Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Childhood in Contemporary Britain

Literature, Media and Society

Sandra Dinter, Ralf Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315313351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children's fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.

Section I
Childhood in Contemporary British Literature and Literary Criticism

1 Writing Plural Childhoods – Some Thoughts Concerning the Recent Carnegie Medal Shortlists

Anja Müller

An assessment of childhood in contemporary Britain would certainly be incomplete without taking into account contemporary children’s literature because it is a truth universally acknowledged that children’s literature is a good index for childhood concepts. Children’s literature scholars agree unequivocally that children’s literature does not simply respond to the ‘true nature of children. Together with school and the family, it has become an integral actor when it comes to defining and conceptualising childhood (Buckingham 2000, 7–9). Accordingly, the development of children’s literature throughout the ages coincides with the historical contingency of childhood concepts. Charles Frey and John Griffith therefore maintain that children’s books “provide a reading of children and of childhood” (1987, vii), whereas John Stahl, when contemplating canon formations in children’s literature, believes that “[t]he task of establishing a canon is analogous to determining the nature of childhood” (1992, 12). By implying their readership through selections of topics, characters and narrative techniques, however, children’s books not only reflect, they also participate very actively in shaping notions of childhood or rather ‘childhoods’. Taking the plural form as a cue, the following chapter explores whether and in how far contemporary children’s literature indeed conceptualises childhood as plural.

Since the bulk of contemporary children’s literature is so vast that it is impossible to gauge it in its entirety, I have decided to resort to literary prizes in order to select my material. I am aware that books that have received institutional appraisal may not necessarily be those that also enjoy the highest sales numbers or the largest readership. Nevertheless, literary prizes condense, as it were, socially and institutionally legitimated norms, values and interests (Dücker 2013, 217). In the case of children’s literature, such value systems include social constructions of childhood, as books that are included in the shortlists of literary awards tend to reflect ideas of what children ought to read, hence, what is believed to be adequate reading matter during childhood today (Kidd 2007; Stevenson 2009).¹

My particular focus in this essay lies with the Carnegie Medal shortlists from 2012 to 2014. The Carnegie Medal is arguably the most prestigious children’s book award in the UK (comparable to the Newbery Medal in the US) and thus representative of what is supposed to be ‘good’ reading matter during childhood and adolescence in Britain. In what follows, I am first going to present the Carnegie Medal’s criteria of selection in order to gauge in how far these criteria already hint at the concepts of childhood implied and supported by the respective award committee. I am then going to situate this conceptualisation within current discourses on childhood in children’s literature research, before finally discussing the shortlisted books with regard to their acknowledgement of plurality.

According to the Carnegie website, the Carnegie Medal “was established in 1936, in memory of the […] Scottish-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)”, who greatly supported the implementation of libraries. Today the medal is awarded by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), which also co-ordinates the nomination process and recruits the jury. Apart from its high reputation, this particular award offers itself to further academic enquiry because the Carnegie’s criteria are, in comparison to most other awards, made very transparent on its website.² There, one can read the following requirements for becoming a Carnegie Medal winner:

The book that wins […] should be a book of outstanding literary quality. The whole work should provide pleasure, not merely from the surface enjoyment of a good read, but also the deeper subconscious satisfaction of having gone through a vicarious, but at the time of reading a real experience that is retained afterwards. (emphasis in original)

The criteria for plot construction and development, characterisation and style are then further specified (the following summary is based on the list of criteria on the Carnegie website):

Plots should be well constructed. The author ought to be “in control of the plot, making definite and positive decisions about the direction events take and the conclusions they reach”. Events ought to “happen, not necessarily logically, but acceptably within the limits set by the theme”, culminating in a credible, final resolution. Characters must be believable, convincing, rounded and dynamic. Interaction between characters ought to be as convincing and consistent as characters’ behaviour and speech. An effective deployment of narrative strategies, such as narration, dialogue, action and thoughts for direct and indirect characterisation is equally desired. Finally, the jury evaluates whether the handling of style (in both prose and verse) and mood are appropriate to the subject and theme of the novels, and whether the author succeeds in using literary techniques – such as narrative or poetic elements – effectively. Factual references ought to be accurate and clear. Most of these criteria are obviously not age-specific but apply to narrative fiction in general, although one can discern a general predilection for an idea of the ‘good’ book as a piece of art, with coherence and consistency between form and contents, very much in the sense of John Keats’s “well-wrought urn”.

Considering these statements, the Carnegie Medal clearly understands itself as an award for literary quality. Such an agenda may be self-evident for a book award, yet it actually is not so when it comes to children’s literature. After all, children’s literature has struggled for a long time, and to some extent is still struggling, to be recognised as a full member of the literary field. Whereas general literature has asserted its aesthetic autonomy since the eighteenth century (Reinfandt 1997), children’s literature has always been hovering between determination by extra-literary factors (such as morality, socialisation or didacticism) and asserting its aesthetic autonomy as a literary genre (Müller 2011). The liminal literary status of children’s literature is still manifest today in the fact that children’s literature had, for a considerable time, been excluded from canonisation processes. By now, children’s literature research may have become to some extent institutionalised in British literature departments, thanks to the pioneering work of scholars like Peter Hunt. Yet outside the few specialised research centres (for example, at the universities of Reading, Roehampton or Newcastle, the latter two being closely associated with renowned national archives) it is frequently relegated to didactics or pedagogy and, consequently, determined by the academic interests and methods of these disciplines, whereas it is often quite slow to respond to developments in general literary or cultural theory.³ This ambiguous status of children’s literature also reveals something about the concept of childhood underlying the respective institutional associations: the realm of aesthetic appreciation of (high) art is, apparently, a cultural field that does not necessarily grant childhood access to it. Consequently, children’s books are seen as a concern of socialisation rather than artistic considerations. If didactic concerns are downplayed, finally, children’s literature is largely appreciated for its entertaining functions without requiring particular aesthetic depths.

Whereas such characterisations of children’s literature were connected with conceptualisations of childhood as a deficient state of the human being, they are today more often linked with the very opposite, namely, idealising discourses about childhood. Such idealising discourses perceive childhood as a precarious, transitory state of innocence, of authenticity, liberty from civilisational and professional restraints, freedom from the prejudices imbued by socialisation into peer groups and enviable youthfulness, imagination and optimism (Buckingham 2000, 12). As all these qualities are believed to be gradually abandoned or lost while growing up, childhood has become a utopian counterpart to the experience of the contemporary disillusionment and corruption of the adult world. In a time where the UK and other Western European countries are facing a demographic change, involving the reversal of the age pyramid, childhood seems to become even more precious, and its preservation is pursued with increasing vigour. From a historical perspective, all these are well-known developments, and one can easily recognise in today’s almost obsessive concern with childhood a reverberation of the condition that engendered the Romantic cult of the child (Müller 2009, 232).

As far as children’s literature is concerned, the legacy of Romantic idealised childhood, with its preservationist imperative, has the effect that strong currents in children’s literature criticism call for a literature for children supporting this concept. The reactions to the Carnegie medallist of 2014, Kevin Brooks’s Bunker Diary, which will be discussed in this chapter, are exemplary for a position believing that children’s literature should offer a comfort zone or at least a safe house built on the ground rule that occurring conflicts and hardships must be harmoniously solved. No book should end without at least so much as a hopeful, if not entirely happy, ending, in order to reassure the child readers that the worlds they encounter (the fictional and, by implication, the real) are, despite all appearance, endowed with an ordered, meaningful structure. In line with this attitude are voices demanding that books for children should be written in a language strictly following all the codes of political correctness and that older texts therefore ought to be rewritten accordingly.⁴ It is declared that if children grow up with a language cleansed of anything that may contain traces of discrimination, the very practice of discrimination will be extinguished, too. This quasi-magical belief in the negative creative power of language (that is, if you do not say the word, the thing does not come into existence) has triggered almost militant bouts of censorship and expurgations, especially of literary texts that were produced in the years, decades and centuries ‘BPC’ (before political correctness). The problem with such endeavours is, however, that they not only ignore the historical contingency of literary language and forget that discrimination first and foremost means ‘distinction’ (an indispensible cognitive tool for identity construction by the means of inclusion and exclusion as well as the notion of difference). Finally, and more importantly for our context, the idealising preservationist idea of childhood ultimately presupposes that children are only able to read texts literally and that they exclusively approach texts via identification. Children are thus believed to be unable to distinguish fiction from reality, to distance themselves from a text and to reflect on it critically. Since distancing and critical reflection in a literary text are achieved by stylistic devices (such as narrative strategies or imagery), children ought to learn to realise or process such devices, otherwise their reading will only be for the plot, for identification and entertainment. However, if one looks at didactics for teaching literature at school, one will find that literary texts tend to be increasingly employed as mere topical starting points for general discussions. Diane Duncan’s Teaching Children’s Literature (2009) is a case in point: in order to “make stories work in the classroom” (so the subtitle of her book), she suggests dramatisations of narratives in class or asking pupils about what or whom they like or identify with. Although critical terms for literary study, such as metaphor, also surface in the book, they are by far less prominent than suggestions concerning the social skills children should learn from literary texts or the topical issues that ought to be discussed. Pupils are, hence, consistently asked to identify with characters, to wonder what might have happened if a character had decided otherwise, to visualise scenes or to complete fragments of literary texts with their own stories. Instead of providing tools that enable young readers to enter into a dialogue with literature and its alterity, the ‘other’ (that is, the text) is appropriated and assimilated into one’s own experiences and codes. Such a didactic approach to literature may invite children to read more, yet it will also result in a self-fulfilling prophecy: while arguing that it suits the way children read, it does not sufficiently provide young readers with tools that would enable them to reveal the strategies of a text; instead, it produces child readers who fuse fictional and real worlds, who are unable to distance themselves from the text and who therefore either need careful monitoring and protection or become mindless consumers.⁵

Luckily, the zealous educationalists promoting the preservationist concept of childhood are not the only actors in the field of children’s literature. Other actors, including a considerable number of authors and readers of children’s books, have come to see things differently. Wouter de Nooy, for example, has diagnosed a shift in the system of literary prizes for children in the late 1980s from a ‘pedagogic’ to a ‘literary’ perspective among the juries of awards for children’s literature. As a result, prizes have become more and more concerned with literary quality instead of educational considerations, and literary scholars have joined the jury boards in addition to the accustomed majority of educationalists or librarians (de Nooy, esp. 202–3 and 212). The Carnegie Medal is a very visible representative of this change in the actors defining standards in literary prizes for children. By emphasising the literary quality of children’s literature, they presuppose that children’s books should offer their readers more than a hopeful assurance of possible conflict resolutions. Reading should be an “experience that is retained afterwards”, as the Carnegie Medal website contends. Whatever engenders this lasting impact, it certainly contains an experience that exceeds the already known. Although the listed criteria for good children’s literature highlight aspects of content (plot and character) slightly more than form (style), their guiding principles are narrative coherence, plausibility and effectiveness. A good children’s book, therefore, is a book that coherently follows the ground rules established in its story world. It does not need legitimation by external factors, such as ideological demands for happy endings. Nor is the language of a text bound to codes outside th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• List of Contributors
• Approaching Childhood in Contemporary Britain: Introduction
• SECTION I Childhood in Contemporary British Literature and Literary Criticism
• SECTION II Medial and Visual Constructions of Childhood in Contemporary Britain
• SECTION III Historical and Social Dimensions of Childhood in Contemporary Britain
• SECTION IV Contemporary British Childhoods between Rights and Regulations
• Index