The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature

David Rudd, David Rudd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134028245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature is a vibrant and authoritative exploration of children's literature in all its manifestations. It features a series of essays written by expert contributors who provide an illuminating examination of why children's literature is the way it is. Topics covered include:

• the history and development of children's literature
• various theoretical approaches used to explore the texts, including narratological methods
• questions of gender and sexuality along with issues of race and ethnicity
• realism and fantasy as two prevailing modes of story-telling
• picture books, comics and graphic novels as well as 'young adult' fiction and the 'crossover' novel
• media adaptations and neglected areas of children's literature.

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature contains suggestions for further reading throughout plus a helpful timeline and a substantial glossary of key terms and names, both established and more cutting-edge. This is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to an increasingly complex and popular discipline.

Part I
ESSAYS ON CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

1
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

DAVID RUDD

INTRODUCTION

‘Before there could be children’s books, there had to be children’, wrote John Rowe Townsend (1990, p. 3) at the very beginning of what was, for many years, the standard popular history of English children’s literature. It is a key statement, but one that also encodes the heart of the area’s problems. ‘Haven’t there always been children?’ is an obvious response. Townsend elaborates by saying that, while children there were, they weren’t recognized in the same way, being seen rather as ‘miniature men and women’ (Townsend, 1990, p. 3). This, though, doesn’t necessarily take the issue much further, for the next question is, how, then, did children come to be recognized? And the answer, of course, is that this could occur only by these miniature beings having increased representation in society’s key discourses (e.g. church, education, family), through cultural forms like paintings and literary works, and in various non-discursive ways, too, such as by being given separate spaces (in schools, bedrooms, nurseries), distinctive clothing and other artefacts. With the Industrial Revolution and the growth of capitalism, the child would become a niche market with its own products, including books, illustrations, toys and games. But we then come to a decisive phrase in Townsend’s work, one that separates him and other humanists from poststructuralist thinkers. He states that these specialized books were to serve the child’s ‘own particular needs and interests’ (Townsend, 1990, p. 3), whereas later critics would ask, ‘In what sense were these “needs” the child’s own?’ Surely it is predominantly adult depictions that we have of what children require and, not unsurprisingly, these have changed over time (from a need to be saved and instructed to being amused and educated). So, returning to Townsend’s opening statement, we might now suggest that it could be reversed, to claim that children’s texts helped produce the very beings that we now recognize as children (beings seen as innocent, natural, helpless, pure and so on).

This revision might seem to complicate considerations of the development of children’s literature, but it is a necessary one if we are to avoid being seduced by tabloid notions of ‘real’ children (frequently white, middle-class, male constructions) and what they ‘really’ like. This chapter, then, is pluralist throughout: it will look at different versions of the development of children’s literature, and of the various types of child that are thereby presupposed, and, in passing, at the different ways that criticism has been informed by conceptions of the child and its literature. This should prepare the reader for the next chapter, which looks more explicitly at various theoretical approaches to the subject, although later chapters will also show how theory has informed particular issues (e.g. in the case of gender studies: feminism).

HISTORIES OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Townsend’s standard history has already been mentioned, and the premise of its narrative questioned (children first, texts second). But, beyond this, we might note the whole narrative trajectory of his book, in which a ‘proper’ children’s literature is seen to come to fruition in Victoria’s reign with Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Such a conceptualization can itself be traced back to Harvey Darton’s (1932) history, which sees in Carroll’s Alice ‘the coming to the surface, powerfully and permanently, the first unapologetic appearance in print, for readers who sorely needed it, of liberty of thought in children’s books’ (Darton, 1982, p. 260). There is a notion here of child readers finally being given what they genuinely ‘need’, which ever since (‘permanently’) has been recognized. This version of events, then, where the imagination is liberated from a dull instructional past, is a common one, often celebrated in the titles of works such as From Primer to Pleasure in Reading (Thwaite, 1972) and From Instruction to Delight (Demers, 2009).

But the above story itself has a history – histoire, of course, being the French word for ‘story’ – which more readily fits our postmodern suspicion of grand narratives and our preference for versions only. Thus, when we look more carefully at this shift from instruction to delight, we note that there has always existed more frivolous and bawdy material (such as The Friar and the Boy [c.1512] with its celebration of farting [Cunningham, 2006, p. 58], or nursery rhymes such as ‘Piss a Bed / Piss a Bed / Barley Butt – / Your Bum Is So Heavy / You Can’t Get Up’, which appeared in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book [1744; Delamar, 1987, p. 5]. However, not only is such work less likely to be seen as appropriate for the newly fashioned, middle-class child but, because of its coarser nature, it is also less likely to have survived, which is itself linked to the fact that much of this material – in line with jokes and anecdotes – is more frequently transmitted orally. Likewise, we might query later moments in this grand narrative, like the fact that, alongside the liberatory Carroll, others like Hesba Stratton (dubbed ‘Ministering Angels’ – Cutt, 1979) were writing works more centrally in the instructive vein. Even in our own century the publishing of morally uplifting, religiously informed children’s books remains strong (e.g. the 11 million plus sales of the Christian ‘Left Behind’ series [see Jenkins and LaHaye, 1995] or, from the Islamic tradition, an equally vibrant range of texts [see Islamic Bookstore, 2009]).

Furthermore, there is a tendency to write these histories in a tidy past tense, as though we, in the present, somehow stand outside our own history. Maria Nikolajeva’s book Children’s Literature Comes of Age (1996), which argues for the universality of this instruction-to-delight model of development, is indicative, her title itself suggesting a sense of arrival. Such a ‘presentist’ stance, though, can ride roughshod over historical differences. ‘In one staple metanarrative,’ as Mitzi Myers (1999b, p. 49) wittily puts it, ‘the juvenile historian ransacks a vast body of writing for imperialist or racist quotes that earn the collective authors a critical spanking.’ This is not to dispute that over the years we have gained far more knowledge about earlier children’s literature, merely to be suspicious of the way that accounts of this material have themselves been narratively shaped.

The American literary movement known as new historicism tries to address this issue, seeking to situate texts within their context, while recognizing that what we call ‘context’ is, itself, just another set of texts. It thus works hard to avoid privileging any particular work (either for its ‘literary’ or ‘historical’ status), but it does so in the recognition that all writing is a form of power (what Michel Foucault [1980], termed the ‘power–knowledge’ coupling), so that there will always be attempts to privilege certain texts, to see them as superior, canonical, or whatever, while marginalizing others (like the scatological material, above); most famously, it is now recognized as commonplace that most history has been his-story rather than hers. Certainly, accounts of canonical Golden Age children’s literature (e.g. Carpenter, 1985) follow this trend (for a more contentious canon, see Nodelman, 1985–9; Lundin, 2004). Cultural materialism, which is often coupled with new historicism as its British equivalent, should be mentioned in this light, for not only does it try to account for a particular text’s form and reception but also seeks to show how it could have been otherwise. In short, however ‘monologic’, or authoritatively controlled, a text is, it always contains ‘faultlines’ exposing competing discourses (Sinfield, 1992; Brannigan, 1998). To take one, famous example, Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter (1845) has been read as both outrageously didactic (a boy having his thumbs cut off because he will not stop sucking them) and as so excessive in its cautionary-ness as to be parodic, undermining the whole didactic tradition (Freeman, 1977; Metcalf, 1996).

A particularly rich example of new historicist criticism can be found in Mitzi Myers’ work. She has pointed out the extent to which the narrative about the emergence of delight from instruction was predicated on the male, Romantic child as the norm, that is, on a child seen to stand outside society: an innocent, natural being. However, this norm was itself established only as a result of a struggle in which many of the female writers of the time were made figures of fun by the male establishment, with Charles Lamb famously dismissing them as ‘that cursed Barbauld crew’ (see Clarke, 1997). Thus, as Mitzi Myers (1992, p. 135) puts it, ‘the Romantic lens we habitually look through is a culturally conditioned ideology, a tissue of assumptions, preferences, and perspectives, and not a transhistorical, universal body of truth about childhood’. She has undertaken some alternative readings of these female writers’ work, and of Maria Edgeworth especially, in the process helping us rethink what the very terms childhood, Romanticism and didacticism mean.

Taking the latter term, for example, although I earlier alluded to the still thriving religious presses to illustrate the instructional side of children’s literature, I could as easily have turned to the work of Melvin Burgess. For despite his claim that a book like Bloodtide has ‘no educational value of any sort whatsoever’ (2004, p. 294), we surely learn from it that power corrupts, that there is a difference between male and female power, that blood is thicker than water and that the future is a dystopian place where women are still regarded as property. As Wayne C. Booth (1988, pp. 151–2) tersely expresses it, ‘all narratives are “didactic”’ – from high art to the low, tasteless joke.

This is to say little more than that we should read all texts carefully and closely, in order to note that the conceptual apparatus we use itself has a history, often arising out of conflicting interests, rather than having some transhistorical warrant. Thus, to designate a certain text ‘didactic’ and another ‘subversive’ carries certain consequences, each label throwing up different facets. Roald Dahl, for example, is regularly described in terms of the latter; however, he can also be seen as remarkably didactic in, for instance, his disapproval of television (Mike Teavee and the Wormwood parents) and of badly behaved children in general (e.g. all those in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory except Charlie himself). Theoretical approaches are no different, of course, in the way they either foreground or marginalize particular issues; it goes without saying (sometimes regrettably) that all histories of children’s literature have their agendas. Thus, Robert Leeson (1985) and Andrew O’Malley (2003) – following Darton (1982) – are quite explicit in arguing that the development of children’s literature is linked to an emergent middle class; Leeson’s work uses a Marxist perspective, whereas O’Malley’s is more Foucauldian. Even where critics abjure theory – as for instance Brian Alderson does, calling it ‘floss’ (1995, p. 17; see also Grenby, 2004) and setting it against his own bibliographical approach – theory abides, for example, in Alderson’s case as a form of ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills, 1959). Moreover, as with Townsend, a liberal humanist conception of the child as pre-existing and relatively unchanging prevails.

New historicism certainly queries this idea, although it does not explicitly advocate any one theoretical alternative. As a result it is more tentative, recognizing that all readings are not only provisional and partial but also produce their own ‘truth-effects’; that is, evidence seems to follow the adoption of a particular explanatory framework, or paradigm – as we saw above with the supposed move from instruction to delight (which is why, as noted earlier, knowledge is always linked to power for Foucault). Another example would be the way that the fairy tale is commonly seen to have been developed by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm out of simple tales told by country folk – a history that effaces a rich written tradition to which many female contemporaries of Perrault also contributed (Harries, 2001).

In short, a healthy scepticism is essential when reading any study of children’s literature. Why is it conceived the way it is? Why have some genres (like the fairy tale or the animal story) come to be seen as prototypically childish? Why does the study of children’s literature tend to ignore non-fictional material? Why doesn’t it include children’s own literary productions? Why is certain material central to the discipline whereas other work is deemed peripheral, often hived off as the concern of others? Storytelling and nursery rhyme thus tend to be seen as the province of folklorists, psychologists and educationalists. Moreover, unless a novel is involved (Peter Pan, for instance), children’s drama is rarely considered; this applies to children’s comics too, whereas children’s films have been readily accommodated, albeit with most alacrity when book adaptations are involved (see Chapters 9–11 for more detail).

There are no straightforward answers to these questions; it is simply the way the discipline has developed. It is, therefore, now seen as quite natural for departments of literature to run courses in children’s literature, though this was laughable 50 years ago, when education and librarianship were regarded as more suitable homes. And, of course, each of these disciplines produced its own version of what the area’s proper concerns should be, generating their particular truth effects. In librarianship, for example, an emphasis on historical, bibliographical work was clearly in order (Alderson, 1995), resulting in the label ‘book’ people; by contrast, with educationalists, tagged the ‘child’ people, a developmental approach was preferred, often linked to reading competence – although all remained committed ‘[t]o give each child the right book at the right time’, as the pioneer American librarian Anne Carroll Moore put it (quoted in Lundin, 2004, p. 27). In this regard, the work of Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and others found wide favour (see Tucker, 1981).

National histories of children’s literature are perhaps the area where truth effects are most readily discernible, but where they are also most prone to challenge as a result of competing interests, often based on cultural differences. To take just one example, Canadian children’s literature has the problem of the relationship between its English and French sides, let alone coming to terms with its Aboriginal pre-history, which has its own, distinct, oral tradition. Finally, such attempts to forge a discrete national literature have to contend with the pressure of foreign markets that increasingly want a more ‘international’ or ‘homogeneous’ product (Reimer, 2004, p. 1018; also Pouliot, 2004; on Ireland, see Keenan, 2007; and more generally, see Meek, 2001).

But in spite of national differences, in an age of increasing specialization children’s literature has always prided itself on being more cosmopolitan, with many critics readily crossing national boundaries (e.g. Hürlimann, 1967; Nikolajeva, 1996). While this is commendable, there is always the worry that local differences are forsaken in attempts to generalize and, indeed, that different manifestations of the child are themselves lost in hazy terms like Paul Hazard’s (1944, p. 147) ‘universal republic of childhood’. In short, it is high time that this ‘child’ was more carefully considered.

THE CHILD IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Although common sense would suggest that children needed to be recognized in their own right before there could be a literature specifically for them, it was suggested above that this ‘right’ never was children’s own; indeed, the category ‘child’ has no intrinsic referent, only that which different societies have determined – and societies’ notions have differed substantially: from seeing children as spawn of the devil to holy innocents, with equally huge differences in childhood’s provenance. But though it is hard to dispute that childhood is a socially constructed state, there are still competing notions about what constructionism itself involves. There is not the space here for an in-depth analysis, so I shall simply point to some of the key theorists and some of the problems involved.

The starting point for most discussions is Philippe Ariès’ seminal Centuries of Childhood (1960), which has itself generated a sub-industry of criticism (e.g. Archard, 1993; Cunningham, 1995; Gittins, 1998). Its most famous sentence, ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’ (Ariès, 1973, p. 125), has subsequently proved to be overstated, although many are agreed that childhood was a far less separate sphere at this time. It was only with the emergence of the nuclear family and the development of schooling that a more modern conception of childhood emerged in the seventeenth century. Neil Postman (1982) developed a related thesis, linking childhood to the rise of print culture; this, he argues, resulted in children being forced into a position of inferiority to a ‘master’, until they had learned to decode the symbolic system of language. Children’s books, of course, can be seen as complicit in this process.

Arising from the notion of childhood being socially constructed, Jacqueline Rose (1984, p. 1) provocatively argued that ‘children’s fiction… hangs on an impossibility’, in that it is adults who write, publish and criticize it. Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (1994, pp. 158–9) took this argument one stage further, claiming that Rose’s work not only ‘closes down the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editor's Introduction
• I Essays on Children's Literature
• II Names and Terms
• III Timeline
• IV Resources
• Bibliography
• Index