Children's Literature Comes of Age

Toward a New Aesthetic

Maria Nikolajeva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317358275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1996. A detailed analysis of the art of children's literature covering world literature for children, children's literature as a canonical art form, the history of children's literature from a semiotic perspective, and epic, polyphony, chronotope, intertextuality, and metafiction in children's literature.

1 WORLD LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

The term “world literature” was coined by Goethe. Although we constantly use this notion, it is not always defined. By the “world library” we probably mean a number of texts from different epochs, countries and nations which have endured the test of time and are deeply imprinted in the minds of many generations of readers.

The notion of “world literature for children” is even more complicated. Its history has not yet been written and probably never will be, not only because there are no scholars versed in the literature in different countries, but also because world literature is not merely a sum of literatures from various countries.

The many reference works on children’s literature in particular countries or on children’s literature in general, need not be enumerated here. Those which treat children’s literature in general are always biased by the origin of their authors, who give priority to the literature from their own countries, overestimate the importance of certain writers from that country, and so on.¹ Many American sources do not mention international literature at all, as if it never existed,² or they treat it in a separate brief chapter, in parentheses, as it were, as something marginal and secondary.³ The “touchstones” of children’s literature in the United States are not only Anglo-Saxon but very distinctly North American.

On the other hand, in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Dutch sources the author’s own country will be presented as the capital of world children’s literature, while the Anglo-Saxon tradition is somewhat diminished. One of the most central American children’s books of the twentieth century, Charlotte’s Web, is in Sweden mostly known in the form of an animated cartoon and is nowhere mentioned as a touchstone.

In the former Soviet Union, where translations of foreign children’s literature were subject to very special and entirely extraliterary regulations, the picture of foreign children’s literature was sometimes seriously distorted. Thus in a standard textbook used by schools of education, contemporary (twentieth century) American children’s authors are represented by Carl Sandburg, L. Frank Baum, Upton Sinclair, Dr Seuss, John Ciardi, Lincoln Steffens, Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, Marjory Kinnan Rawlings, William Saroyan, Carson McCullers, Harvey Swados, and Robert McCloskey.⁴

Nowhere has there been any effort to view children’s literature as a whole, as sharing a common literary evolution. Naturally, this is a very difficult if not impossible task, since it demands not only a huge body of concrete facts but also new instruments which differ radically from those used to describe children’s literature in a particular country. The only feasible thing is to attempt to sketch the historical poetics of children’s literature rather than a history of children’s literature as such, to ignore details, concrete works and authors, and instead look for tendencies, recurrent phenomena, typological similarities and possible paths of evolution.

ARE FOLKTALES CHILDREN’S LITERATURE?

To my mind, the first big mistake that historians of children’s literature usually make is to start with folktales. Folktales existed and were told long before childhood was apprehended as a category. Folktales, myths and legends were never created for an audience of children. Indeed, folktales, fables, moral tales, often with religious overtones, were a makeshift solution at a time when there appeared to be no special literature for young readers. The fact that folktales were part of this solution does not mean that they became children’s literature. Most oral folktales are not suitable for children because they often contain violence and child abuse. Moreover, they are sometimes obscene and amoral, contradicting the ideals of proper upbringing. Today we know that the Grimms decided to purify their tales after the first edition of their collection was published to make them more suitable for children. We also know that the Grimms did not wander at all among people and collect material, as was earlier believed, but found most of it in the kitchens of respectable bourgeois families, which means that the versions they wrote down had most probably already been purged of the most offensive details.⁵

Folktales also differ from children’s literature in terms of communication. They belong to a fundamentally different type of culture—the oral one.⁶ When children listen to a narrated folktale, the communication process differs radically from that involved in reading. Reading a collection of folktales is also different from reading a children’s book. Instead of a writer—the sender of information in a simple communication model—we have in the case of folktales a mediator (the person who tells the story orally), a collector (the person who makes a transcript of the oral text), and an editor or publisher (the person who is responsible for the published version of the text). As I have just mentioned, in editions for children texts are usually subject to still further transformation, that is, they are adapted to prevailing moral and pedagogical views. The picture of the world that children receive during this communication is completely falsified and has nothing to do with the original world view of folklore. Although ordinary children’s books are also subject to purging by the editors, we can nevertheless assume that in modern, non-adapted books for young readers information passes more or less directly from sender to addressee.

By this I do not at all mean that folktales are not suitable as children’s reading. Many exciting studies show possible ways of using folktales in childhood education. Two widely disparate treatments of folktales are Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytical⁷ and Jack Zipes’s sociological approaches.⁸ It is noteworthy that in countries in Africa and Asia today that lack children’s literature, there is an effort to use myths and folktales to satisfy their young people’s needs for reading material. Although folktales are essentially not children’s literature they do have significance for its emergence since so many children’s books in some way or other are based on myth and folklore, not only directly, in subject matter or action, but also with respect to narrative, characterization and the use of symbols. This is naturally something that scholars of children’s literature must take into account. Indeed, some fascinating archetypal studies of children’s literature do take as their point of departure parallels between children’s literature and myth or folktale.

ARE THE “CLASSICS” CHILDREN’S LITERATURE?

Another common denominator in children’s reading in most countries is the so-called classics. By classics we usually mean a rather heterogeneous group of texts which were not originally written for a young audience. The most remarkable thing is that while these originally adult texts were rewritten, abridged and adapted to children’s needs, there were hundreds of other useful, educational, didactic, moralistic texts being produced directly for children. Unlike international classics, such books remained local and were very seldom translated into other languages. Today they are hopelessly obsolete. Usually written by second-rate authors, they scrupulously followed the established and rapidly changing conventions and views on child education. In contrast, the so-called children’s classics, which were never meant for children, are eternal and universal.

At least one of these, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), has been enormously popular and well-known among generation after generation of children in many countries. When in the eighteenth century Rousseau recommended Robinson Crusoe as suitable reading for his ideal pupil Emile, he most probably did it for lack of anything better. If he had had access to the children’s books available today, he probably would not have chosen Pippi Longstocking, since that work is too far from his educational ideas; but in his time there were not many texts to choose from. Depending on the country, children read Aesop’s or Lafontaine’s fables or carefully selected tales from Arabian Nights; British children had King Arthur or Robin Hood. None of these texts was originally created for children and, as I suggested earlier, they provided a makeshift solution. Charles Perrault’s fairy tales were thoroughly purged before they were allowed into the nursery.

Robinson Crusoe was regarded as suitable for children partly because of its moral values, partly because it contained useful information about such things as nature and human activities. Its central theme is the eternal striving of the young to break free of the parents, to be grownup and mature, to become independent. These elements reflect the Age of Enlightenment when the book was written, but they are also an important component of children’s literature. Although not intended for children, Robinson Crusoe contains the most essential narrative pattern of children’s literature, namely the structure: Home—Departure—Adventure—Homecoming.⁹ In its original version, however, the book was far too long and sometimes too difficult for children, and this paved the way for all manner of adaptations and rewritings.¹⁰ Since the German educator Joachim Heinrich Campe’s adaptation of Robinson in 1779–1780, numerous versions of adult texts regarded as suitable for young people have been adapted and retold for children. Two selection criteria have usually been taken into consideration here: usefulness and pleasure. Often satisfying the criterion of pleasure were adventure books with elements of suspense, most of them from the periods of Enlightenment and Romanticism. The demand for usefulness could be fulfilled by the practical knowledge that the books contained or by the moral and ethical values originally present or added to them by retellers. These values sometimes seem rather obtrusive to modern reader. Ethical norms grow outdated sooner than practical information, but even facts can become obsolete and confusing.¹¹

Another adult text that in some countries enjoys the same popularity among young readers as Robinson Crusoe is Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift. While the different retellings of Defoe have more or less retained the central idea of the book, most of Swift’s satirical elements, his allusions to contemporary persons and events, and his deep philosophical reflections have been removed from children’s editions. What remains is adventure and the humorous play with dimensions: the giant Gulliver among the Lilliputs, tiny Gulliver among the giants. The third and forth parts of Gulliver’s Travels are often omitted.

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels are found in most histories of children’s literature, that is, in my view, in histories of childhood reading. But there are other adult texts which are included among children’s classics in some countries but are completely unknown in others. I am thinking of books like François Rabelais’ Gargantua (1535), Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–1615) or Charles de Coster’s Tyl Ulenspiegel (1867). They contain the same ingredients which have made Robinson and Gulliver successful children’s reading: the same classical adventure composition with home—wandering—homecoming, suspense, and a chain of more or less independent episodes. They are also humorous; the hyperbolic characters of especially Gargantua border on the absurd, while Tyl Ulenspiegel is both romantic and funny. Ulenspiegel’s faithful friend and squire Lamme Goedzak is a figure appreciated by children in countries where the text is known, while children who are given a chance to get acquainted with the wandering Spanish knight Quixote and Sancho the jester usually come to love them. But in many countries these characters fall entirely outside the range of children’s reading.

Tyl Ulenspiegel: well known to Russian young readers. Illustration from the Russian “World Library for Children”

There are also some curious cases of an adult text from one country becoming known as a children’s classic in another. In Russia, one of the most beloved children’s classics is a book entitled The True History of A Little Ragamuffin by a certain James Greenwood. It is a sentimental story that takes place in the slums of London, somewhat in the style of Oliver Twist. However, the book is not mentioned in any British reference source on children’s literature,¹² the reason being that the work, published in 1866, was never intended for children, was never reprinted and in Britain was never regarded as a children’s book. Not many experts on British nineteenth century literature have even heard of it. But in Russia the book was retold for young readers only a few years after the appearance of the original. In the 1920s the great Russian children’s writer and educator Kornei Chukovsky made a new version which secured the book a prominent place in Russian children’s reading. It has been reprinted in more than forty editions totalling more than twenty million copies. A third-rate British adult text has thus become a children’s classic and a component of Russian childhood reading.

Sometimes I have an uneasy feeling that we overestimate the importance of “classics” in our children’s reading today. The criteria for the publication and evaluation of the classics have been inherited from older generations who read Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne, James Fenimore Cooper and Baroness Orczy as children and therefore believe that these texts are the best they can offer modern children. But older generations did not have Winnie-the-Pooh or Moomintroll, they were not acquainted with Maurice Sendak, Roald Dahl or E.B. White. Grandparents of today who go into a bookstore to buy a Christmas present for their grandchildren recognize with a pang of nostalgia the good old stories of their childhood and buy them, believing that they are purchasing literature of quality. Sales figures create the illusion that the books are still in demand, and publishers continue to publish them.

The interesting aspects of, to take one example, Jules Verne’s books, are his various scientific and technical ideas—even if some of them, such as the giant cannon in From Earth to the Moon Direct (1865), proved to be impossible. Especially Captain’s Grant Children (1868) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) also contain important ethical issues. Among his best known, these books are featured in many textbooks as indispensable childhood reading. Again, what makes them attractive to young readers is their adventurous, dynamic, slightly mysterious plot.

Jules Verne, however, wrote a vast number of books, many of which are little more than travelogues furnished with a superficial plot to resemble novels. Some of them are remembered today thanks to vivid characters such as the witty servant Passepartout in Around the World in 80 Days (1872). The central character in the novel, the correct British gentleman Phileas Fogg, travels around the world to win a bet. He is completely uninterested in the journey itself, and whatever description there is of foreign countries is from the naive perspective of Passepartout. Many other books, like The Giant Raft (1881), lack even this element. The characters are bleak and schematic, the villains are totally evil and the heroes totally good, magnificent and noble. Of course, this is the way novels were written in Jules Verne’s time, but why expose modern children to this?

The foreign countries Jules Verne described for his readers (and they were adults!) were unfamiliar, fascinating and exotic. Although some small part of the geographic and historical facts are still valid, the mass media have made modern children much more familiar with foreign countries than were Jules Verne’s contemporary adults. Today’s children and young people prefer to get their information from no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFACE
• CHILDREN’S LITERATURE COMING OF AGE? BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 WORLD LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN
• CHAPTER 2 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE — A CANONICAL ART FORM
• CHAPTER 3 THE HISTORY OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE FROM A SEMIOTIC PERSPECTIVE
• CHAPTER 4 FROM EPIC TO POLYPHONY
• CHAPTER 5 CHRONOTOPE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
• CHAPTER 6 INTERTEXTUALITY IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
• CHAPTER 7 METAFICTION IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
• WHITHER CHILDREN’S LITERATURE? BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX