Kenneth Grahame Research Articles

“The childhood I was meant to be in”: The Queer Time of Reading

ABSTRACT How can attention to queer adults’ childhood reading illuminate the complex temporalities of queer experience—and of reading itself? Developing existing critical work on non-linear time, reading and book use, this article proposes queerness as a mode and oral history as a method for provoking new thinking about reading-in-time and how the manipulation of the material book might facilitate time unfolding differently. Analyzing the Textual Preferences archive, in which ten LGBTQ+ adults reflect on their formative reading, the article shows how recalling and rereading key books from childhood enables readers to produce belatedly legible aspects of their “protoqueer” child-selves. Through encounters with texts by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruby Ferguson, Louisa May Alcott, Enid Blyton, Kenneth Grahame, Susan Coolidge and Joanna Trollope, these readers use books to negotiate growing up, to disrupt and defend against the progress of chronological time, and to reshape their past experiences, both in life and in reading.

Loafing, Driving, and "Messing About in Boats": Kenneth Grahame's Decadence from Pagan Papers to The Wind in the Willows

Abstract: "Loafing, Driving, and 'Messing About in Boats': Kenneth Grahame's Decadence from Pagan Papers to The Wind in the Willows " seeks to highlight the radical queerness and rejection of heteronormative mores within the classic Golden Age children's book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. It does so by tracing its roots within Grahame's involvement in the famously queer Decadent movement in late nineteenth century Britain. This reading challenges the much more common assumption that The Wind in the Willows is a fairly conservative text which reinforces "proper" behavior and traditional values. To develop these claims, the essay focuses on the queer relationships between characters, the rebellious behaviors of Toad, and the imagery and themes the text borrows from the Decadent movement.

『버드나무에 부는 바람』에 나타난 소음의 의미

The purpose of this study is to explore the meaning of noise in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, a representative work of the Edwardian era. From the perspective of the social context, noise in this novel can be divided into two aspects: collision noise caused by class conflict and mechanical noise created by technological civilization. During the Edwardian period, the conflict between the upper class and the working class was deepening while the advent of automobiles was ushering in a new era of technological civilization. At times, the class conflicts would erupt into noisy public demonstrations, even rebellion. Simultaneously, new technologies such as automobiles created noises never heard before in rural environments. All of these new noises disrupted the peace and contributed to a break - down in the stable class hierarchy and the idyllic tranquility of nature. Symbolically, these noises reflect Grahame’s fear of the destruction of the established ideology and the terror of industrialization. Grahame maintains a critical stance on society by depicting the issues of class conflict and industrialization as a cacophony that he wishes to eliminate.

Epic Echoes in The Wind in the Willows by Georgia L. Irby

Reviewed by: Epic Echoes in The Wind in the Willows by Georgia L. Irby Daniel Harris-McCoy Epic Echoes in The Wind in the Willows. By Georgia L. Irby. Routledge Focus on Classical Studies. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. Pp. x + 140. Hardback, $59.95. ISBN: 978-1-032-10510-9. In this book, Georgia Irby lays out in full what scholars have previously explored only on a piecemeal basis, namely, that Kenneth Grahame's children's classic, The Wind in the Willows (WW), is profoundly indebted to Greco-Roman epic and especially Homer's Odyssey. This debt should not surprise anyone. Grahame was something of a phenom at Greek and Latin. But, for better or worse, his ambitions for further study at Oxford were frustrated by a stingy uncle and thus possibly sublimated in his literary works, which feature a large number of classical references. In WW in particular, Grahame recycles episodes, tropes and themes found in Homer (and Virgil and, in comic form, in the Batrachomyomachia) including the themes of home, travel, hospitality, heroism and bardic metapoesis. Some may question the need for a book that examines, in great detail, epic reception in WW. I would offer three responses: First, that Irby's book, as a study in reception, is a worthy companion to the several volumes and projects on the reception of classical culture in children's literature that have appeared in recent years. Second, as a study in intertextuality, Irby reveals Grahame's intense, granular engagement with his ancient sources. Finally, WW is, simply put, a beloved literary masterpiece whose fans ranged from Theodore Roosevelt to original Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett. For all these reasons, this reviewer believes that Irby's specialized study is well merited. The book's contents fall into nine chapters. The first two zoom out from the text to address the broadly classical nature of Grahame's writings and its [End Page 371] underpinnings. Thus, in Chapter 1, we learn about Grahame's classical education, know-ledge of Greek and Latin and his literary interests, ancient and otherwise. We also get a preliminary survey of evidence for his engagement with the classics in WW and elsewhere. Irby's discussion here is good and her bibliography up-todate, though an even more in-depth discussion of Grahame's "classical" biography would be of interest and could serve as a ripe topic for a future article. Chapter 2 assists in the transition to the close-readings conducted in the later chapters by surveying the classical and, in particular, epic elements found in WW. The content of this chapter is diverse to the point of sometimes feeling a bit scattershot, but does provide food for thought and is returned to from time to time in the material that comes afterwards. The remaining chapters provide examples of intertexts organized according to major themes that will be familiar to any student of ancient epic and the Odyssey in particular, e.g. heroic traits and behaviors, the clever hero, wanderlust, kleos/aristeia and return/nostos. Though organized into theme-based chapters, Irby's analyses have a list-like quality that will convince the reader of the depth of Grahame's engagement with his classical sources partly through the sheer number of parallels that she identifies. In this sense, Irby's text feels fundamental, like it's exploring a literary relationship in depth for the first time. To her credit, Irby is aware that there are many possible explanations for Grahame's engagement with classical epic: biography, history, parody, literary/aesthetic reverence and the productive dissonance generated by the inclusion of simultaneously adult and childlike material. As mentioned, Irby offers some explanation for Grahame's inclusion of classical material based on his biography and historical milieu in her opening chapter, relating it in particular to the rapid technological progress of his age and the need for Odysseus-like heroes to navigate societal change (e.g. 8, 22). In the close readings themselves, however, Irby does not commit as much to a particular vantagepoint for explaining or interpreting the intertexts she identifies. This has the benefit of allowing Irby to include more material...

Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains by Lisa Sainsbury

Reviewed by: Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains by Lisa Sainsbury Samantha Piede (bio) Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains. By Lisa Sainsbury. Blooms-bury Academic, 2021. Lisa Sainsbury's Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains is, as the author aptly explains, "a book about something and nothing"—in the most literal sense (11). The book takes seriously problems of ontological "fuzziness"—the nebulous territory of "being"—embedded within children's literature, as well as its role in stimulating a child's philosophical wonder (5). In the introduction, Sainsbury finds such "fuzziness" in Tove Jansson's Comet in Moominland (1946), when characters Moomintroll and Sniff embark on an "irregular journey" to the Lonely Mountains. She notes that "much of the language accompanying their expedition exacerbates this sense of something murky and increasingly strange in the world about them," though this eeriness never takes clear form (4). She holds that what these characters have encountered is a "fuzzy mountain": something imbued with "vagueness." But in what sense? One could argue, Sainsbury notes, that such vagueness is best explained by philosophers Tim Crane and Kaitlin Farkas's concept of "borderline cases, whereby the identity of entities is difficult to establish" or, alternatively, by Gareth Evans and David Lewis's [End Page 434] notion that such vagueness stems not from the nature of the world, but from its relation to language. However, for Sainsbury, such solution-seeking may be beyond the point. She notes, "The purpose of this poetic and visual language … is not to find a solution to philosophical problems—in the manner attempted by Quine and company—but to identify and engage with such conundrums through the conditions of children's literature" (5). In the case of Comet in Moominland, and many of the other titles cited within this ambitious book, Sainsbury highlights the vast potential of children's books to "make an ontological philosophy of childhood through their metaphysical groundwork and an engagement with childness in the astonishment of being" (7). Throughout the book, Sainsbury avoids classifying certain children's books into a uniquely "philosophical" genre and instead explores metaphysical structures embedded within children's literature of varying forms and styles: young adult novels (The Wild Robot, The Nowhere Girls), picture books (The Baby's Catalogue), poetry (Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies series), comics (Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes series), and many staples of the Western children's literary canon (e.g., Joan G. Robinson's When Marnie Was There, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows). The bibliography is notably limited to English-language publications (including translations), which Sainsbury claims "acknowledges links between a regional literature and a Western philosophical tradition" (8). Though Sainsbury does not expand heavily on this point, her book illustrates that, indeed, writers of children's literature are not merely informed, but in many ways bounded by their philosophical and cultural traditions. Sainsbury's text is both centrally concerned with children's literature and deeply anchored in theory. She consistently demonstrates ways in which children's stories are informed by—and reflect—developments in contemporary metaphysics: for instance, how parental absence in Sonya Hartnett's Thursday's Child reflects "a Sartrean 'origin of nothingness'" and how picture books "convey directly a connectedness between different entities" with Emanuele Coccia's sense of metaphysical immersion (189, 110). By consistently drawing out these theoretical parallels for readers, Sainsbury establishes that such metaphysical insights in children's literature are not simply trivial whimsies. Sainsbury offers several ways in which children's literature is perhaps even "less daunted by metaphysical mess than [many traditional] philosophies" (118). One metaphysical structure Sainsbury identifies as a central concern in children's literature is what she refers to as "ontological exchange"—an "ontic encounter between self and other, whereby being is tested and made aware of its status as being" (11). This, she finds, plays a central role in Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952). The book follows the adventures of a tiny humanoid heroine, Arrietty, and her family, who have taken up residence under the floorboards of an English country home. Readers find themselves charmed by, and relating to, her precociousness [End Page 435...

Ideological rewriting of conflict and violence in The Wind in the Willows: mitigating class struggle through translation into Chinese

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how conflict and violence in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) is represented in Yang Jingyuan’s Chinese translation of the novel. With a subtext that implicates conflict in class struggle at a time of rapid social change, Grahame’s novel offers an opportunity to explore how ideological factors influence the translation process. Through selective tailoring and nuanced word choice, violence is culturally and ideologically appropriated in the translation so that it preserves potentially objectionable elements in the source text while complying with the prevailing ideology of the target culture. The analysis reveals how translation is intertwined with internalised censorship, which is informed by the sociocultural structures of the target context as reflected in the translator’s social and cultural history.

Learning to Love the Everyday: The Idyllic Mood of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows

Learning to Love the Everyday: The Idyllic Mood of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows

Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia by Goodwin Elena (review)

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 344 The book, oddly, lacks a conclusion, which would have been helpful in tying all the strings of Russian-influenced British modernism together. Another frustrating aspect, which appears most prominently in the final chapter, is the number of conjectures (‘possible’, ‘might’) regarding influence for which there is no definitive proof. While intellectually exciting, the pondering of various possibilities is ultimately unproductive, though it does reflect the authors’ meticulousness as they truly leave no stone unturned. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Tatiana Kuzmic Harvard University Goodwin, Elena. Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia. Library of Modern Russia. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2019. xii + 256 pp. Illustrations. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. Soviet children’s stories were written by avant-garde writers and illustrated by avant-garde artists. This literature also served as historical material designed to teach a young generation about Communism. In a similar vein, English children’s stories, as Elena Goodwin traces, for almost a century, ‘supported and promoted educating and bringing culture to the masses, starting from childhood’. Goodwin’s book explores how Russian translations of British children’s literature construct a literary narrative of England and its culture. ‘Translating England’, as Goodwin explores, involves several components. To begin, the notion of Englishness is set apart from the notion of Britishness. Englishness, in many children’s books, is depicted as ‘Merry England’, translated as dobraia staraia Angliia, and appearing mostly in classics of British children’s literature published between the late-Victorian-Edwardian period and the end of World War Two. Russian translations captured this concept as symbolizing comfort and calm, traditions and conservatism, law and order, with attributes such as aristocracy and castles, ladies and gentleman, and hats. Goodwin’s study focuses mainly on works published between the late-Victorian-Edwardian periods and the end of the Second World War. In her study, Goodwin finds that the way Englishness is represented varied according to changes in the political situation in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and that political ideology played a significant role in the Soviet Union. Her book explores what criteria led to certain books being translated into Russian. Secondly, it explores the literary transfer of images of Englishness from British children’s literature to Russian translation during the Soviet period and how those literary images were preserved or misrepresented in the translated texts. REVIEWS 345 Finally, Goodwin focuses on the reception of history of the translated books in Russia by drawing on media reviews. Chapters one and two present the historical background by highlighting the political, social and cultural environment in which Russian translations of English children’s books were formed. Chapter three includes a larger contextual picture of British books written for children and translated into Russian, in particular those books published between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War. Chapters four to eight analyse the translations in case studies such as Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) and P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins (1934). These chapters also include the analysis of pictorial representations of Englishness. One of the central claims of Goodwin’s book is that children’s literature in the Soviet Union was not immune to ideological influences in literary translation. Concerning translation theory, I would like to bring into this study of children’s stories the fact that the USSR was the first place to develop translation theory partly because there had to be one correct way of translating a text. Just as there were conferences that met to discuss Socialist Realist literature, there were also conferences that met in the early Soviet period to discuss rules for translation. Soviet translations reflect the conflict between free and literal translation, which is a major topic in translation studies. It was not literal but free translation that prevailed in the 1930s, allowing the translator to adapt the text to Soviet contemporary audiences (and ideas of Socialist Realism). The meaning of the original should be translated, but the translator should also...

Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse by Dorothy Burroughes, and: The Magic Herb by Dorothy Burroughes

Reviewed by: Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse by Dorothy Burroughes, and: The Magic Herb by Dorothy Burroughes Jan Susina (bio) Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse. By Dorothy Burroughes, edited by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2021. The Magic Herb. By Dorothy Burroughes, edited by Jack Zipes. Little Mole and Honey Bear, 2021. The most recent reprints in Jack Zipes's Fabulous Excavated Tales series are two books written and illustrated by Dorothy Burroughes. Popular during the 1930s and 1940s, Burroughes is a British children's author who is rarely mentioned in the histories of children's literature but is still held in high regard as a print maker and poster artist. Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, Burroughes's first major success as a commercial artist was designing posters in 1920 for the London Underground that encouraged visitors to the London Zoo in Regent's Park. Drawn in the style of Japanese woodcuts, her image of Langur monkeys became popular with the public. Her second zoo poster, known as "the monkey poster," became the most requested poster in the history of the London Underground and is reprinted in both volumes along with her striking print of "The Black Panther." In the 1930s and 1940s, Burroughes was considered one of the leading British animal artists, along with Harry Rountree and Cecil Aldin. Many of her twenty children's books, like her better-known posters and prints, focus on animals and animal rights. Burroughes established her reputation as an animal artist with her prints and posters often featuring animals that she sketched at the Regent's Park Zoo and was awarded a Zoological Society Fellowship for her animal artwork. Yet she expressed mixed feelings about zoos and restricting animals in cages. In addition to illustrating informational books on animals such as Queer Beasts at the Zoo (1927) and Queer Birds at the Zoo (1927), Burroughes also wrote children's stories featuring anthropomorphized creatures that address social issues and emphasize the need to treat animals with respect and kindness. While Burroughes uses watercolor illustrations interspersed with linocuts in her children's books, her stories are longer and more complicated than those by Beatrix Potter and are intended for older readers. Her chummy and social world of animals more closely resembles that of Kenneth Grahame in [End Page 445] The Wind in the Willows, without the humorous escapades of Mr. Toad that A.A. Milne admired. The Magic Herb shows a bit of Lewis Carroll influence. Three badgers go on a quest for the Magic Herb to aid their seriously ill baby brother. To obtain the mysterious plant, they must journey to the Magic Isle where the white plant is guarded by the Dodo and the Unicorn. Burroughes draws the Dodo so he resembles John Tenniel's illustration of the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Dodo, who initially appears rather fierce, is just "a little embittered by being misunderstood" (19). He is moved by the unselfish nature of the badgers' quest. As the Unicorn explains to the badgers, he and the Dodo are tasked with the responsibility of preventing the life-restoring plant from falling into the wrong hands, such as "pompous scientists and people who-want-towrite-to-the-papers" about discovery of this rare species. The selfless nature of the badgers' quest is reminiscence of Gluck's journey in John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River. The badgers succeed on their impossible journey, liberate the Dodo and the Unicorn from their long-term duties as protectors of the Magic Herb, and restore their younger brother to health, all a result of their selflessness. Teddy, The Little Refugee Mouse is an updated version of Aesop's "Country Mouse and City Mouse." Teddy is an elegant mouse who wears a smart gray coat with clean white collars. He accompanies his human family when they vacate London for the country for the duration of the War. Burroughes uses animal figures to comfort younger readers who were moved from the cities to escape Nazi bombing during World War II. Teddy is befriended by the Brown Mouse family who introduce him to the rural world of cows, pigs...

The Romance of the Rail

The Romance of the Rail Kenneth Grahame In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier times, three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or if it were not North and South America. “And there be certaine flitting islands,” says one, “which have been oftentimes seene, and when men approached near them they vanished.” “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,” said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans call the “getting-off place”); “it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.” And so on, and so on; each with his special hope or “wild surmise.” There was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles. And in that first fair world whose men and manners we knew through story-books, before experience taught us far other, the Prince mounts his horse one fine morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning, lo! a new country: and he rides by fields and granges never visited before, through faces strange to him, to where an unknown King steps down to welcome the mysterious stranger. And he marries the Princess, and dwells content for many a year; till one day he thinks “I will look upon my father’s face again, though the leagues be long to my own land.” And he rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning he is made welcome at home, where his name has become a dim memory. Which is all as it should be; for, annihilate time and space as you may, a man’s stride remains the true standard of distance; an eternal and unalterable scale. The severe horizon, too, repels the thoughts as you gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about, within touch and hail; and the night cometh, when no man can work. To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in this second generation of steam. Pereunt et imputantur; they [End Page 179] pass away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed—not fully nor worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to immediate recognition as poetic material. “For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to Nature and the whole—re-attaching even artificial things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper insight—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts”; so that he looks upon “the factory village and the railway” and “sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider’s geometrical web.” The poet, however, seems hard to convince hereof. Emerson will have it that “Nature loves the gliding train of cars”; “instead of which” the poet still goes about the country singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible and liberal. Turner saw and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its kinship with the elements, and to blend furnace-glare and rush of iron with the storm-shower, the wind and the thwart...

Peter and Wendy: Cultural References from British Literature and Beyond

Peter and Wendy, written by J. M. Barrie and published as a novel in 1911, is one of the most iconic works of English literature. This article aims to elucidate references that appear in Barrie’s Peter and Wendy which make it so fantastic and unpaired: the literary and the sociocultural references, which contribute to tag this book as an English “modern classic”. The references that are well-known by the British reader provoke an immediate sense of belonging and recognition. For instance, sociocultural mentions can easily be noticed throughout the narrative, especially the ones that bring to the reader aspects from Edwardian and Victorian everyday life of British families. Regarding the literary references, the reader might find aspects from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s The Peter and Wendy, written by J. M. Barrie and published as a novel in 1911, is one of the most iconic works of English literature. This article aims to elucidate references that appear in Barrie’s Peter and Wendy which make it so fantastic and unpaired: the literary and the sociocultural references, which contribute to tag this book as an English “modern classic”. The references that are well-known by the British reader provoke an immediate sense of belonging and recognition. For instance, sociocultural mentions can easily be noticed throughout the narrative, especially the ones that bring to the reader aspects from Edwardian and Victorian everyday life of British families. Regarding the literary references, the reader might find aspects from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s The Treasure Island, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll). Or even from The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) and The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame), both works that arecontemporary with Peter and Wendy, and are also conversing with it, particularly in terms of the notion of escapism and social criticism. Above all, Barrie’s novel opens a new field for the modern literature of the twentieth century. A literature that is more concerned with the psychological features of the characters, contributing to the emerging of a new narrative aimed at children, young readers and – why not – adults. This article uses the concept of “family romance” proposed by critic Marthe Robert in order to establish the connection between Barrie’s texts and those of other writers.

A Leap Forward at Toad Hall: David Ferry’s Seasonal Veteran and Vintage Cars in Colour


 
 
 The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame, is the fictional frame for this discussion on David Ferry’s altered book and print series Seasonal Veteran and Vintage Cars in Colour (2017- 2018). Grahame’s character, Toad, is obsessed with the motor car. Toad’s disturbance of the rural scene is married with Ferry’s practice of inserting photographic additions – mischievous intrusions – from hobbyist ‘donor’ books in to discarded pictorial guidebooks of the British Isles. Ferry’s photomontages and prints from the late 1980s on, which comment on the British heritage industry, are the wider context for this essay.
 For Seasonal Veteran and Vintage Cars in Colour, Ferry overlaid the ‘host’ picture book of museum vehicles from the collection of a wealthy aristocrat, with bright, exuberant flora from gardening books, thus obscuring the ‘intruders’ by greening over their presence. The paper proposes that these photomontages are a response to the inevitable redundancy of technology, and concludes that modern innovations are eventually co-opted by traditional conservative values. This argument is constructed using three protagonists: Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as advocate of modernity; John, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, as motoring pioneer; and Kenneth Grahame as establishment figure.
 
 

The Late-Victorian Little Magazine, by Koenraad Claes

Reviewed by: The Late-Victorian Little Magazine by Koenraad Claes David Finkelstein (bio) The Late-Victorian Little Magazine, by Koenraad Claes; pp. x + 278. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £89.50, $110.00. The nineteenth century saw explosive growth in the number of journals and literary periodicals issued for sale and subscription to an ever-expanding British reading public. The number of newspapers and periodicals produced in Britain over this period was staggering: John North, the general editor of The Waterloo Directory series on English, Irish, and Scottish nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, has published evidence of over 3,900 Irish titles, 7,300 Scottish titles, and over 100,000 English titles appearing over the course of the century. Many of these were short lived, with small readership numbers who failed to repay editorial energies with good money for variable periodical contents. Some journals were more successful in carving out spaces for enlightening and entertaining general readers, with heavyweight monthly literary periodicals such as early-century Blackwood’s Magazine (1817–1980), or mid-century-founded The Cornhill Magazine (1860–1975), sailing alongside nimble successors that sprang up in the wake of the demotic, pacy style of new journalism from the 1880s onward, championed by newspapers and journals such as Tit-Bits (1881–84). Comically dismissed by Matthew Arnold in 1887, the appeal of miscellanies such as George Newnes’s Tit-Bits lay in being light and wholesome but also serious enough to offer readers an appreciation of what its editor saw as higher forms of literature. Aspirational readers also found great pleasure in the fare offered in journals such as Newnes’s Strand Magazine (1891–1950), whose mix of interviews, articles, illustrations, and light fiction could be seen to sail along better than heavily laden, essay-based periodicals such as the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) and the Quarterly Review (1809–1967). The fin de siècle saw a number of little magazines spring up espousing a fusion of visual culture, artisanal craftsmanship, and radical aesthetic considerations. Koenraad Claes’s The Late-Victorian Little Magazine takes up the story of a number of these little magazine productions and their earlier inspirations, focusing on a range of better-known English periodicals (such as the 1850 Pre-Raphaelite-inspired The Germ, the 1856 William Morris-initiated journal Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and the 1890s Yellow Book [1894–97] and The Savoy [1896]). Claes’s study also takes in a survey of short-lived, lesser-known regional examples such as the Birmingham Guild-produced journal Quest (1894–96), and the polymathic Patrick Geddes’s Scottish-issued The Evergreen (1895–96). Claes’s focus is on little magazines that featured as part of the arts and crafts movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in particular those that strove to revive fine printing traditions and artisanal-based approaches to cultural production. Several chapters offer studies of journals emanating from the artisan guilds that drew inspiration from William Morris’s espousal of uncommercial, visually and aesthetically rich material production. Examples of journals that picked up on such themes were the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–92), its successor Hobby Horse (1893–94), and Quest. Claes offers sound insights into the material conditions of their production, and in some of the stronger sections of the volume, looks closely at the contradictions underpinning such journals’ championing of art as aesthetic pursuit against their need to ensure viability and survival through commercial sales, subscriptions, and advertising of mundane goods and services. Such arguments work well in the sections exploring the history and development [End Page 145] of the best-known and most controversial aesthetic little magazines of the century’s end, the Yellow Book and The Savoy. The publisher of the former, John Lane, proved a canny operator, turning the Aubrey Beardsley-illustrated Yellow Book into a scandalous success. Its distinct, yellow hardcover volumes became much sought after by well-heeled society members as a means of acquiring and demonstrating access to a decadent literary world represented by the likes of Oscar Wilde, John Buchan, Henry James, Kenneth Grahame, and George Moore. Following the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and his fall from grace...

Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson

Reviewed by: Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson Heather Cyr (bio) Aïda Hudson, ed. Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography. Wilfred Laurier UP, 2018. Edited by Aida Hudson, Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography is a beautifully designed book that collects together a wide range of essays on geographies in literature for young people, adding to the larger conversations, perspectives, and challenges within this fertile area of criticism. The four main sections of the text—"Geographical Imaginaries," "Gardens and Green Spaces," "Fantasy Worlds and Re-Enchantment," and "Space and Gender"—give [End Page 345] an idea of how varied readings that proceed from the interrelated foci of space/place and landscape can be and what rich ground children's literature is for the spatial turn. Many edited collections that examine place and space within children's literature focus on a specific location, geographical topos, or specific theoretical framework as a guiding point: for example, Padraic Whyte and Keith O'Sullivan's Children's Literature and New York City (2014), Mary Shine Thompson and Celia Keenan's Treasure Islands: Studies in Children's Literature (2006), and Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd's Wild Things: Children's Literature and Ecocriticism (2004). Indeed, there have been several entries in the last few years digging quite deeply into the function of mapping in children's literature, such as the special issue of Children's Literature in Education edited by Anthony Pavlik and Hazel Sheeky Bird (2017) not to mention Stefan Ekman's important work on maps and settings in fantasy literature (2013). However, this collection, perhaps to its detriment, takes a different tack, focusing instead on a broadly imagined conception. Hudson's introduction starts with a breakdown of the word "geography" as "imaged earth writing" (1) and then draws upon Edward Said's definition in Orientalism (1978) of "imaginative geographies" as a dualistic concept of familiar-unfamiliar or "our land-barbarian land" (54). Starting with the "universal practice" that "Every individual whether young or old has been exposed to familiar and unfamiliar places . . . whether in life or literature" (4), Hudson shows how widely Said's conception of "imaginative geography" applies. She demonstrates a short "worlding" of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, folds in concepts from environmentalism (specifically environmentalist Gerald Buell's "place attachment," in which she sees Said's influence), turns backward to Tolkien's definitions of myth and the grounding of fantastic Middle Earth in Tolkien's very real experiences of war, and moves toward contemporary Indigenous Literature, giving examples of novels that "may reflect the anger of peoples who have been dispossessed and displaced, but they also often evoke rootedness in the land and an affirmation of Indigenous culture" (12). The introduction casts a deliberately wide net that goes on to define the collection's many varied imagined geographies; however, the collection may have benefitted from both a tighter focus and more interaction with recent children's literature scholarship about place and space. As Hudson's introduction acknowledges, the collection is mostly focused on the Northern Hemisphere: it includes essays on Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling's Britain, Irish writers both at home and within the Irish diaspora, Kenneth Grahame's Edenic England, and Ursula K. Le Guin's fantastic Earthsea. As Hudson is co-editor of Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children's Literature in English (2003), it is no surprise that much of [End Page 346] the collection focuses on Canadian children's literature and other works that examine the North. In the first section, an intriguing entry is Cory Sampson's essay "Pullman and Imperialism: Navigating the Geographic Imagination in The Golden Compass," which interrogates the imperial foundations of Lyra's steampunk world, arguing that the genre relies on imperialist tropes to generate wonder. This is placed side-by-side with Colleen M. Franklin's "Nineteenth-Century British Children's Literature and the North," which examines the "sublime quest" of British explorers in the Canadian north that "became a trope for self-conquest" (Hudson 15) that continues through to Pullman's work. An enriching aspect of the collection is the move from these British-centered conceptions...

Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson

Reviewed by: Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography ed. by Aïda Hudson Laurel Krapivkin (bio) Children's Literature and Imaginative Geography. Edited by Aïda Hudson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019. Aïda Hudson situates her edited collection at the intersection of three concentric ideas surrounding place: Edward Said's imaginative geographies, Lawrence Buell's place attachment, and the idea of mythical spaces. The volume's seventeen essays are divided into four sections with two [End Page 87] interludes and a postlude. Some of the authors in the collection engage with Said's imaginative geographies, while others use postcolonial and ecocritical theories in conjunction with Buell's place-attachment theory. Still others explore particular spaces, or topoi, and their relationship to power structures and binaries (14). Part 1 contains six essays divided into two sections. The first three are grounded in the Old World, while essays four through six "reflect viewpoints that are 'landed' in the New World" (15). In chapter 1, "Pullman and Imperialism: Navigating the Geographic Imagination in The Golden Compass," scholar Cory Sampson traces imperialist themes in His Dark Materials by positing that Lyra's universe is reminiscent of Victorian Britain. While Sampson doesn't necessarily argue that The Golden Compass is "'unconcealedly'" imperialist, his work investigates the series' imperialist themes of geographical exploration, child adventurers, and the ethnic "othering" of non-Europeans (43). In "Nineteenth-Century British Children's Literature and the North," Colleen M. Franklin does similar work in mapping imperialist themes and tropes. Margot Hillel also traces imperialism in "Envisioning Ireland: Landscape and Longing in Children's Literature," focusing on nineteenth-century Ireland and the unique migration of Irish citizens away from "our land" to the New World. Hillel's piece transitions the section nicely to essays focused on North America. In "From Vanity to World's Fair: The Landscape of John Bunyan's Allegory in Frances Hodgson Burnett's Two Little Pilgrims' Progress," Shannon Murray maps a third imaginary landscape that orphan protagonists Meg and Robin create when they find a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and leave their farm home to set out for Chicago's World Exposition. Their imagined geography is a rejection of both the rural life that they have left as well as the industrial city that they travel to. Both Linda Knowles and Petra Fachinger conclude part 1 with essays that illustrate a restorative connection back to indigenous spaces—in particular, the harsh Canadian wilderness—which they argue creates fertile ground for imaginative geographies in fiction written for children. In the first interlude, Hudson offers her audience a change of genre in the interview "History, Hills, and Lowlands: In Conversation with Janet Lunn." Lunn, a prolific writer of Canadian historical fiction for young adults, talks about the connection between Canadian geography and mythology in several of her novels. The interview functions well as a transitional piece from themes of imperialism and migration to a series of essays in part 2 on particular topoi, or "places like gardens, a riverbank, and a rural countryside," and their particular connection to a child's geographical imagination (17). In chapter 8, "How Does Your Garden Grow? The Eco-Imaginative Space of the Garden in Contemporary Children's Picture Books," Melissa Li Sheung Ying focuses on the importance of the garden as an educational space for children, arguing that it invites them into a greater environmental consciousness and, [End Page 88] hopefully, activism. Ying's analysis of the interplay of text and image is particularly effective, calling attention to the parallel of text with visual elements such as color transitions and the use of panels. While Ying's essay focuses on both image and text, Alan West's "Into the (Not So) Wild: Nature Without and Within in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows" focuses primarily on the textual representations of Grahame's idyllic landscape. West discusses the lack of "wild" in the work, in which the main characters wear clothing and are civilized—except for the othered stouts and weasels, whose wildness threatens Toad Hall in the climax of the story. West's analysis fits appropriately within the conversation of the Saidian dualism of "ours/theirs" or...

Disney’s Final Package Film: The Making and Marketing ofThe Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad(1949)

As the last of Disney’s package films in the troubled decade of the 1940s, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) has acquired the reputation of an awkward ‘marriage of convenience’ of two separate stories based on well-known literary properties, one American and one British: Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. This article, by reconstructing the gestation of the film over eight years, demonstrates the degree to which the stark contrast between the two halves was not only inevitable but deliberate. This is especially visible in the handling of the narrative – action set pieces for Toad and a full-fledged musical for Ichabod – as well as the art direction, which favors realism for Toad and stylization for Ichabod. An analysis of the marketing campaign shows that the film was presented as a facsimile of the standard double bill of the period, with an A picture and a B picture. In lauding its new cast of sympathetic Disney characters and stories that stimulate a full range of emotional responses, some film critics in Britain and the US compared Ichabod and Mr. Toad favorably to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo and the Silly Symphonies, calling the film a harbinger of a Disney renaissance – a revival that would be fully realized with the premiere of Cinderella in 1950.

"And follow round the forest track / Away behind the sofa back": the game of "Robinson Crusoe" and its space (river, forest, estate) in children’s literature and memories (Russian-English context)

The article analyses the image of Robinson and his interpretation in a children’s game in the literature of Great Britain and Russia of the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. We will try to analyse how and for what reasons the image of Robinson Crusoe was so attractive to several generations of children, how it transformed and how the hero manifested himself differently in children’s games. Our analysis will be based on literary material, mainly works of children's literature (poetry by Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, Sir Joseph Rudyard Kipling, prose by Kenneth Grahame), as well as writers’ recollections of childhood and autobiographical prose. Special attention is paid to the peculiarity of the "game of Robinson", which was conducted according to special rules and consisted of several options, sometimes involving only children’s imagination, sometimes transforming the world around, and sometimes requiring theatrical props. In addition, the "Robinson game" required a certain space, and a child who was not able to go to a real island was forced to adapt the world around him, giving objects new and lands new assignments.

Talking animals in children's fiction: a critical study

Talking-animal tales have conveyed anticruelty messages since the 18th-century beginnings of children's literature. Yet only in the modern period have animal characters become true subjects rather than objects of human neglect or benevolence. Modern fantasies reflect the shift from animal welfare to animal rights in 20th century public discourse. This revolution in literary animal-human relations began with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and continued with the work of Kenneth Grahame, Hugh Lofting, P.L. Travers and E. B. White. Beginning with the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, this book examines ways in which animal characters gain an aura of authority through using language and then participate in reversals of power. The author provides a close reading of 10 acclaimed British and American children's fantasies or series published before 1975. Authors whose work has received little scholarly attention are also covered, including Robert Lawson, George Selden and Robert C. O'Brien.

Mole's Odyssean Shelter in Kenneth Grahame's THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

As a student at St Edward's School, Kenneth Grahame excelled at Greek and Latin and later acknowledged the formative, “paganizing” effect of his classical education on his worldview.1Grahame wrote:...

Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present ed. by Maria Sachiko Cecire et al. (review)

Reviewed by: Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present ed. by Maria Sachiko Cecire et al. Erin Spring (bio) Maria Sachiko Cecire, Hannah Field, Kavita Mudan Finn, and Malini Roy, eds. Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present. Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Space and Place in Children’s Literature emerged out of a 2009 conference at Keble College, Oxford, organized by the Children’s Literature Oxford Colloquium. According to its four editors, who hail from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the aim of this cross-cultural collection is to “engage with such questions about adults and children, real-world spaces, fantasy, and the material book . . . to offer a foundational study of the multivalence of space and place as they are addressed in the analysis of children’s literature” (14). The introduction establishes a background for themes including play and the adult/child dichotomy, and situates the volume in discussions about children’s literature as a space for the negotiation of power. Readings of children’s literature criticism are entwined with interdisciplinary conversations about spatiality, such as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s space/place distinction and philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s questions of scale. The overarching argument is that children’s literature “privilege[s] the child’s purported capacity for superior imagination and creativity, making marked-off spaces of power into simultaneous places of play” (3). Spatiality is crucial for this vacillation between power and play. The editors note how Lyra’s Oxford, in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, signifies power relations while remaining a city filled with opportunities for play. Questions raised within this introduction are returned to in an epilogue by Pullman himself, in which the novelist distinguishes between inside, outside, and “elsewhere” spaces in a range of classic texts including his own. The explicit links between the introduction and epilogue bring this edited collection full circle in a satisfying (and rare) manner. The individual essays, from emerging and established scholars alike, are organized to build a unified whole. Each of the four sections begins with a half-page introduction, followed by a cross-disciplinary reading list pertinent to the questions posed within the section. These mini-introductions and reading lists help the reader situate the chapters across numerous fields of study. The contributors place their arguments in conversation with similar work—including Jane Carroll’s Landscape in Children’s Literature and Terri Doughty and Dawn Thompson’s edited collection Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature—while clarifying the ways this new volume addresses numerous genres, historical periods, and critical frameworks. Peter Hunt’s opening chapter, “Unstable Metaphors: Symbolic Spaces and Specific Places,” explores power imbalances in children’s literature, drawing on a range of well-known texts to examine the socially and physically constructed spaces between adult writers and child readers. Hunt reinforces his disciplinary arguments with reflections on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s overdetermined house and garden in The Secret Garden; Rudyard Kipling’s [End Page 355] “precisely realized landscapes” in Puck of Pook’s Hill (31); “the coherence and fidelity” of Arthur Ransome’s “child-oriented” Swallows and Amazons (32–33); and Kenneth Grahame’s “personal in-joke[s]” in The Wind in the Willows, a text Hunt calls notable for its “manipulation of real spaces. . . . [A]t no point do the inner spaces or external places provide empathy with a childhood state. The empathy is with a childish state, perhaps, but childishness is a feature of adulthood, not childhood” (30). Aneesh Barai’s feminist analysis of Sylvia Plath’s writing for children and Julia Kristeva’s semiotic theory complements Hunt’s discussion of power, honing in on representations of maternity. Barai pays particular attention to authors’ descriptions of the spaces between mother and child in this memorable essay. Section 2, “Real-World Places,” focuses on identity and locale through an international lens, taking the reader from Italy to the Mexico/U.S. border to South Africa. Francesca Orestano provides a focused analysis of Maria Edgeworth’s The Little Merchants: A Tale. Through her vivid descriptions, Orestano argues that Edgeworth “creates an interstitial space” (27) between England and “exotic” Italy. Another striking contribution...