Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood

Heather Snell, Lorna Hutchison, Heather Snell, Lorna Hutchison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134498703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this collection address the relationship between children and cultural memory in texts both for and about young people. The collection overall is concerned with how cultural memory is shaped, contested, forgotten, recovered, and (re)circulated, sometimes in opposition to dominant national narratives, and often for the benefit of young readers who are assumed not to possess any prior cultural memory. From the innovative development of school libraries in the 1920s to the role of utopianism in fixing cultural memory for teen readers, it provides a critical look into children and ideologies of childhood as they are represented in a broad spectrum of texts, including film, poetry, literature, and architecture from Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, India, and Spain. These cultural forms collaborate to shape ideas and values, in turn contributing to dominant discourses about national and global citizenship. The essays included in the collection imply that childhood is an oft-imagined idealist construction based in large part on participation, identity, and perception; childhood is invisible and tangible, exciting and intriguing, and at times elusive even as cultural and literary artifacts recreate it. Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood is a valuable resource for scholars of children's literature and culture, readers interested in childhood and ideology, and those working in the fields of diaspora and postcolonial studies.

Chapter One

Reading Canadian*

Children and National Literature in the 1920s

Gail Edwards

On 21 December 1920, William Talbot Allison—Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, literary critic, and one of the founding members of the Canadian Authors Association—wrote to Vancouver schoolteacher Margaret Cowie in response to a letter forwarded to him by the Vancouver Daily World. Earlier that month Cowie had written to praise the publication of a literary supplement that had been syndicated in seven newspapers across Western Canada and that included reviews of recent Canadian publications, brief sketches of Canadian authors, and an introductory article by Allison in which he encouraged readers to purchase books for holiday gift-giving.¹ In his response, Allison told Cowie that, as the compiler of the supplement, he was greatly pleased by the tone of her letter and gratified by her recognition of his work. He concluded by telling her that she “must be a very unusual person,” adding that “[i]t is very rare to find a school-teacher, or college teacher for that matter, so keenly interested in our national literature.” He enclosed with his letter a copy of the supplement as published by the Calgary Daily Herald, which he assured Cowie contained more biographical information than the version that had appeared in the Vancouver World, as well as a copy of his pamphlet, Blazing a New Trail, issued earlier in the year by the Canadian publisher Musson to promote its books by Canadian authors.²

Margaret Cowie was indeed an unusual person, although her life appeared to be entirely ordinary on the surface. Born in 1885 in Simcoe County, Ontario, Cowie moved to British Columbia in the early years of the twentieth century. She received a third-class teaching certificate from the provincial Department of Education in 1909 and taught in a rural school in Whonnock, a small farming community in British Columbia, from 1909 to 1914. In the summer of 1914, she attended the Provincial Normal School Advanced Session and was awarded a second-class teaching certificate. The upgrading of her educational qualifications facilitated her move to an urban school district, and by November of the same year she had joined the staff of Aberdeen School in the West End of Vancouver, where she taught for the next twenty years. In 1934, she moved to Nightingale School in Vancouver, where she continued to teach until two years after her official retirement in 1946. She died in Vancouver in 1961.³

One aspect of her professional career was out of the ordinary, however. Beginning with her letter to Allison, Cowie systematically built a Canadian classroom library: she wrote to a wide cross-section of Canadian authors, asking them for a short biographical sketch and a photograph and inviting them to visit her classroom if they were ever in Vancouver. Many authors responded with letters that not only provided the requested information but also revealed the degree to which they were surprised and moved by the interest shown in their work by Cowie and her pupils. Cowie valued the letters that she received and passed them on to a friend, Sheila E. Evans, who donated them to the Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of British Columbia Library in 2002.⁴ The surviving letters, written between 1920 and 1934, help to illuminate the networks of professional and personal relationships among the creators of Canadian literature in the 1920s and to articulate the struggles and anxieties that authors experienced as they sought connections with their communities of readers. Placing the letters within the complexities of the communications circuit of children’s texts also reveals the intersection of cultural production, discourses of national identity formation, and gendered and class-based understandings of childhood.

In the 1920s in the United States, high quality children’s trade book lists were developed by specialist children’s editors at several major publishing houses, including Macmillan and Doubleday, in consultation with influential children’s librarians and educational theorists.⁵ In contrast, children’s publishing in Canada was dominated by educational publishing centred on the lucrative Ontario textbook market, and by the agency system.⁶ Toronto-based Canadian-owned publishers and Canadian subsidiaries of English and American publishers acted as direct importers and distributors of British and American trade titles, and arranged with originating publishers to republish Canadian editions of works first issued elsewhere. There was very little original trade publishing for children, and no specialised editorial support for children’s authors and illustrators. A range of market forces, including a smaller, geographically and linguistically fragmented reading population; distribution challenges resulting from an underdeveloped retail book trade; competition from the range of imported titles and cheap reprints marketed through department store mail-order catalogues; and a pervasive belief that Canadian literary production for children was second-rate, further inhibited the development of children’s trade lists comparable to those issued by American publishers. As a result, although the major Canadian publishing houses issued a limited number of children’s titles each year, many Canadian authors sought first publication with American or British publishers to ensure the broadest possible audience for their work.⁷

The role of reading in promoting children’s moral, social, and intellectual development was a topic of particular debate in Canada in the period after World War I. Children’s library services as a distinct specialization developed in the late nineteenth century in large urban public libraries in the eastern United States. Lillian H. Smith, who established the Boys’ and Girls’ Division of the Toronto Public Library in 1912, taught successive generations of Canadian children’s librarians the philosophy of children’s services that she had learned in Pittsburgh and New York.⁸ As intermediaries in the interaction between children and books, Smith and her colleagues believed that the task of children’s librarians was to encourage a love of good reading by giving “the right book to the right child at the right time.”⁹ They believed that it was their responsibility to encourage children to read a carefully selected range of children’s books that had stood the test of time, the aim being to preserve the innocence of childhood for as long as possible.¹⁰ Confident in their own literary judgment, Smith and her colleagues believed that as experts in the field of children’s literature, they could define with certainty what constituted good reading and apply that knowledge to the selection and purchase of books of “enduring quality.”¹¹ At the same time, they could control access to literature that they deemed unsuitable for child readers by the simple expedient of excluding it from the library shelves.¹² In this model of the circulation of children’s texts, the children’s room in a public library would become the space where readers could be discouraged from indiscriminate reading of new fiction and from the dangers of the “series habit,” as children’s librarians described the consumption of popular serial fiction. Instead, through exposure to books carefully chosen by a sympathetic librarian to provide “food for the mind,” children could be guided into becoming enthusiastic and patriotic Canadian citizens, as well as informed and intelligent readers with a taste for folklore, mythology, and the classics.¹³

There was a tension, however, between the goal of encouraging children to read classic children’s books of enduring quality and the goal of creating Canadian readers. On the one hand, librarians were reminded that they had a “part in the making of Canadian literature” by stimulating an interest among child readers in books by Canadian authors. Reader interest, they believed, would then encourage writers to “do their best” to create literature of lasting value.¹⁴ On the other hand, while the Ontario Library Review sought to remind its readers that “Canadian books … are worthy of being purchased and read,” Canadian authors repeatedly faced the criticism that their work, whether for children or adults, was distinctly inferior to British and American publications, and could succeed in the marketplace only if evaluated through a sympathetic nationalist lens.¹⁵ When the Canadian Authors’ Association (CAA) established Canadian Book Week in 1921 to call the public’s attention to books by Canadian writers, it was accused of trying to push second-rate books by second-rate authors on unsuspecting consumers by applying mass marketing techniques to the promotion of Canadian literature.¹⁶ In response, the CAA countered that Canadians did not purchase and read Canadian books, not because they were second-rate, but because they didn’t know about new Canadian publications, and thus did not know to request them from their local booksellers.¹⁷ In turn, booksellers were reluctant to stock Canadian books that they believed would not sell, because they had observed no appreciable public demand for new Canadian titles.¹⁸ The organization proposed to remedy the situation, in part, through the public school system. CAA members were urged to participate in Book Week events in the hope of educating the “generation after generation of boys and girls [who] grow up in almost total ignorance of our national literature.”¹⁹ Teachers and librarians were encouraged to promote Canadian books, organize displays of Canadian titles, introduce the work of Canadian authors to their students and child borrowers, and, if possible, arrange for author visits to their schools and libraries.

The CAA’s recommendations for coordinated celebrations of Book Week events in libraries and schools were similar to programs organized by Smith and her colleagues in the Boys and Girls Division, which had the necessary institutional support, staffing, and funds to plan large-scale events. Their high standards of service, however, could not easily be replicated. In British Columbia throughout the 1920s, most publicly-funded urban libraries faced significant challenges in the provision of children’s services. At the Vancouver Public Library, for example, space allocated for the children’s room at the Carnegie Library was inadequate and unsuitable; funding for the acquisition of books failed to keep pace with demand; and qualified staff were in short supply.²⁰ Cooperation between the library and the Vancouver School Board was hindered by ongoing concerns that the sharing of resources would lead to a diminution of already strained budgets.²¹ The situation was worse in rural areas of the province, where subscription libraries run by local public library associations relied almost exclusively on donated books and volunteer help.²²

Support for school libraries in British Columbia was also uneven. Thomas Brough, the Assistant Municipal Inspector of Schools in Vancouver, explicitly linked reading with student success, arguing that school and classroom libraries were a necessity in any modern school to prevent “pupils being intellectually starved, or worse ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Fixing the Past for Young People
• Chapter 1 Reading Canadian: Children and National Literature in the 1920s
• Chapter 2 “A Real True Merrican Like Us”: Edith Wharton’s Past, Modern Children and American Identity
• Chapter 3 Nationalism, Nostalgia, and Intergenerational Girlhood: Textual and Ideological Extensions to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House
• Chapter 4 A Japanese History Textbook and the Construction of World War II Memory
• Chapter 5 Modern Architecture, National Traditions, and Ambivalent Internationalism: An East German Architectural Text for Young Readers
• Chapter 6 “You Say You Want a Revolution”: Cultural Memory, Black Nationalist Didacticism, and Sonia Sanchez’s It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs
• Chapter 7 Ambivalent Doomsday for the Young: Nuclear Fictions for Children and Adolescents in the 1980s
• Chapter 8 Constructing an Innocent German Past: Childhood and National Socialism in Dieter Forte’s Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen and Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen
• Chapter 9 “Infinnate Joy”: Play, Performance, and Resistance in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
• Chapter 10 The Seductions of Good and Evil: Competing Cultural Memories in Steven Keewatin Sanderson’s Superhero Comics for Aboriginal Youth
• Chapter 11 “They’re Good with Good Girls”: Constructions of Childhood in Coming-of-Age Films about the Spanish Civil War
• Chapter 12 “Does Not Happen”: M.T. Anderson and Terry Pratchett Imagine the Nation
• List of Contributors
• Index