for agency. I argue that feminist criticism of fiction for young readers must move beyond a focus on images to examine the way in which fiction allows readers to map social structure. Mildred Taylor's fiction does this, providing an analysis of racism and sexism as mutually constitutive and interdependent systems. The knowledge readers of such fiction might gain about social reality, even of structural determination, is paradoxically productive of individual agency, effective resistance, and even social transformation.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Children's Literature Criticism

The Psychopathology of Everyday Children's Literature Criticism

The Transactional School of Children's Literature Criticism

The Transactional School of Children's Literature Criticism

Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tale Debates and the Development of Children's Literature Criticism in Germany

Nineteenth-Century Fairy Tale Debates and the Development of Children's Literature Criticism in Germany

Additional "Variations": Further Developments in Feminist Theory and Children's Literature

Additional "Variations":Further Developments in Feminist Theory and Children's Literature Anne K. Phillips (bio) Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L. M. Montgomery, ed. Mary Henley Rubio. Guelph, Ontario: Canadian Children's Press, 1994. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender, and Girls' Series, ed. Sherrie A. Inness. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels, by Roberta Seelinger Trites. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. When the Children's Literature Association Quarterly began running a column on literary theory and children's literature in 1988, the initial article in that column was Perry Nodelman's "Children's Literature as Women's Writing." Summarizing the winter 1982 Quarterly special section, "Feminist Criticism and the Study of Children's Literature," Nodelman noted that many of the authors in that issue collectively imply "the intriguing idea that children's literature as a whole is actually a kind of women's writing" (32). In her landmark 1987 essay, "Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows About Children's Literature," Lissa Paul suggests "powerful implications about the content and language of children's literature and children's literature criticism; something to do with 'inside' stories; something of our own fractured sense of the distinctions between self and other; something in tune with our particular moment in Western culture—something articulated in feminist theory" (186). Nodelman's and Paul's essays are among the most frequently cited scholarship on feminist criticism and children's literature, and issues of language, power, and identity remain the focus of much children's literature scholarship. The following reviewed books—two essay collections and one full-length theoretical study—manifest these concerns as well. Originally released in connection with the First International Symposium on L. M. Montgomery at the University of Prince Edward Island in June 1994, Harvesting Thistles is a collection of eighteen [End Page 223] essays that seeks to reestablish Montgomery as the "Jane Austen of Canada" (Rubio 4). The title of the collection originates in Montgomery's novel The Blue Castle (1926). The heroine, Valancy Sterling, is confined to a home in which her mother and cousin watch her every move; they only allow her to read a library book titled Thistle Harvest because it is ostensibly a nature study. She finds it empowering, however, and thus "dangerous." As editor Mary Rubio explains, "Montgomery's own books, like Thistle Harvest, are books which amuse and soothe, but are also filled with subversive, prickly shafts. Montgomery writes trenchant social satire within the containers of her 'romances'" (1-2). Taken together, the essays included in this collection seek "to put to rest the untenable assumption that L. M. Montgomery writes only about an 'unblemished bucolic paradise' for undiscriminating women and children. This is the first collection of a growing body of Montgomery scholarship to focus on thistles in her landscape. To read her as a rosy-hued optimist who only wrote romances with happy endings is to misread her profoundly" (6). In addition, Rubio aims "to present new interpretations by critics who have had the advantage of reading Montgomery's journals and thus deepening their reading of the novels" (7). The collection includes material originally delivered at academic conferences; it also contains essays that the editor has solicited. A few essays are book excerpts. The contributors range from leading Montgomery scholars such as Elizabeth R. Epperly and Elizabeth Waterston to scholars who wrote graduate theses or dissertations on Montgomery. With only a few exceptions, the articles are informed by feminist theory and criticism: for example, three of the essays focus on Montgomery and issues of autobiography; two study sisterhood in Montgomery's life and work; others examine the representation of the female voice and the female experience in Montgomery's fiction and journals. Although the collection as a whole is weakened by individual essays that are incomplete or undeveloped (or, occasionally, inaccurate), several of the essays extend Montgomery scholarship in significant new directions and are a welcome addition to the Montgomery canon. Some of the essays are marred by errors that should have been rectified by the editor. In Marie Campbell's essay, "Wedding Bells and Death Knells: The Writer as...

Talking About Children's Literature Criticism

Talking About Children's Literature Criticism

Theory and Textual Interpretation: Children's Literature and Literary Criticism

Theory and Textual Interpretation: Children's Literature and Literary Criticism

Hatchet Job

Hatchet Job Perry Nodelman (bio) Karín Lesnik-Oberstein , Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child is like the little girl with the curl in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem: when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad it's horrid—just about as bad a book about the criticism of children's literature as one could imagine. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein has important points to make and some axes to grind that are very much in need of being ground. But she's so busy, grinding away with boundless passion and energy, that she sometimes doesn't seem to notice it's a saw or a hammer she's handling and not an axe at all. She seriously blunts the edge of her argument and weakens her case by misrepresenting and mis-shaping the evidence she presents for it. According to Lesnik-Oberstein, children's-literature criticism, like children's literature itself, is based on two key ideas: one, that children are different from adults—different enough to need a special kind of literature; and two, that adults can know enough about the different nature of children to write books for them and/or to recommend which of the books written for them they ought to read. For Lesnik-Oberstein, both these ideas are false. "Western society," she says, "has an ever-growing, complex, and ambivalent attachment to the concept of the child. It is the central argument of this book that that child does not exist. For the purposes of children's literature criticism, so closely involved with children's supposed emotions and states of mind, I am arguing that the 'child' is a construction, constructed and described in different, often clashing terms" (9). As constructed, the "fictional child" of criticism relates more to critics' desires about what children could be or should be than to real knowledge of what any given child or group of children might actually be like—a knowledge Lesnik-Oberstein believes to be impossible to obtain. Lesnik-Oberstein concludes that "if children's literature criticism depends on, and is defined by, its claim to the existence of the 'real child'. . . . then it is indeed dead" (163). That's right, dead. Deceased. Extinct. Moribund. Children's-literature criticism has kicked the bucket. This journal is a mortuary, apparently, and we who write in it are undertakers. "As children's literature criticism operates at present," Lesnik-Oberstein asserts as her finely ground axe descends vengefully downward for its last triumphant stroke, "I can only conclude it makes non-statements, for its own purposes. In making judgments and criticisms on behalf of a 'real child' who does not exist, its writings are useless to the fulfillment of its own professed aims" (163). Well, as a children's-literature critic, I obviously want to quarrel with that conclusion. I think it's wrong—and not just wrong, but bad and horrid, for reasons I will point out later in this review. Meanwhile, though, I'm surprised at how often I agree with Lesnik-Oberstein's assertions. Her axe sometimes drops on some specific critical necks I'd like to see it drop on. There are parts of this book I might have written myself. Indeed, I have written them myself, albeit in other words and in other contexts—a fact Lesnik-Oberstein seems blithely unaware of. In the world of children's-literature criticism she describes, Perry Nodelman does not exist—although, speaking about death and grave-robbing and other spooky things, Lesnik-Oberstein quotes the exact words from Jacques Derrida about children as Other that Nodelman quoted in a piece that appeared in the Quarterly as far back as 1990—and in relation to exactly the same idea. She also pursues almost the same argument about the deficiencies of Peter Hunt's work regarding the unity of the child reader that Nodelman presented in a Quarterly review in 1992. In the light of this mysterious, almost magical, coincidence of agreement between Lesnik-Oberstein, axe-murderer of children's-literature criticism, and me, a children's-literature critic who imagines...

The state of contemporary children's literature criticism

The State of Contemporary Children’s Literature Criticism Ian Wojcik-Andrews (bio) Peter Hunt. Ed. Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1992. A critic may write with assurance as long as the critical institution itself is thought to be unproblematical. Once that institution is thrown into radical question, then one would expect individual acts of criticism to become troubled and self-doubting. The fact that such acts continue today, apparently in all their traditional confidence, is doubtless a sign that the crisis of the critical institutions has either not been deeply enough registered, or is being actively evaded. (Eagleton, Preface) The above quote comes from one of Eagleton’s earlier works, The Function of Criticism (1984). In said work, Eagleton argues, as the above quote suggests, that “criticism today lacks all substantive social function. It is either part of the public relations branch of the literary industry, or a matter wholly internal to the academies” (Preface). Eagleton’s comments came to mind when I read Hunt’s first anthology, the ahistoricist Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism (1990). Eagleton’s comments returned again as I read Hunt’s second, companion anthology, Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism (1992). The essays in the anthology make it seem as though children’s literature criticism is keeping up, not quite with the Joneses, but at least with the developments in the fields of criticism and literature. This is fine, for children’s literature criticism needs to keep abreast of things. But, still, the question, for me at least, remains: What is the “social function” (Eagleton, Preface) of criticism? This question is particularly pressing because as we enter an era of global capitalism (an economic system supposedly meant to benefit all human beings) and colonial rule, the number of impoverished children [End Page 128] around the world increases (Boyden 1991). Precisely what is the function of this institution called criticism? On the whole, Peter Hunt’s 1992 anthology Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism proceeds more or less confidently—unproblematically, in Eagleton’s terms—in its approach to the act of criticism. Nothing about a crisis brewing. As Hunt writes in his introduction, “The essays and extracts reprinted here . . . are intended . . . to suggest the kind of links increasingly made in the field [of children’s literature]” (1). The anthology represents the economy of criticism as business as usual. To be sure, Hunt notes that critics still need to investigate certain areas of children’s literature—three “gaps” (14) as he calls them—that revolve around poetry, education, and drama. And, to be sure, individual writers see themselves and their work within philosophy, history, and criticism. Paul, for example, sets her essay in the context of mimetic theories of representation and fractal geometry (contexts my students find difficult yet intriguing). Watkins sets his essay in the context of cultural studies and new historicism, arguing that The Wind in the Willows and The Wizard of Oz articulate the kinds of “mythic proto-narratives” (184) that structure and reinforce nationalist ideologies. But neither these essays nor the anthology as a whole problematizes criticism or the role of those who practice criticism in colleges and universities. The anthology tries to “further the interaction of disparate disciplines and attitudes, and to continue the progress of children’s literature criticism, of all kinds, towards greater rigour” (16). The march of history. The march of criticism. Nothing about a crisis or an evasion. Yet, in the anthology’s first essay, Peter Hollindale’s well-known “Ideology and the Children’s Book” (19–40), I sense a potential crisis in the making, another gap that needs exploring much more fully. To understand the depth of the gap, I want to refer to Hunt’s introduction to Hollindale’s essay. Hunt describes the historical relations between ideology and children’s literature as “emotive” (18). Hunt further argues that “As a result [of this emotiveness], work in this area has tended to be polemical or to address specific issues such as censorship or covert racialism” (18). Hunt assigns responsibility for these polemical approaches to Bob Dixon and Robert Leeson, both of whom happen to be Leftist critics of children’s literature. Confidently dismissing...

Children's literature: criticism and the fictional child

'Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child' draws on literary and critical theory to argue that children's literature criticism through its often contradictory versions of the `child' reveals the realm of `childhood' as one constructed by the adult reader. Crucially, however, this construction is not seen to be an incorrect or partial 'idealisation' of the child, as is commonly argued elsewhere in children's literature criticism and further discussions of childhood, but instead is understood to be about a textuality to which there is no 'outside' - all meanings and identities, including childhood, are here understood as produced in and as language. From this position, the book demonstrates that both children's literature criticism and the texts it studies are underpinned by the narratives of the liberal arts' educational ideals and their attendant socio-political and personal ideologies. In the book, literary discussion is placed in relation to wider debates about childhood in psychology and psychotherapy. The book argues for a significant re-thinking of `childhood' and approaches to children's literature.

Prayer‐wheels and inspirations: Trends in children's literature criticism

Many professionals who deal with children regard children's literature criticism as parasitic, or debate its purpose. Much of the recent work relates to other disciplines, seen by some as a weaknes...

Hunt with a Canon

Hunt with a Canon Perry Nodelman (bio) Hunt, Peter , ed. Children's Literature: The Development of Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Hunt, Peter , ed. Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. These two books are not what they appear to be. They are, however, very entertaining; and they are entertaining exactly because they are not what they appear to be. They are not, despite the claim made in the subtitle of the first volume, a history of the development of children's literature criticism—nor even of "the way in which the criticism of children's literature—and indeed, the subject itself—has developed, particularly in the last forty years" (Development 1). Hunt rather dismissively covers pre-1945 children's literature criticism in about twenty pages of excerpts and represents the entire next quarter century by just one essay. He justifies this practice by asserting that his book "is not a history of criticism, or a history of children's literature. It is not intended to be comprehensive, or to suggest any particular partisan route to the understanding of the field of children's books. Rather, it attempts to give some characteristic points of view. The texts and extracts printed here either clear the ground or provide a foundation for future work" (13). In the rest of the first volume, then, and all of the second, the focus is on still-current concerns—which raises a question about why any history was included at all. This focus pleases me—I have to admit that I find the contemporary issues more interesting than the history seemingly promised but never delivered. A second thing these books are not—or at least, not exactly—are the anthologies of previously published essays that their tables of contents and back jackets seem to suggest, and that I had first thought they were. Much of their content is, in fact, reprinted articles. But three of the eight essays in the second volume are new: one by C.W. Sullivan III on folklore and fantasy, one by Nicholas Tucker on psychology, and one by Tony Watkins on new historicism. Furthermore, one of the other essays, a piece on picture books by Geoff Moss that appeared earlier in the Quarterly, has an entire second half added. Again, I'm glad I was misled; the presence of these new materials makes the second volume a more stimulating intellectual experience than would have been provided by the collection of reprints it first appeared to be. Meanwhile, six of the thirteen pieces listed in the table of contents of the first volume are not complete pieces, only excerpts—and that table doesn't even mention a number of other lengthy excerpts from a variety of other writers. Despite the table of contents' silence, some of these excerpts, from writers such as Geoffrey Trease, Dennis Butts, Myles McDowell, Brian Alderson, Michael Benton, and Jane Doonan, are just about as long as some of the ones listed. There is both less and more for your money here than first appears. In volume two, the habit of excerpting expands prodigiously. Hunt's sixteen-page introduction includes a page and a half of Perry Nodelman (a brilliant page and a half too, I might add), a page of Samuel Pickering, a page and a half of Mitzi Myers, another page and a half of Nodelman (also brilliant), two pages of Aidan Chambers, and a page or so of shorter quotes—and only about eight pages of Hunt to hold all the rest together. The excerpts take over entirely in the poetry piece in the second volume. It consists of extended quotes from a variety of sources loosely held together by Hunt's commentary: "I have been unable to find a single essay that adequately explores the problems of discussing—or even defining—verse and poetry for children. Similarly . . . there is a lack of any extensive theoretical discussion of the links between children's literature and education. In an attempt to partially remedy this, I have edited together a series of extracts" (14-15). It is exactly all these extracts, and the contexts that Hunt provides for them, that makes...

Transitions

Transitions Gillian Adams We are pleased to report that Marilynn Strasser Olson, Associate Professor of English at Southwest Texas State University, was chosen by the ChLA Board of Directors at the Missouri Conference this June to be the new editor of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Because issues are planned ahead, the editorial transition is of necessity a gradual one. From June on, all unsolicited manuscripts not slated for one of my special issues have been Marilynn's primary responsibility. Marilynn is also setting up the special issues that will appear under her editorship, and suggestions for such issues, as well as new essays, should be sent to her at her address on the masthead. I will continue to handle other Quarterly correspondence until my term as editor is over, in December 1995. We are grateful to the chair of the Department of English at Southwest Texas State University, Lydia Blanchard, who has offered her full support during the transition and has been unfailingly cooperative. The Quarterly will be housed in a spacious, fully equipped office in the remodeled English building. Access to amenities such as a flat-bed scanner has already made a difference. Mary-Agnes Taylor, Professor Emeritus of English at Southwest Texas State University, is retiring as Associate Editor as of the Winter issue. We will sorely miss Mary-Agnes's wit, editorial acumen, and good advice, but we are glad that she will now be able to join our ranks as a contributor. Claudia Nelson, Assistant Professor of English at Southwest Texas State University, has been appointed associate editor. Claudia comes to us with extensive editorial experience as a former managing editor of College Literature and a former book review editor of Victorian Studies; she recently was guest editor of our special issue on fathers and sons (Fall, 1993). We regret that we must say good-bye to Jill May, who has resigned as an editorial consultant; her hard work on behalf of the Quarterly is well known. Thank you, Jill. The ChLA Board of Directors has agreed to replace her with Lois Kuznets. Lois has already been a knowledgeable and perceptive reader of many submissions, and we are pleased that the masthead will now reflect her efforts on our behalf. We also regret that Perry Nodelman is stepping down as editor of the Literary Theory and Children's Literature column. Perry's pioneering essays have had a major impact on the development of children's literature criticism and are now classics. Roderick McGillis, my predecessor as editor of the Quarterly, has graciously agreed to become the new column editor. Rod's latest book, tentatively titled Beyond Formalism Again: Literary Theory and Children's Literature, is forthcoming from Twayne. The essays in this issue mark another transition, from the gender criticism, particularly as it applies to literature for older children and adolescents, which has dominated recent issues. It has become a critical truism that most children's literature both reflects and resists adult cultural norms. Resistance usually takes place through a literary and illustrative subversion that ranges from the obvious to the extremely subtle, sometimes relying on codes or conventions known only to a small group of adult observers. The essays in our special section on children's rhymes demonstrate other forms of resistance, either in terms of the persistent adoption by children of rhymes that celebrate violence and other forms of anti-social mayhem or in terms of responses to such rhymes by illustrators. In Ode Ogede's essay Nigerian children endorse community values but criticize adults and other children for not living up to them. We have chosen to accompany this special section with essays that also concentrate on works for young children and that further explore resistant and subversive responses to adult cultural values. The word subvert comes from the classical Latin subverto, to turn upside down, and Gertrude Stein's work, which has turned upside down many of our assumptions about what a written text ought to be, only relatively recently has begun to attract the close scrutiny that it deserves. Peter Schwenger discusses Rose's attempts in Stein's The World Is Round to solve the problems of the constitution...

Interrupting the Critical Line from Rationalism to Romanticism

Interrupting the Critical Line from Rationalism to Romanticism Lissa Paul (bio) Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr.Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. The best essay in Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, a collection edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr., is "Romancing the Moral Tale: Maria Edgeworth and the Problematics of Pedagogy" by Mitzi Myers. With a brilliant mix of scholarly breadth and compassionate, critical insight Myers illuminates a world that is usually opaque, even to children's literature specialists. Although the essay appears in the middle of the book, I am situating it at the beginning of the review, not just because the essay is an exemplary work of criticism, but because it offers a glimpse of what the collection might have been. With the provocative collision of romancing, moral tale, and pedagogy in the title, Myers interrupts the traditional straight and narrow line from rationalism to romance. She questions beliefs received from Harvey Darton (and often parroted by children's literature scholars) that didactic tales are undifferentiated, boring aggregates and not up to the original art of the romantic writers. Through her analysis of Maria Edgeworth's Simple Susan as a "nurturing fantasy masquerading as rational moral tale" (111), Myers demonstrates how to read moral tales against the grain and so release forgotten "maternal pedagogies" and a "plurality of meanings." She shows how to open up relations "between nurturance and autonomy, connectedness and individuation, child and parent, dependence and dominance, feeling and reason, and, finally, between experience and the discursive practices that configure or constitute it" (98). When Myers explains how late twentieth-century poststructuralist criticism destabilizes the privileging of nineteenth-century romanticism over eighteenth-century rationalism, she is explaining [End Page 210] how we can revise our assumptions about the period—and so discover readings unlike the ones we knew. Myers is joined in this endeavor by other contributors to the book, particularly Jeanie Watson, Alan Richardson, Patricia Demers, Michael Hancher, Phyllis Bixler, and Anita Moss. All write about un(dis)covering received ideological assumptions—and that, it seems to me, is a good reason for assembling a collection of critical essays about romanticism and children's literature in nineteenth-century England. To demonstrate what I think is best about the collection, I will focus first on the critical lines in essays by Richardson, Bixler, and Hancher. With those examples up front, my difficulties with the collection as a whole will be easier to explain. In "Wordsworth, Fairy Tales, and the Politics of Children's Reading," Alan Richardson uses a New Historicist approach to explore how the didactic writers of the early nineteenth century did not so much censor the fairy tale as appropriate it. He reveals the blurring of genre distinctions. Like Myers, Richardson shows that the boundaries between the fairy tale and the didactic story are not as clear as they have been assumed to be. And that contention opens up a radical new project for children's literature criticism. He suggests a possible direction: "Rather than maintain a simplistic opposition between didacticism and fantasy, indoctrination and a negative 'natural' education—a model inherited from the Romantics themselves—critical studies might profitably develop more complex approaches attuned to the intricate politics of literacy and education in the Romantic period" (49). In the same spirit of redefining relations between rationalism and romanticism, Phyllis Bixler uses the insights of feminist theory to focus on the community of mothers in The Secret Garden. She reads beyond the subjugation of Mary within the story and extrapolates why Mary continues to be celebrated by female readers despite the way she apparently recedes into the background of the narrative. Bixler reads the feminist "webs of symbolic imagery"—especially the house and garden—as "a celebration of nature's power, . . . a primarily female power" (209). To use the terms of "ecriture feminine," Bixler "thinks through the body" in order to reveal a feminist reading of "the maternal body" in The Secret Garden. Another essay that awakens alternative interpretive strategies for reading nineteenth-century children's literature is "Alice's Audiences." Michael Hancher takes the old problem of trying to...

The Politics of Children's Literature Criticism

The Politics of Children's Literature Criticism Audrey Beisel (bio) and Ian Wojcik-Andrews (bio) John Stephens . Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. New York: Longman, 1992. The first priority is to understand how the ideology of any given book can be located. Above all, such an understanding is important for teachers, especially primary school teachers and English specialists. Their task is to teach children how to read . . . so . . . that child will not be at the mercy of what she reads. Peter Hollindale, "Ideology and the Children's Book," Signal 55 (1988): 19. To what extent does contemporary children's literature criticism infantilize rather than politicize the child? To what extent does it articulate a classic power struggle (this time over language) between the haves (adults) and the have-nots (children)? John Stephens's Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction, an intellectually challenging book that uses many modern critical theories to explore the efficacious relationship among language, ideology, and children's literature, raises a multiplicity of (perhaps unanswerable) questions. Is the book too difficult, too theoretical? For whom was the book written? What is its intended audience? What is its relation to the child reader, ideal or real? Does Language and Ideology, and other similar critical studies—Nodelman (1992) and Hunt (1991)—articulate the kind of contradiction Jacqueline Rose eloquently spoke of in The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, the fact that "Peter Pan . . . gives us the child, but it does not speak to the child" (1). And if children's literature criticism is likewise an impossibility because it speaks in an unspeakably difficult language that only literary specialists might decode, precisely what language must young people be armed with in order to protect themselves in an increasingly violent new world order? What language will produce a more equable redistribution of the world's resources, from the elites to the masses? Where is the critical language—of resistance, struggle, and empowerment—that politicizes rather than infantilizes young people, and [End Page 220] what is the role of the intellectual Left in the dissemination of that critical language for the young? Such questions belittle neither John Stephens's work in general nor Language and Ideology in particular. Stephens has made several valuable contributions to children's literature in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly and in Children's Literature (1993). Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction continues those worthwhile contributions. Stephens's thesis and overall aim—clearly set out in his introduction—is an important one, particularly in these days of political correctness: language, ideology, and children's literature are intimately related, he argues. Further, "[a] narrative without an ideology is unthinkable: ideology is formulated in and by language, meanings within language are socially determined, and narratives are constructed out of language" (8). Childhood is a function of adulthood meaning. Adulthood is a function of childhood meaning. Both are a function of language. Moreover, we would argue, they are related not in any kind of unspoken relationship, as the gay and lesbian children's literature that articulated the egalitarian and thus controversial vision of New York's Rainbow Coalition curriculum dramatically showed. Whether it be a liberal or Leftist agenda looking to articulate a socialist vision through the lens of a humane and caring curriculum or a conservative, right-wing rejection of both that vision and its humane embodiment in a democratic curriculum, the triumvirate of language, ideology, and children's literature shapes and organizes the socialization of the child into the adult. Young people must know that while children's literature is immensely enjoyable as art, it is also immensely powerful as ideology—what Althusser called an ideological state apparatus. Subsequent chapters in Language and Ideology, though often difficult ironically because of Stephens's wide-ranging use of complex theoretical terminology, nonetheless convincingly argue that, "[a] narrative without an ideology is unthinkable" (8). For example, in chapter one, "Ideology, Discourse and Narrative Fiction," Stephens incorporates the theoretical work of Aidan Chambers, Peter Hollindale (the summary of Hollindale's essay on ideology is good), Wolfgang Iser, and Wayne Booth to discuss the relationship between narrative and ideology in Steven Kellog's The...

Criticism, theory, and children's literature

Introduction - a map of criticism criticism and children's literature the situation of children's literature defining children's literature approaching the text the text and the reader style and stylistics narrative politics, ideology, and children's literature producing children's literature criticism and the picture book criticism for children's literature.