Prizing Children's Literature

The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards

Kenneth Kidd, Joseph Thomas Jr., Kenneth Kidd, Joseph Thomas Jr., Kenneth B. Kidd, Joseph T. Thomas Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317231417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Children's book awards have mushroomed since the early twentieth-century and especially since the 1960s, when literary prizing became a favored strategy for both commercial promotion and canon-making. There are over 300 awards for English-language titles alone, but despite the profound impact of children's book awards, scholars have paid relatively little attention to them. This book is the first scholarly volume devoted to the analysis of Anglophone children's book awards in historical and cultural context. With attention to both political and aesthetic concerns, the book offers original and diverse scholarship on prizing practices and their consequences in Australia, Canada, and especially the United States. Contributors offer both case studies of particular awards and analysis of broader trends in literary evaluation and elevation, drawing on theoretical work on canonization and cultural capital. Sections interrogate the complex and often unconscious ideological work of prizing, the ongoing tension between formalist awards and so-called identity-based awards — all the more urgent in light of the "We Need Diverse Books" campaign — the ever-morphing forms and parameters of prizing, and scholarly practices of prizing. Among the many awards discussed are the Pura Belpré Medal, the Inky Awards, the Canada Governor General Literary Award, the Printz Award, the Best Animated Feature Oscar, the Phoenix Award, and the John Newbery Medal, giving due attention to prizes for fiction as well as for non-fiction, poetry, and film. This volume will interest scholars in literary and cultural studies, social history, book history, sociology, education, library and information science, and anyone concerned with children's literature.

1 Prizing National and Transnational

Australian Texts in the Printz Award

Clare Bradford

At the beginning of his study Economy of Prestige, James English observes, perhaps a little histrionically, that the practice of awarding prizes is “both an utterly familiar and unexceptional practice and a profoundly strange and alienating one” (1). In the field of children’s literature as in other areas of cultural practice, more and more prizes are offered each year: national, state and city awards; prizes offered by foundations, individuals, professional bodies, universities, research centers, newspapers, and journals; awards for genres of production; and prizes for books that address particular topics. When English writes that prizing is both familiar and unexceptional and also strange and alienating, he touches on the complex interrelations of culture and economics that swirl around prizing, from the nomination of contenders to the administration and judging of prizes, award ceremonies, and the discourses that surround awards, increasingly through social media but also in the more traditional forums of newspapers and journals.

The domain of children’s and Young Adult literature constitutes what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as a field with its own practices, habits, and hierarchies (Distinction). Within this field, cultural capital accrues to books that win or are named as honor books in various award systems. Literary awards are not reducible to the economic benefits that flow from them; rather, they endow winning titles with weight and value. Nevertheless, as English observes, the field of children’s and Young Adult (YA) literature is notable for the effects of prizes on sales (360–1n35), particularly in the case of venerable awards such as the Newbery and the Caldecott Medals. Books that win these prizes do not merely sell better, but they stay in print longer than other books and are marked out as members of an illustrious “family” of prize-winning books.

The properties and practices of fields of production shape perceptions of cultural capital and the worth of prizes, quite apart from any monetary rewards that flow to authors. The Printz Award is located firmly within the profession of librarianship: it honors the memory of a revered school librarian, Mike Printz; it was instituted by the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, being first awarded in 2000; and it is sponsored by Booklist. This institutional location confers on the Printz a certain gravitas, so that it is not susceptible to the scandalous excesses of, for instance, the Academy Awards where public relations firms, lobbyists, and “awards consultants” seek to influence members of the Academy.

The Printz distinguishes itself from most other children’s literature awards by its departure from the requirement that authors should be citizens or residents of the nation in which it is awarded. In contrast, major national awards such as the Newbery Medal, the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards, the Governor General’s Literary Awards for children’s literature in Canada, and the Esther Glen Award in New Zealand, all stipulate citizenship or at least residency. The charge of the Printz Award is to “select from the previous year’s publications the best Young Adult book (‘best’ being defined solely in terms of literary merit) and, if the Committee so decides, as many as four Honor Books” (“Printz Award”). Much discussion around the Printz hinges on the diversity of the books and the fact that a number of winners and honor books are citizens of countries other than the United States.¹

This impression of diversity is, however, not borne out when we look closely at the statistics of Printz Award winners, seen in Table 1.1 below. Of the fifteen winners from 2000 to 2014, eight come from the United States, five from the U.K., one from Australia, and one, Meg Rosoff, has dual U.S./U.K. citizenship:

Table 1.1 Printz Award Winners, 2000–2014

Country of citizenship	Number	Percentage
U.S.	8	53%
U.K.	5	33%
Australia	1 (Jellicoe Road)	7%
Mixed affiliation U.K./U.S.	1	7%

Table 1.2 Printz Honor Books, 2000–2014

Country of citizenship	Number	Percentage
U.S.	36	63%
U.K.	7	12%
Australia	7: Margo Lanagan, Black Juice Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger Sonya Hartnett, Surrender Markus Zusak, The Book Thief Judith Clarke, One Whole and Perfect Day Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones	12%
Canada	3	5%
New Zealand	1	2%
Denmark	1	2%
Mixed affiliation	2	4%

The record of Printz winners thus points not so much to diversity as to how the selection processes of the award favor books from the United States and the United Kingdom. The pattern is only slightly different when we look at the Honor Books in Table 1.2, which include seven Australian titles:²

Apart from Denmark, represented by Janne Teller’s translated work Nothing (an Honor Book in 2011), the countries represented here are, predictably enough, English-speaking former British colonies. All are nations in the North of the North–South divide, with well-established children’s publishing industries.

The most crucial aspect of the eligibility rules relates to the provenance of titles. Award-winning books must be published or distributed by American publishing companies; they may be self-published, ebooks, or published in another country, but they “will not be considered eligible until the first year the book is available in print or distributed through a U.S. publishing house” (“Printz Award”). But the availability of books first published elsewhere is limited, since very few such books are taken up by U.S. publishers. In his analysis of prizewinners in music, cinema, architecture and literature, English observes that while the proliferation of prizes might suggest that more artists and authors might be expected to win prizes, in fact the reverse occurs, in that there is a tendency for “huge numbers of prizes to accrue to a handful of big winners” (334). In the field of children’s and YA literature as well, one of the main predictors of success in awards is previous success. And it seems that authors’ achievements as prizewinners influence U.S. publishers in their selection of books originally published outside the U.S., along with considerations about the extent to which such books are cognate with or complement their own lists.

Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (2006), the only Australian Printz Award winner (2009), affords a telling example of these dynamics. This novel was first published in 2006 by Penguin Australia as On the Jellicoe Road. By the time Marchetta won the Printz, her earlier novels had achieved success in the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBC) Book Awards: in 1993 Looking for Alibrandi won the award for Book of the Year: Older Readers; and in 2004 Marchetta won the same award for Saving Francesca. In 2007, when On the Jellicoe Road was eligible for consideration in the CBC Awards, the novel did not appear in the lists of shortlisted or prize-winning books, or even in the CBC’s publication of “Notable Books,” the long list from which winners are selected. It is impossible to know why the novel did not succeed in the CBC Awards, since these awards are too well-mannered (or well-policed) for any intelligence to leak from the judges’ deliberations. But Marchetta’s previous novels had been sold into the desirable U.S. and U.K. markets, paving the way for the publication of Jellicoe Road by HarperTeen in 2008, and its success in the Printz Award.

In 2007, 87 Australian novels were nominated for the CBC Older Readers Award.³ Two of the award-winning and shortlisted authors in the CBC list for that year also appear in the Printz: Margo Lanagan, author of Red Spikes, the CBC winner, received a Printz Honor award for her short story collection Black Juice in 2006, and her novel Tender Morsels in 2009; and Judith Clarke’s One Whole and Perfect Day, shortlisted in 2007, was named a Printz Honor book in 2008. The winning, honor, and shortlisted CBC books for 2007 are set out below in Table 1.3:

Table 1.3 2007 CBC Awards, Book of the Year: Older Readers

Winner
Lanagan, Margo	Red Spikes
HONOR BOOKS
Cornish, D. M.	Monster Blood Tattoo Book 1: Foundling
Dubosarsky, Ursula	The Red Shoe
SHORTLIST
Bauer, Michael Gerard	Don’t Call Me Ishmael!
Clarke, Judith	One Whole and Perfect Day
Shanahan, Lisa	My Big Birkett

Of the 87 books nominated for the CBC Older Readers Award in 2007, only fifteen (17%) were subsequently reprinted or distributed by U.S. publishers. That is, 83 percent of Australian YA books nominated in 2007 were not. As I have noted, prize-winning books are always more likely to find international publishers than other books; for instance, all the 2007 CBC winners and shortlisted books were republished in the United States.⁴ But the small percentage of Australian books eligible for the Printz Award butts up against the idea that the Award celebrates “the best” Young Adult book published in a certain year. Katherine Bode remarks that

we need to accept—and be concerned with and intrigued by—the way that the production and reception of literature (including ‘evaluative criticism’) is always already implicated in commercial systems; indeed, we need to acknowledge that the different forms of implication in such systems are constitutive of the processes of literary production and reception.

(97)

The commercial systems at issue in the Printz Award are the decisions and choices made by U.S. publishing companies, which are implicated in the processes whereby some Australian novels are “consecrated,” to use Bourdieu’s term (Distinction xxvi), while others are rendered invisible.⁵

Whereas Bourdieu views awards as a manifestation of “the dominant taste” of different groups and classes, the American Library Association (ALA) uses terms such as “excellence” and “quality” to identify the criteria on which Printz Awards are determined. As Bourdieu says, “each taste feels itself to be natural” (49), defining itself by its rejection of other tastes. The Printz policies and procedures pose the question “What is quality?” and responding with “We know what it is not”…: “Popularity is not the criterion for this award. Nor is MESSAGE” (“Printz Award”). In Bourdieu’s terms, popularity and message are rejected as markers of taste. Having tied itself in knots by defining what quality is not, the Printz policy falls back on a rearticulation: “What we are looking for, in short, is literary excellence” (“Printz Award”). The Printz is, then, said to recognize an indefinable “excellence” that is nevertheless graspable by the Printz Committee.

Transnationalism and the Printz Award

If concepts of literary excellence are difficult to pin down, national inflexions in fiction are also elusive. Literary history has traditionally viewed the production and dissemination of fiction in terms of nationhood: how and why national imaginaries have shaped textual production and formed reading communities. More recently, however, scholars have addressed the multiple modes in which national literatures connect with the wider realms of international and global literature. One strand of this investigation has reinvigorated the concept of world literature, addressed in David Damrosch’s How to Read World Literature (2008) and Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2007). Damrosch proposes a model of reading in which readers who encounter works from a tradition different from their own “become aware of different literary assumptions made in different cultures” (4), thereby enlarging their appreciation of diverse approaches and concepts. A second scholarly direction, typified by Paul Giles’s Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002) and Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2008) explores how national literature manifests multiple connections to diverse traditions and “deep time” through transnational relationships.

The Australian books that appear among Printz winners and Honor books belong to the vast body of texts produced in one place and subsequently unmoored from this location to find readers elsewhere. While Dam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• A Prize-Losing Introduction
• 1 Prizing National and Transnational: Australian Texts in the Printz Award
• 2 Prizing the Unrecognized: Systems of Value, Visibility, and the First World in International and Translated Children’s Texts
• 3 The Guys Are the Prize: Adolescent Fiction, Masculinity, and the Political Unconscious of Australian Book Awards
• 4 How Award-Winning Children’s Non-fiction Complicates Stereotypes
• 5 The Last Bastion of Aesthetics? Formalism and the Rhetoric of Excellence in Children’s Literary Awards
• 6 The Still Almost All-White World of Children’s Literature: Theory, Practice, and Identity-Based Children’s Book Awards
• 7 The Pura Belpré Medal: The Latino/a Child in America, the “Need” for Diversity, and Name-branding Latinidad
• 8 Peter’s Legacy: The Ezra Jack Keats Book Award
• 9 Race and the Prizing of Children’s Literature in Canada: Spotlighting Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards
• 10 Finding Nominations: Children’s Films at the Academy Awards
• 11 Prizing Popularity: How the Blockbuster Book Has Reshaped Children’s Literature
• 12 The Archive Award, or the Case of de Grummond’s Gold
• 13 Apologia
• 14 Prizing in the Children’s Literature Association
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index