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The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture
 1003214959, 9781003214953

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes On Contributors
Introduction
Works Cited
Part I Concepts and Tools
1 Children’s Literature and Theory
“Criticism” and “Theory”
The Origins of Writing for Children: What Is a Child?
Authorship: The J. K. Rowling Phenomenon
Knowing Children: Observation, Memory, Psychology, and Neuroscience
“Book People” and “Child People”: Representation, Identification, and Empathy
Identities: All Children Are Not the Same?
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
2 Poetics and Pedagogy
The Weight of History
Beyond Pedagogy: Comenius’s Contribution to the Poetics of Children’s Literature
Guardians and Detractors of (Rational) Education
Back to the Future: Pedagogy and Poetics in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Notes
Works Cited
3 Ethics and Historical Perspectives
Complications in Studying Children’s Literature From a Historical Perspective
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
4 Children’s Literary Geography
Introduction: The Where of Children’s Literature
Literary Geography
Setting and Place
Chronotope and Worldbuilding
Place and Genre: Moretti’s Ortgebunden Narratives
Playworlds
Between Space and Place
The Production of (Poetic) Space
Cartography
Maps in Children’s Books
Seeing Pictures: Visualizing Geographies
Words and Worlds: Descriptive Geographies
Real-World Children’s Literary Geographies
Works Cited
5 The Monster at the End of This Book: Posthumanism and New Materialism in the Scholarship of Children’s Literature
There Is a Monster at the End of This Chapter. Please Do Not Turn the Page
Notes
Works Cited
6 Digital Humanities and Children’s Literature
Collaboration: Playing Together
Digital Archives
Beyond the Archive, Or Playing With the Archive
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
7 Research With Young Readers: Participatory Approaches in Children’s Literature Studies
Introduction
Children’s Participation, Agency, and Voice
Child-Adult Research: Benefits and Challenges
Research With and By Children in Children’s Literature Studies
Present and Future Orientations
Notes
Works Cited
Part II Media and Genres
8 Picturebooks
Introduction: The Picturebook as a Multimodal Art Form
Material Qualities of Picturebooks
Materiality and Types of Picturebooks
Materiality and Interaction
The Impact of Materiality On the Picturebook’s Storyline
Hybridity and Materiality in Picturebooks
Material Challenges of Digital Picturebooks
Conclusion: Future Prospects
Works Cited
9 Books for Beginners
Proto Beginner Books
The Mid-Twentieth Century “Reading Wars”
Expanding the In-Between in the 1980s and ’90s
Beginner Books Mature: The Early Twenty-First Century
The Present and Future of Beginner Books: Diversity
Works Cited
10 Magazines
Defining the Ideal Child Reader
American Publications
Correspondence
Competitions
Conclusion
Note
Works Cited
11 Comics for Children Across Cultures
“Comics” ‘And Graphic Novels’ for “Children”: A Defensive Introduction
Definitions Most Relative: Definitely Maybes
Children’s Comics Across Cultures: Great Britain and the United States
Children’s Comics Across Cultures: Canada and Mexico
Children’s Comics Across Cultures: Greater South America
Children’s Comics Across Cultures: The Japanese Manga Explosion
Notes
Works Cited
12 Children’s Fiction: The Possibilities of Reality and Imagination
Introduction
History of Children’s Fiction
The Plausible Present: Realistic Fiction
The Plausible Past: Historical Fiction
The Unreal: Fantasy and Science Fiction, But Especially Fantasy
The Unlikely: Action/Adventure, Survival Stories, Mysteries, and Spy Stories
Conclusion
Works Cited
13 Nonfiction
Introduction
Definition and Evaluation of Nonfiction
Historical Overview
The Nonfiction Picturebook
Note
Works Cited
14 Children’s Poetry
Pre-Nineteenth Century
Nineteenth Century
Nursery Rhymes
The Tyranny of Illustrations
Schoolroom Poets
Nonsense
Twentieth Century
British Caribbean Poets
Urchin Verse/Urchin Poetry
Picturebooks
Twenty-First Century
Notes
Works Cited
15 Theatre and Drama: Global Perspectives
The Tyranny of the Title in the United States
Emancipatory Theatre in North-West Europe
The United Kingdom and France
Professionalizing Theatre for Young Audiences in Russia
Argentina: TV Live and Independent Theatres
The Controversial Folk Tale Dramatizations in South Korea
Africa: Dramatizing Folk Tales
Conclusion
Note
Works Cited
16 Children’s Film
Children’s Film – Impossible to Define?
Children’s Film Scholarship
Children’s Film and Adaptation
Crossover
Children’s Film Tropes and Popular Culture
Notes
Works Cited
17 Television
Introduction
Television Influence: Early Studies
Television, Global Flow, and Global Sesame
Glocal Television
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
18 Playful Possibilities: The Rights of the Reader in a Digital Age
Introduction: Exploring Playful Reading Practices
Understanding Playscapes: Looking Through the Kaleidoscope
Shaping Storyworlds: Immersion and Embodiment
Playing PAW Patrol: Volition and Intra-Action
Building Banterbury: Affective Engagements
Hunting Hunger Games: Participatory Social Networks
Rights of the Reader: Roles and Responsibilities
Notes
Works Cited
Part III Identities
19 Age
Concepts of Age
Age Norms in Children’s Literature
The Pleasures and Need of Defying Age Norms
The Complexities of Fighting Ageism: A Case Study
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
20 Gender
Echoes of Earlier Paradigms
Gender Studies: An Array of Parallel Approaches
Girlhood Studies
Boyhood Studies
New Possibilities for Gender Studies Within Children’s Literature Research
Notes
Works Cited
21 Nation and Citizenship
Defining the Concepts
Origins and Indicators of the Concepts
Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotional Mechanisms Involved in Nation Building and Citizenship
Cultural Mechanisms Involved in Nation Building and Citizenship
Children’s Literature as a Key Instrument of Nation Building and Citizenship
Case Study
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
22 Religion and Children’s Literature
Religious Children’s Literature From a Historical Perspective: The Middle Ages and Early Modern Times
The Enlightenment
Excursus: Bible Stories/Children’s Bibles
From the Nineteenth Century Through the Second World War
The Present
Excursus: Nonfiction
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
23 Whatever Common People Do: Social Class in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Children’s Fiction
1800–80: Cheap Print for and About the Poor
1880–1945: The Working Class Writes Back
1945–2000: The “Common People” Speak
Leila Berg’s Common Children
Robert Westall and Class Nostalgia
Aidan Chambers and Robert Leeson: Reading and “Righting” for Working-Class Youth
Alan Garner: Articulating the Struggle Between Roots and Education
Note
Works Cited
24 Race and Ethnicity in Children’s Literature
Introduction
Race and Ethnicity in the Children’s Literary Tradition
In Comes the Corrective: BIPOC Children’s Writers Update the Narrative
Conclusion: #WeNeedDiverseBooks
Notes
Works Cited
25 LGBTQ+ Discourses in Eastern and Central European Children’s Literature
The Political Dimensions of Children’s Literature
LGBTQ+ Children’s Literature in Russia, Hungary, Ukraine, and Poland
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
26 Disability and Children’s Literature
Introduction
Impairment and Disability
Stereotypical Metaphor
Disability During the Transitional Period
Disability for Its Own Sake
Institutionalization of Disabled People
Disabled Characters With Voice, Subjectivity, and Agency
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Part IV Border Crossings
27 Translation
Children’s Literature: Relevant Factors for Its Translation
Adaptation in Translation: Rationale and Strategies
The Geopolitics of Translation
Notes
Works Cited
28 Retranslation
Defining Retranslation: Its Connection With Children’s Literature
Why Retranslate Children’s Books?
How to Retranslate Children’s Books
Notes
Works Cited
29 Adaptation
General Theoretical Considerations
Adaptations for Children’s Literature
Adaptations of Children’s Literature
Cultural Function of Adaptations of Children’s Literature
Notes
Works Cited
30 Fairy Tales and Circulation: A Case Study in Poland
The Cultural Circulation of Fairy Tales as Their Essence
The Fairy Tale as World Literature
Global Versus Local
References to Global Trends
Entertaining Intertextual Plays and Thought-Provoking Metafiction
Deconstruction of Traditional Gender Roles
Adapting to Historical, Cultural, Social, and Political Contexts
Final Thoughts
Notes
Works Cited
31 Children’s Literature and Transnationalism
Transnationalism and Indigeneity
Migrant and Refugee Narratives
Transnational Identities
Conclusion
Works Cited
32 Transcultural Comparison as Method Korean and Hebrew Children’s Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century
Introduction: Why Compare?
Transculturality in Five Keywords
Language
Folktales
Translation
Nation
Children
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
33 Marketing and Franchising
Introduction
Intersecting Histories of Children’s Literature and Commercial Cultures
Character Branding and Licensing
Mass-Market Publishing and Franchising
Participatory and Critical Engagement With Children’s Franchise Texts
Transmedia Storytelling, Fictional Storyworlds, and Immersive Experiences
Social Media, Independent Publishers, and Marketing
Works Cited
34 Children’s Literature Websites and Fandom
Pedagogies, Literacies, and What Scholars Have Seen in Children’s Literature Websites
Children’s Literature Websites and the Canon
Patterns in Children’s Literature Websites: Consumption, Hidden Adults, and Offline-Only Engagement
Children’s Fandoms And/or Children as Fans
Engaging Children and Mediated Connections
YouTube Channels, Podcasts, and Social Media
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Part V Institutions
35 Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Commercial and Charitable Publishers Circulating Books Internationally
International Publishers Adapting British Books
British Publishers Defining Global Children’s Literature
Notes
Works Cited
36 Children’s Book Publishing in Europe A Historical Approach
The Medieval and Early Modern Periods
The Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
The Golden Age
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
37 Contemporary Asian Book Publishing
The People’s Republic of China
Japan
India
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
38 From Canon-Making to Participatory Prizing: Children’s Book and Media Awards
Cultivating a Public: Mock Prizes
Prize Prediction Blogs
Edubrow Extension Activities
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
39 Children’s Literature in Schools
Introduction: Children’s Literature Goes to School
Objectives and Assumptions: The Implications of the Literary-Didactic Split
The Didactic Approach
The Literary Approach
In Practice: Functional Vs. Complex Literacy
Social and Political Factors
Teacher Preference
The Classroom as a Democratizing Space
Literacy Acquisition
The Teacher as Mediator
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
40 Libraries
The Presence and Absence of a Home Library
Public Libraries
School Libraries
Back Home Again
Note
Works Cited
41 Book Clubs
Introduction
The Junior Literary Guild
L’Ecole Des Loisirs’ Max
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
42 Promoting Children’s Reading Internationally
The International Board On Books for Young People
The International Youth Library
The Biennial of Illustration Bratislava (BIB)
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
The International Research Society for Children’s Literature
Further Organizations
Book Fairs
Awards
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
43 Censorship and Shifting Contexts in Children’s Literature
History and Motives: Who Censors and Why?
Academic Discourse: A Call for Change
Public Discourse
The Discourse of “Censorship” and Alternative Terms
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Focusing on significant and cutting-​edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume: • Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature. • Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children. • Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content. • Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice. • Explores the historical evolutions and trans-​regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature. Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field. Claudia Nelson is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University, USA. Elisabeth Wesseling is Professor of Cultural Memory, Gender, and Diversity at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu is Director of the Chinese Language Center and Professor of Children’s Literature and Taiwanese Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series: THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GLOBAL LITERARY ADAPTATION IN THE TWENTY-​F IRST CENTURY Edited by Brandon Chua and Elizabeth Ho THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by Matthew Stratton THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA Edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ECOPOETICS Edited by Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach and Orchid Tierney THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH Edited by Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-​Vallejo THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE Edited by Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Edited by Masood Ashraf Raja and Nick T. C. Lu THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND FEMINISM Edited by Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan For more information on this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Lit​erat​ureCom​pani​ons/​book-​ser​ies/​RC4​444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Edited by Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu

Designed cover image: Getty First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​10359-​4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​10360-​0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​21495-​3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003214953 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

List of Figures Notes on Contributors

x xi

Introduction Elisabeth Wesseling, Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu, and Claudia Nelson PART I

1

Concepts and Tools

7

1 Children’s Literature and Theory Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein

9

2 Poetics and Pedagogy Karen Coats

21

3 Ethics and Historical Perspectives Amanda K. Allen

33

4 Children’s Literary Geography Björn Sundmark and Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang

45

5 The Monster at the End of This Book: Posthumanism and New Materialism in the Scholarship of Children’s Literature Megan L. Musgrave

v

58

Contents

6 Digital Humanities and Children’s Literature Deanna Stover 7 Research with Young Readers: Participatory Approaches in Children’s Literature Studies Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak PART II

69

80

Media and Genres

93

8 Picturebooks Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer

95

9 Books for Beginners Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec

106

10 Magazines Kristine Moruzi

117

11 Comics for Children Across Cultures Joseph Michael Sommers

129

12 Children’s Fiction: The Possibilities of Reality and Imagination Deborah Stevenson

141

13 Nonfiction Giorgia Grilli

153

14 Children’s Poetry Michael Joseph

164

15 Theatre and Drama: Global Perspectives Manon van de Water

178

16 Children’s Film Christine Lötscher

191

17 Television Debbie Olson

203

18 Playful Possibilities: The Rights of the Reader in a Digital Age Angela Colvert

214

vi

Contents PART III

Identities

227

19 Age Vanessa Joosen

229

20 Gender Mia Österlund and Åsa Warnqvist

241

21 Nation and Citizenship Sara Van den Bossche

255

22 Religion and Children’s Literature Gabriele von Glasenapp

267

23 Whatever Common People Do: Social Class in Nineteenth-​and Twentieth-​Century British Children’s Fiction Kimberley Reynolds and Jane Rosen

279

24 Race and Ethnicity in Children’s Literature Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

291

25 LGBTQ+​Discourses in Eastern and Central European Children’s Literature Mateusz Świetlicki

302

26 Disability and Children’s Literature Toshio Kimura and Junko Yoshida

313

PART IV

Border Crossings

325

27 Translation Emer O’Sullivan

327

28 Retranslation Virginie Douglas

340

29 Adaptation Anja Müller

352

vii

Contents

30 Fairy Tales and Circulation: A Case Study in Poland Weronika Kostecka

364

31 Children’s Literature and Transnationalism Clare Bradford, Kristine Moruzi, and Michelle J. Smith

377

32 Transcultural Comparison as Method: Korean and Hebrew Children’s Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century Dafna Zur and Rachel Dwight Feldman

389

33 Marketing and Franchising Naomi Hamer

402

34 Children’s Literature Websites and Fandom Sara K. Day and Carrie Sickmann

413

PART V

Institutions

427

35 Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Courtney Weikle-​Mills

429

36 Children’s Book Publishing in Europe: A Historical Approach Emily Bruce

441

37 Contemporary Asian Book Publishing Shih-​Wen Sue Chen

454

38 From Canon-​Making to Participatory Prizing: Children’s Book and Media Awards Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth B. Kidd

467

39 Children’s Literature in Schools Etti Gordon Ginzburg

479

40 Libraries Margaret Mackey

491

41 Book Clubs Julie Fette and Anne Morey

504

viii

Contents

42 Promoting Children’s Reading Internationally Valerie Coghlan

516

43 Censorship and Shifting Contexts in Children’s Literature Andrew Zalot

528

Index

540

ix

FIGURES

4.1 Lupus’s neighborhood, from Hilman and Boim, Lupus Kecil: Rumpi Kala Hujan (1992). Illustration by Wedha. PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama 4.2 Map of Treasure Island, from Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883) 18.1 The kaleidoscope of playful possibilities, reprinted from Angela Colvert, The Kaleidoscope of Play in a Digital World: A Literature Review (2021), Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights Foundation 20.1 “It is her, Rosabel, the others follow,” from Den ofantliga Rosabel (2017) by Malin Kivelä and Linda Bondestam. ©Linda Bondestam 20.2 “I’ve lived with Marbles for eight years, but today was the first time we ever got to have a conversation,” from Al-​sa-​taang (2012) by Baek Heena. ©Baek Heena Bear Books Inc.

x

50 53 216 248 250

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Amanda K. Allen is Professor of Children’s Literature at Eastern Michigan University, where she studies postwar adolescent romance novels (known as junior novels) and the mid-​century network of professional women who produced and distributed them. Her current book project constructs a revised history of twentieth-​century young adult literature that incorporates histories of women’s employment in publishing, librarianship, and education. She has also published articles on fan and fandom studies and is currently the YA section editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. Trevor Boffone is Lecturer in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. His work using TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, ABC News, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood, among numerous national media platforms. He is the author of Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok (2021) and the coauthor of Latinx Teens: US Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen (2022), in addition to having coedited five collections on Latinx cultural studies. Clare Bradford is Emeritus Alfred Deakin Professor at Deakin University in Melbourne. Her books include Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (2001), which won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award and the International Research Society Book Award; Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007); New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (2009) (with Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum); and The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature (2015), which won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Emily Bruce is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota Morris. She is the author of Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class (2021). Ramona Caponegro is Curator of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida and a Former Professor of Children’s Literature at Eastern Michigan University. She has served on the Caldecott Medal Committee, chaired the Pura Belpré Award and Phoenix Picture Book Award Committees, and published essays on other children’s book awards. xi

Notes on Contributors

Shih-​Wen Sue Chen is Associate Professor in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. She is the author of Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood (2019) and Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–​ 1911 (2013). She is the coeditor (with Sin Wen Lau) of Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers (2022). Karen Coats is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge. She is also a visiting Associate Professor for the MA Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University and Professor Emerita at Illinois State University. Valerie Coghlan is an independent researcher and Lecturer. She is a former editor of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature and is currently President of the Board of Bookbird, Inc. She is a founding member of a number of children’s book organizations in Ireland, including IBBY Ireland. Angela Colvert is Lecturer in Education at the University of Sheffield and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton. Her research focuses on “transmedia storying” and understanding playful literacy practices through co-​design of digital games. She recently worked with the Digital Futures Commission in the United Kingdom to investigate possibilities and challenges relating to children’s free play in a digital world and support the development of rights-​respecting products and services for children and young people. Sara K. Day is an independent scholar of children’s and young adult literature. The author of Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature (2013) and the coeditor of two essay collections, she has served as the editor of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Her interests include narrative theory, gender, popular culture, and fandom studies. Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She is the coeditor (with Zoe Jaques) of Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film (2021), (with Irena Barbara Kalla) of Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind (2021), and (with Macarena García-​ González) of Children’s Cultures after Childhood (2023), and has published, among other topics, on child-​led research, utopianism, and new materialism. In 2017–​21, she served on the board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. Virginie Douglas, Associate Professor at Rouen Normandy University (France), specializes in children’s literature and its theory, narration, and translation. She is the editor or coeditor of Perspectives contemporaines du roman pour la jeunesse (2003), Littérature de jeunesse et diversité culturelle (2013), Retranslating Children’s Literature (2014), État des lieux de la traduction pour la jeunesse (2015), an issue of Palimpsestes: Traduire les sens en littérature pour la jeunesse (2019), and Family Stories and Children’s Literature: Parentage, Transmission or Reinvention? (2020). Her monograph Le roman Young Adult au XXIe siècle en Grande-​Bretagne: Explorations de la marge et de l’entre-​deux is forthcoming with Peter Lang. Rachel Dwight Feldman is a PhD candidate, University of California President’s Dissertation Year Fellow, and Max Kade Fellow in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her dissertation, “The Mother Tongues and Multilingual Specters of Modern Hebrew Children’s Literature,” explores how a new constellation of authors –​ linguists, translators,

xii

Notes on Contributors

poets, and artists –​ turned to multimodal children’s literature and children’s systems in order to develop a discrete yet radically polyphonic modern Hebraist writing aimed at an intergenerational and multilingual audience. She is also a founding member of the IHC Research Focus Group Global Childhood Ecologies at UCSB. Julie Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University. She is the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine (2012) and the coauthor of Les Français (2021). Her monograph on gender representations in contemporary French children’s literature is forthcoming in the Routledge series Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present. Gabriele von Glasenapp is Professor of German Literature at the University of Cologne and from 2011 to 2022 Director of the Center for Children’s and Young Adult Media Research (ALEKI). She is the Vice President of the German Academy of Literature for Children and Young Readers (Volkach), coeditor of the Yearbook of the Gesellschaft für Kinder-​und Jugendliteraturforschung, and coeditor of the series Kinder-​und Jugendkultur, -​literatur und -​medien. Theorie –​Geschichte –​Didaktik. Her research interests include theory, history, and genres of children’s literature and Jewish children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present; nineteenth-​ and twentieth-​century European Jewish literature; the culture of remembrance; cultural memory; and popular culture. Etti Gordon Ginzburg is a senior lecturer and teacher trainer at Oranim College in the north of Israel. Her research interests include depictions of children and childhood in literature, nonsense poetry, genre and canonicity, and contemporary Israeli children’s literature. Giorgia Grilli teaches children’s literature and the history of illustration for children at the University of Bologna, where she co-​founded the Department of Education’s Centre of Research in Children’s Literature. A recipient of the Children’s Literature Association’s Distinguished Scholar Grant, from 2019 to 2021 she was principal investigator in a research project on nonfiction picturebooks. Her published works include Myth, Symbol and Meaning in Mary Poppins: The Governess as Provocateur (2014) and the edited volume Non-​Fiction Picturebooks: Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience (2020). Naomi Hamer is an associate professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her publications examine the cross-​media adaptation of children’s literature with a focus on picturebooks, mobile apps, and children’s museums. She is the coeditor of More Words About Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/​Verbal Texts for Young People (with Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, 2017) and The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-​Tale Cultures (with Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, and Lauren Bosc, 2018), and her joint research project with Ann Marie Murnaghan (Curating the Story Museum) has been awarded an SSHRC Insight Development Grant. Cristina Herrera is Professor and Director of Chicano/​Latino Studies at Portland State University. She is the author of ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy (2020) and the coauthor of Latinx Teens: US Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen (2022). Cristina has coedited multiple books on Latinx literature. Vanessa Joosen is Professor of English Literature and Children’s Literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where she leads the ERC-​funded project “Constructing Age for Young Readers” and organizes the Children’s Literature Summer School. She combines research on children’s

xiii

Notes on Contributors

literature and fairy tales with theories and methods from age studies, gender studies, translation studies, and digital humanities. She is the author of, among other works, Adulthood in Children’s Literature (2018) and Hoe oud is jong? Leeftijd in jeugdliteratuur? (2022, How Old Is Young? Age in Children’s Literature) and edited the volume Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media (2018). Michael Joseph is a rehabilitated rare books librarian and editor of The Robert Graves Review. Kenneth B. Kidd is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of three monographs, most recently Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought (2021), and the coeditor of four essay collections, most recently Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019). With Elizabeth Marshall, he coedits the Routledge book series on Children’s Literature and Culture. Toshio Kimura is Professor of English Language at Tsurumi University in Japan and a member of the Japan Society for Children’s Literature in English. His primary areas of research are children’s literature and English language education. He coauthored “Marginalia in Literature” (in Japanese) on English and American literature. Weronika Kostecka is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw. She conducts research and publishes works on children’s and young adult literature, fairy tales, and popular culture. She is the Director of the Research Laboratory of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Warsaw and the Editor-​in-​Chief of the scholarly journal Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura (Childhood: Literature and Culture). Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer is a professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen. She is the author of 4 monographs and has (co)edited 20 volumes. Her most recent publications are The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (edited, 2018), Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education (edited with Åse Marie Ommundsen and Gunnar Haaland, 2022), and Political Changes and Transformations in Twentieth and Twenty-​first Century Children’s Literature (edited with Farriba Schulz, 2023). Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein is Professor of Critical Theory and Director of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL) and its M(Res) in children’s literature at the University of Reading, UK. Karín has published extensively on children’s literature, childhood studies, literary and critical theory, queer theory, gender studies, philosophy, neuroscience, medicine, and mathematics. Christine Lötscher is Professor of Popular Literature and Media at the University of Zurich, where she focuses on children’s and youth media. Her published works include Die Alice-​ Maschine: Figurationen der Unruhe in der Populärkultur (2020). Margaret Mackey is Professor Emerita in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She researches youth literacies and literatures. Her most recent book is Space, Place, and Children’s Reading Development: Mapping the Connections (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

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Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University, where he teaches children’s literature and creative writing. His research focuses on play, challenging picturebooks, and creative reading. He is the current editor of Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature. Jennifer Miskec is Professor of English at Longwood University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in children’s and young adult literature. She and Annette Wannamaker are the coeditors of The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture (2016). Anne Morey is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University. Her book Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–​1934 (2003) deals with Hollywood’s critics and co-​opters; she has also edited an anthology on Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” phenomenon and coauthored, with Claudia Nelson, a book on the reuse of the ancient world in contemporary children’s and young adult fiction. She is now at work on a book about the Junior Literary Guild and children’s preparation for citizenship. Kristine Moruzi is an associate professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Australia, and the author of Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–​1915 (2012), and with Michelle J. Smith and Clare Bradford, From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840–​1940) (2018). Recent publications include Sexuality and Sexual Identities in Literature for Young People (2021, coedited with Paul Venzo) and Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/​ Monstrous Others (2021, coedited with Michelle J. Smith). Anja Müller is Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her publications have covered topics in English literature and culture from the early modern period to the present, with particular research interests in historical childhood concepts and children’s literature, eighteenth-​century literature and culture, twentieth-​century drama, adaptation, and transmedia, as well as popular (neo-​)medievalist fantasy cultures. Her publications include Framing Childhood in Eighteenth-​Century English Periodicals and Satirical Prints, 1689–​1789 (2009); Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature (editor, 2013); Canon Constitution and Canon Change in European Children’s Literature (edited with Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, 2017); and the book series SEKL-​Studien zur europäischen Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur (edited with Maren Conrad and Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Winter 2014ff). Megan L. Musgrave is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University at Indianapolis, where she teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature, multicultural literature, and literary pedagogy. Her book Digital Citizenship in Twenty-​First Century Young Adult Literature: Imaginary Activism (2015) is the basis for her continuing research on young people and their agency in digital culture. Claudia Nelson is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University, USA. In addition to having coedited multiple essay collections, she is the author or coauthor of six monographs, most recently Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Literature: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals, written with Anne Morey (2019). Her book Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–​1929 won the Children’s Literature Association’s award for the best scholarly book of 2003.

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Emer O’Sullivan, Professor of English Literature at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany, has published widely in German and English on image studies, children’s literature, and translation. Kinderliterarische Komparatistik won the IRSCL Award for outstanding research in 2001, and Comparative Children’s Literature won the 2007 Children’s Literature Association Book Award. Her updated and expanded Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature appeared in 2023. Debbie Olson is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Valley College, where she teaches writing, literature, and film/​media. Her research interests include images of African and African American children in film and television; the intersections of race, gender, and childhood in cinema and television; childhood studies; cultural studies; and New Hollywood cinema. Mia Österlund is Docent in Literary Studies at Helsinki University and Professor of Comparative Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. She is the project manager of the research projects Competing Temporalities: Chrononormativity in Finland-​Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture (2019–​23) and Children’s Literature Criticism and Research (2022–​26), the assistant editor of Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research, and the coeditor of Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature (2021). Her research interests include queer temporality and girlhood studies. Kimberley Reynolds, OBE, is Emeritus Professor of Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. She has won several awards and honors for her contributions to research in children’s literature studies. Jane Rosen is a librarian and currently works for the Imperial War Museum. Her research interest is in radical and working-​class children’s literature, and she has published work on socialist education movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. With Kimberley Reynolds and Michael Rosen, she is the coeditor of an anthology of radical children’s stories, Reading and Rebellion (2018). Carrie Sickmann is a senior lecturer at Indiana University at Indianapolis, where she specializes in Victorian and children’s literature. Her work has appeared in the MLA’s Teaching Literature in the Online Classroom, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Victorian Literature and Culture. Her interests include fandom studies, adaptation theory, narrative theory, and pedagogy. Michelle J. Smith is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of three books: Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840–​ 1914 (2022), From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–​1940 (2018), and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–​1915 (2011). She has also coedited six books in the fields of children’s and Victorian literature, the most recent of which is Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-​Century Childhoods (coedited with Kristine Moruzi, 2023). Joseph Michael Sommers is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches courses on children’s and young adult literature, popular culture, and comics. He has published essays, articles, and miscellaneous other things on topics in youth literature and culture, comics, movies, video games, and Neil Gaiman. He is the editor of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and a proud husband and father of two little girls who love to read. Deborah Stevenson recently retired as Clinical Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign, where she was the editor of Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and the Director of the Center for Children’s Books. xvi

Notes on Contributors

Deanna Stover is Assistant Professor of English and Co-​director of the Digital Humanities Minor at Christopher Newport University. Her work on children’s literature has appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Scholarly Editing, and Women’s Writing. She is currently working on an expanded digital edition of H. G. Wells’s Floor Games and Little Wars that incorporates critical making through the use of 3D printing. Björn Sundmark is a scholar and critic of children’s literature, and Professor of English Literature at Malmö University (Sweden), where he teaches English literature and children’s literature. His publications include the coedited collections Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature (2020) and The Nation in Children’s Literature (2012). Sundmark also serves on the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award jury. Mateusz Świetlicki is an assistant professor at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of English Studies and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture. His scholarship focuses on North American and Ukrainian children’s and young adult literature and culture, memory, gender, and queer studies, as well as popular culture and film. He has published in English, Polish, Ukrainian, and Croatian; his most recent book, Next-​Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory (2023), examines the transnational entanglements of Canada and Ukraine. Manon van de Water is the Vilas-​Phipps Distinguished Achievement Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison. She has published widely on theatre and drama for children and youth globally as Chair of ITYARN, the International Theatre for Young Audiences Research Network (ITYARN.org), and a member of the ASSITEJ Executive Board (assitej-​international.org). Sara Van den Bossche is Assistant Professor of Children’s Literature Studies at Tilburg University (the Netherlands). Her main teaching and research topics are racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity, cognitive criticism, feminist criticism, canonization, adaptation, and picturebooks. She coordinates the “Transcultural Trajectories” track of the Erasmus Mundus International Master’s program “Children’s Literature, Media, and Culture” (CLMC). Annette Wannamaker is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University, where she serves as a coordinator of the children’s literature program. She served ten years as North American Editor-​in-​Chief of Children’s Literature in Education, has edited several collections of academic essays, and is the author of Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (2008). Åsa Warnqvist is Docent in Literary Studies at Stockholm University and Director of the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books in Stockholm. She is the project manager of the research project The Children’s Library Saga Archive: Mapping and Visualization of a Swedish Children’s Book Series 1899–​1970 (2022–​2025), the editor of a new history of Swedish children’s literature (due in 2024), coeditor of Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature (2021), and consulting senior editor of Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research. Her research interests include literature of sociology and gender and normativity perspectives. Courtney Weikle-​Mills (Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh) is a scholar trained in early American and transatlantic studies who has become fascinated by the ways that children’s literature in the long nineteenth century was shaped by international trade. She has written about Afro-​ Caribbean storytelling in “The Obscure Histories of Goosee Shoo-​shoo and Black Cinderella: Seeking xvii

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Afro-​Caribbean Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century,” which appeared in volume 47 of Children’s Literature. Her second book in progress, tentatively titled Little Hands and Mouths: Children’s Literature and the Ethics of Relation in the Early Atlantic World, considers how children’s books, as nominally ethical and educational goods, imagine and help to realize diverse forms of relationality within a transatlantic context. Elisabeth Wesseling is Professor of Cultural Memory, Gender, and Diversity at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. She has edited two volumes on children’s media (The Child Savage, 1890–​2010: From Comics to Games [2016]; Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys and Games [2017]) and coedited special journal issues for Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, International Research in Children’s Literature, and BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, in addition to publishing numerous research articles. Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu is Director of the Chinese Language Center and a Professor of Children’s Literature and Taiwanese Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. She has published widely on children’s literature and culture and is the author of a Chinese monograph, Discourses of Subject, Gender, Place, and (Post)modern Childhood in Postwar Taiwanese Juvenile Fiction (2017). Her recent publications include a co-​edited Chinese monograph, Border-​Crossings, Coming-​of-​Age, and In-​Between: Contemporary Trends in Children’s Literature Research (2022). Junko Yoshida is a former professor at Hiroshima University and at Kobe College. She organized the 2007 Kyoto Congress of the IRSCL as an Advisory Committee member. She has contributed to several edited books, including Peer Pressure in Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (2010), Expectations and Experiences (2007), Bridges for the Young (2004), and The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature (2004). Andrew Zalot is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s School of Information Sciences. His work focuses on censorship and examining the relationship between online and local communities at the sites of book bannings. Dafna Zur is Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. Her first book, Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea (2017), interrogates the contradictory political and social visions made possible by children’s literature in colonial and postcolonial Korea. She has published articles on North Korean popular science and science fiction, translations in North Korean literature, the Korean War in children’s literature, childhood in cinema, children’s poetry and music, and popular culture, and her translations of Korean fiction have appeared in wordwithoutborders.org, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Short Stories, the Penguin Anthology of Korean Fiction, and the Asia Literary Review.

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INTRODUCTION Elisabeth Wesseling, Andrea Mei-​Ying Wu, and Claudia Nelson

Research into children’s literature is a field fed by and developed with diverse sources, primarily library and information science, education (pedagogy), history of education, and literary studies. The first two explore and promote the role of the text in developing emergent literacy. Education also approaches children’s literature as an instrument for inculcating social values and mores in the next generation, while the history of education explores and interrogates children’s books as sources of information about the value patterns of past generations. By comparison, literary studies analyzes writing for children as a specific literary genre, a mode of literature in its own right. Literary studies is the newcomer to this field of children’s literature research. While library science and education emerged around the turn of the twentieth century, literary studies only entered into the picture in the late 1960s, with works such as John Rowe Townsend’s Written for Children: An Outline of English-​Language Children’s Literature (1965) and Sheila Egoff’s Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature (1969) as two notable examples. The study of children’s literature as literature may be understood within the broader context of societal de-​hierarchization, a phenomenon evolving from the mid-​1960s and accelerating in the later decades of the twentieth century, especially in the global north. In this context, hierarchies between parents and children, teachers and pupils, men and women, straight and queer people, upper classes and lower classes were no longer taken for granted; they were subjected to sustained critique by movements such as the antiauthoritarian education movement, women’s emancipation, gay emancipation, systematic efforts to give the lower classes access to higher education as the great leveler, and so on (de Swaan). Translated into literary studies, de-​hierarchization meant that the monopoly of canonical authors on literary studies curricula came under attack (Easthope). Writings by “others” now entered the picture (women, persons of color), as did cultural expressions targeting a mass rather than an elite audience. Media other than print also became a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry, giving birth to a vibrant field responsive to the introduction of ever newer electronic and digital technologies. Contesting the monopoly of the canon on research and teaching also created room for children’s literature. Initially, as work by Zohar Shavit and Maria Nikolajeva (among others) has shown, literary scholars were heavily invested in elevating the status of children’s literature to a mode of literature in its own right, admittedly different from, but not necessarily less than, literature for adult readers. These efforts often implied a certain antagonism towards instrumentalizing approaches that treated children’s literature as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. In other words, literary studies did not necessarily align with library and information science, education, or the history of education.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-1

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Elisabeth Wesseling, Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, and Claudia Nelson

As pioneering practitioners of emergent literary inquiry into children’s literature argued, the research object had emancipated itself from its former subjection to pedagogical and educational regimes, and to do it full justice, research had to follow suit (de Vries, Ewers). This emancipation started around the beginning of the twentieth century, when advocates for children’s literature claimed that writers of children’s books had to be written vom Kinde aus (Lypp) –​that is, present the story from what Peter Hunt calls a “childist” perspective. Mere moralizing would not do; issues of style had to be of prime concern to any self-​respecting author. Poetics and undue moralizing were considered to be at odds with each other, the latter being cast as a persistent threat to literary quality. In the late 1960s, the emancipation from pedagogy assumed the shape of lifting the ban on taboo subjects such as illness, death, divorce, or sex, or traumatic historical episodes such as the Holocaust, the various dictatorial regimes that have terrorized the “bloodlands” (to borrow Timothy Snyder’s term), or the armed conflicts in the Middle East. Increasingly, the consensus has been that these topics should not be kept away from children, meaning that children’s authors demanded the freedom to tackle any subject. In another emancipatory move, authors have also claimed the freedom to use any stylistic device they see fit, to write for themselves or “the child in themselves,” unconcerned about (in-​)accessibility to juvenile audiences. Even texts aimed at the very young may engage in literary experimentation with narrative perspective, irony, metafiction, intertextual references, and so on. These moves went hand in hand with claims to the same literary autonomy (as Aukje van Rooden describes it) that had shaped scholarly inquiry into literature in the wake of the New Criticism that had emerged in the 1930s and went on to imprint its mark on literary studies well into the 1970s. The idea was that a true work of literature transcends the conditions of its making, meaning the biography of its author and the wider societal conditions in which the work was produced and received. These supposedly extraneous factors were considered largely irrelevant, not worthy of scholarly inquiry. Autonomist poetics imposed text-​immanent approaches. This focus has generated a plethora of publications on topics including genres in children’s literature; narrative strategies; rhythm, rhyme, and embodiment in children’s poetry; the role of poetry and song in children’s play; and the interplay between words and images in picturebooks. Such approaches remain valuable and topical, in that they remind us that one cannot read and interpret a narrative fiction as if it were expository prose, or poetry like a newspaper column. However, they no longer define, let alone exhaust, the field of children’s literature research. While children’s literature studies was in the process of establishing itself as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry, autonomist poetics was already moving past its prime in literary studies more broadly. Reception studies (see, for example, Machor and Goldstein; O’Shea) and reader response theory (Iser; Cocks) emerged in the 1970s to illuminate the role of the reader in the construction of literary value and meaning. The shift of scholarly attention from text to reader imparted a renewed awareness that readers do not operate in a social vacuum, but are shaped by entities such as libraries, schools, publishers, professional literary critics, literary magazines, and literary societies. In addition, as Aram Veeser’s volume on this topic demonstrates, the new historicism that launched its attack on the New Criticism from the 1980s onwards developed new insights into the interactions between literary text and historical context beyond orthodox Marxist schemata of base versus superstructure. The subsequent digital turn, with the launch of the World Wide Web in 1989, has not only multiplied the fora and platforms facilitating interactions among authors, readers, and their intermediaries via websites, apps, blogs, Facebook groups, fansites, and so on, but also fundamentally redefined and greatly enriched children’s reading, learning, and living experiences. Indeed, digital media have been so effective in this respect that the line between authors and readers has been blurred considerably, as is expressed in neologisms such as “prosumer” (Bruns; Seymour) or “wreader” (Kouta; Duggan). This development has created new opportunities for children to manifest themselves as writers, rather than mere consumers of the writings produced for them by adult authors. 2

Introduction

The transnationalization of children’s literature also stepped up considerably in the latter decades of the twentieth century, due to causes such as postwar humanitarian idealism, the aftermath of colonialism, and the rise of globalization. But this trend within children’s literature is also caused by the pressures of the book market. Putting out an illustrated children’s book, in particular, is an expensive and therefore risky endeavor. Publishing it simultaneously in different countries through an international conglomerate of publishers is a form of risk reduction, which makes the effort to attune the book to local markets via translation and localization worthwhile. One may also partly attribute the ease with which books cross borders nowadays to contemporary multimedia culture, with story content being adapted to different media platforms that all operate transnationally. The net effect of the shift from text to reader, or from content to user, is that autonomist poetics has become a rearguard phenomenon, while many early modern concerns with children’s literature have returned, but with a difference. Previous preoccupations with imparting to children specific values such as piety, obedience, thrift, diligence, courage, honesty, love of country, empathy, and care have been replaced by a focus on identity politics. Children’s authors and their critics exert themselves to expose children to characters that are representative of a broadly inclusive gamut of different social identities, to provide all possible readers, not just white middle-​class children, with characters that they can identify with. This goal has inspired a renewed imperative to inculcate desirable values in children, in a concerted effort to steer free from sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and ageism. Worries about instrumentalizing and thereby degrading children’s literature have given way to concerns about transmitting social injustice to the next generation, concerns so acute as sometimes to result in censorship. Now that children’s literature scholarship has come to understand children’s literature as a social practice rather than an autonomous collection of texts, its former antagonism to adjacent disciplines such as library science and education has diminished. Around the turn of the twenty-​first century, children’s literature research expanded both its object and approaches to this object. This expansion has made children’s literature research more open to interdisciplinary collaborations. Interdisciplinarity also received a strong impetus from the emergence of childhood studies in the 1990s, a field that creates bridges among all disciplines that have studied children’s literature, inviting conversations between the social sciences and humanities involved in the study of childhood (see, for example, Duane). Childhood studies has shed new light on the conceptualization of children and childhood, illuminating the social and historical variability of the latter, and criticizing the often patronizing approaches to the first. It has taken issue with developmentalist understandings of children as mere becomings or not-​yet-​persons, arguing that children should also be understood as beings with agency, rights, and duties, while adults should acknowledge that they are still and will remain becomings, since all humans need to learn new skills and knowledge to adapt to ever-​changing circumstances (see Arneil). The emphasis on respecting children’s agency in childhood studies has been conducive to methodological innovation, fostering so-​called “participatory” approaches. Rather than being reduced to the status of research objects, children are trained and enlisted as co-​researchers in projects that concern their life world, which includes, of course, books, but also toys, films, TV series, stage plays, (computer) games, amusement parks, and more. This volume has been designed to safeguard the legacies of text-​immanent approaches to children’s literature while also incorporating the more recent interdisciplinary, international, transnational, and intermedial expansions of the field. We start with “Frameworks and Tools,” where theoretical conceptualizations of the object of research are explored. This section aims to familiarize readers with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature. We then proceed in “Media and Genres” with an overview of important formats and genres that have shaped children’s literature up to now. Special attention is paid to the exchanges and interdependencies of these different forms and platforms and to how those genres change along with time and space. 3

Elisabeth Wesseling, Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, and Claudia Nelson

Like texts for adults, children’s texts have always presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity (such as nation, social class, religion, and so on) and sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other.” In recent decades, producers of children’s texts have increasingly foregrounded identities once lacking visibility and voice. The third section, “Identities,” thus aims to do justice to the current focus on the ways in which children’s literature both reflects and constructs different social identities, with a particular focus on marginalized identities. Both in its origins and in current trends of globalization, children’s literature involves the crossing of borders, most notably but by no means exclusively those between adult and child. The fourth section, “Border Crossings,” hence focuses on traditional forms such as translation and adaptation as key indicators for exploring the historical evolutions and transregional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature. It also highlights issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, franchising, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature. In keeping with the shift from texts to readers, the fifth and last section, “Institutions,” deals with the social institutions regulating the production and reception of children’s literature past and present. The institutions that produce children’s books have always had a powerful influence over both form and content, yet institutional authority has often been neglected in discussions of texts and genres. This section therefore considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content. This Routledge Companion contains forty-​three chapters. The volume’s focus is predominantly on North American and European children’s literature, to distinguish it from The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (edited by John Stephens, 2021), which focuses primarily on non-​Western children’s literature. In taking this focus, we do not aim to re-​establish the canonical views of children’s literature from Western perspectives, nor do we uphold the idea that children’s literature is exclusively a product of and for Western societies. Rather, we hope that this collection can point to areas of critical investigation related to children’s culture not only within Western societies but beyond their boundaries. This Companion presents children’s literature as an ever-​evolving form in which past, present, and future are entangled. As the importance of new media to children’s experience of texts over the first two decades of the twenty-​first century makes clear, children’s literature should be understood not only as subject to the interventions of social and cultural factors, but also as continually redefined by the encroachments and innovations of technology. In this regard, children’s literature perennially invites scholars across the globe to revisit and reconsider its whereabouts and possibilities. In this spirit, this Companion seeks to be of use both to scholars and teachers of children’s literature and to advanced students in the field, whatever discipline they may call home.

Works Cited Arneil, Barbara. “Becoming Versus Being: A Critical Analysis of the Child in Liberal Theory.” The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by David Archard and Colin M. Macleod, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 70–​96. Bruns, Axel. “From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-​Led Content Creation.” Paper presented at Transforming Audiences, London, 3–​4 September 2009, https://​epri​nts.qut.edu.au/​27370/​. Cocks, Neil. “The Implied Reader. Response and Responsibility: Theories of the Implied Reader in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children’s Literature: New Approaches, edited by Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 93–​117, doi:10.1057/​9780230523777_​5. Duane, Anna Mae, ed. The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. University of Georgia Press, 2013.

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Introduction Duggan, Jennifer. “Transformative Readings: Harry Potter Fan Fiction, Trans/​Queer Reader Response, and J. K. Rowling.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 53, no. 2, 2022, pp. 147–​68, doi:10.1007/​ s10583-​021-​09446-​9. Easthope, Anthony. Literary into Cultural Studies. 1991. Routledge, 2013. Hunt, Peter. “Childist Criticism: The Subculture of the Child, the Book, and the Critic.” Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books, vol. 43, 1984, pp. 43–​61. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. 1978. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Kouta, Ashraf Taha Mohamed. “Narrative Non-​Linearity and the Birth of the Wreader: A Hypertext Critical Reading of Selected Digital Texts.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 62, no. 5, 2021, pp. 586–​602. Lypp, Maria. Einfachheit als Kategorie der Kinderliteratur. Dipa, 1984. Machor, James L, and Philip Goldstein, eds. Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. Routledge, 2001. Miller, Alyson. “Unsuited to Age Group: The Scandals of Children’s Literature.” College Literature, vol. 21, no. 4, 2014, pp. 120–​40. Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Towards a New Aesthetic. Routledge, 1998. O’Shea, Cathy. “Let Them Speak: Using Reception Analysis to Understand Children’s Relationship with Fiction.” Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2015, pp. 217–​26, doi:10.2989/​16073614.2015.1061894. Rooden, Aukje van. “Reconsidering Literary Autonomy: From an Individual to a Relational Paradigm.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 76, no. 2, April 2015, pp. 167–​90. Seymour, Jessica. “Racebending and Prosumer Fanart Practices in Harry Potter Fandom.” A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, edited by Paul Booth, John Wiley and Sons, 2018, pp. 333–​47, doi:10.1002/​ 9781119237211.ch21. Shavit, Zohar. The Poetics of Children’s Literature. University of Georgia Press, 1986. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. Swaan, Abraham de. “Agoraphobia: On Changes in Emotional and Relational Management.” Theory and Society, vol. 10, no. 3, 1981, pp. 359–​85. Veeser, Aram H., ed. The New Historicism. Routledge, 1989. Vries, Anne de. “Emancipatie in Zeven Richtingen: Een kleine Geschiedenis, 1778–​1998 [Emancipation in Seven Directions: A Brief History].” Literatuur zonder leeftijd, vol. 12, no. 47, 1998, pp. 263–​79.

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PART I

Concepts and Tools

The possible approaches to children’s literature and culture are limited only by researchers’ creativity and the availability of the information necessary to support their arguments. Thus, this section does not claim to be comprehensive in its coverage of “Concepts and Tools” used in explorations of children’s texts, but rather to sketch a range of possibilities in current use. Some are as old as the field of children’s literature studies itself, while others are outgrowths of newer technological or conceptual developments; all can be (and frequently are) combined with others, demonstrating their versatility and richness. The section begins with Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein’s discussion of theory. Theory, she suggests, exists in part to raise questions whose answers might seem obvious but in fact are not, such as “What is a child?” or “What happens when a child reads?” Asking questions helps to illuminate assumptions made by and about various stakeholders: creators, marketers, purchasers, and consumers of works for children, as well as students of these works, since the questions we ask shape the answers we reach. A question central to cultural products aimed at children is “What are they for?” In “Poetics and Pedagogy,” Karen Coats addresses the interplay and interconnection, as old as children’s literature itself, between instruction and delight. The degree of comfort that a culture may have with the perception that art can and should teach varies widely, and this variation has much to tell us about the originating culture. Somewhat similarly, in “Ethics and Historical Perspectives,” Amanda Allen explores approaches to the historical study of children’s literature, ultimately suggesting that the decisions we may make while engaged in such research reveal as much about our own outlook as they do about the time periods forming the ostensible subject for investigation. Like time, space shapes attitudes toward works for children, with an author’s handling of the physical setting of the story creating a particular tone, reflecting cultural understandings of childhood, and providing a world into which readers can slip. In their chapter on literary geography, Björn Sundmark and Chrys ogonus Siddha Malilang discuss a way of framing the study of children’s literature that has emerged more recently than those examined by Coats and Allen. Meanwhile, Megan Musgrave looks at another comparatively late phenomenon, posthumanism and its subdivision new materialism, terms that describe both certain literary works and certain approaches to them. If literary geography focuses on the “where” of a text, implying a state of being firmly located, posthumanism often questions matters that readers might have thought they could count on, such as the borders between the human and the animal or mechanical or the nature of the interaction between the reader and the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-2

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Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu

book. In challenging such basic premises, posthumanism can offer readers new ways of considering their place in real and fictional worlds. Part I concludes with two chapters on new approaches to children’s literature, Deanna Stover’s on digital humanities (DH) and Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak’s on participatory research involving children as co-​investigators working alongside adult scholars. Advocating a playful approach to DH and to children’s literature scholarship, Stover surveys a variety of uses to which digital technology can be put and a number of representative projects that have resulted, from digital archives to material artifacts produced via 3D printing that can illuminate texts of the past. For her part, Deszcz-​ Tryhubczak shows how a methodology emerging from the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies can be implemented in literary study in a way that recognizes children’s agency and potential to contribute in real ways to the heretofore adult realm of scholarship.

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1 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND THEORY Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein

At first sight, children’s literature and what is broadly called “theory” are often assumed to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, with children’s literature being seen as accessible, simple, easy, and clear and theory as inaccessible, complex, difficult, and obscure. But as this chapter will explain, this first impression is deceiving, as from its earliest origins children’s literature has in fact been the topic of extensive theoretical discussion and debate, while theory in turn has been affected by the issues raised by children’s literature. The key reason for this interconnection is that children’s literature is a genre almost always written, published, marketed, and sold by adults for and often about children. This means that issues of power and of “otherness” are intrinsically embedded in this field: how and why do adults write for child readers? Usually, this is asserted to happen through adult authors either remembering their own childhoods or gathering a knowledge of children from experience and observation. But such “common sense” assertions often turn out to lead after all to different ideas of childhood and literature, resulting in different ways of writing, marketing, and selling –​and researching and teaching –​children’s literature, as this chapter will explore. Our consideration, then, will be what “theory” is for or about, especially but not only in relation to children’s literature. In this sense, “theory” in this chapter is understood from the perspective of literary and critical theory, not from the perspective of some social scientists who would rather define it as a set of universalizing tenets based on empirical evidence that have passed critical experimenting and testing. The reason for choosing to focus on “theory” from the literary and critical perspectives is that these perspectives have specific relevance for issues in children’s literature (criticism), including in fact in relation to social science research in these areas, as this chapter will also explain further.

“Criticism” and “Theory” A first issue that can be considered is that not all children’s books are judged to be children’s literature: the question of the “literary” is one that has been raised from the very start of all literary criticism, with its roots in the West in classical Greek and Roman literary criticism and theory and in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic (the three monotheistic “religions of the book”) theological debates around interpretations of religious texts. Aristotle’s famous writings on tragedy are concerned with the question of why some plays are judged more successful than others. For the theological scholars, questions of the authenticity of religious texts as well as questions of interpretation are at the center of their thinking. Drawing a distinction, then, between “children’s books” and “children’s literature”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-3

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Karín Lesnik-Oberstein

has to do with judgment and evaluation: making decisions about what books are better written than others and why or drawing distinctions between genres. These decisions are made on an everyday basis by parents, carers, teachers, librarians, publishers, and booksellers as well as by academics as they engage in writing, producing, selecting, recommending, selling, or analyzing books for children; as with the books themselves, children’s literature criticism too is almost always made by adults for –​ on behalf of –​children. If making such judgments is what children’s literature criticism does, then “theory” is that which can help us to think about the grounds on which the criticism does this. In this sense, as eminent British children’s literature theorist Peter Hunt writes, Theory [...] by seeking to explain what we might otherwise have thought was obvious, [...] draws attention to hidden problems. We usually get along quite well by assuming things to be true that we really know to be quite untrue; for example, that we know how people read, and what happens when they do; [...] that we know how and why stories work. Theory may not solve any of those problems directly, but it forces us to confront them. (1) Children’s literature, as Hunt argues, raises theoretical issues from the very basic level of how and why people read. This is because children’s literature cannot assume reading in the way that much literary study in wider terms often can and does: in relation to adult literature, questions of the author, text, reader, and reading can be (and are) certainly also raised, but they are not as fundamental and necessary as in relation to children’s literature, where the inherent difference between books’ producers (adults) and their readers (children) must be negotiated one way or another. The prominent Canadian children’s literature theorist Perry Nodelman explains this difference as follows: “what theorists often call the other –​ of that which is opposite to the person doing the talking or thinking or studying” and adds, importantly, that “what defines them as outside of their subject [the other] is, exactly, their ability to study it” (29). In other words, theory helps us to understand that adults and children are not just different from each other because people perceive differences between them –​for instance of knowledge, experience, or abilities –​but also because it is adults who come first and then decide who and how and why to study. As a consequence, even when a difference is not seen to be the case (where it is believed that the adult producers and the child readers are the same), that presumed similarity must also still be somehow established and stated. Theory in relation to wider literary studies is often assumed primarily to be about different approaches to literary texts, such as Marxism, feminism, stylistics, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, race theory, dis/​ability theory, postcolonialism, posthumanism, or ecocriticism (to name just a few). But for children’s literature the issues of the adult producer and the child reader remain fundamental even though all these approaches can also be drawn on, with questions always remaining too about how and why each of the approaches is actually constituted and implemented in relation to author, text, and reader as the three core concepts of all literary criticism and theory. This has led British writer Aidan Chambers, among other important children’s literature theorists, even to “wonde[r]‌why literary theorists haven’t yet realised that the best demonstration of all they say when they talk about phenomenology or structuralism or deconstruction or any other critical approach can be most clearly and easily demonstrated in children’s literature” (qtd. in Hunt 5). In other words, by falling outside of “literature” as it is generally understood, children’s literature can raise questions about that wider literature too, while by being after all children’s literature, the field nevertheless also partakes of the issues of literature in general. In being in this position, children’s literature benefits from thinking about and through theory and in turn reshapes and redirects that theory. Because theory in children’s literature helps us to understand the basis for critical judgments –​ how and why they are made –​it does not remain an abstract area only for academic researchers, but 10

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instead has everyday, practical consequences for how people make decisions about, for instance, how and why to write, edit, publish, market, and sell children’s literature or how to use children’s literature at home and in the classroom: how and why to make and use good books for children to somehow educate, develop, shape, and amuse them.

The Origins of Writing for Children: What Is a Child? Another aspect of the distinction between children’s books and children’s literature is the question of when writing for children developed in the first place. This matter will be discussed in more detail in other chapters in this volume, but here I focus specifically on the theoretical issues that underpin such historical claims and ideas. Broadly speaking, most historians of children’s literature point to two sources: first, writing for children is seen to develop from the oral traditions of folk and fairy tales, including myths and legends, which were originally not specifically for children at all, but for any parts of the population that were not literate or –​ even if literate –​ that participated in these cultural traditions. This source is also often seen to be global, in the sense that all cultures either have an oral tradition or are continuously orally based. The second source is writing that was either read by anyone regardless of age, or is seen to be primarily so didactic and moralistic that in that sense it is often judged not to be a children’s book: here, the split between children’s books and children’s literature is rooted in a difference perceived between books that teach and books that amuse children specifically. In any case, both oral and didactic sources are considered to have developed into children’s literature through the discovery or invention of childhood. I write “discovery or invention” because in fact the difference between these ideas points to a major, long-​standing, and ongoing theoretical debate around not just children’s literature, but also all aspects of childhood, including education, history, philosophy, psychology, law, and medicine. For the key question is: did adults start producing children’s literature because they finally discovered what children were really like? And what children therefore really prefer to read? Or because childhood was invented as a cultural and historical identity, leading to changes to how children were treated and shaped? The origin of this debate is often located in the French historian Philippe Ariès’s 1957 book Centuries of Childhood, in which he famously proposed that childhood is not a biological category but a cultural and historical construction of identity, linked to wider developments in Europe such as the eighteenth-​century agricultural revolution and the nineteenth-​century industrial revolution, which led to changes in labor conditions and practices and schooling. Ariès argues that the childhood formed by ever-​more specific roles –​in relation to schooling and specific clothing, foods, and toys –​is invested by adults with value, so that childhood can be seen by adults as either innocent or wise, either obedient or rebellious, either kind or cruel, either original or imitative, among other dichotomies. This discussion also raises the important question of whether childhood can be seen as transcultural or whether it was invented in different cultures at different times and perhaps in some cultures and times not at all: whether in such places children are seen as smaller adults, as Ariès argues was also the case in medieval Europe. Leading Chinese children’s literature theorist Zhu Ziqiang, for example, traces “the discovery of children” in China in the work of Chinese scholar Zhou Zuoren (1885–​ 1967), whom Zhu reads as in turn influenced by the ideas of Western scholars such as psychologist G. Stanley Hall and psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Charles Baudouin (71–​72). Zhu’s account alerts us also to the fact that children’s literature and childhood more widely are often understood to be Western discoveries or inventions (just as the agricultural and industrial revolutions are often seen as originating in Europe and primarily in Britain) that were then spread to other parts of the world either by a voluntary engagement with Western ideas, as with Zhou for instance, or by colonial or imperialist imposition, as with the forced implementation of certain Western political, economic, religious, and educational systems and beliefs. European historical writings that are credited with the invention or discovery of childhood famously include the English philosopher John Locke’s Some 11

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Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), the French philosopher Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or Treatise on Education (1762), and the Romantic poetry of English poets such as William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience [1789]) and William Wordsworth (The Prelude [1850]). In countries that were subject to Western colonialization and imperialism to a much greater extent than China, including other Asian countries and most of the global south, the history of children’s literature is that of the importation and domination of British children’s literature (whether or not in translation) until at least the early twentieth century, followed by the development of an indigenous children’s literature that, even where it draws for instance on an indigenous oral tradition of storytelling, nevertheless is also pre-​shaped in complex ways by the very nature of the conventions of writing.1 This is the area of postcolonial theory, as articulated by the famous postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha: “It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences –​literature, art, music, ritual, life, death –​and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as it circulates as a sign within specific contextual locations and social systems of value” (47). We could add to Bhabha’s list of such “diverse cultural experiences”: childhood. As much as this debate about either the invention or the discovery of childhood rests on important theoretical questions and issues, it also has such vital practical consequences because very often people’s engagement with children and childhood rests on their conviction that they know what children are really like and, therefore, what the best book is for them (or what education, or what psychological or medical treatment, and so on). Simultaneously, thinking of childhood as invented or constructed brings with it the possibility for also thinking about why and how childhood is constructed in that way and by whom and whether it could be considered differently. However, it could equally be argued that the division between childhood seen as “discovered” and childhood seen as “invented” has more overlap than might initially be thought: those who assume that knowledge of the child is self-​evident from observation or from certain psychological, scientific, or biological evidence nevertheless may find themselves –​ perhaps surprisingly –​ disagreeing with each other, no matter how commonsensical or scientifically based their evidence may seem to them. Conversely, those who see the child as a specifically political, economic, religious, historical, or cultural construction that may change as those conditions change nevertheless often still rely on ideas of an ultimate consistency and continuity in the traits assigned to childhood, which after all are not seen to be changeable no matter what cultural or historical changes may take place. Somewhere on the scale between these positions is where almost all critics and theorists of children’s literature can be found, one way or another, but there is a small group of theorists who position themselves at the far end of the spectrum in following the arguments of British theorist Jacqueline Rose in considering childhood never to have essential traits or properties at all, but instead to be always defined from the perspective of the other: in other words, that there is no child other than that claimed from the memory or the observation of the adult. Nodelman named this group of critics the “Reading School,”2 although for some children’s literature critics this kind of work by definition falls outside of children’s literature criticism altogether in reading children’s literature not at all in terms of a child readership (not even indirectly), but in terms of perspectives on the child.

Authorship: The J. K. Rowling Phenomenon With the invention or discovery of childhood comes also the idea of an author who writes specifically for children. Although there have long been internationally famous and culturally high-​ profile children’s writers such as Lewis Carroll of the Alice books, Frances Hodgson Burnett of Little Lord Fauntleroy, L. M. Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, and Jacqueline Wilson, thanks to J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, the status of the children’s author has in past decades been heightened globally to an unprecedented level: the author 12

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as world-​famous celebrity and what is more, an enormously wealthy celebrity. However, theory here too enables us to examine many of the taken-​for-​granted ideas about children’s authors. It is commonplace for most people involved in children’s literature to attribute the success of certain works either to the authors having an exceptional memory of their own childhoods or to their having an exceptional knowledge of children on which to draw for their writing. As we saw Chambers arguing earlier, in this sense issues around authorship can be taken to be magnified in relation to children’s literature compared even to their importance in wider literary criticism and theory, precisely because the author in children’s literature is the one seen to be writing for and about children. Even when some children’s authors claim to be writing not for the child at all, but for themselves or actually for adults, their knowledge of childhood is attributed to them in the judgments of the critics about why the books are after all successful children’s literature: the aesthetic or thematic aspects of their texts, for instance, are then judged to be specifically suitable for or appealing to children. Nevertheless, the fact that some books that are claimed to be written for adults end up being read by children (famous examples include Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels) and vice versa (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Harry Potter series, as well as Nielsen book sales’ data reporting in 2015 that fifty-​five percent of young adult books are bought by adults and seventy-​eight percent of those are buying them for themselves3) does destabilize the assumption that authors’ intentions dictate which readers end up reading their texts. Furthermore, even if the reception of the texts ends up with the readers for whom the author claims to write, the fact that the texts may be read differently than the authors claim to intend disrupts the supposed “control” of the authors’ intentions even further: even ideas of “obvious” moral or didactic “messages” are disputed among different readers and critics. In wider literary theory, this questioning of the role and extent of authorial intentions and their control of readership and interpretation again draws on a very long history and is grounded in the debates in the theologies of the three monotheistic religions “of the book” around the authority (etymologically linked to the very term “author”) and interpretation of the religious texts. Here too, the key issue is the ways in which the interpretations of the texts are seen to differ and to what extent they are permitted to differ: what to one critic or theologian is a different interpretation is to another simply wrong. This spectrum of views remains the case to the present day, also in children’s literature criticism and theory. If the Rowling phenomenon has endorsed the status of the all-​mighty children’s author, then this formulation is destabilized in turn by the theological endorsement of the Divine Being as the ultimate and only “Author/​authority”: in this view, no mere human can replicate the authority of the original and only Author. It also remains central to this issue that before the commercialization of texts through the printing press and the wider spread of literacy in the early modern period in Europe, handwritten manuscripts were often circulated anonymously and that in this sense the author did not have the same function or status as in later periods, as argued in the French historian and theorist Michel Foucault’s famous 1969 article “What Is an Author?” Foucault further points out that such manuscripts were not conceived of as owned by their author and therefore not seen as sources of potential personal profit in the days before copyright laws came into force in Britain in the eighteenth century. It may be noted in relation to this point that even today, the ideal of the genius (children’s) author whose works make large sums of money and are adapted into films and merchandise (much aspired to by enrollees in present-​day creative writing courses) is something of a chimera: some of the key outcomes of research that the British Society of Authors commissioned in 2018 include that the “median annual income of a professional author is £10,500 (US$11,300), which is well below the minimum wage,” and that “just 13.7 percent of authors earn their income solely from writing. In 2005 this was 40 percent” (Anderson). The idea of children’s literature as distinct from the wider category of children’s books also obscures, therefore, how many children’s books are not considered as written by someone with the status of an “author” at all but by “writers” who either work together on a series under one pseudonym (popular American series such as Nancy Drew or Goosebumps are examples of this phenomenon) or by writers working on 13

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children’s learning-​to-​read series, educational textbooks, or nonfiction books. Theory in relation to authorship, then, helps us to understand that a person writing is not necessarily an “author,” or an entity who controls the reception of a text, but instead a value attached to specific kinds of writers who have specific powers attributed to them. This perspective helps us also to understand the practical consequences of the attribution of the status and powers of authorship to such as Rowling in terms of ideas of knowledge and talent and access to publishing and marketing and pay.

Knowing Children: Observation, Memory, Psychology, and Neuroscience If the authors of children’s literature are often widely credited with having an exceptional knowledge of childhood, many children’s literature critics and theorists also rely on claiming knowledge of at least some “core” attributes of childhood deemed “essential” or inherent and continuous and therefore judge children’s literature directly or indirectly by the standards of that knowledge about children. In the first instance, the initial, commonplace step is usually to propose to ask children themselves what they would like to read and why or to claim that this information is already known from observing or having experience of children. But as many children’s literature critics and theorists have long pointed out, this starting point encounters several difficulties in relation to what has already been discussed previously here too: as British psychologist and children’s literature critic Nicholas Tucker argues, One [...] approach to the problem has always been to ask children themselves through various questionnaires and surveys, what exactly their books mean to them. Turning a powerful searchlight of this sort onto complex, sometimes diffuse patterns of reaction is a clumsy way of going about things, however, and children can be particularly elusive when interrogated like this, with laconic comments like “Not bad” or “The story’s good” adding little to any researcher’s understanding. (2) But even if instruments for assessing children’s tastes could somehow be improved, making this effort cannot change what Tucker is pointing out. Much as we already saw Nodelman argue in relation to the study of the “other,” the questionnaires and surveys will still necessarily be designed in the service of the researcher’s understanding and will still necessarily draw on books and ideas about reading already created by adults for children. The same factors also come into play in well-​known book prizes claimed to be awarded “by children,” such as the Nestlé Smarties book prize, a British award that ran from 1985 to 2007, where “eligible books were written by UK citizens and residents and published during the preceding year. The shortlists were selected by a panel of adult judges. [...] First, second, and third places were determined by British schoolchildren, at least finally, by vote of ‘selected school classes’ ” (“Nestlé”). Many children’s literature critics and theorists who work with ideas of knowledge gained through the observation and experience of children foreground in their work the importance of children’s “voice” and “agency.” The idea that children have voice and agency was first theorized in the work of the so-​called “new sociology” of childhood, leading exponents of which, Norwegian sociologist Jens Qvortrup, American sociologist William Corsaro, and German sociologist Michael-​Sebastian Honig, explain how and why they see these characteristics as central to childhood studies: Agency and voice for children: Among those who embarked on the study of children within the framework of the new paradigm of childhood it was a common observation that children were largely appreciated as people who were on the receiving end in terms of provision and knowledge. Children were reduced to vulnerable people to be protected without being seen also as 14

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participants –​in any case, not participants in the larger social fabric, which was an adult privilege and prerogative. Therefore it became imperative for social studies of childhood to look into these charges or prejudices. (5) The opposition that Qvortrup, Corsaro, and Honig note here between the child as agent and the child as victim is used widely. American children’s literature critic Marah Gubar, for one, critiques what she sees as an “unfortunate tendency to characterize young people as artless beings devoid of agency [… which] suggests that children are invariably exploited and oppressed by adult attention [… such] generalizations [...] about children’s fiction repeatedly characterize children as helpless pawns in the hands of all-powerful adults” (32). While many critics and theorists continue to work on the basis of such ideas, then, theory can raise further questions for us to think about regarding how “voice” and “agency” are not natural terms but themselves rooted in certain political and ideological positions and beliefs.4 British critical psychologists Pam Alldred and Erica Burman, for instance, explain that they emphasize “the active and subjective involvement of researchers in hearing, interpreting and representing children’s ‘voices’ ” (175). Memories of childhood run into similar issues: first, memories are necessarily retrospective and different individually as well as culturally and historically. Many people remember having had a childhood that is quite different from others, while some don’t remember having had a childhood at all. In this way, two of the most commonsense and widely used ways of dealing with children’s literature, whether popularly or academically, quickly run up against key theoretical questions, even in the practice of working with children: authors, publishers, or teachers who assume that at least some children have the same kinds of characteristics, lives, and experiences and (therefore) will be interested in the same kinds of books can cause problems, including around equal access to opportunities or dis/​ability, for instance. Aside from observation and memory, the most common source of knowledge of children has been claimed to be drawn from the field of developmental psychology. But here too, however commonsensical it may seem that a knowledge of the psychological stages of development will inform judgment of how to write and evaluate children’s literature, several theoretical issues already discussed immediately reveal why relying on developmental psychology is and remains much more complicated than it may appear at first sight. First, psychology as a discipline actually has little bearing on the evaluation of literature as compared to books. That is to say, the key differentiation between children’s literature and children’s books introduces factors that are not primarily part of the domain of psychology, but lie more within the domain of cultural and aesthetic judgments, values, and tastes. But further than this, psychology too has always had and still has many different views and debates even around the basics of learning to read, for instance, or the processes of literacy. Both historically and nationally, different educational systems deploy different methods for teaching children to read. Moreover, as Etti Gordon Ginzburg discusses elsewhere in this volume, the achieving of literacy is in fact rarely considered in relation to children’s literature, and the books through which literacy is taught are less or differently taught in children’s literature courses, whether in educational (teacher training) or in literary-​critical contexts. These issues are reflected in the history of developmental psychology itself: one of the founders of the field, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, did very little research into reading, and when he was once asked about reading by a fellow attendee at a conference, he apparently replied that he had no opinion on it (Wadsworth 133). The American psychologist Jerome Bruner, one of Piaget’s most eminent successors, rejects the invocation of “psychological processes or mechanisms that operate in ‘real life’ ” to “discover how and in what ways the text affects the reader,” arguing that “such proposals explain so much that they explain very little. They fail to tell why some stories succeed and some fail to engage the reader [...] above all, they fail to provide an account of the processes of 15

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reading and entering a story” (4). We can note how close Bruner’s points here are to those of Hunt cited previously. Similar issues arise in relation to other psychological theories of stages: the well-​ known work of American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg on moral stages of development in children, for instance, necessarily relies on relating his theory to interpretations of children’s literature in terms of how and why the stages are thought to be somehow present in the texts. Kohlberg’s theories (or any psychological theories) necessarily and inherently rely on a set of theoretical assumptions and models in turn, as American psychologist Carol Gilligan demonstrated when her 1982 work famously questioned Kohlberg’s implicit reliance on certain ideas of morality and proposed that these ideas were gendered and not “neutral.” More recently, some children’s literature criticism has turned to another source than psychology as its preferred area of knowledge about children: neuroscience and its accompanying brain-​imaging (“brain scans”). Eminent Russian children’s literature theorist Maria Nikolajeva, for instance, argues that a “child’s sense of space and place, direction and dimensionality, scale and proportion, is different from an adult’s. [...] This is not due exclusively to the fact that a child is physically smaller than an adult, but also [reflects] that these aspects of perception are primarily performed by the left cerebral hemisphere” (30). Even in this area, seen by some as being irrefutable “hard science,” there are fundamental theoretical questions to be raised, however. Leading Belgian critical psychologist Jan De Vos writes in relation to “thought experiments” about digitally uploading the brain that “in devising the very algorithms through which one would be uploaded, would there not also be the choice of which psychology (Freudian, Pavlovian, etc.) you would prefer to be uploaded?” (8). In other words, the ways in which the brain and brain scans are read and interpreted already incorporate pre-​existing psychological models, including some related to reading models about “identification” and “empathy.”

“Book People” and “Child People”: Representation, Identification, and Empathy The grounds on which criticism judges the difference between children’s books and children’s literature can also be roughly divided up into ideas about texts and ideas about child readers, or in terms of what British historian and theorist of children’s literature John Rowe Townsend, in a well-​known formulation, has called “book people” and “child people” (199). “Book people” focus on aspects of texts such as style, themes, story, plot, and characterization, while “child people” focus on the expected responses from and effects on the child readers. Yet, as Townsend points out himself, there is as much overlap as distinction between these two groups, for ideas about the one rely on ideas from the other; for instance, judging style, themes, story, plot, and characterization almost always turns out to draw in turn on judgments about how well such textual elements represent children and children’s lives and experiences, while judgments based on the child draw on ideas of what kinds of styles, themes, story, plot, and characterization appeal to the child. These ostensibly different groups are therefore in fact bound by two of the most widely shared assumptions about reading in children’s literature (and in wider literary studies too): that texts are about “representation” and that reading is about “identification.” In recent decades, the concept of “empathy” has come to join or sometimes even replace “identification” and, like identification, is widely accepted (not just in children’s literature) as a natural process. Indeed, these ideas are assumed to be so natural that even in much theory they continue to be relatively little discussed or challenged.5 Yet, as we saw Hunt argue earlier in this chapter, the ability of theory to question what is taken for granted or seen as unquestionable is crucial here too. Assuming that reading “works” (as Hunt puts it) through representation and identification or empathy again leads to many different critical judgments with many different practical outcomes in terms of what parents, carers, teachers, librarians, and academics think are good books for children –​ because in 16

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such criticism, the representation has to be judged to be “right” in order for the child to identify or empathize with it.

Identities: All Children Are Not the Same? Importantly, representation and identification or empathy each rely on ideas about identities and what “identity” is seen to be, for it is identities (in the widest sense) that are often said to be represented in texts, and identification or empathizing are claimed to be the ways that readers interact with what is represented in texts. If this view is claimed within wider literary studies, it is most true of all in relation to children’s literature, for the whole presumption of children’s literature is that it is for children because it is also about children –​whether directly, in representing children in some way, or indirectly in representing issues that are deemed to be of relevance and interest to children. This is also what “identification” is supposed to be for and about: that when the child reads children’s literature, it recognizes the child in the book as being the same as itself outside of the book, and that it is this similarity that is deemed to appeal to the child. But theory enables us, first, to ask how and why recognizing oneself in a book is appealing and, second, whether that is indeed how reading “works” at all. Do children (or older readers) read by searching books for themselves? In terms of empathy, theory helps us to consider further, as American historian of psychology Susan Lanzoni points out, that “empathy” only entered the English vocabulary in 1908 as a translation of the German term “Einfühlung,” which Lanzoni translates more closely as “in-​feeling.” According to Lanzoni, this concept in German was an aesthetic idea relating to “a viewer’s projection of feeling and movement into paintings, objects of art and nature” (ix). The meaning of “empathy” as knowledge of the feelings or state of mind of another followed later in the Anglo-​American context, including in the realm of neuroscience. In any case, theory raises the question of how empathy as it is now constituted works: if empathy is the knowledge of another’s feelings or state of mind, then how can it be known to exist? In other words, how do people claiming to have empathy know that this is so? How do they know that what they think somebody else feels is indeed what that other person feels? We can see how crucial the questions of representation, identification, and empathy are in relation to identity if we consider, for instance, how many children’s literature critics and theorists have repeatedly engaged with the key issue that children are, in fact, not all the same, as children too are divided by class, gender, religion, ethnicity, dis/​ability, and so on. There are children’s literature critics who do hold to the view that all children are at the heart of the matter the same everywhere and at all times, transcending any ideas of difference among them, but nevertheless, children’s literature criticism and theory have engaged with ideas of difference from their earliest inception. This issue is central to ideas of representation and identification or empathy, because in contrast to critics for whom any differences that might be claimed among children are irrelevant, for other critics representation can only be judged against the different kinds of children and whether those differences have been accurately represented; according to such critics, identification or empathizing will only take place if that representation attains sufficient accuracy. Representation and identification or empathy therefore rely on the idea that something exists before or outside of a text in order then to be “represented” (re-​presented) within the text and for the two to be able to be compared to one another in order to be judged by critics as sufficiently similar or accurate for identification or empathy to take place. One might point to many examples of how the critical steps around representation, identification and/​or empathy, and identity take place, but I will give only some selected examples here to demonstrate primarily from how early on these issues have been raised in children’s literature criticism and how important they are. The foundational African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, 17

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launched the children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book in January 1920, introducing it as follows in the first issue: This is The Brownies’ Book[,] A Monthly Magazine For the Children of the Sun[,] DESIGNED FOR ALL CHILDREN, BUT ESPECIALLY FOR OURS. It aims to be a thing of Joy and Beauty, dealing in Happiness, Laughter and Emulation, and designed especially for Kiddies from Six to Sixteen. It will seek to teach Universal Love and Brotherhood for all little folk –​ black and brown and yellow and white. Of course, pictures, stories, letters from little ones, games and oh –​everything!6 As claimed by the website Tar Baby and the Tomahawk,which makes digitally available many historical American children’s texts, “[The Brownies’ Book] was the first sustained effort to create a body of writing that exclusively addressed the needs of African American children.”7 But just as theory raises the question of whether all children are the same, so it also raises the question of whether “the needs of African American children” (or any other group) are identical. The Brownies’ Book itself in fact is involved in this issue, as Du Bois founded it in part to critique the ideas of his eminent colleague African American educator Booker T. Washington (Bishop 22). For Du Bois, Washington’s advocacy of “common-​school and industrial training, and depreciat[ion of] institutions of higher learning” for African American children and students should be replaced by the “education of youth according to ability” (Du Bois, Chapter 3). The different political strategies of Du Bois and Washington led to different educational and pedagogical strategies, which in turn produced different kinds of texts for African American children and different ideas of African American children (and their needs). The importance of considering that African American children might not necessarily identify with the same texts as white children continues also to be implicated, however, in the questions of whether, how, or why identification (or empathy) works in reading and whether, how, or why “identity” is a deciding factor in that (or any) process. Another example of how theory in this sense raises not just the question of what identities can be considered to divide childhood but also the question of what “identity” itself is occurs in relation to gender: here, childhood is in an odd position in that it is sometimes regarded as naturally divided into boys, girls, and other identities included in the category of “gender,” while conversely it is sometimes regarded as nongendered, in the sense that childhood itself is seen to pre-​date or transcend gender. These positions do not overlap so much as they tend to shift even within the works of the same critic or theorist. American children’s literature historian and theorist Claudia Nelson helps us to understand some of the reasons for these shifts through proposing ideas of gender in children’s literature in the nineteenth century as a “novelistic mechanism by which the ideals of womanliness were presented to Victorian boys as the ideals of manliness” (5). Nelson here theorizes how an initially more androgynous idea of gender in nineteenth-​century British children’s literature became increasingly split into separate spheres and then normalized. Nelson’s readings draw on theoretical positions for which gender is in this sense not “natural,” but, like the debate around the needs of the African American child, shaped by larger ideological, political, religious, or moral forces.

Conclusion Children’s literature criticism and theory continue to engage with new approaches, including perhaps most recently neuroscience, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. As I have explored in this chapter, all approaches revolve around the three core concepts of literary and critical theory: author, text, and reader. In children’s literature, these concepts are further inflected by ideas of childhood, which in 18

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turn helps us to understand better what is at stake in “theory.” As ever, however, theory does not necessarily provide an answer or solution to these questions, although most theoretical approaches do settle on one position or another. What matters is that theory unpacks for us questions and issues that otherwise cannot be further thought about and understood, but only accepted or rejected.

Notes 1 See for just some examples of discussions of (post)colonial and imperial histories of children’s literature McGillis; Yenika-​Agbaw; Maddy and MacCann; Walsh; Kruger. 2 Named after the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, where this group is located in the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL) in the Department of English Literature. For some key publications by this group, see Lesnik-​Oberstein, Children’s Literature; Walsh; Cocks. 3 See “New Study.” In 2018, this phenomenon was linked especially to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series. 4 For an extensive discussion of these theoretical issues, see Lesnik-​Oberstein, “Introduction.” 5 Aside from Rose’s key analysis in The Case of Peter Pan of what is at stake in claims around representation and identification (also but not just for children’s literature), see Barker for what remains to date one of the very few other texts to raise questions around “identification.” 6 See http://​child​lit.unl.edu/​brown​ies.192​001.html, accessed 4 August 2021. Capitals are retained as in the original text. 7 http://​child​lit.unl.edu/​top​ics/​edi.brown​ies.html, accessed 4 August 2021. This website is dedicated to exploring “Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature, 1880–​1939.”

Works Cited Alldred, Pam, and Erica Burman. “Analysing Children’s Accounts Using Discourse Analysis.” Researching Children’s Experience: Methods and Approaches, edited by Sheila Greene and Diane Hogan, Sage, 2005, pp. 175–​98. Anderson, Porter. “How Much Do Writers Earn in the UK? ALCS Report Offers New Input.” Publishing Perspectives, 28 June 2018, https://​pub​lish​ingp​ersp​ecti​ves.com/​2018/​06/​writ​ers-​inc​ome-​alcs-​uk-​sur​vey-​ 2010-​pub​lish​ers-​asso​ciat​ion/​. Ariés, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. 1957. Penguin, 1973. Barker, Martin. Comics: Power, Ideology and the Critics. Manchester University Press, 1989. Bhabha, Homi K. “Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate.” October, vol. 61, Summer 1992, The Identity in Question, pp. 46–​57. Bishop, Rudine S. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Greenwood Press, 2007. Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, 1986. Chambers, Aidan. Booktalk. Bodley Head, 1985. Cocks, Neil. Student-​Centred: Education, Freedom and the Idea of Audience. Inkermen Press/​Axis series, 2009. De Vos, Jan. The Metamorphoses of the Brain: Neurologisation and Its Discontents. Palgrave, 2016. Du Bois, William E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903, www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​408/​408-​h/​408-​h.htm. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, 1969, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others, vol. 2, The New Press, 1998, pp. 205–​22. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, 1982. Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press, 2009. Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature. Blackwell, 1991. Kruger, Haidee. Postcolonial Polysystems: The Production and Reception of Translated Children’s Literature in South Africa. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012. Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: A History. Yale University Press, 2018. Lesnik-​Oberstein, Karín. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1994. —​—​—​. “Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child.” Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood, edited by Karín Lesnik-​Oberstein, Palgrave, 2011, pp. 1–​18.

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Karín Lesnik-Oberstein Maddy, Yulisa Amadu, and Donnarae MacCann. Neoimperialism in Children’s Literature about Africa. Routledge, 2009. McGillis, Roderick, ed. Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context. Routledge, 2000. Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–​1917. Rutgers University Press, 1991. “Nestlé Smarties Book Prize.” Awards and Winners, www.award​sand​winn​ers.com/​categ​ory/​nestl%C3%A9-​ smart​ies-​book-​prize/​nestl%C3%A9-​smart​ies-​book-​prize/​. “New Study: 55% of YA Books Bought by Adults.” Publishers Weekly, 13 September 2012, www.publi​sher​swee​ kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​childr​ens/​childr​ens-​indus​try-​news/​arti​cle/​53937-​new-​study-​55-​of-​ya-​books-​bou​ght-​by-​ adu​lts.html. Nikolajeva, Maria. “What Is It Like to Be a Child? Childness in the Age of Neuroscience.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 50, no. 1, 2019, pp. 23–​37. Nodelman, Perry. “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 29–​35. Qvortrup, Jens, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-​Sebastian Honig. “Why Social Studies of Childhood? An Introduction to the Handbook.” The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, edited by Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-​Sebastian Honig, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 1–​19. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Macmillan, 1984. Townsend, John Rowe. “Standards of Criticism for Children’s Literature.” The Signal Approach to Children’s Books, edited by Nancy Chambers, Kestrel Books, 1980, pp. 193–​207. Tucker, Nicholas. The Child and the Book: A Psychological and Literary Exploration. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Wadsworth, Barry J. Piaget for the Classroom Teacher. Longman, 1978. Walsh, Sue. Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity and Constructions of Childhood. Ashgate, 2010. Yenika-​Agbaw, Vivian. Representing Africa in Children’s Literature: Old and New Ways of Seeing. Routledge, 2008. Zhu, Ziqiang. “The Discovery of Children: The Origins of Zhou Zuoren’s Thoughts on ‘Humane Literature.’ ” Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature, edited by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 63–​74.

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2 POETICS AND PEDAGOGY Karen Coats

If we were to conceptualize children’s literature studies as a fenced-​in playground, the two terms in my title –​poetics and pedagogy –​would be perpetually at play on an imaginary seesaw. Although the metaphor is certainly imperfect, I offer this image as a heuristic device to help us think about the relationship in children’s literature between poetics, defined as a theory of literary forms and discourse, and pedagogy, which implies the conveyance of educational content from adults to children. While the conjunction “and” might imply a relation among equals, over time, in diverse cultures, and across different disciplinary emphases, one focus rises in importance while the other operates as a counterweight, with only rare studies or primary texts managing to achieve perfect equilibrium between a book’s informative or formative intentions and its aesthetic qualities. Educators, parents, publishers, and children have various expectations for what makes a “good” children’s book, leaving researchers with the task of considering how differing needs, desires, and ideological substrates inform those expectations. For literary critics, judgments of relative “goodness” often, but not always, tip more heavily toward an assessment of aesthetic qualities. In 1981, Perry Nodelman threw down this critical gauntlet: Children’s literature is not just literature written for children in mind, nor is it just literature that happens to be read by children. It is a genre, a special kind of literature with its own distinguishing characteristics. Identifying those characteristics and defining that genre are the major tasks immediately confronting serious critics. (“Genre” 22) But where to begin, how to proceed, and what tools are available, adequate, and appropriate for identifying the genre-​defining characteristics of such diverse, multimodal texts? To what degree do we fence off our notions of the intended readership to focus solely on a text’s distinctive poetics? Nodelman himself began in 1988 by examining picturebooks in Words About Pictures. He borrows tools developed for understanding and appreciating gallery art, but also draws insights from social semiotics to account for what Barbara Bader identified in 1976 as the “drama of the turning page” (Bader 1).1 As the academic field developed in complexity and scope, critical attention has extended to include typical uses of language, genre, and narrative structure in children’s texts, both in general and in relation to specific national literatures and texts.2 In The Hidden Adult, Nodelman attempts a more comprehensive approach when he returns to defining the poetics of the genre after twenty-​seven

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-4

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more years of reading and analysis. Marah Gubar responds by suggesting that scholars might be prudent not to attempt to define children’s literature at all, but rather to “cheerfully carry on with their scholarship on specific texts, types, and eras of children’s literature as though the lack of an overarching definition constituted no real impediment to their work” (210). The problem, of course, is that even without agreeing on a definitional poetics of children’s literature, most people do make distinctions about what is and isn’t appropriate or, in Peter Hunt’s word, “relevant” for children (120). Ideas of appropriateness and relevance may wax and wane over time, but there is an expectation that a children’s book, poem, or play will be attentive to what Peter Hollindale calls “childness.” Hollindale argues that children’s literature stages an encounter with its reader, adult or child, that situates the reader in relation to a specific construction of childhood, of what it means to be a human child in a particular place and time. I would suggest that in that encounter, a certain kind of pedagogy –​ intentional knowledge transfer, if you will –​ is assumed to be present even in imaginative literature, if for no other reason than children are young researchers whose scope of inquiry includes the whole world. And there are other, more subjective reasons: parents, teachers, and authors want to convey more than knowledge about how things are or were. They also want to impart their values and hopes for how things might be imagined otherwise and to prepare children for success in a fragmented, complex, constantly changing world. Beyond the quest to define the poetics of a genre, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan poses the most important question for children’s literature scholars this way: This child [...] is prodigiously open to everything concerning the way of the world that the adult brings to him. Doesn’t anyone ever reflect on what this prodigious porosity to everything in myth, legend, fairy tales, history, the ease with which he lets himself be invaded by these stories, signifies, as to his sense of the other? (49) Of course, while questions continue to circulate about the degree to which child-​encounters-​book is an exchange rather than an invasion, it’s undeniable that young readers are more open to the things they find interesting. But oh, the vagueness of that word! Aesthetic interest can be generated by novelty or familiarity, delight or disgust, prurience or profundity, but it is always grounded in affect, which is in large part determined by a reader’s temperament. It’s precisely this indeterminacy that limits the establishment of a formulaic poetics of children’s literature that doesn’t at the same time acknowledge its pedagogical effects, or vice versa. From the frontispiece of John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocketbook (1744), which claims to offer its audience “instruction and amusement” (italics added), to contemporary concerns from both conservatives and progressives about what cultural messages have influenced and are perpetuated through illustrations and language in books marketed to children, poetics and pedagogy are always already entangled in discussions about literature for children in ways that they aren’t, necessarily, in literature for adults. This entanglement has been consequential for both creators and critics. In terms of the field’s professional identity and value, for instance, Zohar Shavit claims that children’s literature’s place in the “literary polysystem” is profoundly and permanently disadvantaged by its embeddedness in pedagogical and moral systems. While her work has been criticized for its lack of engagement with other critics and its undifferentiated notions of childhood (see, for instance, Huse; Nodelman, “Signs”), the strong and historic connections of children’s literature with its didactic intentions and applications have made it something of a poor relation, if it appears at all, in academic departments. Many if not most children’s literature scholars and creators have experienced a condescending dismissal of texts for young readers as formally or morally simplistic, utilitarian rather than artful, or otherwise unworthy of inclusion in literary, cultural, or intellectual histories. Furthermore, the indication in a professional review that the value of a children’s book lies in its curricular utility often reads like an 22

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apology for its lack of aesthetic quality or appeal. Indeed, even literary critics interested in defending children’s books as worthy of academic attention because of their aesthetic merit may still locate their value as inherently educative by seeking to show “the ability of good children’s books to educate [children’s] literary taste” (Nodelman, “Signs” 164) or develop literary competences that will enable them to appreciate fare deemed more sophisticated.

The Weight of History Pedagogy therefore seems to have had the weightier claim, at least historically, making it something of a struggle for scholars to identify when a distinctive poetics of children’s literature developed. While most scholars readily accept the idea that a dedicated literature for children can only be conceived after the development of a differentiated view of childhood, there is good evidence, according to Gillian Adams, that stories written for the education and edification of children had poetic force in mind as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2112 BCE . Indeed, some of these early texts resemble contemporary school stories in narrative structure. They feature (male) children who find school and parental expectations oppressive, are punished or rebuked for their rebellious behavior, and end with wish-​fulfilling resolutions. These stories’ pedagogical value lies in which wishes take precedence and what values are thereby communicated. Adams notes that in one of the tales, the rebellious boy enjoins his father to meet with the headmaster. His father not only agrees but also effectively bribes that headmaster with dinner and gifts to treat his son well. In the other story Adams describes, the father is both complainer and wisher, and the story ends with his hope that his son will reform rather than a guarantee that he will. Both scenarios seem remarkably contemporary, indicating that Sumerian society was not unlike today’s secular cultures: “a competitive society in which hard work, perseverance, prudence, initiative, a certain aggressive, self-​aggrandising foxiness, and above all verbal skills are requisites for gaining earthly rewards and the favour of the gods and king” (227). In the service of teaching the scribal arts, these stories joined with proverbs, hymns, animal fables, and myths to form a body of what Adams terms “ ‘wisdom literature’ because of its didactic intent” (227). Several points are important here. First, while the primary intention was pedagogical, the works’ effectiveness in transmitting values would have depended, then as now, in large part on literary qualities –​ in the case of the stories a structured narrative including dialogue, recognizable characters, humor, and topical content, and in the case of the proverbs and hymns economy, rhythm, and a pithiness that ensures memorability. This imbrication of poetics and pedagogy in the literature we share with or write intentionally for children thus seems to be a structural constant across time and cultures. Second, the Sumerian school stories indicate an understanding of children’s peccadilloes as well as aspirations for them to outgrow the latter in a specific direction; in other words, there is a recognition that children are different from adults, at least in their behaviors and understanding of risk and consequences, and therefore need specific and explicit pragmatic and ethical instruction in order to succeed in the social and commercial endeavors of their culture. Despite claims that literature for children couldn’t exist until the modern understanding of childhood developed, these stories thus suggest that the need for a poetic literature of instruction that focused on children’s interests also seems to be a structural constant. Third, however, as the various forms of wisdom and entertainment literature reflect a culture’s needs, beliefs, and values, it makes sense that as social, political, and economic contexts change, the needs, beliefs, and values we seek to impart to children, and indeed their poetic forms and qualities, will change as well. In order to analyze and critique the poetics and pedagogies on offer in the children’s literature of any given culture or period, critics need to be attentive to these temporally shifting contexts in addition to the less structurally variable capacities, growth needs, and existential interests of young humans. To give equal weight to sociohistorical change and structural constants, then, we need to consider the influence cultural shifts have had on the production and content of children’s texts, but also to note 23

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that there is some consistency in what adults fear and believe about the appeal for children of literary forms and discourse from antiquity to the present. This approach will require some dipping in and out of history along with some perhaps unforgivable skips and condensations, but I want to avoid an overly presentist perspective by suggesting continuities rather than emphasizing absolute ruptures, innovations, or departures. Despite the challenge Adams’s discovery of early educative and entertaining literature for children poses to accepted dogma of when children’s literature began, a persistent distrust of rhetorical finesse’s allure and persuasiveness has haunted the balance between pedagogy and poetics in the western tradition at least since Plato. Whereas the Sumerian stories seem to emphasize the development of epideictic rhetoric (“self-​aggrandizing foxiness [...] verbal skills [...] for gaining earthly rewards and the favor of the gods and king”) over and against the development of moral character and an acceptance of just deserts, Plato worried that philosophical truths and moral values would be overshadowed by aesthetically pleasing but morally suspicious, vacuous, or harmful poetic discourse. Contemporary critics express similar concerns, with an added emphasis on the dangers of images. A marked shift in the goals of education from broad cultural assimilation and the cultivation of traditional literacies to awareness and support of individual and affiliative identities has led to a greater emphasis on how literature portrays groups, genders, and sexualities and whether it promotes prosocial values. While this shift has motivated education researchers such as Holly Johnson and her collaborators and Frank Serafini to advocate for the direct teaching of critical multimodal discourse analysis and visual literacy, others fear that before children can be taught to be critical readers they will be imprinted with harmful messages through what they read in books or learn from folklore. Hence, calls from both conservatives and progressives for books to be censored or removed from publication could be said to spring from the same root belief. As noted, Lacan might argue that it’s not an unfounded fear. After all, gender performance, skin color, and other visible attributes are ingrained as somatic norms through repetition, with the result that a child’s “sense of the other” can be deeply stereotypical. Villains can be made attractive by their wealth and social power. Youth and physical beauty are so often indicative of purity of heart, or certain physical traits a sign of inner evil, that children develop a set of prejudices that are hard to disrupt. Even when parodies, postmodern revisions, or more sensitive and accurate depictions attempt to reverse such associations, their novelty proves that there is, in fact, a largely irreducible prior expectation. In contemporary public forums, a new form of didacticism often surfaces such that a single image, metaphor, or character portrayal deemed offensive can damn an entire book. The undeniable appeal of a funny, scary, or artfully illustrated children’s story makes it crucially important, therefore, for scholars, teachers, and parents to consider the poetics of how the world is presented to children.

Beyond Pedagogy: Comenius’s Contribution to the Poetics of Children’s Literature I suggest that there have been direct attempts to respond to this distrust of the persuasive rhetoric of representation embedded in the history of children’s literary poetics. For instance, early philosopher of education Johann Amos Comenius (1592–​1670) sought to counteract the overdependence on a single imperial language by advocating both multilingualism and multisensory learning about the world through rational accounts of nature and processes rather than through fanciful stories. Extrapolating from his Reformation worldview, Comenius sought to demonstrate through Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures) that certain truths could be discerned through the representation of physical objects and human endeavors in pictures alongside the plurality of languages. That is, no single language or method of representation should have precedence over others when it comes to describing the material fulsomeness of the universe, nor should children believe that they must learn to read Latin to be functionally literate or able to contemplate eternal verities. Originally published in 24

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side-​by-​side columns of German and Latin that refer to numbered images in copperplate prints, the Orbis includes 150 chapters that address almost everything a European child might have questions about concerning everyday life in the 1600s. In addition, while Comenius was writing long before developmental psychology was on the horizon, his approach would have appealed directly to children of the middle childhood age, who, according to Erik Erikson, are actively seeking information about how the world works and what their place in it might be. Comenius’s goal was to be as clear as possible, and while one might take offense at what he omitted as a European male in the seventeenth century, he was not imperialist; rather, he gives all trades and occupations equal attention and dignity, and his presentation of the known sciences of the time lacks editorial comment, though that can’t be said of his chapters on various religions. The book’s appeal was undeniable. Indeed, it is difficult to find complete extant copies in readable condition, as the books clearly underwent much sharing and hard use for more than two centuries. Almost immediately, the Orbis was translated into multiple vernacular languages, with some of the pictures revised or updated as technologies changed. The inclusion of the vernacular languages alongside the Latin not only acknowledged that Latin was taught in schools, often to the exclusion of the students’ home languages, but also offered an implicit critique of Roman Catholics’ exclusionary hold on Christian doctrine in their insistence on using Latin for scriptural translation and interpretation as well as extrabiblical laws, practices, and regulations. Comenius’s method helped break the hold of a single language to name the objects of the world, while the use of pictures disrupted a single way of representing them. His pedagogy was thus enabled by his new approach to a multimodal poetics that would become for many definitional of what makes a text suitable for children. Margaret Mackey, Margaret Meek, and Madeleine Hunter each locate the value of such plurality in visual and verbal representation as one of the first and most important lessons the poetics of children’s literature teaches. As characters, settings, activities, and abstract ideas are re-​envisioned by different authors and illustrators, children can break free of a limiting fundamentalism when it comes to representation, and instead learn to adjust their thinking as new ideas emerge. In addition, they can come to feel secure in their worlds by locating what remains structurally and materially invariant despite linguistic or representational change. Drawing out Mackey’s insight that “Thomas [the Tank Engine]’s illustrations provide one single and small example of the way in which little readers learn the need to deal with plurality” (44), Meek expands: One of the striking things about the saga of Thomas the Tank Engine, as well as about other picture-​book characters who are the focus of industrial empires, is that they make it possible for very small toddlers to belong to the ranks of the initiated, and to know it. Their first approach to fiction is one of coming to terms with different versions, an experience which makes them experts in the settings and characters even as they learn the basic conventions of how story works. (6) Hunter elaborates this idea even further by exploring how contemporary transmedial adaptations teach children and adults to see adaptation itself as an epistemological frame, a necessary way of knowing and creating not just new stories on screens, but new stories of the self. The ideological seeds of plurality that were germinating in the Orbis have thus grown beyond Comenius’s Reformation worldview as they introduced an effective method for presenting cultural values to children through local languages and pictorial representations. Today, it is increasingly rare to find a book written for a child audience that does not include illustrations; more multilingual books are being published (though by no means enough); and appealing and diverse verbal and visual poetics in contemporary nonfiction, as Giorgia Grilli notes in this volume, are as important as their pedagogical intent. 25

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It is, however, unfortunate that Comenius’s influence is often reduced to the pedagogical innovation of including pictures in educative textbooks or nonfiction. His Orbis also contributed, perhaps more subtly but no less significantly, to a materialist, multimodal poetics of children’s literature that encourages heutagogy (student-​determined learning) and pleasure reading as readily as school-​ based pedagogy. Though the Orbis was intended to be used in schools, for instance, Comenius also recommended that children be given a copy of their own prior to starting school or learning to read, as we do with today’s picturebooks. He gave careful thought to its materiality: “It is a little Book, as you see, of no great bulk” (n. pg.), which would have indicated that it was intended to be owned and carried around by children rather than attached to a table or lectern. Throughout the publishing history of trade books for children, trim size and thickness have mattered in similar ways for similar reasons, making it curious and disappointing that contemporary textbooks haven’t followed Comenius’s wise example. In addition, the little book lends itself to browsing, and it very clearly draws attention to details within drawings by numbering the objects discussed in the words, so that students can teach themselves whatever they are interested in. Children probably also shared the pleasure of this text with friends. In the first English edition of the Orbis, after a series of prefaces to adult mediators, the first chapter, “Invitation,” ends with an introduction to the alphabet that encourages children to imitate the sounds made by the pictured objects in order to marry phonemic awareness with the visual representation of the letters in upper and lower case. “Before all things,” says the Master to the student, “thou oughtest to learn the plain sounds, of which man’s speech consisteth; which living creatures know how to make, and thy Tongue knoweth how to imitate, and thy hand can picture out.” So, to learn the letter “a,” children are encouraged to make a sound like a crow; to learn “f,” imitate a gust of wind. One can imagine this practice as a fun exercise or competitive game that relies on things children are already adept at –​ making various kinds of noises –​ and thus makes more sense for preliterate children than the more conventional way of associating a letter sound with a visual and verbal signifier they don’t recognize and that may not relate to the sound the animal or object makes. This sonic blur between humans and nature both draws upon and brings forward the common inclusion of onomatopoeia in children’s poetry and picturebooks. In addition, by leveraging children’s naturally multimodal behaviors in the service of acquiring alphabetic literacy, Comenius championed the value of object-​ oriented, multisensory pedagogies; such pedagogies have been lost and found repeatedly over the years in educative discourses. Interestingly, Comenius’s multisensory method today finds verification in contemporary neuroimaging studies, which not only show the effectiveness of multisensory pedagogies across the lifespan, but also argue for the need for “preexisting congruencies of information coming from the senses” (Shams and Seitz 415). In the Orbis, the task is to learn the sounds of letters through imitation, and this is facilitated by a picture of a thing that literally makes the sound the child hears. Apples don’t make sounds nor do they resemble the letter that represents the sound, so asking children to imitate the sound /​a/​or even to associate its visual mark with the image of an apple, which may in their language have a different name, is sensorily incongruent. Because Comenius’s method relies on multisensory congruence, children can more readily associate the sound with an abstract visual mark that they are then encouraged to “picture out.” Beyond heutagogy, however, a preface addressed to schoolmasters indicates that Comenius also expected teachers to use the book. He intends the volume “To entice witty children to it, that they may not conceit a torment to be in the school, but dainty fare.” Here we see the awareness that even “witty” children are reluctant to attend school or read weighty tomes, a view reinforced by the opening illustration of “The Master and the Boy.” Contrary to typical educational practice, then or now, teacher and student are not confined to a schoolroom, but are depicted as standing in an open field. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s principles of the grammar of visual design are evident in this illustration as clouds appear on the left side above the boy’s head, metaphorically indicating the present state of his ignorance. The boy’s head is inclined upward toward the Master’s, while 26

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the sun’s rays angle downward from the extreme top of the right side of the illustration through the Master’s head toward the boy, indicating not only the direction of knowledge transfer, but also either a divine source or a natural one, depending on one’s viewpoint. The “dainty fare” of this little book’s instructional method is introduced as dialogic and invitational, full of alluring promise: M: Come, Boy, learn to be wise. P [Puer]: What doth this mean, to be wise? M: To understand rightly, to do rightly, and to speak out rightly all that are necessary. P: Who will teach me this? M: I, by God’s help. P: How? M: I will guide thee thorow all. I will shew thee all. I will name thee all. P: See, here I am; lead me in the name of God. Contemporary critics may object to the religious references and content (especially the Biblical allusion to the naming of the animals by Adam, included as an epigram); the implied exclusion of females (it should be noted that Comenius includes girls equitably in his other writings on education, but not in this invitation); and the oft-​referenced entry on “Deformed and Monstrous People.” But most people still accept Comenius’s claim that “it is apparent, that children (even from their infancy almost) are delighted with Pictures, and willingly please their eyes with these lights.” This is why it is still rare –​ or of no use, according to Lewis Carroll’s Alice –​ to find a book for young children or early readers without pictures. More importantly in light of his multisensory approach to both pedagogy and poetics, Comenius asserts that the senses are “the main guides of childhood, because therein the mind doth not as yet raise up itself to an abstracted contemplation of things.” He seeks to bridge this gap in the sensory comprehension of abstract principles by providing visual metaphors or indexical symbols for entities, ideas, or virtues that are not part of the visible world. He encourages children to think in visual, verbal, and sonic metaphoric terms when, for instance, the illustrations include emanata or conventional symbolism for abstract principles, or when, in Chapter CXL, “Diligence,” he uses the ant (pismire) as an exemplar of the virtue and grasshoppers as its opposite, and associates the cawing of the crow with complaints about hard work. These comparisons of human traits with animals’ is as old as Aesop and as new as any posthuman-​themed picturebook. A more subtle way in which Comenius’s pedagogical text might be taken as an augury of later children’s poetics is its narrative structure. As Matthew O. Grenby has noted, a diegetic or extradiegetic indicator that a book has been written for or addressed to a particular child is a common conceit in children’s fiction, and it can be seen in the way the Orbis is set up with its initial dialogue between the boy and his teacher. The presence of a “sympathetic adult” has been identified by Gary H. Paterson as one of the ways authors of children’s books can “reduce that barrier –​ so necessary to break down –​between the austerity of the adult world and the child reader” (16). In addition, the opening creates a frame narrative or the conditions for a portal quest fantasy; it serves as an invitation for a hero’s journey of sorts, as the student is invited to embark with his mentor on a trip that includes the entire world: “Afterwards we will go into the World, and we will view all things.” After their opening act, however, both characters retreat from view in favor of an omniscient, objective narrative voice as the book itself becomes the teacher. The narrative begins the reader’s journey begins with a story of creation, following the general order of the Hebrew myth; shows the reader the activities and occupations of human existence; and ends with the last judgment prophesied in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. 27

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The student, of course, does not die at the end, nor does he disappear; instead, in the chapter entitled “The Close,” he and the Master reappear in a repeat of the picture used in “The Invitation.” This gesture of semantic closure enables the volume to be taken as a variant of the home-​away-​home pattern identified by Nodelman and Mavis Reimer (197). However, clever Comenius likely meant this text to prepare and inspire its readers to pick up his other two books, which serve as something of a trilogy of his thoughts on the content and methods of a proper education: Janua Linguarum Reserata (1631, The Door of Tongues Unlocked) and Didactica Magna (1633–​38, The Great Didactic). So instead of coming home to stay, we find an ending that transforms into a beginning, reminiscent of any number of children’s books, including E. B. White’s Stuart Little (1945) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) –​basically, the boy is enjoined to take what he’s learned and light out into the territories, as his Master tells him to “Go on, now, and read other books diligently and thou shalt become learned, wise, and godly,” surely an appropriate boon for this type of hero’s journey. Comenius’s contribution to the multimodal poetics and multisensory pedagogy of children’s literature cannot be stressed enough. His careful attention to how the poetics of a text could support its pedagogical goals enabled him to bring older storytelling traditions into a volume that encourages children to value the everydayness of peaceful industry and the pursuit of learning in the service of morality and wisdom. Rather than focusing his hero’s journey on war and adventures fraught with danger, violence, and glorious death, he offers a frame story of a young boy in dialogue with a wise guide embarking on a hero’s journey of learning about the world and its parts. Like those before him, he blurs the distinction between humans and nature in physical and metaphorical ways; by highlighting the plurality of representation through diverse languages, he invites his readers to see a moral consistency in the natural world that exists independently of language itself. Comenius also sought to establish or challenge other educative and poetic practices in the teaching of children. Rather than confining education to the acquisition of alphabetic literacy through written text alone and in Latin, he introduced the use of nature sounds to teach the alphabet and the inclusion of an illustration for every topic. He paired vernacular language and Latin with labeled images; encouraged out-​ of-​school use by creating a physically small book with short, discrete chapters; gave relatively equal weight to all subjects and activities; and ended in a way that points to future reading. He also turned the experience of learning into a framed story. Each of these elements remains visible and distinctive as a poetics of contemporary children’s literature.

Guardians and Detractors of (Rational) Education Comenius’s efforts to interest children in the natural world reflect the growing insistence on rational education during the European Enlightenment. While his pedagogical innovations might have presaged greater openness to using a plurality of languages and images to represent the world, the scientific fervor of the day combined with new technologies to discourage reliance on fantasy and myths to describe or speculate upon mysterious phenomena. Unlike Comenius, English philosopher John Locke (1632–​1704) did not write for children, but he did have strong opinions about education that included what they should and should not be reading. He knew, for instance, that children would be attracted to titillating, well told, and memorable stories of supernatural creatures that distracted them from the proper exercise of their rational faculties. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke urges that they be kept from the horror stories found in the popular press or told by servants and nursemaids to encourage good behavior through a fear of frightful consequences. He also argues that the study of poetry and music wastes time better spent on observing the natural world and learning a trade. In that sense his ideas were not far different from those of Comenius. But other advocates of children’s education in the seventeenth century, especially those who sought to teach religious doctrine, did not try to ignore or redirect children’s preferences for the poetics of a memorable poem or a well told quest tale. Instead, many religious writers set about transforming religious doctrine 28

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into stories and poetic forms that they believed would appeal to children, and which are still widely known today. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, John Bunyan (1628–​88) fashioned Christian conversion into a quest narrative that has never gone out of print and has had an enduring influence on children’s literature; it is referenced in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, reimagined by Enid Blyton in The Land of Far Beyond (1943), and alluded to in Chris Riddell’s Goth Girl series (2013–​17). In addition to writing over 700 hymns, Isaac Watts (1674–​1748) rewrote the Ten Commandments in verse, and like Comenius and Aesop used natural metaphors in his children’s poetry to exemplify desirable and undesirable behaviors. Such efforts at poetic interpretations of scripture were not always appreciated for their formal qualities, however. After reading Watts’s Divine Songs, Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), for instance, Anna Laetitia Barbauld queried whether it might not be better for children to “be kept from reading verse, till they are able to relish good verse” (v); compare this sentiment to Nodelman’s concern that “good children’s books” might “educate their literary taste” (“Signs” 164) as a similarly vague reference to the aesthetic qualities that would, in these writers’ opinions, distinguish the poetics of a good children’s book from an inferior one. Barbauld’s sly critique of the poetic qualities of Watts’s verse, which may have been intended to extend to other didactic religious poems for children, indicates not so much a distrust of poetic discourse per se as a sense that children are unable to distinguish the “good” from the attractive or memorable. After all, she was an accomplished poet herself. Her beliefs about children’s underdeveloped capacities for appreciation instead led her to write prosodic dialogues that were meant to be more instructive than poetic in nature. Strongly influenced by Locke, she emphasized a rational approach to pedagogy rather than attempting to leverage the seductive appeal of poetic rhetoric to engage learners’ curiosity and interest. She did, however, take account of children’s modal needs for large print and wide leading and used their curiosity about natural phenomena as an impetus for instruction in chemistry, meteorology, and astronomy. Barbauld’s literary and critical work was influential in changing the poetics of children’s texts for a time. She inspired social reformers such as Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, and Maria Edgeworth to write stories that would provide children with rational and moral “tools for reappraising their social and political situations” (Clarke 93); they believed that children could and should recognize and confront social injustice head-​on. But these rational pedagogues’ outspoken disdain for fantasy led to an extreme backlash as the Romantic poets came to prominence. The Romantics ushered in a new construction of childhood as a time set apart during which the imagination could best be cultivated by wild stories of myth and magic; useful knowledge about the real world could come later, and was seen as a devolution of one’s mental capacities rather than an enhancement. Thence followed what has come to be known as “the Golden Age of children’s literature,” so gilded by the emergence of works such as The Water-​Babies (Charles Kingsley, 1863), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), The Princess and the Goblin (George MacDonald, 1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), and Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie, 1904/​1911). To be sure, these texts were a response to the expansive educational goals of their time and place as well as a protest against overly didactic pedagogies. Treasure Island, for instance, combined with popular tales by Rudyard Kipling and G. A. Henty, among others, to inspire a taste for travel and empire building. Any didactic intent of Carroll’s and Kingsley’s tales was directed more toward adults than toward children; instead, they took the side of the child, with trenchant social critiques and satiric treatments of Victorian culture and education practices barely concealed through clever metaphors. Like Comenius, they respected children’s keen desire and need to learn how the world works, but added to this a respect for children’s ability to critique what they’ve learned and how they’ve learned it. By expanding Comenius’s plurality of languages to include the plurality of worlds and meanings that can be created with words, they provide readers with a different set of tools than those offered by the rational pedagogues, tools that include imagination and irony as means to enhance moral and 29

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rational judgment. In fact, I would argue that what has ensured the longevity of these Golden Age texts is their development of a poetics of childhood and children’s literature that sees playful plurality and multimodal adaptation as a necessary condition of pedagogy.

Back to the Future: Pedagogy and Poetics in the Twentieth and Twenty-​First Centuries Hans-​Heino Ewers argues that explicit and narrowly focused didacticism in children’s literature has largely fallen out of favor (77–​82). He describes and limits what he calls “the pedagogic action system” of children’s literature to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the development of universal compulsory education led to educators thinking collectively about how they might create and disseminate “pre-​conditions and frameworks for leisure reading that could be regarded as educationally positive” (78). These pedagogues were concerned with the dissemination of their evaluations and recommendations: they circulated warnings and negative lists of trade books, aiming to extend their influence beyond school-​sanctioned reading to what children had available to them. Their efforts were largely successful, at least in Germany, as publishers aggressively sought the endorsement of professional educators and adapted their books to the standards they established. While Ewers’s history is limited to Germany, it is concurrent with the formation of recommendation and award-​ granting associations such as the American Library Association and the Children’s Book Committee in the United States. Ewers’s assertion that the pedagogic action system is no longer active, however, is being challenged by both the content and criticism of recent children’s books. Didacticism hasn’t disappeared, but instead indicates an explicit shift in pedagogical aims. According to education theorists Arthur W. Chickering and Linda Reisser, In earlier eras, the principal task of education was “socialization,” and the problem of individuals was to learn the attitudes, actions, and skills necessary for a satisfying and productive fit with “society.” [...] In the global society of the twenty-​first century, where change is the only certainty, not socialization but identity formation becomes the central and continuing task of education. (208) In response, recent books for children focus on championing new norms of identity, greater social inclusion, and environmental responsibility. The critical mood has likewise shifted, with contemporary social media and academic critics intent on finding and exposing what education researchers call a “hidden curriculum” in older texts that have been beloved by generations of children. That is, contemporary children’s literature criticism often focuses on how children’s books, especially those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, subtly promote or defend the values of heteronormative nuclear families, rigid gender identities and roles, white human exceptionalism, colonial exploitation, and entrepreneurial capitalism. Social media have made debates about the implicit and explicit values of children’s literature highly public and highly politicized. Many critics assert that only books that align with their own values pass muster and any that don’t should be taken off the shelves. Such debates do not tend to focus on whether a book has literary or artistic qualities that would appeal to children or help to “educate their literary taste.” Nor do those who engage in them seem to trust children’s capacity to engage in critical dialogue with the book’s content or form. It seems that, like the rational educators of the eighteenth century and the concerned pedagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contemporary culturemakers see the educative and moral influence of all children’s literature as more important than any poetic qualities that might make these texts appealing to or even educative for 30

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their readers. This is not to say that such critiques are not important, but as early as 1967, John Rowe Townsend saw at least three dangers in what he refers to as “Didacticism in modern dress” (33). First, he notes that children will lose interest in books that have been chosen simply because adults approve of their values. Without a poetics that children find interesting, challenging, and otherwise engaging, no book will or should survive, and more importantly, children forced to read such fare may give up on reading altogether. The second danger is that authors will feel confined to writing to specific moral scripts that may “stultify their creative impulse” and result in “nauseating and disastrous work” (40, 39). But the final danger Townsend presents is that parents, critics, and educators will judge a work solely by its representation of social or environmental problems rather than by its literary merits, which, like many critics before him, he ultimately leaves undefined. Finally, then, we are left with the problem of how to approach this inevitable entanglement of poetics and pedagogy in our critical evaluations. I have argued that while contemporary critics have focused on different aspects of this entanglement over the years, Comenius managed to achieve a workable balance by showing how the poetics of a text can and should work in support of both its pedagogical content and child readers’ modal preferences. His emphasis on plurality and multimodality seems to offer two of the most consistently useful and persistent conceptual frameworks through which to consider the contemporary poetics of children’s literature as well as what children learn from their literary experiences.

Notes 1 For further reading on diverse methods of analysis in picturebooks, see Moebius; Painter, Martin, and Unsworth; Serafini. 2 For instance, see Jeffries on distinctive forms of sound-​patterns in children’s poetry; Henderson and Tolson on patterns and forms in children’s literature by and about Black people. In addition, Maria Nikolajeva offers a range of theoretical and analytical options through which to approach the various aesthetic dimensions of children’s novels, while Hans-​Heino Ewers more broadly discusses norms of literary concepts, discourse, and symbols.

Works Cited Adams, Gillian. “Ancient and Medieval Children’s Texts.” International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, vol. 1, edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2004, pp. 225–​38. Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868. Bader, Barbara. American Picturebooks: From Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within. Macmillan, 1986. Barbauld, A. L. Hymns in Prose for Children. London: J. Johnson, 1781. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. London: Nath. Ponder, 1678. Chickering, Arthur W., and Linda Reisser. Education and Identity. Jossey-​Bass, 1993. Clarke, Norma. “The Cursed Barbauld Crew.” Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood 1600–​1900, edited by Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson, Routledge, 1997, pp. 91–​103. Comenius, Johann Amos. Orbis Sensualium Pictus: The Visible World in Pictures. 1887/​1658. Translated by Charles Hoole, Project Gutenberg, www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​28299/​28299-​h/​28299-​h.htm. Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society. W. W. Norton, 1950. Ewers, Hans-​Heino. Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research. Routledge, 2009. Gubar, Marah. “On Not Defining Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 209–​16, doi:10.1632/​ pmla.2011.126.1.209. Henderson, Laretta. “The Black Arts Movement and African American Young Adult Literature: An Evaluation of Narrative Style.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 36, no. 4, 2005, pp. 299–​323, doi:10.1007/​ s10583-​005-​8314-​4. Hollindale, Peter. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books. Thimble Press, 1997. Hunt, Peter. “Criticism and Children’s Literature.” Signal, vol. 15, 1974, pp. 117–​30.

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Karen Coats Hunter, Madeleine. We Are in Convergence: Intergenerational Synergies in Twenty-​First-​Century Children’s Media Franchises. University of Cambridge, PhD dissertation, 2022. Huse, Nancy. “Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 20, no. 2, 1989, pp. 121–​28. Jeffries, Leslie. “The Language of Children’s Poems: A Stylistic Case Study.” Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories, edited by Janet Maybin and Nicola J. Watson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 218–​35. Johnson, Holly, Janelle Mathis, and Kathy G. Short, eds. Critical Content Analysis of Visual Images in Books for Young People: Reading Images. Routledge, 2019. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–​1954. Translated by John Forrester, Norton, 1988. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A. and J. Churchill, 1693. Mackey, Margaret. “Communities of Fictions: Story, Format, and Thomas the Tank Engine.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp. 39–​52. Meek, Margaret. “Introduction: Definitions, Themes, Changes, Attitudes.” International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, vol. 1, edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–​12. Moebius, William. “Introduction to Picture Book Codes.” Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/​Visual Enquiry, vol. 2, no. 2, April–​June 1986, pp. 141–​58. Newbery, John. A Little Pretty Pocket-​Book. London: Newbery and Carnan, 1744. Nikolajeva, Maria. Aesthetic Approaches to Children’s Literature: An Introduction. Scarecrow Press, 2005. Nodelman, Perry. “Beyond Genre and Beyond.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1, 1981, pp. 22–​24, doi:10.1353/​chq.0.1558. —​—​—​. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. —​—​—​. Words about Pictures: The Narrative of Children’s Picture Books. University of Georgia Press, 1988. —​—​—​. “Signs of Confusion.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 4, 1986–​87, pp. 162–​65. —​—​—​, and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, 3rd ed. Allyn and Bacon, 2002. Painter, Claire, J. R. Martin, and Len Unsworth. Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. Equinox, 2013. Paterson, Gary H. “Adults, Children, Didacticism, and the Modes in Children’s Literature.” Canadian Children’s Literature/​Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, vol. 14, 1979, pp. 14–​23. Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy. Teachers College Press, 2014. Shams, Ladan, and Aaron R. Seitz. “Benefits of Multisensory Learning.” Trends in Cognitive Science, vol. 12, no. 11, 2008, pp. 411–​17. Shavit, Zohar. The Poetics of Children’s Literature. University of Georgia Press, 1986. Tolson, Nancy D. Black Children’s Literature Got de Blues: The Creativity of Black Writers and Illustrators. Peter Lang, 2008. Townsend, John Rowe. “Didacticism in Modern Dress.” 1967. Only Connect: Readings in Children’s Literature, edited by Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, and L. F. Ashley, Oxford University Press, 1969.

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3 ETHICS AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES Amanda K. Allen

This chapter contends that what it means to study children’s literature from a historical perspective has been –​ and continues to be –​ affected by the changing composition, methodologies, and theoretical interests of the field that studies it. It takes as its central argument the maxim that no history is neutral; thus, the first half provides a historiographical overview of major methodologies used by scholars of Anglo-​American children’s literary studies, accompanied by a brief meditation on archival research. The second half acknowledges the complications involved in studying children’s literature from a historical perspective, such as definitions, disciplines, periodization, the lack of cross-​cultural analyses, and other practical considerations. The scope of both halves is limited to texts published in English and written by scholars within the Anglosphere. It excludes other scholarly traditions solely due to space considerations and my own limitations in language; I want to emphasize that historically based children’s literature criticism is not confined to Europe and the Anglosphere. While the histories of other scholarly traditions may conceptually overlap those presented here, they each possess their own rich narratives. Scholarship on the history of children’s literature started well before the field of Anglo-​American children’s literature studies formed into anything we recognize today. By “field,” I refer to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a system of social positions in which “All critics declare not only their judgment of the work, but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of a legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art” (35–​36). In our case, these critics (librarians, bibliographers, and academic scholars, among others) struggle not only over which texts count as children’s literature, but also over their ability to canonize those texts and their history –​ struggles apparent within the following historiography. Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1869, British author Charlotte Yonge was among the first critics to establish both a historical canon of children’s literature and her expertise for doing so. Grouping “infantine literature” within “class literature,” Yonge declared that the genre was “a recent production. Up to the Georgian era, there were no books at all either for children or the poor, excepting the class-​books containing old ballads[…] and short tales[…] all told without any endeavour to simplify the language, but rather dealing in grandiloquence” (229). Yonge’s work established key concepts, including the difference between texts published for children and those published by children, a recognition that some texts were more pleasurable and some more didactic, and a gender binary between girls’ and boys’ books.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-5

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Yonge’s article was early; most initial investigations into the history of Anglo-​American children’s literature emerged during the late nineteenth century, the period known in Britain as the Victorian era and in the United States as the Gilded Age. The sudden proliferation of this research stemmed from multiple motivations, but foremost among them were what Anne Lundin characterizes as Victorians’ “romantic longing for the past –​for one’s own childhood reading and the childhood of the genre” and fears regarding the proliferation of penny dreadfuls and dime novels. As Lundin observes, To establish a canon of childhood literature became critical as its very foundations were considered threatened. The field was being glutted with cheap publications, products of the new rotary press. […] Many in the educational establishment felt threatened by such encroachment on the perceived purity of literature for the young. (52) Three categories of critics started to publish histories of children’s literature during this period: new children’s services librarians (“new” in that children’s librarianship was only just appearing), bibliographers, and children’s authors, with each group heavily focusing on Romantic notions of the child. In 1888, pioneering American children’s librarian Caroline Hewins expanded the timeline of children’s literature past Yonge’s Georgian origins and into the early fifteenth century. Following John Locke’s theories, she suggested that children learning to read should be given “some easy, pleasant book, like Æsop’s Fables or Reynard the Fox, with pictures if possible” (114). Writing in 1891, E. M. Field (Louise Frances Field) reached back further, examining texts from the Saxon era to the 1820s, while espousing Romantic notions such as “the pure soul of a child acts as a test for true gold” (7). Field created a foundation for the later narrative of instruction versus delight by suggesting that John Newbery’s publications promoted a shift from educational and moral instruction to more pleasurable reading: The shrewd perception of Newbery, Saint of Newcastle, and their successors, from about 1770, started the stream of little books which has swelled into the great flood of to-​day. In spite of the never-​failing moral, there was now a distinct intention to amuse the little people, an inclination which has grown more and more, until the very newest phase of opinion seems to be that instruction, if admitted into a story-​book at all, must be scrupulously veiled and cloaked. (4–​5) Importantly, R. Gordon Kelly notes that Field “never defined what she meant by a children’s book, and this tendency to remain vague about essential definitions and distinctions characterizes subsequent writing in the field” (95). Hewins and Field were two of many critics, with numerous others writing during the early decades of the twentieth century. These critics generally followed their Victorian and Gilded Age forebears in emphasizing the influence of Romanticism (and Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, in particular) and continuing to avoid defining children’s literature. Their texts often encompassed bibliographical lists spanning centuries, although a divide between British (primarily English) and American histories started to appear. Rosalie Halsey’s Forgotten Books of the American Nursery (1911), for example, was the first book-​length study of the history of American children’s literature. Relying heavily on Field and on Charles Welsh’s 1899 article “The Early History of Children’s Books in New England,” Halsey “concludes that American children’s literature was simply a variant of English taste until the 1830s” (Kelly 95). She established a nineteenth-​century American canon by surveying authors such as Jacob Abbott and Louisa May Alcott. This canon would be further entrenched via Algernon Tassin’s “Books for Children” (1917), which Beverly Lyon Clark considers “striking[…] because it provides insight into how the academy[…] viewed and categorized children’s literature” (63). Clark 34

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emphasizes that “What Tassin marks, in effect, is the passage of [women’s works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin][…] out of the canons of adult culture, leaving works of such power, for lack of anywhere else to go, in the nursery” (63). A turning point was 1932, when Paul Hazard’s Les Livres, les enfants et les hommes and F. J. Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life were published. Hazard’s text was one of the first comparative studies of historical children’s literature, although that comparison is limited primarily to Western European nations and the United States. By considering the role of children’s literature in the construction of national identities, and by placing texts from different cultures in conversation, Hazard emphasized commonalities that support his concept of a “universal republic of childhood” (46). Additional influential cross-​national historical comparisons include those by Bettina Hürlimann (Europäische Kinderbücher aus drei Jahrhunderten, 1959), Carmen Bravo-​Villasante (Historia de la Literatura Infantil Universal, 1971), Ganna Ottevaere-​van Praag (La Littérature pour la jeunesse en Europe occidentale [1750–​ 1925], 1987), Gillian Avery (Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–​ 1922, 1994), and Emer O’Sullivan (Kinderliterarische Komparatistik, 2000), as well as Anne Pellowski’s annotated bibliography The World of Children’s Literature (1968), which sought to “bring together into one volume the information (or the means to it) which would lead to an accurate picture of the development of children’s literature in every country where it presently exists, even in the most formative stages” (3). Darton’s influential text –​still in print, with revisions by Brian Alderson –​ follows many themes established by previous historians (particularly by Field and by Montrose Moses’s 1907 Children’s Books and Reading), but moves from “delectando monemus” (“instruction with delight”) to polarize instruction versus delight, so that children’s literature is “the scene of a battle between instruction and amusement, between restraint and freedom, between hesitant morality and spontaneous happiness” (vi). While previous historians such as Yonge and Field organized their works by separating texts of educational and moral instruction from those designed to provide pleasure, their separations rarely suggested the level of opposition described as “battle.” Darton’s binary stuck; as Deborah Stevenson observes, his “polarization becomes a largely unchallenged tenet of the literature, providing the spectrum that underpins nearly every genre history prior to the 21st century” (180). In some ways, the consequence of this polarization was the canonization of the Golden Age as the beginning of “real” children’s literature. Darton defines the “children’s book” as a “printed wor[k]‌ produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them profitably quiet” (1). He points to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as a “revolution in its sphere” and claims that “It was the coming to the surface, powerfully and permanently, the first unapologetic, undocumented appearance in print, for readers who sorely needed it, of liberty of thought in children’s books. […] There was to be, in hours of pleasure, no more dread about the moral value” (268). For much of the twentieth century, historians and bibliographers of children’s literature supported what Matthew Grenby calls Darton’s “astonishingly durable ideological agenda,” so that “those histories of British children’s literature which have followed have almost always stuck to [Darton’s] categories” (“Resources” 142). Such histories include Percy Muir’s English Children’s Books, 1600–​1900 (1954), John Rowe Townsend’s Written for Children: An Outline of English-​Language Children’s Literature (1965/​1995), and Eric Quayle’s The Collector’s Book of Children’s Books (1971), among others. Observing the entrenchment of this narrative, David Rudd acknowledges that “This version of events[…] 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, 1971) and From Instruction to Delight (Demers and Moyles, 1982/​2009)” (4). It is important to note, of course, that Darton’s influence does not necessarily extend past Anglo-​American texts; as Grenby explains, “almost all western European nations have their own 35

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‘Darton’ –​that is to say, a mid-​twentieth-​century surveyor of the nation’s children’s literature (mostly available only in the language of that nation, but sometimes in English)” (“Resources” 143). Beyond Western Europe and the United States, however, it is more difficult to find such bibliographies, and those that are published in English within African, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries are particularly rare. Alternative histories may be found within bibliographies focusing on language rather than nation, such as Uriel Ofek’s Hebrew Children’s Literature: The Beginnings (1979), which incorporates texts from 1506 to 1905 but spans continents. Such language-​based bibliography provides a hint of larger, potentially interconnected influences on the development of children’s literature than nation-​based texts may allow; as Grenby observes, “In a sense, national bibliographies, though the reasons for constructing them have been extremely cogent, have prevented us from seeing this web of connections” (“Resources” 145). Within the Anglo-​American tradition, scholars in the 1980s and 1990s started to expand past Darton-​influenced historical narratives by employing new theoretical lenses. The approaches were varied; for example, writing in 1996, Maria Nikolajeva introduced a semiotic model that was “not related to any concrete historical periods but rather attempts to discern more universal evolutionary patterns” (93). The most influential methodologies followed what Tony Watkins calls “the reconceptualization of history and its relationship to literature” (53), articulated by theorists such as Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Raymond Williams. Within children’s literary studies, such reconceptualization coincided with critical turns in theorizing about the child of children’s literature, such as Neil Postman’s notion in The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) that the rise of print culture created childhood by separating it from adulthood, and Jacqueline Rose’s famous assertion in The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) that the child of children’s literature is the construct of adult needs and desires. In recognizing the importance of opening the canon, many historians of children’s literature turned to American new historicism (sometimes called “cultural poetics”) and Marxist-​influenced British cultural materialism. Both movements acknowledge texts as material products derived from (and influencing) specific historical conditions; both explore systems of power and mechanisms of repression and subjugation; and both reject notions of a single, knowable “history” or canon of texts to suggest instead a plurality of histories and canons, including those that are recovered or recuperated.1 In 1988, Mitzi Myers articulated how a new historicism of children’s literature would integrate text and socio-​historic context, demonstrating on the one hand how extraliterary cultural formations shape literary discourse and on the other how literary practices are actions that make things happen. […] It would pay particular attention to the conceptual and symbolic fault lines denoting a text’s time-​, place-​, gender-​, and class-​specific ideological mechanisms. (“Opportunities” 42) Importantly, Myers stressed that “What a New Historical orientation could not make central to its program is what much historically-​based study of children’s literature still does: organize material within preconceived patterns implying an evolutionary view of historical progress” (“Opportunities” 42). Indeed, following the rise of new historicism and cultural materialism, much scholarship (although not all) shifted dramatically from Darton-​style long histories of children’s literature (often asserting teleological progressions) to studies that examine smaller scopes in time and place. Buttressed by postmodern theorists such as Jean-​François Lyotard, scholars thus became critical of metanarratives such as Darton’s –​narratives that overpower and marginalize other discourses –​and instead turned to the multiplicity of specific, local narratives. This shift provided the ideological and methodological contexts that allowed researchers to recover excluded texts and authors. Myers’s own work accomplishes such recovery by providing alternative readings of eighteenth-​century female writers such as Maria Edgeworth that, in Rudd’s summary, 36

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demonstrate how “the narrative about the emergence of delight from instruction was predicated on the male, Romantic child as the norm. […] 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” (5). Thus, as Myers asserts in an argument obviously invested in new historicist methodology, “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” (“Ephemera” 135). Medieval children’s literature was similarly recuperated in the 1990s when scholars started to look past the metanarrative that had questioned –​and even denied –​its existence. Since 1962, when Philippe Ariès famously asserted that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (128), many scholars had viewed childhood as a social category and life phase (differentiated from adulthood) “invented” during the seventeenth century, thereby suggesting that children’s literature could not exist in an earlier period. Admittedly, Ariès’s work was useful in establishing childhood as constructed rather than “natural” (or universal, or transhistorical), but it also created a grand narrative that endured for decades before scholars of childhood started to complicate it in the 1990s, and children’s literary historians such as Gillian Adams began in earnest to explore the possibility of pre-​seventeenth-​century texts read by children. Thus, Adams disavowed the notion that children’s literature did not exist in the Middle Ages by arguing that many medieval works of “adult literature” were actually written with children in mind. Many of the new historicist and cultural materialist analyses of the 1980s and 1990s became foundational to the scholarly expansion of the field. Within fairy tale scholarship, for example, Jack Zipes’s 1979 Breaking the Magic Spell moved away from earlier aesthetic or psychological considerations of fairy tales in order to break the “magic spell of commodity production” (20) and to analyze folk and fairy tales in relation to the sociohistorical forces that created them. In doing so, Zipes demonstrated how the fairy tale appropriated folktale elements to become a new genre expressing the ideology (and struggles) of early capitalism. His 1983 Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion continued his Frankfurt School-​inspired approach by exploring “how fairy tales operate ideologically to indoctrinate children so that they will conform to dominant social standards which are not necessarily established in their behalf” (18). Like 1932, the years 1991–​1992 became another turning point due to the close publication of four influential, assumption-​challenging texts: Claudia Nelson’s Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–​1917 (1991), Peter Hunt’s Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature (1991), John Stephens’s Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (1992), and Perry Nodelman’s The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (1992). Nelson challenged conceptions of gender by tracing two competing versions of masculinity within nineteenth-​century British children’s literature. Her text revealed an important shift in perception of gender, from the discourse of feminine ethics –​ influenced by evangelicalism and emphasizing an androgynous ideal –​ that dominated Victorian-era writing for boys, to physical toughness and increasing homophobia in Edwardian children’s fiction. Hunt’s, Stephens’s, and Nodelman’s texts were not historical investigations of children’s literature per se, but relied heavily on historical children’s literature to support their arguments. Hunt’s text is best known for his “childist approach”: a parallel to feminist criticism that involved challenging our adult assumptions and reading as a child. Using a deconstructionist approach, Stephens explored how a book’s character and its implied reader are positioned within ideology, explaining that “Since about 1960 there has appeared a variety of books for children which broadly share an impulse to create roles for child characters which interrogate the normal subject positions created for children within socially dominant ideological frames” (120). Nodelman’s textbook provided a theoretically informed overview of literary characteristics inherent to various forms of children’s literature, and included sections that contextualized that literature in relation to the history of childhood. Importantly, although Nodelman repeated Darton’s and Ariès’s grand narratives, he also questioned them. 37

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Scholars of the new millennium built on the foundations provided by this 1980s and 1990s research, often maintaining a focus on ideology. By 2000 the field had expanded so much that my historiographical narrative is inevitably inadequate, and thus I can only gesture to the many new areas of investigation. In Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (2000), for example, M. Daphne Kutzer argued that empire is presented as good and natural within late-​Victorian British children’s fiction. The seemingly neutral texts of the early twentieth century continued that presentation, encoding it as nostalgia. Clark (Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America, 2003) traced how the emergence of literary studies as a scholarly discipline marginalized the perceived value of children’s literature. She observed critical theory’s exclusion of age as an analytical category, articulated the (often gendered) agenda behind the bifurcation of children’s and adult literature, and noted the resultant invisibility of children’s books within popular press and academic circles. Writing in 2006, Andrew O’Malley explored how the evolution of eighteenth-​century middle-​class ideology was disseminated and consolidated in children’s literature, which in turn became the mechanism by which children “had to be rendered into subjects whose energies could be controlled and effectively harnessed” (11). O’Malley revealed how the child was “othered,” became an object of study, and shaped contemporary concepts of childhood. In the most recent decade or so, the already expanding scope of historical studies of children’s literature has grown even further to include a diverse range of focuses and intersectional methodologies. As key samples, Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2010) reframes the role and agency of Victorian children. Although she acknowledges the “cult of the child,” Gubar furthers previous scholarship by suggesting that the Victorians and Edwardians possessed a critical self-​consciousness concerning the power imbalances in relationships between a child reader and an adult author. Kenneth Kidd and Michelle Abate’s Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2011) is a collection of essays not necessarily focused on historical analysis, but providing a history of queer criticism in youth literature nonetheless. Across three sections, chapters focus on queering the canon, politics associated with post-​Stonewall gay and lesbian movements, and queer readers and writers. Lastly, three unconnected but intersecting texts examine the influence of production cultures on children’s literature. Jacalyn Eddy (Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–​1939, 2006), Leonard S. Marcus (Minders of Make-​Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature, 2008), and Lissa Paul (The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century, 2010) incorporate concepts from book history and print culture to explore not only children’s texts, authors, and readers, but also the influence of neglected contextual figures such as editors, booksellers, librarians, and critics (among others) on the history of children’s literature. Within these many new avenues of scholarship, it is important to note that a recuperative –​ and often intersectional –​approach is especially evident in recent scholarship that explores historical texts related to children of color, particularly Black children.2 Michelle Martin’s Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–​2002 (2004) demonstrates the evolution of African American picturebooks from stereotype and minstrelsy to contemporary representations (and celebrations) of Blackness. Writing in 2014, Katharine Capshaw suggests that civil-​rights era African American photobooks positioned the child as a locus of cultural instantiation: “Picturing childhood became a powerful instrument in civil rights activism[…] threats to the young made the stakes of the movement palpable to individuals and to the nation. Undoubtedly, images of children under siege had generative effects for the civil rights campaign” (Childhood xi). Perhaps one of the most important historical analyses published in recent years, Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence (2011) demonstrates how the concept of childhood innocence became “raced white” in the mid-​nineteenth-​century United States (4), excluding Black children and ultimately demonstrating the role of childhood in large-​scale racial projects such as slavery, abolition, and the civil rights movement. 38

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There exist far, far more approaches to studying children’s literature through a historical lens than I can include here. Before considering the complications involved in such research, it is worth pausing to contemplate a privileged –​ perhaps even idealized –​ methodology within historical investigations: archival studies. For many scholars, archival research presents a romantic fantasy of recovery that belies what Carolyn Steedman describes as “the ordinariness, the unremarkable nature of archives, and the everyday disappointments that historians know they will find there” (9). The potential of the archive is exciting, even as the work of requesting and viewing archival documents may feel tedious (and physically cold). The greater work of weaving a narrative from those documents is, of course, the most difficult aspect of archival research, and fraught with multiple (and often conflicting) considerations. As Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici explain, “the business of unknowing is unsteady. … Between the fraught and necessary practices of historicization, anachronism, interpretation, bias, and partial readings that propel historical scholarship, archival fragments fall in and out of the frame of an easily perceptible knowledge” (1). The last twenty years have seen a rise in archive-​informed investigations of children’s literature. Potential reasons for this proliferation include the scholarly growth and legitimation of the field itself –​Kidd observes that “The rise and sorting of the archive goes hand in hand with the articulation of a children’s literature canon and field of research” (5) –​which in turn grants institutional archival access to scholars of children’s literature and (some) funding and prestige to specialty children’s literature archives. Of course, the relative recentness of that growth and small size of the field often means that the scholarly apparatuses supporting children’s literature-​related archival materials –​such as cataloging –​ have not always been prioritized or funded. Still, as Alison Bailey remarks, “since when it comes to collections of children’s literature much material is uncatalogued or not catalogued to any level of detail, there are still plenty of discoveries to be made” (45). For examples of strong archive-​driven historical investigations of children’s literature, I offer three representational texts. Capshaw’s Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (2004) recovers neglected writers to explore the influence of the New Negro Renaissance on the development of African American children’s literature. She focuses on “cross writing” (2) to reveal how authors wrote to Black children, dissolving adult/​child boundaries, and positioning these children as the locus of influence within their communities. Using unpublished letters, publication histories, and even scribbles in books, Capshaw demonstrates the ways in which texts for children became a complicated (and conflicted) site of competing ideologies regarding the role of African Americans within American society. Julia L. Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006) relies on archival research and extensive interviews to reveal how leftist authors, illustrators, publishers, booksellers, and librarians eluded Red hunters (such as Joseph McCarthy) during the late 1940s and 1950s to publish and distribute texts incorporating left-​wing messages. Mickenberg articulates the circumstances that allowed leftist writers and teachers to turn to and incorporate these messages within trade books in fiction, science, and history, all supported by editors and librarians who upheld ideals of free speech. Lastly, Victoria Ford Smith’s 2017 exploration of children’s active role in creating nineteenth-​ and early twentieth-​ century children’s literature uses letters, publishing histories, dedications, and memoirs (among other documents) to explore adult-​child creative relationships –​ which she terms “intergenerational collaborations” –​in order to “elucidate the contours of real children’s participation in their own literature and culture and challenge popular narratives of children’s literature that read actual young people solely as idealized listeners or passive muses” (7). The point of this historiography is to emphasize the extent to which historical studies –​ including archive-​based ones –​ emerge from and inform the composition, methodologies, and theoretical interests defining the field at any point in time. Thus, as the above historiography demonstrates, the proliferation of historical explorations in children’s literature both upholds and 39

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simultaneously critiques earlier criticism, just as future research will do the same for our contemporary criticism. As such vacillations suggest, there is no end point in children’s literary history; there is only a changing field, and its influence on how, why, who, and what we study as historical children’s literature.

Complications in Studying Children’s Literature from a Historical Perspective How, then, does one study children’s literature from a historical perspective? Literary historians of children’s literature are faced with a complex field filled with contrasting ideological conceptions, differing disciplinary agendas, unconventional organization, and numerous practical complications. To enter into such study is to be aware (and perhaps wary) of the complexities that form the field. Consider the seemingly simple task of deciding what texts to study. As the above historiography demonstrates, changing canons regarding which texts scholars embrace or exclude rely on –​ and create –​ differing answers to the following questions: What is children’s literature? What counts as children’s literature then and now? Who decides? “What is children’s literature?” is perhaps the most fraught question within the field. As Roger Sale once noted, “everyone knows what children’s literature is until asked to define it” (1). Scholars must consider related definitions surrounding “child” and “literature” before they can argue definitions of “children’s literature” and whether or not, following Rose, it is “impossible” to define. Even the question of whether the field actually focuses on such definitions is fraught; Nodelman suggests that “defining children’s literature has been a major activity of children’s literature criticism throughout its history” (136), whereas Gubar acknowledges that “influential children’s literature critics have been arguing back and forth about whether or not it is possible to define their subject of study since this academic field came into being in the 1970s,” but observes that “the vast, silent majority of scholars cheerfully carry on with their scholarship on specific texts, types, and eras of children’s literature as though the lack of an overarching definition constituted no real impediment to their work” (209, 210). It may be that definitions of children’s literature cannot be fixed, or change with the influence of different times, spaces, and ideologies. Gubar suggests that we should “give up on the arduous and ultimately unenlightening task of generating a definition without giving up on the idea that ‘children’s literature’ is a coherent, viable category” (210). While I agree, I will note that historians of children’s literature –​particularly those working before the Golden Age –​may not provide explicit definitions, but often incorporate implicit definitions based on how they position their texts and readers within or against the post-​Darton polarization of instruction versus delight. Thus, as Stevenson observes, within contemporary histories of children’s literature “a convention seems to have tacitly arisen: Educational materials merit inclusion in places and times when few other books are published for children, only to lose that consideration after the 18th century when a literature develops that’s expressly geared for children’s pleasure” (180). Further implicit definitions are, of course, also related to damaging prejudices. As has been made clear by the slow rise in scholarship in the last thirty years dedicated to recuperative, historical studies of previously excluded texts and authors, what defines children’s literature has not necessarily always been synonymous with what has counted as children’s literature, especially when those arguments have been made by a field whose members have historically been overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and heterosexual. In addition to conflicting definitions, organizational aspects of the field further complicate historical studies. The field’s encompassment of three dominant disciplines (education, English, and library science) –​as well as a multitude of additional related disciplines –​certainly influences scholarship. As Patricia Enciso, Karen Coats, Christine Jenkins, and Shelby Wolf argue, scholars within each discipline may choose to study the same texts but “differ in how, where, and with whom we value their inclusion in our scholarship” (220). The result is that “the boundaries of our expertise and, consequently our research questions, methods, and findings, operate through expectations and 40

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relationships that are presumed to be shared, familiar, and equal,” but are not (221). What it means to study children’s literature historically, then, is strongly tied to one’s discipline. Library science may use both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to focus on the reader and the text, or to identify historical publishing trends. Education may view historical texts within a social practice that emphasizes the perspective of the child reader. And English may study the text as text, contextualizing it within its historical moment while also providing “close readings” that seek to interpret meaning. My summaries are reductive, but they gesture toward why discipline-​based emphases led some people –​particularly during the 1990s –​to perceive the field as split between what John Rowe Townsend called “book people” (who focused on historical, bibliographical work) versus “child people” (who were more interested in children’s reading development) (407). Today, work from scholars such as Bernstein, Capshaw, and Marilisa Jiménez Garcia3 establishes both the advantage of and the urgent need for such multidisciplinarity. A further complication in studying children’s literature historically is that the field’s organization does not lend itself to historical study. Conventional literary histories of adult texts are shaped by relatively fixed periods and movements that group texts, authors, and styles into a linear pattern. For many scholars, such linear periodization is not only helpful, it is necessary: as Virginia Jackson notes, “if we admit that the history of ideas matters historically, then we can’t afford not to periodize what we read” (2). Children’s literature, however, exists in an uneasy relationship with such periodization. Eric Hayot hails it as one of the “few institutionally viable nonperiodizing concepts” (“Periodization” 743), but as Karin Westman observes, its general categorization by genre eludes typical conventions of periodization to the extent that “it can be difficult to find children’s literature within the broader landscape of literary history” (466). Indeed, the field’s reliance on genre as its primary organizing principle has often positioned children’s literature as “the disempowered stepchild of literary history, absent from survey courses and discussions of literary periods” (464). For Westman, this reliance suggests possibility: “by attending to genre, the very category which has relegated children’s literature beyond the canonical pale, scholars of children’s literature can revise existing narratives of literary history” (466). The revision she suggests incorporates both a text’s initial generic performance and its subsequent remediations. Thus, her example of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon and its later re-​presentation in other media (Goodnight Bush, Goodnight iPad, and so on) and to other audiences (grown children reading to their own children) “challenges periodization as a defining method of literary history” by asking the question, “To which ‘period’ does Goodnight Moon belong, if it exists in many?” (467). Westman suggests that “The answer does not lie with the ahistorical or the synchronic, but resides instead with multiple and varied instances of generic performance across established periods” (467). Westman’s argument participates in current discourses of literary history that critique conventional historiographical periodization. These critiques emphasize the ethical problem of periodization by making obvious the power differentials that reify texts from certain places (and cultures) over others; as Susan Stanford Friedman observes, “All too often in literary history… temporal periodization can easily obscure the power relations embedded in space” (386). Hayot similarly views the “totalizing nature of periodization” as “relentlessly unmodified by the arrival of noncanonical authors from a variety of national and social locations” (Worlds 156, 155). Dipesh Chakrabarty points to the colonial underpinnings of such periodization, suggesting instead that “the writing of history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with itself” (109). Perhaps the most successful –​and ethical –​children’s literary history, then, would not only rely on the field’s multiplicity of generic performances (and remediations) across time, but also require a fundamental acknowledgment of the power relations on which it has been built, and the plurality of times (and spaces) that it may be complicit in ignoring. Such an acknowledgment may include recognizing and pushing back against the continuing dominance of Anglo-​American historical research into children’s literature. It means being alive to the 41

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potential multiplicity of contrasting historical narratives of both the child and children’s literature that arise in other cultures, as well as the potential commonalities that emerge from the context of colonization. Kimberley Reynolds remarks how Western (and particularly Anglo-​American) children’s literature has dominated histories worldwide, obscuring other traditions. As she writes, “Globalization and use of the Internet have further skewed this trend in favour of Anglophone publications,” but she adds that “long before the current phase of globalization, as a consequence of migration, colonization, missionary and trade activities, or occupation, there was considerable commonality in what children read in many parts of the world, so this broadly Anglo-​American history will have a family resemblance to histories of children’s literature in many cultures” (4). Of course, the extent to which these commonalities and contrasts are perceived within the field rely on scholars’ pursuit of comparative studies; O’Sullivan explains that comparative historiography of children’s literature “calls for fundamental discussion of the cultural, social, economic and educational conditions in which literature for children developed” in different cultural contexts. As she notes, however, “There is still no comparative study of children’s literatures from different cultures which takes account of these aspects” (44). While the complications included above have been primarily theoretical, practical considerations are equally important. The scarcity of physical texts is one such consideration; Field lamented as early as 1891, “It is the fate of children’s books to be destroyed by children themselves; to be put aside as insignificant in public and private collections; to be omitted from catalogues and bibliographies[…] to be preserved –​if at all –​either by a mere happy chance, or for the sake of illustrations they may happen to contain” (v). Moreover, the collectible nature of some children’s texts –​ often based on adult nostalgia –​makes accessing them difficult and expensive, and many scholars navigate a minefield of cheaply printed bowdlerized and abridged editions to make do with a modern standard edition, rather than being able to obtain the (usually preferred) first edition or author’s last revised edition. While the slow proliferation of online digitization of texts might seem to provide a possible solution, these digital archives are often subject to the continuing stigmatization of children’s literature. Examining Eighteenth-​Century Collections Online (ECCO), for example, Grenby explains that “in common with many such databases, ECCO is not specifically designed for students of children’s literature[…] its holdings of children’s books are not as complete as they might be: children’s texts seem to have been given a low priority in deciding what should be digitized, or perhaps what the libraries that provided the digitized images should acquire” (“Researching” 100). Additional practical complications include determining children’s literacy rates when such estimates generally focus on adults, and when “literacy rate” itself is an ambiguous term. Stevenson concludes, “It’s therefore impossible to ascertain exactly how many children in a given period would be able to read non-​scholarly books even if they had access to them” (181). Stevenson also raises questions regarding child readers’ access to books and to light by which to read; the building of roads, canals, and later railways to distribute books past major cities; and the possible spread of texts via the absence of copyright laws and proliferation of piracy. Finally, she makes the simple but essential point that “scholars can only document reading of which they have record” (182). These practicalities –​ and many others –​ may seem mundane, but are often as important to the literary historian as the many theoretical complications (and others) listed above.

Conclusion From a brief historiography to a survey of typical complications this chapter has argued that research into children’s literature from a historical perspective is inevitably shaped by the key theories, methodologies, and composition of the field of children’s literary studies. Understanding historical works of children’s literature (and archival documents) as mediated objects, placing them into conversation with the discourse of the field, and working to undo unhelpful, misleading, or damaging cultural constructions can lead researchers to create nuanced readings of historical children’s literature 42

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that crack open the canon. Doing so allows neglected authors, works, and child audiences to be recuperated, acknowledged, and expanded, thereby creating a new history of children’s literature that reflects a diversity that may otherwise have been forgotten or suppressed. This work is ongoing; as Hunt states, “Any history[…] can (and should) be challenged at virtually every point” (xiv), and that includes both current historical research and those histories of children’s literature yet to be written.

Notes 1 The overlap between the two movements can make it difficult to recognize their divergences. In addition to national backgrounds, one major difference, as articulated by John Brannigan, is that “where new historicists deal with the power relations of past societies, cultural materialists explore literary texts within the context of contemporary power relations” (9). He provides the example of 1980s British scholars interpreting Shakespeare through the lens of then-​contemporary politics. 2 I use “related to” to acknowledge that histories such as Martin’s do not include only texts by Black authors aimed at Black children; as Martin states, “Readers will also encounter historical texts that are all about black people but whose white authors deliberately excluded black readers –​ juvenile or otherwise –​ from their intended audience” (xix). 3 In addition to their books cited above, see Bernstein, “Toys”; Capshaw, “Studies”; García.

Works Cited Adams, Gillian. “Medieval Children’s Literature: Its Possibility and Actuality.” Children’s Literature, vol. 26, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–​24. Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, translated by Robert Baldick. Knopf, 1962. Bailey, Alison. “Using Research Libraries, Archives and Collections.” Children’s Literature Studies: A Research Handbook, edited by M. O. Grenby and Kimberley Reynolds, Red Globe Press, 2011, pp. 45–​53. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York University Press, 2011. —​—​—​. “Toys Are Good for Us: Why We Should Embrace the Historical Integration of Children’s Literature, Material Culture, and Play.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 458–​63. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Columbia University Press, 1994. Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Macmillan Education UK, 2016. Capshaw, Katharine. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana University Press, 2006. —​—​—​. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. —​—​—​. “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 3, 2014, pp. 237–​57. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts.” Scrutiny2, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998, pp. 4–​15. Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Enciso, Patricia, Karen Coats, Christine Jenkins, and Shelby Wolf. “The Watsons Go to NRC-​2007: Crossing Academic Boundaries in the Study of Children’s Literature.” 57th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, edited by Youb Kim and Victoria J. Risko, National Reading Conference, 2008, pp. 219–​30. Field, E. M. The Child and His Book: Some Account of the History and Progress of Children’s Literature in England. London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co., 1891. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Alternatives to Periodization: Literary History, Modernism, and the ‘New’ Temporalities.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 4, Dec. 2019, pp. 379–​402. García, Marilisa Jiménez. “Side-​by-​Side: At the Intersections of Latinx Studies and ChYALit.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 113–​22. Grenby, Matthew. “The Resources of Children’s Literature.” Understanding Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2005, pp. 140–​58. —​—​—​. “Researching Historical Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Studies: A Research Handbook, edited by M. O. Grenby and Kimberley Reynolds, Red Globe Press, 2011, pp. 99–​107.

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Amanda K. Allen Gubar, Marah. “On Not Defining Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 209–​16. Hayot, Eric. “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time.” New Literary History, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, pp. 739–​56. —​—​—​. On Literary Worlds. Oxford University Press, 2012. Hazard, Paul. Books, Children and Men, translated by Marguerite Mitchell. The Horn Book, 1944. Hewins, C. M. “The History of Children’s Books.” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. LXI, January 1888, pp. 112–​26. Hunt, Peter. Children’s Literature. Wiley, 2001. Jackson, Virginia. “Introduction: On Periodization and Its Discontents.” On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute, edited by Virginia Jackson, English Institute in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, 2010, pp. 2–​17. Kelly, R. Gordon. “American Children’s Literature: An Historiographical Review.” American Literary Realism, 1870–​1910, vol. 6, no. 2, Spring 1973, pp. 89–​107. Kidd, Kenneth. “The Child, the Scholar, and the Children’s Literature Archive.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 35, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–​23. Lundin, Anne. “Victorian Horizons: The Reception of Children’s Books in England and America, 1880–​1900.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 64, no. 1, January 1994, pp. 30–​59. Marshall, Daniel, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici. “Editors’ Introduction.” Radical History Review, vol. 122, May 2015, pp. 1–​10. Martin, Michelle H. Brown Gold: Milestones of African-​American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–​2002. Routledge, 2004. Myers, Mitzi. “Missed Opportunities and Critical Malpractice: New Historicism and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 41–​43. —​—​—​. “Sociologizing Juvenile Ephemera: Periodical Contradictions, Popular Literacy, Transhistorical Readers.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 41–​45. Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. Garland, 1996. Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. O’Malley, Andrew. The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century. Routledge, 2003. O’Sullivan, Emer. Comparative Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2005. Pellowski, Anne. The World of Children’s Literature. R. R. Bowker, 1968. Reynolds, Kimberley. Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2011. Rudd, David. “The Development of Children’s Literature.” The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd, Routledge, 2010, pp. 3–​13. Sale, Roger. Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White. Harvard University Press, 1978. Smith, Victoria Ford. Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Rutgers University Press, 2002. Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. Longman, 1992. Stevenson, Deborah. “History of Children’s and Young Adult Literature.” Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Christine Jenkins, Karen Coats, Patricia A. Enciso, and Shelby Wolf, Taylor and Francis, 2011, pp. 179–​94. Townsend, John Rowe. “The Present State of Children’s Literature.” Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, edited by Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, L. F. Ashley, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 407–​18. Watkins, Tony. “Space, History and Culture: The Setting of Children’s Literature.” Understanding Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2005, pp. 50–​72. Westman, Karin E. “Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 464–​69. Yonge, Charlotte M. “Children’s Literature of the Last Century.” Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 20, nos. 117–​19, 1869, pp. 229–​37; 302–​10; 448–​56. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. Methuen, 1979. —​—​—​. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. Heinemann, 1983.

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4 CHILDREN’S LITERARY GEOGRAPHY Björn Sundmark and Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang

Introduction: The Where of Children’s Literature Literary geography is concerned with the ways in which a sense of place is evoked in works of literature. Other terms that complement and partly overlap with the concept of literary geography are setting, place, space, and worldbuilding. What these terms have in common is that they all have to do with the “where” in literature. Where does the story take place, and does the setting matter? If a story has a suspenseful plot, if the language is rich, and if the characters are intriguing, is the location important? For some readers the answer is “no”: the place is irrelevant, and it does not matter one way or another where a story is situated, or how the fictional places and circumstances are described. For others, however, the fictional destination is the reason they keep reading. In the essay “On Stories,” C. S. Lewis recounts such a discussion he had with a student. For the student, the setting of Fenimore Cooper’s 1823–​41 Leatherstocking tales (which he admired) was merely “a distraction.” As a reader, he was just after the suspense. Lewis, in contrast, who had not even read Cooper at that time, but who was intrigued by the student’s description, writes: “Take away the feathers, the high cheek-​bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged –​ the snow and the snow-​shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names” (5). Problematic as this exoticizing description appears today, it is nevertheless clear that for Lewis the place, the “where,” is all-​important. Lewis goes on to quote and discuss a number of ­examples –​ Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920) –​ all examples of genre literature (lost world fantasy, children’s animal tale, and science fiction, respectively) in which the setting is crucial to the reading enjoyment. As for Lewis’s own method of fiction writing, he famously stated: “All my seven Narnian books, and my three science-​fiction books, began by seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen” (53). Apparently, for Lewis, not only the enjoyment of literature, but even the storytelling impulse itself was intimately linked to a strong sense of place. And although some kinds of books and genres are less reliant on the successful realization of place, others lose a great deal of their meaning without it. As an experiment, since Lewis’s Narnia books (1950–​56) have already been mentioned, one can try to take the “Narnia” out of the Narnia books –​for instance by reimagining the series in a completely different setting –​and DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-6

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see what it is left: not much, as it turns out. It would be a similar operation to that posited by Lewis in relation to Cooper’s Leatherstocking books. Interestingly, Lewis does not use the word “setting” in the discussion either of the Leatherstocking books or of his own Narnia books. Instead, he talks about “story” and “seeing pictures.” The “pictures” appear as fundamental, formative story elements, the visualization of a place where someone/​something is doing something (a Faun carrying an umbrella, for instance). In any case, the Lewis example suggests that the “where” of a story does matter, that it is built into the fabric of story, scene by scene. To many readers the where of the story is in fact the single most important aspect of a literary work. Already for that reason, an exploration of the places and spaces of children’s literature is warranted. Moreover, it can provide insights into the workings of the creative imagination: how do writers and illustrators create fictional worlds? And how do readers enter these realms? In this chapter we will approach the subject through the key term “children’s literary geography.”

Literary Geography Geography (from Greek: “earth” and “to write”) is the study of the physical and human features of the world. Geography books for children are information books that convey knowledge about real-​world places; they are often grouped together with travel books to real places (Lundin). In practice, however, the information content of both geography and travel books is regularly fictionalized. The line between fact and fiction is further blurred by novels and romances that make use of nonfiction/​information genres. Anne Lundin notes that in the early days of children’s literature, “Novels disguised as travelogues were popular reading fare for children, who gravitated to adventurous tales of explorations and expeditions, whether fact-​based or fantastic” (129). She also mentions the robinsonade and the enduring popularity of the fictional travelogue. We would argue that all geography in a sense is “literary,” since any representation of the world, “real” or otherwise, depends on reduction, abstraction, symbolic thinking, ideology, human language, and a host of literary conventions. Borrowing Marc Brosseau’s distinctions concerning literary geography (11), this chapter leans towards a “geopoetic approach,” wherein the focus is on “the relationships between literary creation and space as well as the forms in which they are expressed.” It is not merely about the perceived difference between fact and fiction (or real and imaginary), but rather points to the conventions of print and media culture –​ verbal, visual, sensory. Furthermore, literary geography goes beyond the merely descriptive and provides affective and relational aspects to the environment. The relationships to people (peers, kin, strangers), to flora and fauna, to man-​ made things and features of nature and landscape, are what make places meaningful, whether real or imagined. Literary geography pays attention to how places are invested with such emotional and relational meanings, and how they affect the unfolding of story. Classic examples of literary geography and travel are, for example, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (2 vols., 1906–​1907).

Setting and Place Setting can be thought of in much the same way as literary geography but is at one and the same time both more general and less imprecise. Conventionally, setting provides the time and place(s) and the social milieu of the action, but not much else –​not the meaning and mystery of those places, not how they connect to each other. Setting can be regarded as the stage and the backdrop to the drama, and usually refers to a work in its entirety. This usage is practical, but it hides the fact that almost always literary works are constituted of several different places/​scenes –​ small-​large, significant-​ insignificant, indoors-​outdoors, close-​far away, and so on. And each place is in itself a specific site of “being” in the world (fictional and/​or real), constituting a meaningful fictional “scene” –​just like 46

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Lewis’s Faun in the snowy forest. In other words, setting is the sum of the places, whereas literary geography charts and makes sense of the route between the different places/​scenes. Settings can also signal national, regional, or ethnic identity. Through an analysis of settings typically found in contemporary Canadian children’s and young adult books, Cheryl Cowdy, for instance, sheds light on and critiques the Canadian cultural imaginary. In her study she notes that places associated with Canadianness, such as the wilderness and the prairie, are not the places where most Canadians actually live, such as the strip mall, the single-​family home, and the developing subdivision. She also notes that the suburb is underrepresented in the fictional representations of Canadian children’s literature. One can make similar claims about the national resonances of, for instance, forest settings (for example, of Sweden, Finland, Russia) and mountain valleys (Norway, Switzerland). In the latter case, we have, among others, Maria Parr’s books about Tonje Glimmerdal and Johanna Spyri’s Swiss heroine Heidi (1880–​81). Such national settings are of course not only about topography, but also about climate and seasons and how the weather and wind affect its people. In “Snowy State: The Children’s History of Sweden” Björn Sundmark analyzes how a northern setting with a cold climate has shaped the discourse of Swedish history and national identity in four history picturebooks.

Chronotope and Worldbuilding National histories, such as the ones mentioned above, show that settings also have a time dimension. Places exist in time. Here we find that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope –​the place (topos) in and through time (chronos) –​is necessary for our understanding of literary geography. Places do not only extend spatially, but also have a temporal dimension. When Lagerlöf wrote The Wonderful Adventures of Nils as a school reader with a focus on Swedish geography, the protagonist, Nils, does not only learn about the features of the land. Everywhere he goes he encounters the legends, myths, histories, and other stories associated with each particular place. In the process, these places become meaningful for Nils and, more importantly, to the young readers of the novel. Lagerlöf understood the connection of time and place, of geography and history, and defended her historicizing approach in her communications with her editor (Sundmark, “Nils”). Similarly, to continue the Narnia thread, when the Pevensie children return to Narnia in Prince Caspian (1951), they at first do not recognize that they are standing in their old royal castle, Cair Paravel: the buildings are in ruins, and a forest has grown up all along the coastline. In fact, a thousand years have passed in Narnia. The time-​vertigo experienced by the children in the story is probably shared by most readers. It is the experience of a place marked by time (or vice versa: time manifested in physical form). Furnishing fictional places with a time-​dimension, making the literary geography historical at the same time, makes a story not only more meaningful and “deep,” but also more convincing. A place with a past and a (pre)history is more compelling, more realistic, more believable than a place that is no more than a blank slate. This is, paradoxically, why setting is especially important in fantasy. In social realist fiction the background does not have to be presented, as the historical connections are part of readers’ presumed frame of reference; they are implied. In fantasy, by contrast, the writer must make the secondary world convincing. Part of the work is in the creation of a credible history; it is part of the fictional worldbuilding, a term often associated with fantasy writing, science fiction, and other fictional “secondary worlds,” to use J.R.R. Tolkien’s term in “On Fairy Stories.” Worldbuilding in such genres is associated with the creation of a plausible geography, ecology, history, social customs, language, and technology. Yet all fiction and art –​realistic or otherwise –​ are of course fruits of the imagination and strive to (re)create an imaginary space (world) for the reader. In that sense, all authors and artists (and readers!) engage in worldbuilding to some extent. 47

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Place and Genre: Moretti’s Ortgebunden Narratives In Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti argues for the significant connection between geography and literature. He believes that “geography shapes the narrative structure” and that “each space possesses its own genre as much as each genre possesses its own space” (7). While this argument is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s concept of a dominant chronotope that characterizes all genres, Moretti believes that something more than that phenomenon is at play here. Just as in any creation myth, he argues, more than one force is engaged in the creation of literary geography. The first one is a centripetal force that he calls ortgebunden (“place-​bound”). According to Moretti, each place has “its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes” (5). The second determinant force is the internal logic that moves and shapes the narrative centrifugally. It is the dynamic and interplay between these forces that creates a sense of place and at the same time establishes the genre. An example of this dynamic can be seen in Kit Kelen’s The Boy Who Went Under the Border (2007), a collection of eleven short stories for children from Macau. All of them take place in various places and neighborhoods that make up Macau, ranging from the casino settings that have made Macau famous internationally to a dirty (and very specific) Macanese apartment. As each of these stories reflects local views, rules, and even taboos, the different geographical settings in the text result in different genres. In the titular short story, the setting of Gong Bei, a border gate between Macau and mainland China, is juxtaposed with the border of the world of the living and the afterlife. This parallel is played on from the very first sentence: “Ming had been standing in the immigration queue for an eternity, or it seemed like an eternity to Ming” (40). Through the story, we can see the ortgebunden nature of the border gate –​ such as the rule of queueing and the importance of passports –​ and how these rules and taboos are played out to create a sense of place in the narrative. The place-​bound quality of literary geography also taps into collective expectations and perceptions. The use of such expectations can for instance be seen in “The Flying Fairy Casino,” another short story from the same Macau collection. This short story touches upon the phenomenon of people losing their casino chips and blaming it on a fairy who lives there. The story explores the local belief that casinos are simultaneously realistically familiar and obviously magical places where wealth can be gained and lost in seconds.

Playworlds Bearing in mind the power dynamics between children and adults in children’s literature, we argue that the resulting space in the reading of the text can be seen as a playworld –​a concept first coined by Gunilla Lindqvist and referring to a sphere where the child readers seize or are given spatio(temporal) power and authority. This shift in dynamic, however, does not nullify the presence of adults completely. Instead of stepping back into total detachment, adults are invited to participate in this carnivalesque situation and given the opportunity to recover their childlike innocence and sense of wonder (You and Malilang). Adults become mere participants in the play regulated and controlled by children. They may provide the building blocks –​ in their capacity as the authors and artists, for ­example –​ but it is up to the children to (re)invent the space to their liking. This capacity, of course, does not eliminate the existing influence of adult agents (or the author) in trying to set the limits governing which place can be entered freely and which space can only be visited temporarily. If we see the creation of a fictional world as a playful act shared by readers, authors, and artists, we also need to remember that play is governed by two laws to ensure its enjoyment (Lindqvist). The first one is the law of least resistance, in which all participants can do what they want to do without limitations. The absence of rules or laws, however, will lead the created world and narrative into anarchy and pure chaos. The law of greatest resistance –​ the second law –​ is thus necessary. It 48

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stipulates that everything that happens in the created world needs to follow (or in some cases, clearly break) the spatiotemporal rules to create enjoyment. The playworld could also be associated with the idea of “home.” In a study of Canadian children’s literature, Mavis Reimer uses the key metaphor or discourse of “home” in children’s literature and focuses variously on home as place (dwelling, family, town, or region), as metaphor (“comfort”), and as plot device, home as a place to start from and return to. “Home,” in Reimer’s study, is a rich concept that includes setting, motif, metaphor, symbol, and theme. In Reimer’s study “home” also has a national resonance, since the primary material is Canadian, but the concept could be applied to other languages and nations or address children’s literature in general.

Between Space and Place While the terms space and place are often used interchangeably, Yi-​Fu Tuan differentiates these two concepts based on the intimacy level and how we see ourselves in connection to them. In Space and Place, Tuan defines place as an area with more intimate qualities, where all needs are satisfied. It is construed as a timeless, if not static, sphere permeated by familiar things and feelings. This definition invokes what children’s literature scholars refer to as “home.” Space, conversely, is generally seen as a marked-​off area that needs to be constantly defended against intruders or invaders. Contrary to the cozy hearth associated with place, space suggests the existence of outside threat and one’s own vulnerability outside the sphere of place. At the same time, the concept of space also allows expansion through freedom of movement and exploration. This will result in spaciousness, which also enhances the sense of being free through having the power and enough room to act. Within the framework of children’s literature study, this concept echoes the “away.” Tuan further argues that the construction of a geographical sense/​reality requires experiential exploration. This means that one has to “venture forth into the unfamiliar and experiment with the elusive and the uncertain” (9) and compare it to the familiarity of the established place. The construction of space’s literary geography thus calls for detailed description and elaboration due to the unfamiliar quality of this sphere. The more description laid out for this new environment, the narrower the gap between text and reality to be filled by readers’ inference from their own surroundings and experience. This emphasis on description leads to the creation of strangeness and detachment from readers’ daily life. At the same time, it also implies that the same level of rigor is not necessary in building the depiction of home and place, as the text can rely more on the familiar references. The bigger gap between the text and reality as well as the timeless quality of the place become a welcoming gateway enabling the readers to come in and exercise their ownership. This progression of place to space in children’s texts can be seen, for example, in Hilman and Boim’s Lupus Kecil: Rumpi Kala Hujan (1992). Lupus’s house is never described in great detail, apart from an extra illustration showing the room divisions. Interaction after interaction occurs and overshadows the establishment of the place, often as minimal as “in the kitchen” or “in the living room.” This stingy description, however, does not hinder the readers from picturing themselves in the same place as Lupus and his family. After all, Tuan characterizes a place we refer to as home as follows: “It may be plain, lacking in architectural distinction and historical glamour, yet we resent on outsider criticism of it. Its ugliness does not matter; it did not matter when we were children, climbed its tree, paddled our bikes on its cracked pavements, and swam in its pond” (144–​45). It is through the very nondescriptness of the home that the readers are invited to come and imbue this textual place with their own expectation and memory of a home. This process ends up creating an intimate third space –​out of the gaps in the text and their background knowledge –​for the readers to live in. A meaningful and lived space thus becomes manifest. As the narrative moves out of the house and traverses a wider area, however, the nondescripts progressively diminish and more details start to creep into the creation of space. When Lupus’s family is 49

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Figure 4.1 Lupus’s neighborhood, from Hilman and Boim, Lupus Kecil: Rumpi Kala Hujan (1992). Illustration by Wedha. PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama.

forced to evacuate the house because of a rumored fire, we are given the illustration of the neighborhood. It is here that we can see details that may instill a sense of strangeness, particularly to readers who are not familiar with the culture of reference. The elevated birdcage hanging from a flagpole or a hawker cart, for example, might exclude more readers from owning this space the same way they can own the house before. The invitation for readers to impart intimacy to the setting and transform the space into place is substantially reduced as Lupus goes on a study tour to another town. While this movement/​exploration expands the space, it also exposes the readers to a higher degree of strangeness. Gone is the familiar and nondescript sphere of Lupus’s home, into which the readers can move as tenants. The high level of eccentricities and the unique things in this new space obstruct readers from immersing themselves in this space and owning it. The readers, instead, are only invited for a short-​term, temporary visit before they need to go back into the comfort of home.

The Production of (Poetic) Space Besides Tuan, both Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre have made significant contributions to our understanding of the concept of space. Lefebvre, to begin with, has explored the reciprocal relationship between physical and mental spaces: on the one hand, how the physical spaces we inhabit affect and color our social relationships, and on the other hand, how social reality affects and shapes the physical spaces we organize and create for ourselves. Literature’s role in this process serves to (re)produce this lived space symbolically and imaginatively. Lefebvre claims that social reality always takes place and has a shape. To give an example: how, one may ask, does the metaphor of “child rule” or distinct child spaces (J. M. Barrie’s Neverland, Fairyland, the titular space of Flora Gomes’s 2012 film The Children’s Republic) affect the way we conceive of the spatial organization 50

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of children’s upbringing, play, disciplining, and education (nurseries, playgrounds, schools)? And how does our view of children’s status or family roles shape these same spaces? These are issues that affect children’s literature profoundly –​and that are in turn influenced by the spaces created by children’s literature. An interesting application of the Lefebvrian concept of space can be seen in Suzanne Jane Carroll’s analysis of “landscape” as “spaces” in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series (1965–​77): “sacred spaces, green spaces, roadways, and lapsed spaces.” When Cooper sees “literary landscapes [as] geographical places within socio-​historical contexts,” this perception warrants her use of “space” rather than “place.” As this terminology further suggests, the critical framework also makes use of ecocritical theory and the concept of the chronotope. The concept of space has also been analyzed in detail by Bachelard but in a rather different way from that of Lefebvre or Tuan. In The Poetics of Space Bachelard is primarily concerned with how different literary devices can open up “an entire world” to the “dreamer” –​that is, to the reader who is able and willing to take part in acts of imagination, expressed in terms of space. Moreover, Bachelard calls these spaces/​worlds “realities of the imagination” (158, his emphasis). For Bachelard the spaces that are particularly apt to attract and concentrate the poetic imagination are representations of objects such as houses, drawers, chests, wardrobes, forests, nests, shells, closets, corners, and houses –​ keywords gleaned from the table of contents of The Poetics of Space. But they can also be conceptual, as in “immensity,” “roundness,” or “miniature.” As we can see, the keywords are associated with fantasies of home and dwelling. Again, Lewis’s example comes to mind, and not only that first forest scene, but also the wardrobe that transports the children to Narnia and the different cozy homes (the Faun’s, the Beavers’). We see the home metaphors, but also the miniaturist imagination at work. Tove Jansson’s Moomin books (9 vols., 1945–​70) could also be used to exemplify several of the keywords listed here –​ houses, roundness, the miniature. Both visually and verbally, the Moomin books exemplify in various ways what Bachelard calls the “miniaturizing imagination”: the “small” trolls (originally her artist’s signature), the pictorial details, the chapter summaries, devices such as the crystal ball, the magnifying glass, the maps. Bachelard argues that the miniature, instead of implying reduction, is a condensation and enrichment. He goes on to compare the “minuscule” with “a narrow gate” that “opens up an entire world.” Jansson’s “muminalism” provides that gate, opening up the fictional world of the Moomintrolls (Sundmark, “Muminalism”).

Cartography One notable aspect of Jansson’s miniaturist art and the literary geography of the Moomin books is the use of the Moomin maps. This point brings us to cartography. Maps/​cartography are visual, verbal, and symbolic representations of literary geography. The map-​iconotext can be defined as a composite of verbal text, cartographic symbols, and illustration (Sundmark, “Moominland”). The verbal signifiers of the map typically refer to place names or objects in the map, or instructions on how to read and use the map. But it is the cartographic symbols that most obviously mark this kind of iconotext as a “map.” The cartographic signs are themselves halfway between the verbal and the visual, and include such elements as compass symbols, scale, longitude and latitude indicators, political borders, plot itineraries, elevation, battlegrounds, the X for “hidden treasure,” and symbolic monsters. The pictorial elements can vary greatly and are impossible to separate entirely from artistically conceived cartographic symbols. However, a map drawn from a vertical perspective reduces the pictorial content automatically by flattening the landscape features. The panorama or bird’s-​eye view, by contrast, makes it possible to represent mountains and trees in relief. A combination is also possible, as in Tolkien’s maps of Middle-​Earth where the vertical perspective is combined with mountains and other landscape features in relief, as if seen from a high altitude. As a rule, large-​scale maps reduce the pictorial content; a world map has less room for flamboyant illustration than a map of, say, the Hundred Acre 51

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Wood of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-​the-​Pooh (1926). There are three main functions of maps, all of which are potentially important in the construction of a work’s literary geography. These are: ● the referential, ● the poetic, ● the diegetic. The referential map function is practical. It allows the reader (and the author) to keep track of how the hero (for instance) goes from A to B, which obstacles are in the way (deserts, mountains, rivers), where the treasure is buried, and which distances need to be covered. A map’s referential function makes sense of the literary geography. In maps where the referential function dominates, the pictorial elements tend to be minimalized. The London Tube map is an example of such a (topological) map. The poetic function is less about location and all the more about worldbuilding and creating an imaginary space. The Moomin endpaper maps reference places that will be important in the narrative, but they also serve as portals to that imaginary world, by stimulating the imagination and helping the reader visualize characters, places, and upcoming events and actions. In practice, the referential and poetic map functions tend to overlap, but the emphasis and main purpose of the map can differ. For instance, the panoramic map of the lighthouse island in Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea (1965) provides a visual prompt that opens up that particular literary geography, but the referential content is fairly low. However, Jansson also made a map of the island with more details about places and actions as a kind of storyboard for herself when writing the book. Finally, maps can be diegetic; that is, they can be part of the narrative, a plot mechanism that drives the story forward. The map in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) is used in the story itself both as an object of conflict and as a treasure map. Moreover, it encapsulates perfectly the three basic functions of the map mentioned above: the referential, the poetic, and the diegetic. Thror’s map in Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) plays a similar role. It should be noted that maps that have a diegetic function can of course also serve referentially and poetically, that is, if they are reproduced graphically at all. The Marauder’s Map in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–​ 2016) is an interesting case, since it has a diegetic function in the narrative but is not printed in the original publications. The problem is of course that it is a dynamic and changing map (or blank), as is the object of its mapping (Hogwarts Castle). In other words, that it resists static visual representation. But in the films based on the series, the Marauder’s Map can be shown and can thereby assume the other (extradiegetic) map functions as well. Finally, the films have also led to the publication of static print and electronic versions of the Marauder’s Map.

Maps in Children’s Books Whereas maps in literature for adults can be found mainly in fantasy fiction and travel accounts, maps in children’s literature surface not only in fantasy and travelogue but in many other kinds of literature as well. We encounter maps in detective stories and in tales of adventures, in historical fiction, in humorous literature and parody, as well as in didactic nonfiction. Indeed, the uses of maps in children’s books are both manifold and varied. A major reason why maps are more common and more versatile in children’s books than in adult literature may be the general readiness in children’s literature to combine the verbal and the visual. Illustrations are, after all, part and parcel of the preliterate child’s experience of story, and pictures continue to support the imagination and orient the reader/​ viewer in the fictitious realm even as the audience grows older and learns to read. A map is not out of place in children’s books; it is just another pictorial element. In adult literature, with its traditional privileging of word over image, the situation is radically different. In adult literature there is little room for illustrative material, including the cartographic. Because illustrations are part of children’s 52

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Figure 4.2 Map of Treasure Island, from Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883).

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experience of literary geography, maps in children’s books are also more varied in style and content, tending as they often do towards the pictorial. Children’s fantasy maps are concerned with aesthetic pleasure and stimulating the imagination. So even if fictional maps in books for adults are not fundamentally different from those found in children’s books, there are nevertheless significant differences. Humorous and playful maps in children’s literature can be seen as a distinct mode of mapping. Characteristically, these are maps where the referential function is downplayed and where the fictional space is less that of a conventionally portrayed fantasy world than a mirror image of the play-​world of the child. One could also see such maps as toys in themselves, prompting and inviting the child to play and have fun. Typically, some of these maps replicate a child’s world; it is the playworld of the nursery or the backyard garden with its toys, as in Milne’s and Ernest Shepherd’s map of the “100 Aker Wood” in Winnie-​the-​Pooh. It is the tongue-​in-​cheek use of picturebook conventions, as in Taro Miura’s Tokio (2006), or the topological conceptualization of a child’s everyday life through childish map-​drawings, as in Sara Fanelli’s My Map Book (1995). Moreover, the map conventions themselves can be exaggerated and subverted to create a spirit of boisterousness and humorous recklessness, as in Cressida Cowell’s books about the Viking boy Hiccup (Hiccup: The Seasick Viking [2000], followed by the How to Train Your Dragon series [12 vols., 2003–​15]), or as in Martin Widmark’s Lassemaja detective series (26 vols., 2002–​17). Finally, there are also humorous maps that are integral to the absurd and nonsensical fictional worlds they portray, such as Walter Moers’s map of Zamonia in Captain Bluebear’s 13½ Lives (1999).

Seeing Pictures: Visualizing Geographies Maps are visualizations of literary geography. The verbal information and cartographic signs/​symbols privilege a geographical reading of the pictorial content. However, (extra)ordinary illustrations can (and do) also stimulate the place-​making imagination. Continuing the example of the Narnia books, it is not only Pauline Baynes’s maps that affect readers’ perception of the literary geography of Narnia. The book covers, as well as the black-​and-​white in-​text illustrations, also convey a powerful vision of that world. Similarly, Jansson’s Moomin books, which we have also touched on above, do not rely solely on their maps to visualize Moominvalley’s geography and its meaningful places; Jansson’s illustrations do that too. Of course, most illustrated books and picturebooks do not have maps, in which case the pictorial visualization of literary geography is expressed through illustrations alone. A single picture can convey information about place, mood, genre. It can relate a specific event, set the stage for action, and trigger the imagination. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze all the ways in which illustrations can contribute to the creation of a specific literary geography, but there are a few types of books that are particularly interesting. In the case of wordless (“silent”) picturebooks, for instance, the full burden of visual description and storytelling is carried by the pictures. Time, place, flora and fauna, cultural markers, social bonds among people/​characters, and affective relationships to animals and nature –​all of these aspects must be considered and addressed through visual means only. Alessandro Sanna’s The River (Fiume Lento, 2013), which wordlessly relates four separate stories during four different seasons, but situated along the same river, conveys all of these place-​making aspects; wordless does not necessarily mean worldless. A specific kind of wordless picturebook is the so-​called wimmelbook (from German, Wimmelbuch, “teeming,” “swarming”) –​see, for instance, the works of Ali Mitgutsch and Rotraut Susanne Berner. In wimmelbooks the reader is confronted with highly detailed illustrations of specific literary geographies on each consecutive two-​page spread. Often wimmel illustrations lack sequential or narrative structure; instead, they show places with “wimmel” potential, such as a beach during summer, a bustling city scene, a lively zoo, a farm, a winter landscape. This style of illustration is not unique to children’s wimmelbooks but has antecedents in classic painting by early masters such as Hieronymus 54

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Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. Characteristically, wimmel illustrations are pictures of places to get lost in due to the level of detail. There is no one correct way of reading a wimmel illustration, except in terms of geography, and there is no one correct answer to the question “What does this picture show and tell?” Instead, it is quite possible to construct any number of micro stories on the basis of the place and the numerous incidents and great number of characters that are displayed. Not only books, but Advent/​Christmas calendars and children’s jigsaw puzzles are also frequently constructed as wimmel artifacts. Some contemporary picturebook artists, such as Richard Scarry and Sven Nordqvist, make use of wimmel-​related techniques, but in their case, there is almost always a dominant storyline as well as a guiding, verbal level to the narrative.

Words and Worlds: Descriptive Geographies Even as illustrations can support and co-​create literary worlds, they can also –​if they are uncongenial to the story or unprofessionally executed –​undermine or distort a work’s literary geography. In such cases, readers may well prefer to make their own images based on the words only. Moreover, with the exception of the cover, most children’s books for the age span nine to thirteen have no illustrations, in which case the worldbuilding, the place-​making, the setting, the literary geography, and so on largely depend on the words and nothing but the words. Again, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss all the ways in which books build worlds with words, or how an author describes a particular literary geography. It is also important to stress, in this context, that verbal description of setting and place is not only about what the eye can see. It also concerns sound and smell and touch: it involves the senses and the emotions. Moreover, it engages imaginings and histories about the setting that are shown to be meaningful to the fictional characters. Furthermore, one can argue that the place of a story is woven into the fabric of the language in which the story is written. The style of writing and choice of words will signal anything from feudal fantasy to urban jungle. In other words, what matters are (to re-​quote from the introduction to this chapter) “the snow and the snow-​shoes, beavers and canoes, warpaths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.” It is at any rate clear that literary geography can be conceptualized and understood in numerous ways. When we analyze works of fiction, the “where” of children’s literature turns out to be “everywhere.” It is in the setting, of course, but also in the language/​style, in the genre, in the development of plot, in the characterization, and more.

Real-​World Children’s Literary Geographies Literary geography is not even to be contained between the pages of a book. Fanfiction, as well as transmediations and adaptations (film, comics, games, merchandise), can expand, perfect, and/​or warp the original fictional universe, including its geographies. Moreover, literary geographies can spill over into real lived spaces, such as themed playgrounds and nurseries set in Neverland, in the Hundred-​Acre Wood, in Moominvalley, or in different Disney or Studio Ghibli locations. Theme parks are perhaps the most striking example of such geographical spillover and of the reciprocal relationship between the fictional and the real. Disneyland, Moominvalley, Astrid Lindgren-​land, and the like provide real-​world geographies for their imaginary locations. Real places have been shaped and landscaped and peopled (by fictional characters) by the books and films they are inspired by. Conversely, these theme parks root the imaginary in the real world and give tangible shape to it. Thus, theme parks, playgrounds, and literary walks/​tourism open a space in the Lefebvrian sense, one that is both real and imagined, and where the real influences the imaginary and vice versa. In the case of Astrid Lindgren-​land, which is set in and around the place she grew up, a further dimension is added. It is not only the fictional world that is conjured up, but the biographical element as well, Lindgren’s home and the setting that formed her. 55

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The Warner Brothers studio tour –​ “The Making of Harry Potter” –​ that shows the sets of the Harry Potter films is another interesting example. The tour of this particular dream factory derives much of its force from its inversion of the idea of the fourth wall of drama. That is, instead of creating an illusion of reality by actors breaking through the imagined wall between the scene (or screen, in the case of TV and film) and the audience, the audience is invited into the sets themselves, to be immersed in the fiction. This aim is achieved most strikingly with the first set, where the audience initially sits in a movie theater and watches a film sequence. Then the spectators are invited on stage, to walk through the curtains and into the Great Hall of Hogwarts itself. This action employs the idea of going through a portal into a secondary world. It blurs the distinction between real and imaginary in several ways. The spectator enters a real place (a studio), which is also a place of filmic make-​believe, in turn inspired by a fictional literary place. The relationship between real and fictional places also plays out in relation to the authors. The places authors such as Lindgren and Rowling have lived or visited or mentioned in their works can be of significance to readers. Hence, literary walks and pilgrimages can take one to places that inspired this or that aspect of a text, such as the Harry Potter trolley in King’s Cross station in London, or to Lindgren’s Näs. This too is a form of literary geography, one that relocates the fiction (or the source of it) in the real world, and where the reader may get a heightened sense of the literary work by “being there.”

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon, 1969. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981. Berner, Rotraut Susanne. All Around Bustletown: Spring. Prestel, 2019. Brosseau, Marc. “In, Of, Out, With, and Through: New Perspectives in Literary Geography.” The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, edited by Robert T. Tally, Jr., Routledge, 2017, pp. 9–​27. Carroll, Jane Suzanne. Landscape in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2014. Cowdy, Cheryl. Canadian Suburban: Reimagining Space and Place in Postwar English Canadian Fiction. Queens-​McGill University Press, 2022. Fanelli, Sara. My Map Book. HarperCollins, 2019. Hilman and Boim [Hilman Hariwijaya and Boim LeBon]. Lupus Kecil: Rumpi Kala Hujan. Jakarta: PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 1992. Jansson, Tove. Moominpappa at Sea. 1965. Translated by Kingsley Hart, Square Fish, 2010. Kelen, Kit, ed. The Boy Who Went Under the Border and Other Stories. Macao: macauCLOSER, 2007. Lagerlöf, Selma. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. 2 vols., 1906–​1907. Translated by Peter Graves, Norvik, 2014. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Translated by Donald Nicholson-​Smith, Blackwell, 2012. Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950. Puffin, 1970. —​—​—​. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper, Harcourt, 1982. —​—​—​. Prince Caspian. 1951. Puffin, 1973. Lindqvist, Gunilla. The Aesthetic of Play: A Didactic Study of Play and Culture in Preschools. Coronet Books, 1996. Lundin, Anne. “Geography and Travel Books.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. Vol. 2, edited by Jack Zipes, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 127–​30. Milne, A. A. Winnie-​the-​Pooh. 1926. Puffin, 2005. Mitgutsch, Ali. Mein Wimmelbuch: Komm mit ans Wasser. Ravensburger Verlag, 2019. Miura, Taro. Tokio. Mediavaca, 2006. Moers, Walter. Captain Bluebear’s 13½ Lives. Translated by J. Brownjohn, Peter Mayer, 2006. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–​1950. Verso, 1998. Parr, Maria. Tonje Glimmerdal. Samlaget, 2009. Reimer, Mavis. Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2008. Sanna, Alessandro. The River. Translated by Michael Reynolds, Enchanted Lion Books, 2014. Spyri, Johanna. Heidi. 1880. Wordsworth, 1998.

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Children’s Literary Geography Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1883. Oxford University Press, 2011. Sundmark, Björn. “Of Nils and Nation: Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 2, 2008, pp. 168–​86. —​—​—​. “‘A Serious Game’: Mapping Moominland.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 2, 2014, pp. 162–​81. —​—​—​. “Muminalism: Tove Jansson and the Art of the Miniature.” Nordiques: Nordic Minimalism, vol. 44, 2023. —​—​—​. “Snowy State: The Children’s History of Sweden.” Nordic Utopias and Dystopias: From Aniara to Allatta!, edited by Pia Maria Ahlbäck, Jouni Teittinen, and Maria Lassén-​Seger, John Benjamins, 2022, pp. 111–​29. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726. Wordsworth, 1992. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. 1937. HarperCollins, 2002. —​—​—​. “On Fairy Stories.” Tree and Leaf. George Allen and Unwin, 1964, pp. 11–​70. Tuan, Yi-​Fu. Space and Place. 1977. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Widmark, Martin. Diamantmysteriet. Illustrated by Helena Willis, Bonnier, 2012. You, Chengcheng, and Chrysogonus S. Malilang. “Playtime in Playworld: How Children Learn to Rule.” Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children’s Literature, edited by Christopher Kelen and Björn Sundmark, Routledge, 2017, pp. 218–​30.

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5 THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK Posthumanism and New Materialism in the Scholarship of Children’s Literature Megan L. Musgrave

There Is a Monster at the End of This Chapter. Please Do Not Turn the Page In her recent overview of posthumanism in children’s literature scholarship, Zoe Jaques captures why posthuman theory is both a perfect and an impossible mechanism to inform this field: Children themselves are always already posthuman, operating in a constant tussle with their humanity. Perched on a boundary line, in the process of becoming, supposedly closer to the animal, more fluid in outlook, aligned with unknown futures, both subjugated and enormously powerful, children represent the not-​quite-​human. Therefore it is only natural that the dichotomous, morphing, and often fraught spaces of children’s books offer key interventions in the development of posthumanism, even when such narratives appear to operate within an ostensibly humanist framework. (“Posthumanism” 373) My argument begins where Jaques’s eloquent overview leaves off: with the acknowledgment that children’s literature, like childhood itself, is liminal by nature, and thus a perfectly “dichotomous, morphing, and often fraught” space in which to explore posthuman ways of thinking and being. With that said, scholarship in children’s literature is in a transitional moment concerning posthuman and new materialist approaches. Before I address that transition, a few definitions. Posthumanism is a critical, philosophical, and theoretical orientation that draws from a variety of fields and practices. It is best known as a field that engages cyborg, machine, and technology studies, but it also engages feminist and postcolonial theories, deconstruction, animal studies, and ecocriticism. Broadly speaking, the end goal of posthuman scholarship is to shift away from the anthropocentric notion that human beings are exceptional, dominant over all other living and nonliving forms, and instead to consider how humans coexist and co-​evolve with other organic and nonorganic entities: nonhuman animals, the environment, and machines. Pramod K. Nayar defines posthumanism as “radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life and machines” (2, emphasis in original). Building upon the work of Donna Haraway, Francis Fukuyama, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, 58

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-7

The Monster at the End of This Book

Cary Wolfe, and other theorists, posthumanism rejects what Rosi Braidotti identifies as “the humanistic arrogance of placing Man at the centre of world history” (23). Posthuman studies encompasses a variety of approaches, including transhumanism, moral transhumanism, and critical posthumanism, which is the key approach for literary scholars. By questioning what it means to be “human in the age of technological modification, hybridized life forms, new discovery of the sociality of animals and a new understanding of ‘life’ itself” (Nayar 3), this critical approach opens up new possibilities for understanding the role of literature as well. To that end, scholarship of children’s literature and culture framed by posthuman approaches seeks to “redefine the boundaries of the human, and call into question the hierarchies of human/​nonhuman, human/​machine and human/​inhuman” (Nayar 4) in order to establish a more inclusive definition of life. It therefore draws from disability studies, animal studies, cybernetics, and other fields, recognizing that when humans treat nonhuman forms of life as expendable, some expressions of humanity become expendable as well. Historically, the result of these expressions has been not only violence against the environment and animals, but also genocide, racism, enslavement, and discrimination in its many forms. Moreover, Donna Tarr and Anita White argue in their introduction to Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction, the humanist narrative of (white male cisgender heterosexual) exceptionalism is illusory: “Our speciesism, our sense of privilege as (male) humans, our fortressing against the Other have all been performances, socially constructed acts based on fear and dominance. We are all hybrids. We are all networked with others and the environment. We are all posthuman” (xxii). In short, the central questions of posthumanism concern not only what it means to be human, but also what ethical responsibilities human animals have as we encounter the other humans, the nonhuman animals, the environmental spaces, and the material and nonmaterial objects with which we coexist. To date, the lion’s share of posthuman scholarship in children’s literature has used animal stories, ecocritical stories, and especially dystopian young adult fiction as its key examples. Tarr and White’s excellent collection, for example, focuses on posthuman analyses predominantly of speculative fiction that considers the implications of cyborg bodies and networked identities. In children’s literature, Jaques and other critics rely heavily on canonized works such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-​the-​Pooh to model posthuman critical approaches. While the field has been forged in important ways by the work of these and other scholars, focusing primarily on texts that foreground human encounters with either animals or machines risks overlooking the ways that applying posthuman analyses across a more diverse cross section of examples can open up more opportunities to consider how children’s literature fosters young people’s ability to recognize and understand problematic power structures and inequities. To break into the conversation where every contemplation of children’s books should begin, consider a monster. Specifically, The Monster at the End of This Book, a 1971 Little Golden Book written by Jon Stone, illustrated by Michael Smollin, and featuring “lovable, furry old Grover,” a resident of Sesame Street. The book generates a sustained interaction between the reader and Grover, who, upon observing the book’s title, spends the entire book begging the reader not to continue turning pages because he is “so scared of monsters!!!” (3). Grover’s metatextual imploring engages the reader with questions of subjectivity and otherness. The reader is dually positioned, in one sense aligned with Grover, fearful and uncertain about the unknown monster at the end of the book. And yet the reader is also positioned to oppose Grover’s wishes; when Grover constructs a janky fence of nailed-​up boards and attempts to hammer the book shut (12–​13), the reader must pry the pages open in spite of him to see what happens next. When Grover mortars a brick wall in order to shut off access to the rest of the book (16–​17), the reader must smash the wall to turn the page. Reading this book also demands kinetic action. Turning pages becomes play acting; reading means breaking through barriers, an operating metaphor that aligns child’s play with ownership and pursuit of literacy. As the reader overcomes each of Grover’s obstacles, the muppet becomes more and more desperate, finally begging, “The next page is the end of this book, and there is a MONSTER at the end of 59

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this book. Oh, I am so SCARED! PLEASE do not turn the page. Please Please Please” (20–​21). This spread features a sweating, supplicating Grover, hands clasped in prayer and words in hot pink bold type captured in speech-​bubbles striped with worry lines. It is a moment that gives the earnest reader pause: is there really something to fear at the end? I have read this book for the first time with bold and fearless children who have practically torn the page to get to the end (a reaction apparently endorsed in my own nuclear family, as our 1971 first edition has many pages repaired with yellowed and crispy Scotch tape). I have read it for the first time with anxious and hesitant children who genuinely fear they may endanger Grover (and themselves?) by turning the page. Inevitably, because Grover’s ideal child readers are ruled more by curiosity and heartlessness than by compassion, they turn the page. On the next spread they discover a relieved, smiling Grover whose image and dialogue bubbles partially obscure the giant block letters in the background reading “THE END”: “Well, look at that! This is the end of the book, and the only one here is… ME. I, lovable, furry old GROVER am the Monster at the end of this book. And you were so SCARED! I told you and told you there was nothing to be afraid of” (22–​23). The resolution is, of course, a psychoanalytic critic’s dream –​ a Lacanian enactment of the recognition of one’s monstrous self in the other-​monster. Or a posthuman dream, as Haraway would have it, since “the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world” because “human status is highly problematic” (67, 63). Grover involves the reader in his existential crisis, and he and the reader simultaneously learn that fear is of their own construction, a recognition that leaves the self-​deprecating Grover both happy and “so embarrassed” (24). From a posthuman perspective, a text like this one playfully invites readers to recognize that they are both Grover and not-​Grover; they are the monster, the protagonist, and the antagonist all at once. Interacting with a text that simultaneously positions readers to align themselves with Grover and against him invites wonderfully rich deconstruction of the boundaries between self and other. To interrogate, question, and disempower those presumed binaries is a quintessentially posthuman activity. However, to stop there would be to overlook additional layers available for analysis and interaction. Enter new materialism, a critical approach that is related to, but distinct from strictly posthuman analysis in the ways that it carefully considers questions of interaction and agency between and among entities. If one focuses on the material presence and particularly on the function of the book as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari term an assemblage, almost any text is available for new materialist analysis as an agential object, modeling the potential of new materialist analyses of children’s literature to cross interdisciplinary boundaries and foster broader understanding of books as just one point of interaction in young people’s syncretic identities. Assemblage consists of two segments: one of content, the other of expression. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand, it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (88). This notion of assemblage is instantiated in their consideration of books’ “rhizomatic” nature. A “rhizome book,” or a book-​assemblage, has no clear divisions among “a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)” (Deleuze and Guattari 23). Rather, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi argues, a book-​assemblage establishes “connections between these different fields where different flows (a semiotic, a material, and a social flow) act and are acted upon, intersecting, overlapping, and traversing each other” (714). Considered as assemblages, books are nonhuman materialities imbued with what Bennett calls “thing-​power” (2), “themselves bonafide agents rather than [...] instrumentalities, techniques of power, recalcitrant objects, or social constructs” (47). According to Bennett, “A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities” (21). Research with this rhizomatic book-​assemblage requires resisting a focus on developmental markers and shifting emphasis to include the young person’s experience of and interaction with the agentive book. 60

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Any exploration of The Monster at the End of This Book and Grover’s existential journey must occur within the context of the broader assemblage that is, Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop, and its flagship program Sesame Street, which first aired on public television in 1969.1 A model of inclusion, Sesame Street and its characters offer marvelous opportunities to capture posthumanist ways of thinking at work in material produced for children. In addition to the diverse human residents of the neighborhood, Jim Henson’s muppets are liminal creatures, neither human nor recognizable as any particular animal. Even Big Bird and Kermit the Frog, though they allude to familiar species, don’t resemble any frog or bird we’ve ever seen. But as its name reminds us, the “monster puppet” is literally and figuratively animated by a human being –​ specifically by the human hand (in the case of tiny muppets), arm (in the case of a medium-​sized Grover), or body (in the case of giant muppets such as Big Bird), giving it life and action from the inside, and from the human voice giving it the power of speech. The muppet emerges from this assemblage, a posthuman amalgam of human and nonhuman elements that work together to produce a distinct performance, a personality, a nonhuman being capable of expressing selfhood. In its entirety a wonderful example of assemblage in children’s culture, Sesame Street was groundbreaking in its use of research as the basis for the production of a television show. As Mavis Reimer explains, “the collaborative model used by CTW to develop Sesame Street in the first instance was one in which authority circulated among expert theorists, concerned parents, experienced producers, empirical researchers, and the audience of children who were observed and interviewed” (9). With its television program, its merchandising empire, its allied Muppet films, and its digital spaces and fandoms, Sesame Street is a key example of an assemblage that has monetized an original impulse to reach children and give them agency in their education in tandem with their media consumption habits.2 Today, children charmed by their existential adventure with The Monster at the End of This Book can enhance that relationship not only by tuning in to the television show, but also by finding a Grover muppet to animate with their own hands and voices or by searching the Internet for Grover coloring pages, games, and additional books in this series, all of which expand the rhizome book-​ assemblage and its potential points of contact and engagement with children. Macarena García-​González and Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak emphasize this approach in their 2019 article “New Materialist Openings to Children’s Literature Studies,” in which they argue that scholars need to consider the theoretical frames that limit us from capitalizing on the full potential for this field of study to break new and more productive ground. A central concern is that scholars still rely on theoretical and methodological approaches that prevent them from “responding to diverse openings offered by new materialist thinking” (47). Scholars of children’s literature largely continue to rely on developmental psychology and socialization theories that “presume that human lives should unfold according to age-​determined needs, interests, competences and achievements” (47). In addition, scholars usually restrict the nonhuman to animals, plants, toys, and machines, discounting the complete environmental spectrum of materialist assemblages.3 In response to these critical tendencies, these critics offer an “intellectual toolbox containing new materialist notions and terms” and call for scholars to “provide innovative research possibilities” (47) in order to expand on the posthuman and new materialist turn in children’s literature studies.4 The decentering of the categories of childhood and adulthood “helps us to re-​orientate our research away from naturalised social hierarchies towards jointly agentic and ever-​transformative encounters with texts” (50). Such a reorientation is significant for the study of children’s literature. In “Fish Is People,” Perry Nodelman argues that An awareness of the human-​centered implications of children’s books about creatures of other species suggests [that…] many human beings –​ women, children, people of other races and nations –​are also less than completely human. They remain animal-​like enough either to need 61

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to be governed by more completely human beings (the basis of sexism and racism) or else they need to be encouraged to evolve beyond their current animal-​like nature in order to become more human themselves –​ the basis of many of our views of children. Posthuman thinking attempts to move beyond the arrogance and divisiveness of ideas like these and to develop, instead, an awareness of how animals and other supposedly animal-​like creatures might be understood once we stop thinking of them as being less than we humans are. (13–​14) Additionally, I would suggest, it should prompt those who no longer identify as children to reconsider our definitions of childhood –​not simply as a phase bound by biological, sociological, psychological, or legal frameworks, but as a period of increasing exploration, agency, and participation in the process of co-​evolution. Such a reconsideration presents challenges that will force transgression of traditional critical boundaries. Nodelman calls for less anthropocentric representations of nonhuman animals in literature. Through his analysis of the representation of fish in picturebooks, Nodelman argues that books featuring nonhuman animals might blind young readers to other, less human-​centered ways of thinking [...] about ourselves and other humans. What those ways might look like, I have to admit, I am far too immersed in humanist ideas to see. I can only embark on an attempt to do it and recommend that others try it also: try to see what fish –​ and other animals –​ might be and mean if we removed our humanist blinders. (20, emphasis added) This is the challenge for scholars of children’s literature today: to consider books as assemblages that position readers to think in new, more expansive ways about their experience of human embodiment and how it is shaped in connection with other humans, nonhuman animals, the organic and human-​ made elements of their environments, and the various forms of technology with which we interact every day. García-​González and Deszcz-​Tryhubczak contend that new materialist frameworks may help scholars overcome the impasse identified by Nodelman, “enabling us to engage in creative experimentation in the conceptualisation of our research” (48). New materialism is a particular posthuman orientation that emphasizes what Barad terms “intra-​activity,” which “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (33, emphasis in original). For example, rather than considering a book an inert object waiting to be decoded, implying its passivity, consider it an agentic assemblage. In response to Bennett’s challenge in Vibrant Matter to see all things as agential assemblages, García-​ González and Deszcz-​Tryhubczak ask, “What if we take books to be vibrant matter? What would we name as part of their assemblage?” (54). Thinking diffractively rather than discursively can help scholars focus on “what a given phenomenon, event, or text does and what it is related to, which in turn enables us to see its agency and be affected by it” (56). This new materialist approach opens up new avenues of exploration and encourages scholars to “let go of the researcher’s gaze and acknowledge our exposure to the relationalities of texts, readers, affects, and matter” (57). I have argued elsewhere that books are not just something we read, they are something we do. If literature for young people is often “designed to instigate real-​world discussion, engagement, and action” (Musgrave xi), consideration of books as assemblages invites a diffractive approach to the possibilities that they instill in readers. In certain ways this approach encompasses aspects of reader-​ response theory, with its emphasis upon the reader’s embodied experience of a text. But further consideration of a text’s value and agency as an object in its own right also takes the emphasis off the reader and shifts the focus to material and economic considerations. In that sense, posthuman and 62

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new materialist approaches work together, borrowing from a variety of critical fields in an attempt to understand the text’s full potential for the reader, the position it occupies in a capitalistic system, and its role as an agential object. But not all book-​assemblages for children prompt digging into their endlessly sprouting rhizomatic empires. Or do they? Consider a reading of the Swedish picturebook Boken som inte ville bli last, published in English as The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read. Upon encountering the book, experienced readers will immediately recognize that it participates in the nonsense tradition founded in the work of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. It takes up the challenge of The Monster at the End of This Book and plumbs the metatextual, contrarian vein of picturebooks such as Jon Scieszka’s The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992) and B. J. Novak’s The Book With No Pictures (2014). The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read encourages a playful and interactive exchange between the young reader and the grown-​up (parent? teacher? librarian? peer?) who must read and resist the book’s imperative together. First, the book invokes the roles of “the child” as the person who selects the book and “the grown-​ up” as the person called upon by the child to read it. And then the book begins to misbehave. It breaks the rules of design: sometimes the words become too big to fit on the page or too small to be readable; at one point the book sprouts wings and begins “flap-​flap-​flapping around like a bird” (7). At another point the resistant book catches on fire, requiring both grown-​up and child to blow it out (20). It breaks grammatical and syntactical rules, so that “It suddenly got very blard to fread the book. There was a baddle that kralled poysh” (12). Elsewhere, the words begin to disappear, so that the text of one page becomes a fill-​in-​the-​blank exercise akin to a Mad Lib, inviting readers to write words of their own choosing on the page (22). Moreover, the book refuses to offer any discernible narrative. In the midst of its faux-​Victorian collage style of illustrations united by bits of toile, a jarringly crisp, realistic photograph of a rabbit appears in the text: “Suddenly, there was a picture of a rabbit that didn’t have anything to do with anything” (13). Finally, the book insists it must absolutely not be read again, as “It needed to rest” (33). It ends with a very conventional closure –​lines that require the “grown-​up” to assure the child auditors, “Don’t forget that you’re the best. You can be whatever you want to be” and wishing them sweet dreams (34). In short, the book refuses to deliver anything resembling a plot other than the metanarrative in which child and grown-​up are positioned as protagonists in tension with the antagonistic book. Considered as an assemblage, the book’s relationship with its reader becomes more complex still. Before Boken som inte ville bli last arrived in the American reader’s hands, its text was written by David Sundin, its pages illustrated by Alexis Holmqvist. It was contracted by an agent, shaped and revised by an editor, and produced, published, and marketed by Swedish publisher Bonnier Carlsen in 2020. Among other international publishers, Simon and Schuster then picked up the subsidiary rights and published it in the United States in 2022 as The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read, translated from the Swedish by B. J. Woodstein (real name: Epstein). In other words, the book as a material object is the result of individual and collaborative work on the part of various groups, teams, and corporations. It was marketed and sold, suggested by book reviewers or librarians, and finally selected by or recommended for a young person from a bookstore shelf, a library shelf, a schoolroom library, a family member, or a website. This rhizome book’s generation, production, and dissemination are the result of a variety of subjectivities involving creative impulses, literary and artistic craft, collaborations and compromises, educational goals, capitalist agendas, marketing strategies, and consumer choices. As such, the rhizome book is available to a variety of interpretations before, during, and after its production as an object. Keeping in mind the many layers of agency that combine to produce them, these and other metatextual picturebooks invite kinetic responses; they inspire curiosity about their movement across physical spaces, in this case from creation in Sweden to printing and manufacturing in China to marketing and sale in the United States. They suggest performance and play as integral to the 63

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reading experience. They emphasize and invite resistance to the notion of bookness as a structure to be controlled or interpreted by the reader; they endorse rule-​breaking and resistance as a part of the interpretive process. Texts such as these encourage readers to approach all reading with their own agency in the reading process at the forefront of the experience. Like Margery Williams’s eponymous Velveteen Rabbit (1922), these books reflect their status as beloved assemblages through teeth marks on their spines, folded and torn pages, sticky fingerprints, and notes and doodles that transform pristine pages into spaces of interaction and evolving creativity. Are these examples a bit too obviously metatextual as examples for new materialist analysis? Absolutely. But such examples set up useful pointers for how to read any book as an assemblage. The literal and figurative resistance of The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read interrogates the nature of storytelling, the agency of book as object, the prescribed relationship between adult as reader and child recipient of/​participant in the story. The book asserts its own agency and by its existence produces questions not only about its own meanings, but also about its responsibility as a book to fulfill its mission of behaving as a good book should, namely following narrative, formal, and material conventions of bookness. The antinarrative of a book such as this one also illuminates a metanarrative: the act of handling, reading, and interpreting a book has violent potential. Like the Monster Book of Monsters used as a course text at Hogwarts by Rubeus Hagrid, it implies that the relationship between book and reader is mutually beneficial, playful, and potentially dangerous. From a posthuman perspective, the grown-​up’s inclination to trap “the child” in a limited range of responses throws up humanistic barriers to the potential for the exchange of ideas that can take place between the young reader as an embodied and autonomous person and the book as an agential assemblage. Although it draws much attention to its materiality, this book, assembled as it is (and as all books are) by a variety of adult actors, does not challenge the boundary between adult and child; indeed, it reinforces it by prescribing roles, actions, and even dialogue for each. The adult is still in a position of power to shape the child’s reading experience. And yet since the book itself encourages resistance and rebellion, in this reader’s experience it likewise plants the idea in young readers that they, too, could break the rules about what a book can do and be. In one instance in my own experience of The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read, a child reader insisted, “I want to drive the book!” and grabbed the text when we were reading the second spread, in which the book becomes a steering wheel –​“Vroom Vroom” (3). Of course, the extent to which a child reader wants to claim this book depends largely on how performative the grown-​up reader chooses to be; if the grown-​up reads the book as an assemblage of words and pictures on flat pages, child readers show little enthusiasm. But if the grown-​up performs the book as a playful object that can transform into a car (2–​3), a bird (7–​8), a fire (19–​20), or a Mad Lib (21–​22), such a reading invites energetic participation from the child. A reading of a book less overtly metatextual, less insistent upon its own agency, may help clarify the relationship between these two critical orientations, demonstrating how posthuman ways of thinking are embedded in reading experience and how new material orientations to texts encourage readers to take agency not as children, but simply as humans forming ethical orientations to the world. Something Beautiful, a 2002 picturebook written by Sharon Dennis Wyeth and illustrated by Chris K. Soentpiet, tells the story of a young Black girl navigating her urban neighborhood for the day. Like the work of Ezra Jack Keats, Faith Ringgold, Christopher Myers, Jacqueline Woodson, and others, the book participates in what Melissa Jenkins identifies as a genre of picturebooks that “facilitate transformational critical multiculturalism and offer strategies for dealing with difference and disadvantage” (345). Such texts often feature protagonists who “cope with an otherwise harsh cityscape through close attention to a natural object” (Jenkins 359n); in the case of Something Beautiful, the protagonist engages with a variety of objects –​some natural, some human-​made, some intangible –​in the process of developing her conception of beauty. The first lines of the book, accompanied by an illustration of an unnamed girl perhaps nine years old, in profile, braids and beads highlighted by sunlight, indicate her desire to locate beauty in the 64

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ordinary, even in the ugly: “When I look through my window, I see a brick wall. There is trash in the courtyard, and a broken bottle that looks like fallen stars” (Wyeth 2). Her ability to see “fallen stars” in a pile of broken glass and trash presages her ability to see objects as more than their empirical parts, to imagine their agency and move them beyond their current status as discarded objects. The girl is nevertheless clearly disheartened by her environment, where “[t]‌here is writing in the halls of my building. On the front door, someone put the word Die” (4). In the spread containing these words, she stands on the front stoop of her brick building, her eyes downcast, her body framed by the iron railings of the stoop and the ugly word scrawled on the door behind her in red paint. As she begins her neighborhood rounds, she passes “a lady whose home is a big cardboard carton. She sleeps on the sidewalk, wrapped in plastic” (6). The contrast between the two subjects in this spread is stark. The neatly outfitted girl stands in the background with her perfectly symmetrical braids, blue-​and-​white striped shirt tucked into a pleated white skirt, white ankle socks, and black patent leather flats. She gazes down at the woman in the foreground who slumps against the brick wall, partially shaded by cardboard and partially covered by clear plastic sheeting, one bare foot extended out into the sidewalk toward the girl. While neither image nor text romanticizes poverty, neither does it render poverty ugly, frightening, or threatening to the girl. The material conditions in which the woman is living lack comfort, but her dark skin is lit by the sun; her hands are beautiful, resting on her leg; her sleeping face is peaceful. She is not a feature of the landscape to be overlooked or rendered invisible, and thus the girl does not look away from her in embarrassment or shame, but rather looks directly at her with a pensive expression. Thus begins the urban child protagonist’s process of “map[ping], mark[ing], and delineat[ing]” the material landscape of her community as one of many “pointed socioeconomic critiques [offered by this subset of picturebooks], responding to the difficulties of urban life by expanding the accepted geographies of black experience and politicizing projects of urban ‘uplift’ ” (Jenkins 345). The girl’s project involves answering a question for herself: “Mommy said that everyone should have something beautiful in their life. Where is my something beautiful?” (10). She considers that she was introduced to the spelling of the word in school, concluding that “I think it means something that when you have it, your heart is happy” (12). By posing her own aesthetic theory, the girl steps into a classic philosophical debate on the nature of beauty. Wyeth and Soentpiet’s diverse representation of beauty across the text suggest that the little girl’s theory is in line with eighteenth-​century philosopher David Hume’s well-​known stance on the subject: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others” (136). The girl’s journey positions readers to witness her interactions with a variety of people, tastes, sounds, sensations, spaces, and environments, but not to judge different manifestations of beauty. Her neighborhood for her becomes an intra-​active assemblage of exchanges, positioning her to see herself as one part of a community constituted by individuals who are coexisting and co-​evolving. Further investigation into the creation of this book-​assemblage reveals that the author is deeply invested in representing diverse stories as a descendant of enslaved Africans from Cameroon and enslaving colonizers from Britain (Wyeth, “About Me”). Readers can learn that the illustrator, born in South Korea and adopted and raised by an American family in Hawaii, is similarly interested in telling complex stories of identity formation (Soentpiet). Understanding that the author and illustrator participate in and work to represent complex cultural identities is affirming for children who want to see stories like theirs represented in books, but more broadly it promotes the posthuman awareness that all identities are complex. It invites readers to recognize that racial differences exist without suggesting that any one experience of human-​ness is better than others. Jaques ruminates at some length on the “challenges of representing posthuman concerns to child audiences” (Children’s Literature 233). I contend that given their interest in seeing connections, 65

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young people are more inclined toward posthuman ways of thinking than they are toward establishing boundaries and binaries. Wyeth’s protagonist surveys her community, noting differences in the midst of interconnections. Soentpiet’s illustrations underpin this theme by repeating the visual tropes of boundaries throughout the text: brick walls, iron window bars, gates and railings, and chain-​link fences. These are objects that divide and connect, that separate and unite. In one spread, a chain-​ link fence, a common signifier in landscapes of poverty, creates a textured background, allowing Soentpiet to foreground a moment of joyous dancing with Georgiana, who invites the girl to “Hear my sounds!,” her “something beautiful” playing from a radio at their feet (21). The shining metal of the fence separates them from their friend Marc; his “something beautiful” is to play basketball with a pack of kids whose skin tones and clothing come in every color (21). Marc’s smile is wide; the players’ body language is kinetic. Similarly, Georgiana’s head is thrown back, and the girl raises her arms joyfully as they dance, the braids on both heads flying. The scene is colorful, sun-​bleached, and bright. The chain-​link fence that bisects the illustration does not signify separation, segregation, and degradation, but rather lends texture to the scene and delineates different but connected and shared spaces for play, expression, noise, and joy. Characteristic of the text’s many contrasting examples of beauty, the ebullient playground scene is immediately countered by the reverent tone of the following spread. Old Mr. Sims sits on his front steps, boundaried by a cement wall and guard rail with a flood of sunlight highlighting the features of his open, kind face and his graying hair. Holding his upright cane in one hand, with the other he reaches out to the now-​somber girl: “Touch this smooth stone. [...] All these years, I have carried it in my pocket” (23). The stone fits so perfectly into the hollow of the man’s hand, its tone so closely matching that of his skin, that it appears to be a part of him. The illustration suggests that as the man has aged and his skin wrinkled over the years, the stone has become smoother, its crags and crevices worn away by the man’s movement through life. This moment is perhaps the most moving “something beautiful” offered in the text, even though the meaning of that simple stone is unknowable. It is the text’s most perfect expression of the commingled ideas that beauty is personal and subjective and that meaningful connection and co-​evolution are everywhere, even between human beings and inanimate objects. The girl takes this idea of connection home, where she decides to transition from observation into action. She cleans up the trash and broken glass in her courtyard and scrubs the graffiti off her door: “When the word Die disappears, I feel powerful” (28). Not only does she feel empowered by the accomplishment and the aesthetic pleasure of creating a more beautiful environment, she also takes pleasure in claiming responsibility. She did not create the mess, but she willingly takes responsibility for the mess created by others. The process compels her to imagine a more beautiful future beyond herself: “Someday I’ll plant flowers in my courtyard. I’ll invite all my friends to see” (28); “I will give a real home and a real bed to the lady who sleeps in a cardboard carton. She will sing, and I will hear her song” (30). Importantly, she is rewarded at the end of her day of isolation-​in-​ connection when her mother comes home from work. When the girl asks, “Do you have something beautiful?” her mother responds, “Of course. [...] I have you” (30). The girl’s notion of beauty has evolved to include her relationships and community. It includes the ethical and aesthetic pleasure of growing and sharing in the beauty of the natural world and her urban environment. Her vision of helping the homeless woman find a home and a voice also anticipates the pleasures of transforming her own empathy into action and sharing her own empowerment with another person. Though not an overtly didactic book, Something Beautiful invites more investigation into what we can do with books. Digging deeper into the roots of this rhizome book, reader-​investigators can discover videos, including one of Soentpiet participating in a video about how books are made (Soentpiet). This nesting work documents the assembly of a book-​assemblage designed to educate and intrigue readers potentially interested in art and illustration. In another video, Wyeth speaks with a class of Pennsylvania elementary school students who were inspired by Something Beautiful 66

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to create a variety of philanthropic projects in their area (Musone). Deep engagement with this text offers a variety of possible responses, all of which position readers (whether adults or children) to consider how they move about in the world, whom and what they affect, and what they can do to initiate positive change. Read as a text that inspires both inner contemplation of beauty and outward actions toward beautification, Something Beautiful is a book-​assemblage capable of challenging readers to expand their ways of reading and their ways of seeing (and not seeing) differences among humans, nonhuman animals, and the objects and spaces with which they interact. But as a material object and product of the work of many individuals beyond the author and illustrator, it is also a demonstration that embracing posthuman ways of thinking can encourage rhizomatic growth of tolerance, eco-​ethics, community consciousness, and other posthuman ways of thinking and being. As I have emphasized, picturebooks are material objects produced and promoted for young readers by a variety of adult creators and contributors. However, I suggest that young people influenced by their interactions with book-​assemblages may be prepared to recognize all texts they encounter as agential objects, capable of surprising them; capable of encouraging risk-​taking; capable of helping them to develop posthuman ways of thinking and most importantly to ask posthuman questions about the nature of knowledge, responsibility, power, and equality. Texts that encourage posthuman orientation in their readers –​that position readers to recognize the materiality and agency of the living and nonliving things in the world around them –​also position such readers to reflect on the ethics of interconnectivity and the value of difference. Wolfe anticipates this critical linkage between the work of critical posthumanism and the work of antiracist pedagogy, LGBTQI+​ rights, disability rights, and other movements against the problems that their advocates see as inherent in the humanistic tradition, arguing that to encourage posthuman ways of thinking is to reject “violence against the social other of whatever species” (8). I close by acknowledging the risk inherent in this challenge to become more expansive in posthuman and new materialist explorations of children’s literature: What is the monster at the end of this chapter? If children represent the “not-​quite-​human,” as Jaques contends (“Posthumanism” 373), perhaps those who identify as no-​longer-​children are monstrous in the end. For no-​longer-​child humans, the monster may be a structural system more likely to dismiss children’s agency in their own lives than to recognize their ability to help us discover new ways of seeing things –​and of seeing beyond things. But if, as many critics seem to agree, we are all already posthuman, we have no humanity to lose in opening our minds and embracing new ways of reading, thinking, and being a little bit less human.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Michelle Ann Abate and the editors of this collection for their invaluable feedback.

Notes 1 See Debbie Olson’s chapter in this volume, “Television,” which explores global iterations of Sesame Street. 2 Sesame Street offers an excellent example of transmedia franchising, which Naomi Hamer discusses elsewhere in this Companion. 3 See Jaques, Children’s Literature. 4 In addition to the ethico-​onto-​epistemological and diffractive approaches I apply here, their “toolbox of new materialist concepts” includes considering texts from Bennett’s framework for vibrant matter, using the intergenerational community of inquiry, taking up Barad’s call for response-​ability, and employing post-​ qualitative research. See García-​González and Deszcz-​Tryhubczak (53–​56) for details on their challenge to scholars.

Works Cited Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

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Megan L. Musgrave Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. García-​González, Macarena, and Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak. “New Materialist Openings to Children’s Literature Studies.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–​60, EBSCO, doi:10.3366/​ircl.2020.0327. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 3–​90. Harrison, Jen. Review of Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, edited by Anita Tarr and Donna R. White. The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 44, no. 1, 2020, pp. 119–​23, Project Muse, doi:10.1353/​uni.2020.0010. Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” 1757. Essays Moral and Political, George Routledge and Sons, 1894. Jaques, Zoe. Children’s Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg. Routledge, 2014. —​—​—​. “Posthumanism.” A Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Karen Coats, Deborah Stevenson, and Vivian Yenika-​Agbaw, John Wiley and Sons, 2022, pp. 364–​75. Jenkins, Melissa. “‘The next thing you know you’re flying among the stars’: Nostalgia, Heterotopia, and Mapping the City in African American Picture Books.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, 2016, pp. 343–​64. Musgrave, Megan. Digital Citizenship in Twenty-​First-​Century Young Adult Literature: Imaginary Activism. Palgrave, 2015. Musone, Amy. “Sharon Dennis Wyeth.” Video interview, 2014, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​PzyO​iSHS​xe4. Nodelman, Perry. “Fish Is People.” Bookbird, vol. 57, no. 2, 2019, pp. 12–​21, Project Muse, doi:10.1353/​ bkb.2019.0026. Reimer, Mavis. “Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street.” Jeunesse, vol. 5, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–​15, Project Muse, doi:10.1353/​jeu.2013.0002. Soentpiet, Chris K. “Biography” and “How a Book Is Made.” Chris Sontpiet.com, accessed 27 February 2023. Stone, Jon. The Monster at the End of This Book. Illustrated by Michael Smollin, Western Publishing Company and Children’s Television Workshop, 1971. Sundin, David. The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read. Illustrated by Alexis Holmqvist, translated by B. J. Woodstein, Simon and Schuster, 2020. Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz. “Images of Thinking in Feminist Materialisms: Ontological Divergences and the Production of Researcher Subjectivities.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 26, 2013, pp. 706–​16, Taylor and Francis Online Journals, doi:10.1080/​09518398.2013.788759 Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Wyeth, Sharon Dennis. “About Me.” Sharon Dennis Wyeth, https://​sharon​denn​iswy​eth.com/​about-​the-​aut​hor/​, accessed 27 February 2023. —​—​—​. Something Beautiful. Illustrated by Chris K. Soentpiet, Dragonfly Books, 2002.

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6 DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Deanna Stover

Both children’s literature and digital humanities (DH) are difficult to define. Marah Gubar begins her article “On Not Defining Children’s Literature” by quoting Roger Sale’s observation that “everyone knows what children’s literature is until asked to define it” (209). Similarly, Shawn Graham’s definition of DH from Jason Heppler’s What Is Digital Humanities? site explains: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.” In part because of this amorphousness, as Elizabeth Callaway, Jeffrey Turner, Heather Stone, and Adam Halstrom have pointed out in an article that analyzes 334 definitions of the digital humanities field (a number that, as they admit, only begins to capture what is out there), “Digital humanities has a definition addiction.” For confirmation, one might look at Heppler’s site, which, in addition to Graham’s quip above, compiles over 800 short definitions of the digital humanities, with a new definition populating each time one refreshes the page, showing just how diverse the field is regarding what digital humanists do, what they study, and what they produce. In many ways, the ambiguity of children’s literature and digital humanities makes for more compelling scholarship as we think about methods of blurring boundaries further rather than attempting to stay within the confines of traditional areas of inquiry. This is not to say that traditional research is unnecessary –​ it is very necessary –​ but if we make an effort to follow Sara L. Schwebel’s advice to take children’s literature scholarship to the public (including by “embrac[ing] digital humanities initiatives” [“Scholarship” 472]), DH provides another path forward. Thus, instead of defining either field in this chapter, I provide an overview of projects related to DH and children’s literature and an argument for an increasingly playful engagement with the digital. After all, if one eschews definition, there’s more room to play and experiment with form and content using exciting, creative, and innovative techniques. “Play” is often identified as one of the tenets of digital pedagogy (see Tracy and Hoiem; Sample), but it’s also a useful concept for the digital humanities more broadly –​ especially, I argue, when it comes to children’s literature, a field with a ripe history for inspiring play in children1 and a compelling future for inspiring playful digital approaches in adults. Robin Bernstein, in her study of Black dolls in the nineteenth century, contends that “literature and material culture […] co-​scripted nineteenth-​century practices of play” (211). Literature and material and digital culture similarly inform current play practices; for instance, Elisabeth Wesseling points out that media (including books but also “the newer electronic and digital media”) are toys and vice versa, suggesting that the Internet has contributed to fundamental alterations in adult understandings of childhood and their own relationship to it (7). Although how children engage in play online is outside the scope of this chapter (and my expertise), adults can practice

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-8

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a similar playful approach to the creation of digital resources and projects. Indeed, being playful with form and content provides exciting alternatives to more traditional forms of scholarship, allowing us to think critically in new ways about children’s literature and culture –​ways that push the boundaries between the serious and the playful, the digital and the analog, and the scholarly and the public.

Collaboration: Playing Together Despite the plethora of DH projects out there, children’s literature projects currently make up only a small part of the DH field. In “Victorian Digital Humanities” Karen Bourrier, building on work by Marjorie Stone and Keith Lawson, explains how, when large-​scale digital humanities projects began, “many projects focusing on women’s writing considered women collectively, a move that may have been necessary to gain funding” (130–​31). It seems that, similarly, children’s literature is often a component of a larger DH project rather than the focus, as in the Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP). Of course, this is not always the case, and in what follows I will discuss a number of projects that focus on children’s literature. More are on the way; at the time of editing this chapter, The Lion and the Unicorn, an academic children’s literature journal, released a call for papers for a special issue on “Children’s Literature and Digital Humanities.” This issue helps to signal a growing interest in combining the two fields. However, as Vanessa Joosen states, while “digital humanities has had a profound impact on literary studies […] the field of children’s literature […] has been rather slow to take part in this development, even though an increasing number of digitised children’s books are being made available through virtual libraries” (252). Wouter Haverals and Joosen go further in “Constructing Age in Children’s Literature” by claiming that “Children’s literature studies […] risks separating itself from one of the most significant shifts in twenty-​first-​century literary analysis”; here they refer to distant reading (25), the practice of looking at a large body of texts at once and analyzing the results, often with the aid of more traditional close reading practices (in Haverals and Joosen’s case, focused on Guus Kuijer’s oeuvre).2 The fact is that the field of children’s literature could benefit greatly from more engagement with the digital, and the field of digital humanities could be deeply enriched by children’s literature –​ especially if we think about the ways play can become a part of digital (and even analog) humanities projects and research. For, of course, beyond distant reading, there are many ways to explore the digital humanities, some of which require fewer technical skills than others. From minimal computing to mapping to digital editions and archives to data visualizations and network analysis to Linked Open Data to image analysis to 3D modeling and printing, DH provides many ways to reimagine, rethink, and play with children’s literature in digital (and digital-​aligned) spaces. There are even resources that make more technical topics, such as corpus stylistics –​“the study of language based on large collections of ‘real life’ language use stored in […] computerized databases created for linguistic research” (Nordquist) –​ more accessible to those new to DH. For instance, Michaela Mahlberg and her collaborators worked on creating CLiC: Corpus Linguistics in Context, which started as the CLiC Dickens Project but now has a ChiLit (or Children’s Literature) corpus with seventy-​one books for children currently digitized and ready for practitioners to explore.3 The tools available for research and teaching are constantly advancing, increasing the ease of entry into DH. For those new to computational text analysis, The Data-​Sitters Club is a particularly enlightening and fun way to learn more. On this site, Lee Skellerup Bessette, Katherine Bowers, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Quinn Dombrowski, Anouk Lang, and Roopika Risam explore a variety of textual analysis methods, both in a “Main Series” about the English-​language books and in a “Multilingual Mysteries” section about the translations of the popular series The Baby-​Sitters Club. The design of the website itself (built with GitHub, a well-​known code repository) is an homage to the series, and each “book” written by The Data-​Sitters Club is in the style of a story while also functioning as a catalog of different methods of (and issues with) computational analysis. Through these stories, The 70

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Data-​Sitters Club becomes more about exploring and playing with technology than it is about any final product and offers a less intimidating way into computational text analysis. Imaginative and user-​friendly, The Data-​Sitters Club is a particularly compelling example of how children’s literature and DH might come together in instructive and constructive ways. Although the “hack” vs. “yack” debate in DH4 certainly exists and new (and sometimes experienced) humanities practitioners often face Imposter Syndrome, particularly regarding technology, not only do these relatively easy-​to-​use tools and the many, many DH blogs and other resources out there exist, but as the long list of names I have included for The Data-​Sitters Club illustrates, collaboration is key within DH. Often, scholars, library professionals, software developers, and designers (to mention only a few possibilities) work together to create digital projects, sometimes across national boundaries, as in the case of Our Mythical Childhood,5 an investigation of the reception of classical antiquity in youth culture hosted by the University of Warsaw and spanning four continents, with components ranging from DH to traditional print to online gaming. In fact, some funding organizations, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States, actively enforce collaboration in digital projects. For instance, the NEH’s Digital Projects for the Public Notice of Funding Opportunity 2022 explains that “the most competitive projects are those which include collaboration with multiple scholars offering diverse perspectives. Projects that depend on input from a single scholar are not competitive” (1). Even the NEH’s Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations grant (which supports both print and digital editions) only supports collaborative teams. The NEH also offers many other funding opportunities, some of which are for individuals, but it’s important to note that collaboration, both within and without associated institutions, is an important part of the digital humanities, and many of the projects I look at below are collaborative. While I spend much of this chapter surveying DH projects, particularly digital archives, this chapter serves as a call for more playful DH projects within children’s literature and culture. In many ways, then, this piece is as much about inspiration as it is about information. After all, DH not only provides children’s literature practitioners with more opportunities to collaborate with people in a diverse range of fields and get funding and recognition through internal and external grants, it also provides other benefits such as reaching a larger public, exploring new methods of scholarly communication, and involving students in learning essential digital skills.6 In the end, whether working individually or as part of a team, the possibilities for how one might combine children’s literature and digital humanities in compelling ways are practically endless for researchers with enough creativity and playfulness.

Digital Archives Currently, digital archives tend to be the most prevalent and famous digital projects about children’s literature. Examples include the Children’s Literature Archive through Ryerson University and the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature through the University of Florida, both helpful resources that have provided essential digitizing efforts of texts for children. Of course, some of the digitizing efforts by libraries go beyond image scans and metadata. Working with Suzan Alteri, then the curator of the Baldwin, Emily F. Brooks digitized interactive books by creating short videos of different kinds of interactive components in movable books aimed at children as well as providing metadata for these components. These efforts on the part of librarians and other scholars provide important resources for further research and give wonderful alternatives to having to travel to visit archives, although depending on a researcher’s goals, the digital cannot always replace the physical. Many digital archives created by libraries are obviously dictated by the library’s collections. However, some digital archives, usually created outside of the library system (although they may be inspired by or funded by libraries), focus on specific texts or topics within a particular time period. As a particularly well-known example, one might look at Schwebel’s The Lone Woman and Last 71

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Indians Digital Archive, which compiles documents from numerous databases. The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, famous during the nineteenth century, lived alone from 1835 to 1853 (when she was “rescued”) because her community was destroyed by the practice of forcing Indigenous peoples into Catholic missions and by a massacre on the island. Since 1960, however, the Lone Woman is perhaps best known as the reimagined teenager Karana in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. Both a children’s literature project and an archival project that gathers over 450 documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Schwebel’s project not only further contextualizes O’Dell’s novel but also explores the Lone Woman’s fictionalization in other forms of media. Schwebel expands on the digital archive by incorporating other interactive features. Of course, as she admits in the “About” section of this site, The Lone Woman archive is not “complete” because of copyright restrictions and the problems with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which (sometimes unreliably) turns image scans to text, meaning that there are other documents out there –​both those that have already been digitized in academic and nonacademic digital databases and those that have not. Schwebel provides annotated transcriptions of archival documents (some of which are in languages other than English), which are marked up with TEI, or the Text Encoding Initiative standards for encoding texts using XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a human-​ and machine-​ readable way to mark up features in a text from simple paragraph breaks to more complex cultural tropes. TEI has long been the standard for encoding documents, a practice that ensures that there is some sense of standardization among digital editing practices. However, Schwebel goes further by plotting the compiled and tagged documents on a series of historical and contemporary maps7 and, in addition, providing interactive data visualizations made with Tableau based on the literary tropes found within The Lone Woman archive. Her transcriptions of the archived documents are also interactive, allowing users to explore the intertextuality of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century publications about the Lone Woman. Schwebel’s archive thus contextualizes a piece of historical children’s fiction within the historical discourse surrounding the Lone Woman –​ or perhaps we might say that Schwebel’s archive brings together resources related to an Indigenous woman who has been continuously fictionalized by (often) white writers and provides a critical framework for better understanding this fictionalization. The critical framework, topic, content, and even name of a project will, of course, affect the ways users engage with that project. For example, the VWWP places its focus on women writers, some of whom sometimes wrote for children, while Gerald Early and Amanda Gailey’s in-​progress project The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature, 1880–​19398 focuses on depictions of racial difference in children’s literature during the Gilded Age, although it also includes some adult correspondence. In the latter project, the correspondence between adults thus becomes supplementary for better understanding juvenile literature during the time period. In other words, children’s literature is still the focus of The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk while other projects, such as the VWWP, focus on authors’ works more broadly. These examples are just two approaches that serve different goals, but it’s important to note that they fundamentally change the ways users might engage with children’s literature in an online context. In the case of the VWWP, the project is meant to recover lesser-​known nineteenth-​century female writers and the myriad forms of writing they engaged in, including children’s literature; in the case of The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk, users know from the outset that children’s literature is centered and that any other works simply provide context. Of course, users don’t have to follow a project’s implied, and sometimes explicit, goals –​for instance, they could focus only on the children’s works in the VWWP or only on the adult correspondence in The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk –​but the framing of these projects also indicates the changes in funding possibilities. The VWWP started in 1995, whereas The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk appears to have begun somewhere around 2010. This chronology may provide children’s literature practitioners hope that they, too, might now receive monetary support for both small-​ and large-​scale projects that focus on children’s literature more 72

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specifically, although of course projects that explore how authors wrote for different audiences are also important in their own right. Like the VWWP, children’s literature only takes up a part of AustLit, an impressive project that embraces the literary scene in Australia in an expansive way by including many forms of storytelling. A bibliographical project at its heart, AustLit’s children’s literature section includes both historical and modern works for children, from fully digitized texts to smaller, informational entries and essays on topics related to children’s literature in Australia along with teaching resources. In 2019, AustLit already included over 30,000 works meant for children and 5,000 works meant for young adults, with the full text of over 1,500 of these works available on their site. AustLit also includes digital exhibitions, including essays on Aboriginal literature for children and Asian-​Australian children’s literature. In addition, users can explore Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR), which offers full texts of children’s works published between 1830 and 1945. However, AustLit requires a subscription in order to cover operating costs, which bars access to much of the site for those unaffiliated with subscribing institutions. While the subscription requirement is understandable, it is worth noting that in 2012 Lisa Spiro defined one of the values of DH as “openness” since the field, in general, aims at providing open-​access publications and transparency. Ambitious projects such as AustLit might be difficult to pull off without subscriptions, but from open-​access journals to free digital tools, DH as a whole pushes for open, transparent, and inclusive projects that help to bring resources to the public free of cost. Of course, many archives are free. In addition to most of the examples listed above, the University of Pittsburgh has made over one hundred textbooks available in their 19th Century Schoolbooks collection; the University of Southern Mississippi has digitized books and manuscripts as part of the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection; the University of Maryland has created the Prange Digital Children’s Book Collection with around 8,000 digitized Japanese children’s books from 1945–​49; and the Collectie Jeugdliteratuur (or Collection for Children’s Literature) brings together over 1,000 children’s books from the Netherlands and Flanders. As the first example in this list helps to show, works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appear to be the most explored in terms of DH and children’s literature; as John A. Walsh explains it, currently the nineteenth century serves as the “final frontier” because of copyright restrictions on later works. Among other eighteenth-​ and nineteenth-​century archives, one might mention Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, which includes Austen’s juvenilia; The William Blake Archive, which includes beautiful scans of the illuminated Songs of Innocence; Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, which includes a section on the text as a children’s book; and the “developing experimental site” Learning as Play: An Animated, Interactive Archive of 17th-​to 19th-​Century Narrative Media for and by Children, which focuses on movable books. All wonderful resources, these digital archives are integral for furthering the study of children’s literature. In addition, projects such as Allison Giffen and Lucia Hodgson’s Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project bring together resources for those interested in thinking about children’s literature and DH, while websites for entities such as Svenska Barnboks Institutet (the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books) combine cataloging with a host of additional aids ranging from digitized lectures to notices of upcoming grants. However, in the next section, I want to push children’s literature practitioners and DHers to move beyond the archive and other digital resources and continue to think creatively about how we might play with the confluence of technology and children’s literature.

Beyond the Archive, or Playing with the Archive I am not the first to call for a move beyond the archive. Walsh, for one, in his 2008 piece on nineteenth-​ century digital resources, echoes Marcel O’Gorman in discussing how DH as a whole is prone to “archive fever,” or the “inordinate emphasis on textual editing and archiving at the expense of more 73

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adventurous, experimental, and creative uses of technology to transform humanities scholarship.” “Archive fever,” then, is not exclusive to children’s literature, but just as the children’s literature field has been slow on the uptake where DH in general is concerned, so is it slow in thinking beyond the archive or, alternatively, playing with the archive in interesting ways. Again, this is not to say that more traditional digital archives are less important than their innovative counterparts; they simply have different goals. Many of the larger archives, for instance, are about making collections accessible, allowing for more engagement with (often) historical documents and books –​ a lofty and important goal indeed. Other archive projects take a deeper dive into specific periods or topics, and some of these provide more interactive components for users to explore. Some archives, such as The Lone Woman and Last Indians Digital Archive discussed above, have already begun to expand beyond digitizing efforts with the use of mapping and data visualizations, and others I discuss below (including my own project) still combine digital textual editing with other technologies. So part of a more playful approach to DH more generally might involve experimenting with form and thinking outside the box (we might say the “black box”) so that practitioners could think about how DH and critical making can work together. The latter, a term coined by Matt Ratto, combines the ideas of “critical thinking” (abstract) and “making” (concrete, material). More focused on the process than the product, this concept aligns well with the field of DH, which is not overly distressed by failure.9 In other words, experimentation can certainly be impermanent and challenging. One of my favorite children’s literature digital projects, Anastasia Salter’s Alice in Dataland 2.0, is partially broken, but perhaps this feature helps to show the ephemerality of the digital –​an ephemerality those who study children’s literature and culture are probably already familiar with. Books may disappear from collective memory, get “lost” in personal collections, or be torn or scribbled on by children;10 similarly, digital projects may be neglected, fall victim to unsupported technologies, or disappear due to lack of funding. Because of this vulnerability, some of the projects I discuss in this chapter might be unavailable or broken by the time readers visit them, although larger digital archives often have institutional backing and so are more permanent. While, again, stable resources are important, the experimental and ephemeral can provide us with new ways of knowing. We can think about playful approaches to media studies in Alice in Dataland 2.0, which uses Lewis Carroll’s Golden Age children’s book to explore different digital avenues of research. This project is part of what is called “big tent” DH, or the concept that DH can encompass more through being open to a variety of projects because “there is no one size that fits all” (Svensson). Alice in Dataland 2.0 might be thought of as a digital rhetoric or media studies project, especially with its publication in Kairos, but we can also think about it productively within DH. As Salter explains in the preface to the project, “While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a thing is the center of the work, its ‘literariness’ was peripheral to my core interest. Instead, I was drawn to exploring it as what Craig Mod calls a ‘future book.’ ” To do so, Salter was inspired by “the classic web, and particularly [by] early electronic literature and webtexts.” One can see this emphasis on development in the myriad forms her project takes, from a handwritten and hand-​drawn booklet that users can digitally flip through in “Down the Rabbit Hole” to a web-​based comic in “Advice from a Caterpillar” to a generative poem in “A Mad Tea-​Party” and to two Twine-​based stories11 in “The Queen’s Croquet-​Ground” and “The Mock Turtle’s Story.” Salter’s project really is an exploration into a variety of forms and web languages and tools that help to reimagine Carroll’s iconic text, and while she does not focus on the “literariness” of the original work, the project provides a playful approach to scholarship. It also shows how innovative projects build on the digital collections of libraries, since Salter worked from the Baldwin Library’s Afterlife of Alice and Her Adventures in Wonderland collection to create the impressive project. Alice in Dataland 2.0 illustrates that a playful approach to DH might involve critical making, whether in digital spaces or in physical ones. As Jentery Sayers has remarked, “The use of matter as a medium for historical research need not fetishize the past. Instead it can become a time and space to 74

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interpret the intricacies of material design and interaction, both now and then” (159). More recently, Sari Altschuler and David Weimer have released a manifesto about “texturing the digital humanities,” calling for more tactile experiences within a digital project in order that we might think about accessibility and DH. Their own project “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read” focuses on 3D replicas of books produced from 1830 to 1910 for low-​vision and blind readers –​particularly Boston Line Type, a method of raised type that was developed around the same time as braille. In addition to their manifesto and pop-​up exhibits, the Touch This Page website allows users to download and print their own versions of the 3D models and offers critical context for understanding the project. Thus, we might use digital technologies to remake and reimagine physical objects while still thinking critically about what it is we are (re)producing. As another example of the physical/​material in DH, one might look at my own in-​progress project. For some background, in my coedited digital edition of H. G. Wells’s 1913 text Little Wars, which was published in Scholarly Editing in 2017, I worked with Nigel Lepianka and Jason Fairfield to create a simplified set of rules since Little Wars is exactly that: a set of rules for playing at war aimed at “Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books” (Wells, Wars 3). The simplified set of rules, meant to facilitate access to the games Wells played, is only the beginning. I have plans to continue the project by pairing it with the earlier companion text, Floor Games (1911), which describes Wells’s play with toy soldiers with his two sons. Both Floor Games and Little Wars contain marginal illustrations by J. R. Sinclair, but Floor Games also includes a full-​page illustration of civilian miniatures that Wells and Sinclair imagined as “Some Suggestions for Toy Makers” since “even the grocer wears epaulettes” (Games 27). Among these suggested toys are a suffragette and a New Woman, adding to Wells’s already complicated understanding of gender and play. In this new, larger project, I will embrace critical making and Sayers’s call to “prototype the past” by “remak[ing] technologies that no longer function, no longer exist, or may have only existed as fictions, illustrations, or one-​offs” (Sayers 158). Thus, moving forward, my goals are to create a digital edition of both of Wells’s texts, complete with marginal illustrations, that also allows users to download the stereolithography (or STL) files used for 3D printing in order that readers might print (and play with) the toys Wells and Sinclair imagined. While the STL files would be accompanied by directions for painting the figures according to early twentieth-​century fashions, users can do whatever they’d like with what they print. Ideally, this approach would allow users of the edition to play with the toys that Wells imagined and Sinclair drew, pushing us to think about how (some) digital editions might be reimagined in order to necessitate re-​ engagement with the physical, even as they appear in digital spaces. Of course, 3D printing is not the only way to engage in critical making, as Salter’s project demonstrates. As yet another example of a DH project that blurs these boundaries, we might look at a pedagogical project that incorporates maker technologies: Bridget Dalton and Kirsten Musetti’s work with high school and undergraduate students to create tactile children’s books for children with visual impairments as part of the Build a Better Book team based at the University of Colorado-​Boulder. Using technologies such as 3D printers, Makey Makey invention kits, the programming tool Scratch, conductive boards, laser cutters, and low-​tech crafting materials, students experimented in order to recreate children’s books in a differently accessible form. Although Dalton and Musetti discuss the importance of this project in terms of STEM/​STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, [Arts,] and Mathematics), I offer it as an example of the ways other people have incorporated critical making practices in humanities fields. After all, Dalton and Musetti focus on an undergraduate children’s literature course and an English Language Arts class for ninth-​grade students –​both courses that, while they may engage with STEM/​STEAM, certainly also fall under the category of the humanities. It is perhaps this issue that makes compiling a list of children’s literature DH projects (and, often, DH projects as a whole) frustrating at times. First of all, because the field is so diverse, it can be difficult to decide whether a project would be considered DH or not. But, as I mentioned above, subscribing to 75

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“big tent” DH and being open to myriad technologies and approaches allows us to incorporate all sorts of projects. For instance, Moya Z. Bailey, in the fantastically titled piece “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave,” discusses this problem: What counts as a digital humanities project? As an undergrad, I interacted with people who were actively doing intersectional digital humanities work in all but name in other arenas of the academy. Dr. Carla Stokes12 wrote her dissertation on the online culture of Black girls. She discussed how Black girls were using digital platforms like chat rooms, web pages, and blogs to create identity. Through the creation of the non-​profit Helping Our Teen Girls, Stokes offered an alternative online network (which she built) that was peer moderated to help address issues of cyber-​bullying, and the targeting of youth online by adults. Stokes[’s] work is lauded in Girls Studies and Critical Media Studies. While certainly a digital humanities project, her work has not been legible as such. Bailey’s article was written in 2011, but Dalton and Musetti’s work on tactile picturebooks appeared in 2018 with no mention of DH, even though their project surely combines technology with the humanities in interesting ways. There is still a lot of work being done that could be defined as DH but isn’t –​ perhaps purposefully, and perhaps because the DH world might not be as welcoming or “nice” (or as diverse), as some people, such as Spiro, have argued. Regardless, how far can we go in terms of the “big tent”? Do Linda Liukas’s excellent Hello Ruby children’s books, for instance, have any place in DH? I would argue yes, despite Liukas’s own interest (like that of Dalton and Musetti) in framing her children’s books about a young girl learning about computers and technology as part of STEM. While it certainly can be read in that way, we can also reframe the Hello Ruby series, which gives readers activities such as building their own paper computer, as an exploration of critical making within DH. Second, beyond simply deciding whether a project is DH even if it is not presented as such, actually finding these projects can be difficult. Other subdisciplines in DH have created crowdsourced lists, such as Black Digital Humanities Projects & Resources and US Latinx Southwestern Hist Resources. Inspired by these crowdsourced documents, I’ve begun populating my own list of Digital Humanities Projects/​Resources in Childhood and Adolescent Studies/​Literature that others can add to as this important field continues to grow.13

Conclusion Of course, like the Hello Ruby books, children’s literature DH is not exclusive to scholars; children’s literature authors (whether scholars or not) might also be interested in born-​digital storytelling. As an example, Mark C. Marino and his children along with the artist Brian Gallagher have created several stories about Mrs. Wobbles, a mysterious woman who may be a witch and who runs a foster care home, and the children who live there. All wonderful examples of interactive fiction, these pieces are also about the emotional effects foster care can have on children and families. Made with Undum and powered by Javascript, the Marino Family and Gallagher have created just one example of how authors might engage young readers in interactive stories that also teach them about the world. But more than that, electronic literature might be a way to engage children in reading in fun and exciting ways. For instance, child (or adult) readers of the Mrs. Wobbles stories are asked to enter their own names before reading, adding a personal element, and, in the case of the most recent adventure in the series, SPY E.Y.E., they can collect poetry in order to cast spells. Interactivity is key to DH, and interactive fiction technologies such as Undum and Twine provide exciting opportunities for both creative and scholarly works. This is all to say that DH is an ever-​evolving field, and children’s literature provides fascinating avenues for rethinking how we might engage with the digital in playful and productive ways. 76

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In addition to the projects discussed here, I can imagine a network analysis of children’s literature authors during the nineteenth century or digitized, interactive board games based on historical children’s games. I can think about more digital editions and archives that incorporate playful attitudes and approaches to children’s texts from 3D printing to distant reading. I can dream of more Geographic Information System (GIS) projects that map novels or authors or publishers. The possibilities are both thought-​provoking and critical and offer children’s literature DH practitioners an opportunity to engage the public in their research and ideas in new and innovative ways. Of course, DH is not the be-​all and end-​all in scholarship, but if we are thoughtful about how we engage new technologies in research and teaching, it can be a rewarding practice that helps to reach a broader audience. From small, one-​person projects to larger collaborative works, children’s literature as a field might be slow on the uptake when it comes to DH, but the possibilities and potential of the field are particularly exciting, especially if we allow ourselves room to play.

Notes 1 For a discussion of play in children’s literature, see the chapters in Joyce E. Kelley’s Children’s Play in Literature. Kelley’s introduction sketches some influential adult theorizations of play. See also Maaike Lauwaert’s The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures. 2 Eugene Giddens did write a chapter on “Distant Reading and Children’s Literature” in 2017, and Melissa M. Terras further addressed the need for utilizing distant reading techniques in “Picture-​Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature” in 2018. 3 Anna Čermáková and Mahlberg’s 2022 article “Gendered Body Language in Children’s Literature over Time” is one example of scholars using CLiC. 4 See Bethany Nowviskie’s article “On the Origin of ‘Hack’ and ‘Yack,’ ” which details how we need to allow for both hacking (in the sense of building) and yacking (in the sense of theorizing and discussing) within DH. 5 URLs for websites surveyed in this chapter appear in Works Cited. 6 Thanks to Shawna Ross for helping me with this list of the benefits of digital scholarship. As a side note, Claire Battershill and Ross’s book, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students (now in its second edition) is a useful resource for thinking about how DH can be applied in the classroom. While I discuss a pedagogical project later in this chapter, pedagogical opportunities within DH are not the focus of this piece. 7 At the time of writing this chapter, however, the historical maps are not showing up on the site, instead being replaced by generic Google maps. 8 The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk was originally named Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age, a title reflected in Gailey’s book chapter on the project and the decisions the collaborators made at the start of the project, particularly regarding TEI encoding practices. 9 One might take a look at Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays for an example of how failure is integral to the digital humanities and its practitioners. 10 Such scribbles are often interesting pieces of history themselves. 11 Twine (twinery.org) allows creators to easily develop multilinear stories, or interactive fictions, that are reminiscent of choose-​your-​own-​adventure novels but provide even more possibilities for interactivity and user-​generated knowledge. 12 For an example of Stokes’s research, see “ ‘Get on My Level’: How Black American Adolescent Girls Construct Identify and Negotiate Sexuality on the Internet,” which pairs well with the discussion of the sexualization of black girls via Google’s algorithms in Sofiya Umoja Noble’s more recent monograph, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. 13 To add to this list or find other resources not discussed in this chapter, please go to https://​bit.ly/​3kuJ​kk2.

Works Cited Altschuler, Sari, and David Weimer. “Texturing the Digital Humanities: A Manifesto.” PMLA, vol. 135, no. 1, 2020, pp. 74–​91. —​—​—​. “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read.” Touch This Page Exhibition, https://​ touchthispage.com/​.

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Deanna Stover Bailey, Moya Z. “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.” Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, http://​jou​rnal​ofdi​gita​lhum​anit​ies.org/​1-​1/​all-​the-​digi​tal-​ humani​sts-​are-​white-​all-​the-​nerds-​are-​men-​but-​some-​of-​us-​are-​brave-​by-​moya-​z-​bai​ley/​. Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, https://​ufdc.ufl.edu/​coll​ecti​ons/​juv. Battershill, Claire, and Shawna Ross. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. 2nd ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York University Press, 2011. Bessette, Lee Skellerup, Katherine Bowers, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Quinn Dombrowski, Anouk Lang, and Roopika Risam. The Data-​Sitters Club, https://​data​sitt​ersc​lub.git​hub.io/​site/​. Black Digital Humanities Projects and Resources, bit.ly/​Black-​DH-​List. Brooks, Emily F. “Digitizing Interactive Books.” Emily F. Brooks, http://​emily​fbro​oks.com/​proje​cts.html. Čermáková, Anna, and Michaela Mahlberg. “Gendered Body Language in Children’s Literature Over Time.” Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, vol. 31, no. 1, 2022, pp. 11–​40. Callaway, Elizabeth, Jeffrey Turner, Heather Stone, and Adam Halstrom. “The Push and Pull of Digital Humanities: Topic Modeling the ‘What Is Digital Humanities?’ Genre.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1, 2020. Children’s Literature Archive, https://​child​rens​lit.libr​ary.ryer​son.ca/​. Collectie Jeugdliteratuur, www.dbnl.org/​onzek​inde​rboe​ken/​. Dalton, Bridget, and Kirsten Musetti. “Tactile Picture Book Making and Multimodal Composition: Students Design for Equity in English Language Arts.” Best Practices in Teaching Digital Literacy, Vol. 9, edited by Evan Ortlieb, Earl H. Cheek Jr., and Peggy Semingson, Emerald Publishing, 2018, pp. 195–​213. de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, www.dig​ital​coll​ecti​ons.usm.edu/​de-​grumm​ond. Digital Humanities Projects/​Resources in Childhood and Adolescent Studies/​Literature, https://​bit.ly/​3kuJ​kk2. “Digital Projects for the Public Notice of Funding Opportunity 2022.” National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​inl​ine-​files/​Digi​tal%20P​roje​cts%20for%20the%20Pub​lic%20N​OFO%202​ 0220​608-​MD-​MN-​MT.%20Mod.3.29.22.pdf. Early, Gerald, and Amanda Gailey. The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature, 1880–​1939, http://​child​lit.unl.edu/​. Eaves, Morris, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive, www.blake​arch​ive.org/​. Gailey, Amanda. “A Case for Heavy Editing: The Example of Race and Children’s Literature in the Gilded Age.” The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, edited by Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell, University of Michigan Press, 2011, pp. 125–​44. Giddens, Eugene. “Distant Reading and Children’s Literature.” The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 305–​13. Giffen, Allison, and Lucia Hodgson. Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project, https://​ ccs​proj​ect.org/​. Graham, Shawn. Failing Gloriously and Other Essays. The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2019. Gubar, Marah. “On Not Defining Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 209–​16. Haverals, Wouter, and Vanessa Joosen. “Constructing Age in Children’s Literature: A Digital Approach to Guus Kuijer’s Oeuvre.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 1, 2021, pp. 25–​45. Heppler, Jason. What Is Digital Humanities?, https://​what​isdi​gita​lhum​anit​ies.com/​. Joosen, Vanessa. “Research in Action: Constructing Age for Young Readers.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 14, no. 3, 2021, pp. 252–​68. Kelley, Joyce E., ed. Children’s Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child. Routledge, 2019. Lauwaert, Maaike. The Place of Play: Toys and Digital Cultures. Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Learning As Play: An Animated, Interactive Archive of 17th-​to 19th-​Century Narrative Media for and by Children, https://​sites.psu.edu/​play/​. Liukas, Linda. Hello Ruby, www.hellor​uby.com/​. Mahlberg, M., P. Stockwell, V. Wiegand, and J. Lentin. CLiC 2.1. Corpus Linguistics in Context, https://​clic. bham.ac.uk/​. Marino Family and Brian Gallagher. Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House, http://​mark​cmar​ino.com/​mrsw/​. 19th Century Schoolbooks, https://​digi​tal.libr​ary.pitt.edu/​col​lect​ion/​19th-​cent​ury-​scho​olbo​oks. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press, 2018.

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Digital Humanities and Children’s Literature Nordquist, Richard. “Definition and Examples of Corpus Linguistics.” ThoughtCo., www.though​tco.com/​what-​ is-​cor​pus-​ling​uist​ics-​1689​936. Nowviskie, Bethany. “On the Origin of ‘Hack’ and ‘Yack.’ ” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 66–​70. Our Mythical Childhood, http://​omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/​. Prange Digital Children’s Book Collection, https://​digi​tal.lib.umd.edu/​pra​nge. Salter, Anastasia. “Alice in Dataland 2.0.” Kairos, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019, https://​kai​ros.tec​hnor​heto​ric.net/​20.1/​ inven​tio/​sal​ter/​index.html. Sample, Mark. “Play.” Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, MLA Commons, https://​digi​talp​edag​ogy.mla.hcomm​ons.org/​keywo​rds/​play/​. Sayers, Jentery. “Prototyping the Past.” Visible Language, vol. 49, no. 3, 2015, pp. 157–​77. “Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations.” National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/​gra​nts/​ resea​rch/​schola​rly-​editi​ons-​and-​trans​lati​ons-​gra​nts. Schwebel, Sara L. The Lone Woman and Last Indians Digital Archive, http://​lonewo​man.isch​ool.illin​ois.edu/​ lonewo​man/​home. —​—​—​. “Taking Children’s Literature Scholarship to the Public.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 470–​75. Spiro, Lisa. “ ‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 16–​34. Stokes, Carla E. “ ‘Get on My Level’: How Black American Adolescent Girls Construct Identify and Negotiate Sexuality on the Internet.” Girl Wide Web 2.0: Revisiting Girls, the Internet, and Negotiation of Identity, edited by Sharon R. Mazzarella, Peter Lang, pp. 45–​68. Sutherland, Kathryn, Marilyn Deegan, Elena Pierazzo, Jenny McAuley, and Sharon Ragaz. Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts, https://​jan​eaus​ten.ac.uk/​index.html. Svenska Barnboks Institutet, www.bar​nbok​sins​titu​tet.se/​en/​engl​ish/​. Svensson, Patrik. “Beyond the Big Tent.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 36–​49. Terras, Melissa M. Picture-​Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2018, doi:10.1017/​9781108529501. Tracy, Daniel G., and Elizabeth Massa Hoiem. “Scaffolding and Play Approaches to Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Assessment and Iteration in Topically-​Driven Courses.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 4, 2017. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, http://​utc.iath.virgi​nia.edu/​site​map.html. US Latinx Southwestern Hist Resources, https://​docs.goo​gle.com/​sprea​dshe​ets/​d/​1wtOeETfLvCv4ZYKx​j0xi​ B6mq​h3Gf​FqvR​v8U9​LVr_​OkM/​edit#gid=​437937​615. Victorian Women Writers Project, https://​weba​pp1.dlib.indi​ana.edu/​vwwp/​welc​ome.do. Walsh, John A. “Multimedia and Multitasking: A Survey of Digital Resources for Nineteenth-​Century Literary Studies.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens, Blackwell, 2008, www.digita​lhum​anit​ies.org/​compa​nion​DLS/​. Wells, H. G. Floor Games. Frank Palmer, 1911. —​—​—​. “Little Wars.” Edited by Nigel Lepianka and Deanna Stover, Scholarly Editing, vol. 38, 2017, https://​ schol​arly​edit​ing.org/​2017/​editi​ons/​lit​tlew​ars/​intro.html#page_​i​nfo. Wesseling, Elisabeth. “Introduction.” Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture, edited by Elisabeth Wesseling, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–​16.

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7 RESEARCH WITH YOUNG READERS Participatory Approaches in Children’s Literature Studies Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak

Introduction The three decades following the proclamation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) have witnessed a marked shift in the public perception of children and young people, manifesting itself in valuing their voices in matters that affect their lives. One of the ways for adults to gain an understanding of children from their own perspective is participatory research involving children not just as objects of scientific scrutiny but as researchers in their own right. Children’s research engages them in all stages of the research process –​from identifying research needs and designing methods, through data analysis, to the dissemination of results. Ideally, it should effect change by enabling children to use their findings to promote their agendas with various stakeholders and shape policy and practice regarding their lives. Such research is widespread in childhood studies, which itself developed from the premise that children are competent social actors and the attempt to oppose what Kristen Cheney characterizes as “the prevailing deficit and dependency models of childhood perpetuated by developmental psychology” (98). Children’s protagonism in research (Nuggehalli 12) also overcomes the field’s central limitation: that it is adults who examine the lives of the young, while children are positioned as objects of knowledge production. Cheney has argued for a decolonization of childhood research and practice not only “in the conventional sense of confronting Western civilizing constructions of childhood” but also as a means to challenge adultist knowledge production about children reflecting prejudices against their capabilities (91). As she explains, such a reimagining of childhood studies could be achieved “through a vitally inclusive co-​production of knowledge with children that aims to resist or even rupture the status quo of adults” (100). This inclusivity could in turn result in epistemic diversity that will make children’s knowledge legitimate in the eyes of researchers, policymakers, and educators. While children’s participation has become important in children’s literature studies, especially in the growing interest in children’s cultural activities in the past, the current rise of young authors and reviewers, and youth activism,1 child-​led research is not as popular in this field as it is in childhood studies. Yet it is not unprecedented, as I exemplify in this chapter. To clarify academic collaboration with young researchers, I first provide an overview of notions of participation, agency, and voice as central for the conceptualization of child-​adult knowledge production. I then move on to challenges 80

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-9

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and benefits of participatory research with children. Having presented participatory research in our field, including projects I co-​conducted with child researchers, I invite colleagues to consider the relevance of collaboration with young researchers to their own scholarship. While I do not argue that this approach is better than any other methodology, I contend that the questions of who can know and in whose interest knowledge is produced inspire us to examine how children’s literature scholarship may establish positive child-​adult connectivities.

Children’s Participation, Agency, and Voice The UNCRC compels adults to guarantee children’s right to participate in decision-​making and to determine the course of their lives in the context of various institutional settings, family life, and culture. Yet participation is a matter of a combination of individual and collective factors (Prout et al. 95). It depends on a generational order, or in Leena Alanen’s words, “a structured network of relations between generational categories that are positioned in and act within necessary interrelations with each other” (161–​62). Children’s participation is therefore enacted in intragenerational and intergenerational relations. As Claudio Baraldi and Tom Cockburn point out, it is also defined by “[t]‌he tension between individual autonomy and dependence on social conditions” (12), which in turn results in its assuming diverse forms and intensities. Traditional models of participation propose a linear development of children’s empowerment and emancipation from adult control. This is the case in Roger A. Hart’s frequently cited “ladder of participation,” whose lowest level corresponds to “manipulation” (Tokenism 9), while the highest one indicates “child initiated, shared decisions with adults” (14). Harry Shier’s “pathway to participation” consists of the following five levels: “1) children are listened to; 2) children are supported in expressing their views; 3) children’s views are taken into account; 4) children are involved in decision-​making processes; 5) children share power and responsibility for decision-​making” (110). Michael Fielding distinguishes four positions available to child participants: they can be “sources of data, active respondents, coresearchers, or researchers” (135). As we can see, the lower levels of participation involve consultation, which signals adults’ recognition that children have perspectives that make a valuable contribution to the issues being considered and that these perspectives may differ from those of adults. Consultation also offers children opportunities for personal expression and building positive relations with adults. Finally, it elicits information that adults can use to influence policies that affect the young. Yet consultation tends to be controlled by adults and may result from instrumentalization of children’s knowledge or from tokenism, which happens when adults who genuinely want children to have a voice do not consider how exactly they can provide them with opportunities to communicate their views (Hart, Theory 41). In contrast, the highest level of participation is associated with agency, regarded as a transformative type of participation in decision-​making (Baraldi and Cockburn 9). It entails children’s ability to choose and initiate action to shape their social contexts. As Håvard Bjerke notes, children actively use their “resources and abilities in their relations with others” (94), negotiating meaning, actions, and power in specific lived social relations. Children’s research usually belongs to this higher level of participation even if it is adults who initiate the communication through the acknowledgment of “mutual interdependence, recognition and respect for children and their views and experiences” (Fitzgerald et al. 300). In practice, it means that adults temporarily move away from their typical role of experts and authorities in intergenerational relations towards more balanced power differentials. The dialogical nature of children’s participation and agency enables the emergence of child voice, a concept that has inspired numerous theoretical discussions in childhood studies, with scholars becoming aware of their own complicity in what Spyros Spyrou refers to as domesticating child voice through “reducing it to something other than what it is in order to make it knowable” (“Research” 109). Such a conceptualization of child voice claims that it is possible to “give” voice to children and 81

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see it as the authoritative and authentic account of their experiences (Mazzei and Jackson 1–​2). Yet this approach does not address researchers’ role in the elicitation, documentation, and representation of children’s words. For Spyrou, interpreting child voice superficially results in producing oversimplified ideas about children’s rich lifeworlds (109). As Danica Facca, Brenda Gladstone, and Gail Teachman summarize the current scholarship on this topic, it posits that (1) “(child) voice is always already relational” as “produced out of relations between agents [...] within a specific context”; (2) it has “no authentic point of origin” and cannot be “traceable to a particular individual child” or “a particular standpoint or location that can be deemed authentic in nature”; (3) it “is almost always produced through intergenerational dialogues, which means we cannot readily dismiss factors that mediate those interactions, such as power, for example, from analysis” (6). Hence, (child) voice is “accounted for in research practice as a complex construction where meanings are always situated and open to multiple interpretations” (6). Finally, as Facca and her coauthors stress, scholars draw attention to exploring nonlinguistic phenomena (for example, laughter, tears, or silence) (8). Such data generated in encounters with children may reveal more about their views than do their verbal expressions. Conceptualizing child voice should be an ongoing critical endeavor aimed at avoiding the reproduction of the power differentials that participation aims to redress (6). The categories of participation, agency, and voice become even more complex in light of new materialism and posthumanism. Karen Barad argues that humans and other entities do not exist before or outside of relationships, and that agency can only be considered as emerging within and through a relationship. She refers to this all-​pervasive connectedness as “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-​acting components,” with intra-​action understood as the “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (37). It is through such mutually constitutive entanglements that the world –​from its smallest to its most complex components –​ comes into being. Childhood and adulthood are thus enacted both by children and adults, and through “entangled relations which materialize, surround, and exceed children [and adults] as entities,” unfolding diversely across time and space (Spyrou, Childhoods 8). Thinking about the child and adult as always already intra-​acting “within this larger relational field of human, non-​human, and technological forces” also decenters them as identity categories, making them both beings and becomings. Hence, children’s participation and agency result from multiple and ever-​shifting entanglements of human and nonhuman materialities and agents (such as books, classrooms, toys, and institutions). Moreover, children’s (and adults’) agencies exist within a broader assemblage of entities, forces, and intensities. Importantly, this decentering of the child is not aimed at reducing children’s status but at creating a flat or horizontal perspective that may facilitate our understanding of multiple relationships children have with/​in the world around them. Finally, it needs to be stressed that regardless of how we define children’s participation, agency, and voice, not all children have the option of becoming involved in participatory initiatives. As Baraldi and Cockburn note, “[d]‌isadvantaged groups of children and young people, in Western societies and, above all, in the ‘rest’ of [the] global world, are neither consulted, nor involved in decision-​making” (13). Migrant children, children living in poverty, or disabled children, to name only three categories, are often excluded from conventional conceptualizations of participation, agency, and voice. E. Kay M. Tisdall criticizes the ableist privileging of speech as a means of expression as excluding children unable to speak comprehensibly (185–​86). She insists that researchers rely on multiple methods (for example, visual arts or multimedia) to welcome all communication (188).

Child-​Adult Research: Benefits and Challenges Research co-​conducted with children or led by them is the most intensive form of participation, since it helps them to become “protagonists in their own lives,” as Roshni Nuggehalli puts it (21), and to gain new skills, competences, and a sense of self-​fulfillment, which in turn results in greater confidence in intergenerational relationships. Children’s research reflects the theoretical assumption that 82

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children are experts on their own lives and can provide insider knowledge unavailable to adults. It poses in particular the question of whether children’s research is “an area to be studied for generating our own insights” or whether children’s knowledge is to be treated on par with knowledge generated by adults (Nuggehalli 19). Children’s research, Karin Murris writes, is thus about an “ethico-​political commitment” to epistemic justice and trust (258), which counters stereotypical thinking about children as “epistemically incomplete” (257). Through promoting the diversification of knowledge production, it resists ageist prejudices and deficit models of childhood that essentialize and normalize children’s competences and capabilities (257). The commitment to promoting children’s knowledge and research necessitates methods that take into account their skills, capacities, interests, preferences, and experiences, as well as their age, gender, ethnicity, and cultural background. Such methods include creative and arts-​based methods, which are sometimes seen as detracting from participatory research’s validity and rigor. However, if we value children’s knowledge, we should ask, as Spyrou suggests, whether “we expect children to conform to established research rules and procedures and end up producing the same kind of research produced by adults” (Childhoods 165). I would add that the crucial methodological issue to be addressed is that we cannot determine these methods in advance. Ideally, they should be negotiated and developed in our encounters and conversations with young researchers, as in this way they are likely to reflect their situated contexts. This unpredictability and the resulting inevitable messiness of the research process, as well as the need to remain constantly aware of children’s reactions and to respond to unexpected developments, constitute a discomforting challenge “in increasingly output-​driven and feasibility-​focused research-​ funding contexts” (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak and García-​González 1048). Moreover, for some scholars the multiplicity of relationalities shaping childhoods and adulthoods necessitates methods geared less towards producing new knowledge than towards immersing oneself in events and processes emerging in messy posthuman entanglements, which in turn can be registered only in their singularity and fluidity. This outlook is associated especially with postqualitative inquiry; as Carol Taylor and Vivienne Bozalek explain, while traditional approaches rely on inductive research designs in which methods are seen as unproblematic and transparent tools aimed at collecting, representing, and communicating data, postqualitative approaches “recast method as a radically open practice that engages doings, actions, becomings and knowings –​as material-​discursive engagement with/​of the real” (88–​ 89). Therefore, method “becomes a joyful unfolding of that which is and which might become” (89). Method also “demands unconstraint, unknowing, unlearning” and “requires the dissolution of the desire to design in advance, to pin down, to hold fast” (89). Finally, it “unsettle[s]‌ the centrality of the researcher” (89). Undoubtedly, something new can be gained through child-​adult knowledge production that takes risks to encounter the unpredictable and focuses more on the work-​in-​progress and particular research events, encounters, and processes than on final solutions, outcomes, or products. Finally, but equally importantly, collaboration with young researchers poses ethical challenges. First and foremost, it needs to be based on mutual trust and respect. Not all children will find initiating and directing research enjoyable, and they need to be able to withdraw from the collaboration whenever they wish to. Adult researchers should then support their decision. It is essential that we both help young scholars feel at ease and establish a shared and sustained responsibility for the research process. Respecting child researchers also includes not overburdening them with research tasks, as they are usually busy in their lives. Time management of such projects may therefore prove a challenge for adult researchers who cope with the pressures of deadlines and grant reporting. Reflexivity and ethical mindfulness regarding child-​adult participatory research are crucial in ensuring that it benefits all its participants (Canosa et al. 402). The above account of research with and by children may cause it to seem a daunting venture. What I find makes it worth the effort is that it destabilizes traditionally accepted academic practices and exposes adult researchers to new ways of knowing. In this way they can become responsible 83

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for “changing the rules of the game” so that children’s participation in academia is recognized and accepted (Nuggehalli 18). It could thus be argued that an important aspect of academic collaboration with child researchers is not only creating safe spaces to make their voices heard but also developing a sense of mutual empowerment and rendering each other capable across age and professional divides to transform the adultist status quo in academia. Inviting children into academia, observes P. J. Lolichen, means deconstructing “the complex myth of research into processes that are understandable and doable by children” (168), as well as making clear the relevance of such research to their lives and potentially informing the development of policies concerning them.

Research with and by Children in Children’s Literature Studies Spyrou quotes Mary Kellett’s point that “children observe with different eyes, ask different questions,” and “have different concerns” than adults (“Limits” 155). Simultaneously, child and adult worlds are not separate: they are co-​created –​ individually and collectively by children and adults. I argue that we can learn at least a bit about children’s unique and valuable contribution to these processes. As the creation of and response to children’s literature express this intergenerational sympoiesis, we need to generate methods (or nonmethods, if we follow postqualitative approaches) facilitating the joint child-​adult co-​construction of culturally, socially, and politically contextualized knowledge about children’s engagements with texts. As children and childhood are constantly evolving, so does children’s literature as it attempts to address these transformations. This fluidity in turn means that the methodological scope of our research also needs to keep adjusting to these new developments. The creative and innovative nature of children’s research and the direct contact with young readers it offers may help us to embrace these changes. My own engagement with child-​adult research was preceded with a thought experiment. In my 2016 article “Using Literary Criticism for Children’s Rights: Toward a Participatory Research Model of Children’s Literature Studies,” I relied among others on approaches developed by David Rudd, Marah Gubar (“Business”), and Karen Coats, all of which questioned adultism in children’s literature scholarship, to propose including children and young people in research modeled on collaborative child-​adult practices developed in childhood studies (226). I also contended that the more pronounced presence of children in children’s literature scholarship would not only advance the field methodologically, but, much more importantly, would also generate conditions for young readers’ self-​empowerment; foster intergenerational dialogue about children’s culture in academia, itself a site of adultism; and ensure the relevance of our field as a transformational academic practice promoting children’s rights (217). My speculation centered on China Miéville’s fantasy novel Un Lun Dun (2007), whose teenage protagonist, Deeba, confronts the British Secretary of State for the Environment about the Prime Minister’s plan to deploy the Smog, a cloud-​like pollutant, as a chemical weapon. I argued that the very idea of a teenage girl demanding transparent policies is a literary representation of a child insisting on her rights (215). Importantly, during her visit to the official, Deeba is accompanied by adult characters following her lead and supporting her. Although I indicated that the research methods to explore the novel would need to be co-​composed spontaneously through collaboration between adult and child researchers, I speculated about possible approaches, such as the text’s use “in a policy-​ related study for a small community or neighborhood, aimed at gauging the influence of cultural representations on children’s perceptions of their rights” (225). I proposed among other possibilities that young researchers could inquire into how adults (including family members, teachers, or representatives of local authorities) respond to Miéville’s representation of a child exercising her rights. Finally, I discussed the asymmetries of power likely to emerge in the research and argued that “the success of the project would depend on an ongoing critical reflection on the part of all researchers” and that their “self-​critical approach to their work, position, and assumptions [would] 84

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[...] result in innovative and unorthodox methodologies achieving something more than examining and explaining young readers’ responses” (225). I concluded the article with an account of institutional obstacles that could make participatory research with children difficult to implement. It was only two years later that I received funding to conduct participatory research with children in the United Kingdom and was able to put my ideas into practice in the project called “Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times” (ChildAct). Two groups of Cambridgeshire primary school students (age ten to eleven) were involved in child-​led research exploring Un Lun Dun. As I provide a detailed account of this project in “Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-​Adult-​Child Events in Children’s Literature Research” (2019), as well as in “Research with Children, Weeds, and a Book: An After-​Childhood Perspective” (2023), let me concentrate on its most important aspects, relevant to my earlier theoretical discussions herein. Although I chose the book for the project and invited the young researchers to read and work on it with me, I asked them to decide on their own approach to it. As I recalled in the article, having shared copies of Un Lun Dun with the participants, I realised that anything could happen. I no longer controlled the project as it was the children, their parents (through allowing and encouraging their offspring to participate) and teachers [...] (through taking care of the logistics) that also controlled the flow of the research. [...] I had to face the challenge of radical unpredictability, messiness and the sheer complexity of the newly emergent relationality and interdependence. (“Deconstruction” 191) I could say (after Taylor and Bozalek) that I “plunge[d]‌” into the process (89). I believe it was the force and energy of that plunge that enabled me to do research with and not about children’s literature and with and not about young readers “as a way towards collective intergenerational ventures” (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak, “Deconstruction” 187). As the children were mostly interested in the novel’s ecocritical message, we saw our activities as a response to environmental crisis. One of the research teams I collaborated with decided to analyze the novel by making a short film adaptation, while the other organized two creative competitions at their school. Both groups intended to collect data about children’s contributions to green policies and felt that these approaches were justified and corresponded to their interests and capabilities. Following the relational approach, it could be argued that our inquiries were shaped not only by the human participants but also by “the nonhuman agent, Un Lun Dun itself, and its performative and creative agency” (191). The novel inspired the initial idea for the project and influenced the participants: on the one hand, the book prompted ideas and actions; on the other, the participants’ entanglement with it activated and spread its “epistemic work” (191). The project challenged assumptions about “children’s literature studies as an adult-​centric field preoccupied with representation towards an opening to the sense-​making that results from socially and culturally situated experiences catalysed by relationalities involving readers, texts and the world around them” (187). Our collaboration meant that all participants “were in a constant and mutual state of responsibility for what happened” in the research process (195). It mobilized the emergence of new intergenerational collectivities engaged in “socially just, dialogical, spontaneous, playful, pleasurable and mutually empowering” knowledge production (196). Finally, the project showed how this kind of children’s literature scholarship enables us to engage with wider social phenomena. In the years 2016–​19, I was also involved in two interrelated research projects conducted with my colleague Mateusz Marecki; a group of primary school students from Wrocław, Poland, and their Polish teacher. We formed a research team and collaborated on “Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars” and “Productive Remembering of Polish Childhoods,” projects inspired by our reflection on the systemic lack of children’s influence on reading lists in Polish schools. As we argued 85

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(Chawar et al. 112), this situation could be amended through participatory intergenerational research projects enabling children and adults to make joint decisions concerning the process of school canon formation. We also emphasized the need to educate teachers about the importance of facilitating the exchange of ideas among children and of creating an intergenerational dialogue based on compromise and informed decision-​making (125). We believed that such actions could result in consensual lists of school readings “satisfying the demand for the school canon, reflecting Polish national cultural heritage, and showing children that a strong sense of national identity can be reconciled with feeling at home in a supranational European, if not global, community” (85). After we completed the first project, we sent a joint letter to the Minister of Education, presenting our research. We received a reply encouraging the school to gain state funding to extend its library collection. Although both projects were initiated by Mateusz and myself, the young researchers and their teacher were invited to determine all stages of the research process. They decided, among other objectives, to examine ways in which such lists could be created at schools. The intergenerational interactions in both projects were fluid and far from the linear models of children’s participation mentioned above: while the adult researchers were moving between the roles of fraternal “least-​ adult” figure or facilitator (Warming 39) and supervising teacher, the child researchers “were switching smoothly between their roles as supervised participants relying on adult assistance and full-​ fledged primary researchers” (Chawar et al. 19). With the aid of Tina Moules and Niamh O’Brien’s dual-​axis model of decision-​making and initiation/​direction, we identified those moments when we were responsible for decision-​making, initiation, and direction; those occasions when these tasks lay mainly with the children; and those occasions where they were shared (19). Our participatory collaboration required us to assume what Lesley Anne Gallacher and Michael Gallagher call the stance of “methodological immaturity” (499), which entails flexibility and openness to children’s appropriation of adult researchers’ tools. Although both projects were substantially framed by the school setting, all the participants strove to keep inevitable power inequalities to a minimum by stressing child-​adult interdependencies. Our successful collaboration with the child researchers motivated Mateusz and me to further democratize academic practices by publishing two peer-​reviewed articles coauthored with the children and the teacher.2 Research participants are usually involved in data collection and analysis, as well as in research dissemination, but as Catherine Wilkinson and Samantha Wilkinson observe, scholars usually write down the results on their own (220). Although such joint publications exist in childhood studies, writing and publishing peer-​reviewed articles with child readers remains an unprecedented practice in our field. Our collaborative writing countered adult-​centered knowledge production in children’s literature studies and created a model for intergenerational collaborations and epistemic justice. There is a substantial difference between affirming that we should build positive relationships with children and actively creating opportunities to establish such relationships in our work with them. Joint academic writing may be a way to achieve the latter. Moreover, these publications are not just scholarly articles documenting research findings; they are also a form of children’s participation in academia and a way to transform it (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak and Marecki 224–​25). They reflect the two-​directional movement animating our research –​a catalyzing of joint knowledge production with young members of society that does not only remain for public use but also returns to academia and changes it. These instances of participatory research with and by children shift scholarly attention to young readers as subjects producing knowledge that may not only guide adult researchers in their explorations of children’s books, young readers’ experiences, and reading promotion initiatives but is also valuable in its own right. A similar direction in children’s literature scholarship has been explored by Jen Aggleton, Vanessa Joosen, Michelle Superle, and, more recently, Macarena García-​ González and Emily Murphy. Aggleton, for example, has reflected on children’s right to be involved in the development of children’s library collections, on their competence to engage in collection 86

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development, and on forms of children’s collections. She has argued for acknowledging children’s role in collection development to ensure that book selections are based on young readers’ interests rather than on the views of adults. While she admits that “giving children full control over the development of children’s collections is likely to be impractical due to the levels of competence required, as well as ethically problematic due to the level of responsibility this would require children to undertake” (“Children” 8), she contends that their views should be considered as valuable guidance for librarians, especially in the case of collections available to particular communities (13). As she also rightly argues, engaging children in collection development can help them to have a sense of ownership over these collections (14). Therefore, librarians should create opportunities for these opinions to be heard and implemented (9). Aggleton also applied participatory methodologies in her 2019 doctoral dissertation, in which she analyzed children’s critical, aesthetic, and creative responses to selected illustrated novels. The core of her research was a participatory qualitative multiple case study with five children aged nine and ten, who helped her to select the texts, determine the research methods, and decide on the directions of the exploration. As Aggleton reflects on this collaboration, it was “adult-​initiated but with shared decisions with children, to maximise child participation,” which, she emphasizes, challenged her own ideas about these texts (“Novels” 53). She also stresses the importance of enabling the child participants to engage in research “at the participatory level at which they felt most comfortable, and felt best able to express themselves,” as was visible in their choices of research methods and in the interviews. The latter were “not consistently child led but varied according to the individual child’s preferences” (53). The methods suggested by the children included “roleplay of contents of texts or ideas inspired by texts,” “filming thoughts about texts,” and “creating a game about the texts” (58–​ 59). Interestingly, the participants were first trained in data collection methods. They were also able to test some of the methods using a book of their own choice before they made their final decisions. This approach enabled Aggleton to make sure these methods offered the participants a reliable means of expressing their views. It also provided her with data that could be assembled for a nuanced understanding of these readers’ responses to the novels. The children were asked to reflect on some of the results, and Aggleton juxtaposed their findings with her own analysis. As she stresses, all these strategies substantially contributed to the validity of the research process (68–​69). Aggleton’s collaboration with young readers has expanded what we know about how illustrated novels engage readers in various critical and aesthetic ways, which should inform their educational use.3 Children’s involvement in promoting reading and children’s literature was also the focus of Joosen’s collaboration with child members of the Kinder-en Jeugdjury Vlaanderen (Children’s and Adolescent Jury Flanders), a children’s jury convened by the reading promotion organization Iedereen Lees, in which the jurors read both original and translated works. As Joosen comments, the collaboration was “a first step towards a more participatory approach to the translation of books for young readers by investigating children’s understanding of translation processes and the criteria that they put forward as desirable for the international circulation of children’s books” (48). The project centered on “the awareness of ten-​ and eleven-​year-​old readers about translations and their understanding of foreign concepts” and resulted in collecting their views on “translated children’s books and their preferences for certain translation strategies that are related to foreign elements in the text” (48). Joosen argues that these insights could “supplement, and perhaps correct, adults’ assessment of what children are able and willing to read when it comes to foreign books” (48). She adds that while the children were more consultants than they were her partners in research, and the research itself relied on a high level of adult intervention and engagement –​ for example, she had defined its goals and methods (interviews and focus group) in advance –​ the project demonstrated “the potential of children to contribute to decisions about the transnational exchange of cultural products developed for them” (48). As Joosen notes, the participants were asked to assume the role of “experts” on children’s reading. She also made sure there was room for their diverging opinions on the translation choices. 87

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She concludes, “[T]‌he children’s interest in the project was clear, and they expressed their satisfaction at having been able to contribute” (48), which indicates the feasibility of research with a higher intensity of children’s participation. Superle’s research connects children’s literature studies and children’s right to a healthy food environment by exploring the significance of picturebooks in the development of children’s understanding of food systems and food sovereignty. In her project “From Rural Idyll to Food Sovereignty: Assessing the Impact of Agricultural Portrayals in Children’s Picture Books,” Superle investigates the use of picturebooks about agriculture as “tools to anchor a rights-​based, participatory educational program that aims not only to help children understand key food security concepts, but also to inspire them to participate in local food systems –​ or better still, food sovereignty initiatives” (n. pg.). To this end, she has co-​created the Dig for Your Rights! pilot program based in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada. The program relies on creative activities to invite children’s engagement with food security topics using experiential, rights-​ based, student-​centered, and participatory methodology. Students are asked to respond creatively to the intersections with human and children’s rights of the books they read in the program. The results are then shared with the class, and the students create research questions about a food justice topic of interest to them. These questions in turn can potentially result in their developing projects that, as Superle and her colleagues hope, could be put into practice with adequate funding (Superle, private correspondence). The pilot for the Dig for Your Rights! program launched in February 2022 in two Chilliwack elementary schools in partnership with the BC Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation. Children are also included as co-​researchers in a project led by García-​González and her colleagues Soledad Véliz and Ignacia Saona in Chile. Formed in 2020, #EstoTbn (from “esto también,” “also this”) is a collaborative platform on Twitter and Instagram (www.instag​ram.com/​esto​tbn/​) for recommending children’s books, videos, games, music, and artwork. The project explores how the circulation of fiction and nonfiction for/​about/​by children depends on themes, genres, styles, and diverse intergenerational collaborations that produce fictional and artistic works. Children send their recommendations, understanding that these will be read by adults first, while the latter pay attention to how their adultism continues to persist in the promise of children’s participation. In its initial stage, four school library managers and fifteen boys and girls were involved in a workshop that reviewed various children’s books and other cultural texts to recommend some of them to other children. In 2021, the study was extended to seven schools in different regions of Chile, where children, teachers, and library managers participated in workshops to implement methods for intergenerational collaborative research and to evaluate the relation of the project to educational justice. As García-​González explains, the project draws on child-​adult relational ontologies to open a diversity of children’s and adults’ positions in relation to books and other cultural texts: “the child and the adult do not hold a fixed identity and are not attached to any defining dimension such as maturity or cognitive abilities” (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak and García-​González 1048). It shows that agency does not reside in individual children or adults but becomes networked, assembled, and distributed with the participants and multiple relations with books, films, Zoom meetings, emails, school libraries, social media hashtags, and human subjects. It also reveals the problems inherent in claiming to represent the child voice simply by conveying some children’s words and implying that they speak for a unitary “I,” regardless of who is excluded (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak and García-​González, 1048). More recently, García-​González launched “CHILDCULTURES: Challenging Adultism, Anthropocentrism and Other Exclusions with Children’s Literature and Culture,” a research project aimed at exploring how shifting relationships within children’s cultures produce ways of knowing that are “less adultist, anthropocentric, sexist, racist and ableist” (García-​González, private correspondence). The project includes participatory collaborations with children as crucial for investigating “the links between literary reading, citizen education and empathy socialization,” especially urgent for 88

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current educational policies “in the context of global uncertainty and the acknowledged importance of the affective and participatory dimensions of citizenship.” Inviting children as her co-​researchers and giving them a say in research design, García-​González hopes to create “intergenerational arts-​ based approaches” that will contribute to epistemologies that “challenge exclusionary systems.” She emphasizes that her collaboration with children is focused not on representing their voices but on “producing deeper accounts of the interactional, institutional and discursive contexts” that shape children and childhoods (private correspondence). Finally, an innovative application of participatory research has also been proposed by Murphy, who has been exploring its use in research with archives to recover historical children’s voices. She has drawn on historical research, participatory approaches in the social sciences, the concept of participatory archives as proposed by Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish, and what she refers to as “participatory archival practice” (Murphy, private correspondence) to focus on child-​created material, which is often neglected in research centered on adult authors and illustrators. As Murphy’s goal is to trace and learn about the child’s life, whenever possible she shares the decisions about what to include in her account with members of communities related to a given record, including the authors of the archived material or their descendants. As she emphasizes, it is a slow process that may not always produce positive results. It also entails gaining the trust of the research participants (Murphy, private correspondence). Yet such an approach may prevent instrumentalizing, essentializing, and distorting children’s voices by enabling scholars to conduct an ethical in-​depth, multifaceted, and polyvocal analysis of archival material.

Present and Future Orientations It could be concluded that the research projects described above are limited in scope, representation, and temporal relevance, limitations that they share with most ventures of this kind. Yet it could also be said that they are examples of situated research grounded in specific places, contexts, and processes, as well as responding to the needs of communities and potentially being capable of transforming these communities, especially inasmuch as they also rely on collaborations with adult nonacademic stakeholders. These aspects of participatory research are of salient importance in these days of the marketization of academic institutions and neoliberal ideas of impact and research use, when we experience pressure to translate scholarly work to public spheres. Projects engaging young readers as research partners and creating opportunities for collaborations with other stakeholders for the benefit of all generations may contribute to the reconceptualization of children’s literature scholarship as promoting intergenerational dialogue. Nonetheless, we are still waiting for what John Wall refers to as a childist revolution in the humanities that would result in an unprecedented centrality of children in scholarship. As he argues, Children will take a central place in humanities scholarship only if there is a revolution on a similar scale to the revolutions that have occurred in connection with other “minorities.” Art, literature, history, culture, philosophy, religion, and the like would need to be considered narrow and stunted if they did not account for age in addition to gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. (68–​69) The field of children’s literature studies can certainly become a model academic practice decolonizing adult-​centered knowledge production and propagating an ethos of solidarity, empathy, openness, and mutuality between scholars and the intergenerational public. These are important goals during the Anthropocene, a time when we face numerous epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Childhood studies is responding to these challenges through 89

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the ever-​intensifying and productive orientations toward relational ontologies, which focus on destabilizing anthropocentrism. Perhaps this is the cue for scholars of children’s literature as well. As García-​González and I suggest, we should seek new research openings through addressing, appreciating, and accounting for the lively common worlds that children, adults, and texts co-​constitute with more-​than-​human beings and entities (56–​57). I would also propose that it is our responsibility as scholars to identify moments and practices when participation becomes a lived entanglement of the human and more-​than-​human, including children, adults, and books. As I see research by and with children in our field as capable of challenging its own anthropocentric assumptions so as to focus on the creation and exploration of the human-​nonhuman diversity of children’s literature and culture, I am looking forward to the new theoretical and practical landscapes such orientations can reveal.

Acknowledgments I thank Macarena García-González, Emily Murphy, and Michelle Superle for permission to quote from our email correspondence.

Notes 1 See for example Gubar, Dodgers; Conrad, “Youth”; Conrad, Time. 2 See Chawar et al. and Deszcz-​Tryhubczak et al. 3 See also Aggleton, “Pictures.”

Works Cited Aggleton, Jen. “Pictures and Picturing: Mental Imagery whilst Reading Illustrated Novels.” Cambridge Journal of Education, 2022, doi:10.1080/​0305764X.2022.2081669. —​—​—​. Reading Illustrated Novels: Exploring the Medium through Participatory Case Study. University of Cambridge, PhD dissertation, 2019, doi:10.17863/​CAM.45134. —​—​—​. “Where Are the Children in Children’s Collections? An Exploration of Ethical Principles and Practical Concerns Surrounding Children’s Participation in Collection Development.” The New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, vol. 24, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–​17. Alanen, Leena. “Generational Order.” The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, edited by Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-​Sebastian Honig, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 159–​74. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Baraldi, Claudio, and Tom Cockburn. “Introduction: Lived Citizenship, Rights and Participation in Contemporary Europe.” Theorising Childhood: Studies in Childhood and Youth, edited by Claudio Baraldi and Tom Cockburn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 1–​27. Bjerke, Håvard. “ ‘It’s the way they do it’: Expressions of Agency in Child-​Adult Relations at Home and School.” Children and Society, vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, pp. 93–​103. Canosa, Antonia, Anne Graham, and Erica Wilson. “Reflexivity and Ethical Mindfulness in Participatory Research with Children: What Does It Really Look Like?” Childhood, vol. 25, no. 3, 2018, pp. 400–​15. Chawar, Ewa, Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak, Katarzyna Kowalska, Olga Maniakowska, Mateusz Marecki, Milena Palczyńska, Eryk Pszczołowski, and Dorota Sikora. “Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 111–​31. Cheney, Kristen. “Decolonizing Childhood Studies: Overcoming Patriarchy and Prejudice in Child-​Related Research and Practice.” Reimagining Childhood Studies, edited by Spyros Spyrou, Rachel Rosen, and Daniel Thomas Cook, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 91–​105. Coats, Karen S. “Keepin’ It Plural: Children’s Studies in the Academy.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 2001, pp. 140–​50. Conrad, Rachel. “Youth Climate Activists Trading on Time: Temporal Strategies in Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2, 2021, pp. 226–​43.

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Research with Young Readers —​—​—​. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Deszcz-​Tryhubczak, Justyna. “Research with Children, Weeds, and a Book: An After-​Childhood Perspective.” Children’s Cultures after Childhood, edited by Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak and Macarena García-​González, John Benjamins, 2023, pp. 122–​36. —​—​—​.“Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-​Adult-​Child Events in Children’s Literature Research.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 41, no. 2, 2019, pp. 185–​201. —​—​—​. “Using Literary Criticism for Children’s Rights: Toward a Participatory Research Model of Children’s Literature Studies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 40, no. 2, 2016, pp. 215–​31. —​—​—​, and Macarena García-​González. “Thinking and Doing with Childism in Children’s Literature Studies.” Children and Society, vol. 37, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1037–​51, doi:10.1111/​chso.12619. —​—​—​, and Mateusz Marecki. “A Meta-​Critical Reflection on Academic Writing with Child Researchers.” Ethics and Integrity in Research with Children and Young People, edited by Grace Spencer, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021, pp. 213–​27. —​—​—​, Mateusz Marecki, Ewa Chawar, Magdalena Kaczkowska, Katarzyna Kowalska, Aleksandra Kulawik, Maja Ożlańska, Milena Palczyńska, Natalia Parcheniak, and Eryk Pszczołowski. “Productive Remembering of Childhood: Child–​Adult Memory-​Work with the School Literary Canon.” Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 2019, article 74. Facca, Danica, Brenda Gladstone, and Gail Teachman. “Working the Limits of ‘Giving Voice’ to Children: A Critical Conceptual Review.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods, vol. 19, 2020, pp. 1–​10, doi:10.1177/1609406920933391. Fielding, Michael. “Students as Radical Agents of Change.” Journal of Educational Change, vol. 2, no. 2, 2001, pp. 123–​41. Fitzgerald, Robyn, Anne Graham, Anne Smith, and Nicola Taylor. “Children’s Participation as a Struggle over Recognition: Exploring the Promise of Dialogue.” Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation: Perspectives from Theory and Practice, edited by Barry Percy-​Smith and Nigel Thomas, Routledge, 2010, pp. 293–​305. Gallacher, Lesley Anne, and Michael Gallagher. “Methodological Immaturity in Childhood Research? Thinking Through ‘Participatory Methods.’” Childhood, vol. 15, no. 4, 2008, pp. 499–​551. García-​González, Macarena. Private correspondence with Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak. —​—​—​, and Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak. “New Materialist Openings to Children’s Literature Studies.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 2020, pp. 45–​60. Gilliland, Anne J., and Sue McKemmish. “The Role of Participatory Archives in Furthering Human Rights, Reconciliation and Recovery.” Atlanti: Review for Modern Archival Theory and Practice, vol. 24, 2014, pp. 78–​88. Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford University Press, 2009. —​—​—​. “Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 450–​57. Hart, Roger A. Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship. Innocenti essays, No. 4, UNICEF, United Nations Children’s Fund, 1992. —​—​—​. Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care. Earthscan Publications, 1997. Joosen, Vanessa. “Children’s Literature in Translation: Towards a Participatory Approach.” Humanities, vol. 8, no. 1, 2019, article 48. Lolichen, P. J. “Children as Researchers and Partners in Governance.” Children as Decision Makers in Education, Sharing Experiences across Cultures, edited by Sue Cox, Caroline Dyer, Anna Robinson-​Pant, and Michele Schweisfurth, Continuum, 2010, pp. 161–​69. Mazzei, Lisa A., and Alecia Youngblod Jackson. “Introduction: The Limit of Voice.” Voice in Qualitative Inquiry, edited by Alecia Youngblood Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei, Routledge, 2009, pp. 1–​13. Moules, Tina, and Niamh O’Brien. “Participation in Perspective: Reflections from Research Projects.” Nurse Researcher, vol. 12, no. 2, 2011, pp. 17–​22. Murphy, Emily. Private correspondence with Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak. Murris, Karin. “The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 32, no. 3, 2013, pp. 245–​59. Nuggehalli, Roshni K. “Children and Young People as Protagonists and Adults as Partners.” Participation, Citizenship and Intergenerational Relations in Children and Young People’s Lives: Children and Adults in Conversation, edited by Joanne Westwood, Cath Larkins, Dan Moxon, Yasmin Perry, and Nigel Thomas, Palgrave Pivot, 2014, pp. 10–​22.

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Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak Prout, Alan, Richard Simmons, and Johnston Birchall. “Reconnecting and Extending the Research Agenda on Children’s Participation: Mutual Incentives and the Participation Chain.” Children, Young People and Social Inclusion: Participation for What? Edited by E. Kay M. Tisdall, John M. Davis, Alan Prout, and Malcolm Hill, Policy Press, 2006, pp. 74–​101. Rudd, David. “Theorising and Theories: How Does Children’s Literature Exist?” Understanding Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2006, pp. 15–​29. Shier, Harry. “Pathways to Participation: Openings, Opportunities and Obligations.” Children and Society, vol. 15, no. 2, 2001, pp. 107–​17. Spyrou, Spyros. “The Limits of Children’s Voices: From Authenticity to Critical, Reflexive Representation.” Childhood, vol. 18, no. 2, 2011, pp. 151–​65. —​—​—​. “Troubling Children’s Voices in Research.” Reconceptualizing Agency and Childhood: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies, edited by Florian Esser, Meike Baader, Tanja Betz, and Beatrice Hungerland, Routledge, 2016, pp. 105–​18. —​—​—​. Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Superle, Michelle. “Meet the Team.” University of the Fraser Valley, Food and Agriculture Institute, www.ufv.ca/​ food-​agri​cult​ure-​instit​ute/​meet-​the-​team/​miche​lle-​supe​rle.htm, accessed 31 July 2022. —​—​—​. Private correspondence with Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak. Taylor, Carol A. “Edu-​Crafting a Cacophonous Ecology: Posthumanist Research Practices for Education.” Posthuman Research Practices in Education, edited by Carol A. Taylor and Christina Hughes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 7–​36. —​—​—​, and Vivienne Bozalek. “Method.” A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research across Disciplines, edited by Karin Murris, Routledge, 2022, pp. 88–​90. Tisdall, E. K. M. “The Challenge and Challenging of Childhood Studies? Learning from Disability Studies and Research with Disabled Children.” Children and Society, vol. 26, no. 3, 2012, pp. 181–​91. Wall, John. “Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities.” The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane, University of Georgia Press, 2013, pp. 68–​84. Warming, Hanne. “Getting under Their Skins? Accessing Young Children’s Perspectives through Ethnographic Fieldwork.” Childhood, vol. 18, no. 1, 2011, pp. 39–​53. Wilkinson, Catherine, and Samantha Wilkinson. “Doing It Write: Representation and Responsibility in Writing up Participatory Research Involving Young People.” Social Inclusion, vol. 5, no. 3, 2017, pp. 219–​27.

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PART II

Media and Genres

If “media” refers to a work’s format or mode of transmission, “genre” is about form. From both, one can deduce much about the creator’s assumptions regarding audience sophistication or naïveté, the cultural value assigned to it (does it seem made to last, or is it ephemeral?), its educational and/​or entertainment agenda, and how it is to be disseminated, among many other matters. The chapters in Part II consider a wide variety of forms and formats old and new, which among them speak to issues such as the developmental stage of the implied consumer, the creation of communities of readers or other users, and the manifold purposes animating works designed for the young. The section begins with two chapters on genres usually considered to be age-​graded, Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer’s contribution on picturebooks and Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec’s on “Books for Beginners.” As both chapters make clear, however, these forms are considerably more complex than the casual observer might assume, with picturebooks addressing a wide audience consisting of children, adults reading to children, and adults enjoying the book on their own, while beginner books may aim more narrowly at the newly independent reader but employ sophisticated techniques to succeed in this address. Kümmerling-​Meibauer’s chapter pays particular attention to the materiality of the picturebook, which in some cases must be constructed of extra-​durable materials to withstand the wear and tear inflicted by infant users. In contrast, Kristine Moruzi’s chapter on magazines and Joseph Michael Sommers’s on comics consider more flimsy formats, although the nineteenth-​century practice of binding a year’s worth of a beloved magazine into a sturdy volume for better preservation and the high prices commanded by collectible comics today speak to the value that may nonetheless be placed upon these forms. Although often conceived of by adults as vehicles for instruction (especially religious instruction), many magazines provided forums for children to hear one another’s voices, while comics have often seemed to promise such a secure haven against adult preachiness that in the 1950s they were the subject of alarmed hearings in the United States Congress. Three additional chapters round out this volume’s discussion of print genres for children: Deborah Stevenson’s on fiction, Giorgia Grilli’s on nonfiction, and Michael Joseph’s on poetry. Stevenson and Joseph explore their topics in part by subdividing them into smaller genres, with Stevenson categorizing fiction as involving “the plausible present,” “the plausible past,” “the unreal,” and “the unlikely,” while Joseph examines verse genres such as nursery rhymes and Urchin poetry. Meanwhile, while all three critics consider the historical development of their respective genres, Grilli turns away from

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-10

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survey to examine in detail one nonfiction form, the new nonfiction picturebook, as exemplifying nonfiction’s aesthetic and literary claims as opposed to its purely informational function. Illustrated books and magazines communicate with their audiences through both the printed word and the image, yet many visually oriented texts for children leave the page behind altogether. Manon van de Water offers a global perspective on children’s theatre and drama, pausing in locations as widely separated as Soviet Russia, South Korea, Argentina, and Nigeria to consider attributes that make children’s theatre locally distinctive and attributes that knit it together into a worldwide phenomenon. Christine Lötscher, writing about children’s film, and Debbie Olson, writing about children’s television, continue the emphasis on performative media. Lötscher focuses especially on questions of definition, audience, adaptation, and the development of children’s film scholarship, while Olson considers questions of child viewership (and, often, adult anxiety over that viewership) and “glocal” circulation, with the various national versions of Sesame Street as a telling example of the latter phenomenon. Rounding out the section is Angela Colvert’s contribution on digital media, which explores children’s “playful reading” of digital books and their engagement with connected apps and other digital environments, such as online fan communities. Twenty-​first-​century online fan communities, discussed from a different angle by Sara K. Day and Carrie Sickmann in their chapter in Part IV of this volume, recall the nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​ century magazine correspondence columns invoked by Moruzi, as well as the book club reading communities that draw the attention of Julie Fette and Anne Morey in their contribution to Part V. These investigations remind us that all children’s media, whether designed to be consumed in a public setting or read, watched, or clicked on in the home, involve collaboration and sometimes struggle among the (usually adult) creators, the (usually young) consumers in their large groups or solitary corners, and the world of the text that forms the location in which all meet.

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8 PICTUREBOOKS Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer

Introduction: The Picturebook as a Multimodal Art Form The picturebook as an art form has a centuries-​old history, with precursors in illustrated picture stories and primers for children (Juska-​Bacher, Grenby, Laine, and Sroka, Chapter 3). From the beginning, the appeal of the picturebook resided in the form’s intricate relationship between pictures and text –​ with the exception of wordless or textless picturebooks, where the storyline is only conveyed through the picture sequence (Bosch). Since the 1980s, when picturebook theory experienced an upturn with landmark studies by Perry Nodelman, David Lewis, and Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, quite different classifications have been developed in order to explore the manifold aspects that shape the understanding of the picturebook story. Even if these scholars start from different theoretical concepts, they agree on the picturebook’s medium-​transcending nature by elaborating on the intermedial combination of image and text and the reliance on verbal and visual codes. To date, it is commonplace that text and pictures may complement each other; that is, the pictures show something that is not told in the text, or the text tells something that is not shown in the pictures. This observation has led to the development of a taxonomy of picture-​text relationships, thus pointing to the various and often complex narrative strategies employed to such a degree that contradictions arise or the interaction is bathed in an ironic light (Nodelman, Chapter 7; Lewis, Chapter 2; Nikolajeva and Scott, Chapter 4). Since then, numerous studies have painstakingly investigated this complex multimodal relationship, using different theoretical frameworks taken from literary studies, narratology, picture theory, literacy studies, and art history. Other studies have pointed to the close connection with related artforms, such as artists’ books, comics, films, and video games. Concurrently, picturebook artists have developed new techniques and applied different styles that captivate the readers’ interest to the extent of inducing them to look at the pictures over and over again. Over time, the picturebook has also reflected contemporaneous pedagogical debates on what children should read and which topics are considered suitable for them. In addition, picturebooks mirror current artistic trends, whether inspired by cutting-​edge movements, popular culture, or the changes evoked by the international book market and the surge of novel production forms (Druker and Kümmerling-​Meibauer). Taking these tendencies into account, it is no wonder that the readership of picturebooks has expanded, ranging most commonly from babies, toddlers, and preschool children up to primary school children, yet also including adolescents and adults. Concomitantly, new picturebook types have emerged that meet the needs and interests of these different age groups, such as concept books, wimmelbooks (wordless picturebooks featuring detailed panoramas that repay intensive study), ABC books, DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-11

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multilingual picturebooks, and picturebooks for adults. This diversity of genres and age-​related types goes hand in hand with the surge of crossover picturebooks that transcend the boundaries between child and adult readers. On top of all this, movable books and picturebooks that appeal to all senses have increasingly entered the book market, pointing to the material qualities of the picturebook medium. Owing to the so-​called materiality turn in the humanities, which emerged at the turn of the millennium and emphasized objects, instruments, and embodiments as well as the ontological underpinnings of these material conditions, picturebook researchers are increasingly becoming aware of the materiality of the picturebook, paying attention to the materials that picturebooks are made of, the formats and page layouts used, and the types of actions that picturebooks trigger –​ in a nutshell, to the potential of picturebooks to stimulate interaction with readers, an interaction that cannot be separated from the material surfaces these picturebooks offer. It goes without saying that a picturebook made of thick cardboard differs from a pop-​up picturebook in the quality of paper employed as well as in the activities it provides. A digital picturebook, in turn, requires completely different skills and involves quite different material experiences. Against this backdrop, materiality is revealed to have four dimensions: first, it refers to the materials picturebooks are made of. Second, it can be conferred upon different types of picturebooks, such as accordion books or pop-​up books. Third, it instigates certain actions that are correlated to the interactive devices picturebooks offer. Finally, materiality has a content-​related aspect, which needs to be explored. These various considerations are at the center of this chapter, shedding light on the close entanglement among picturebook genres, materials and book design employed, and the multiple responses triggered, all of which call into question the common assumption that there is a fixed or standard way of reading a picturebook. In addition, such an approach goes beyond the idea that a concise picturebook analysis should focus exclusively on the text-​picture relationship without considering the book’s material aspect.

Material Qualities of Picturebooks A considerable number of picturebooks call the reader’s attention to their material qualities by pointing to the production process and the physical character of the book itself. This tendency already appears in baby books, picturebooks for children from zero to three years of age. These books are usually printed on thick cardboard, but sometimes on cloth, wood, or plastic –​ in other words, on materials that resist careless handling and can also be wiped or washed (Kümmerling-​Meibauer and Meibauer, “Pictures” 324). As early as the nineteenth century, publishers advertised “tearproof picturebooks” for the little ones, which were made of solid cardboard, thus resisting young children’s drive to tear the pages. Cloth as another material for picturebooks gained momentum at the turn of the century, when British publisher Dean’s Rag Books (founded in 1903) offered “rag books” aimed at infants up to age three (Cope and Cope). Printed on cotton or linen, with the pages manually sewn together, the books consider young children’s interests by either showing objects from the child’s surroundings or offering popular nursery rhymes. The idea of using wood and plastic as suitable materials for small children seems to have been developed in the 1960s. The advantage of both materials is that they are more or less indestructible and can be cleaned when they get dirty. Since pages made of wood cannot be easily glued together, they typically have tiny holes with string that connects the individual pages. The clicking noise that accompanies turning the pages can be especially appealing for small children. For their part, books made of plastic can be used everywhere, even in the bathtub, thus detaching the book and its consumer from the standard reading situation (Kümmerling-​Meibauer and Meibauer, “Picturebooks as Objects” 260–​64). Another trend is the insertion of items that produce noises, such as animal sounds and musical notes, or scents when the reader rubs certain parts of the printed pages. The so-​called “crackle book” 96

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is made of cloth filled with tiny pellets that make a crackling noise when the pages are touched. Other baby books have soft parts inserted at the corners for the child to bite into without damaging the book (Beveridge). Such baby books appeal to different senses, as they can be touched, looked at, listened to, smelled, and tasted. By engaging in these activities, the reader is gradually introduced to the multisensory character of the picturebook (Veryeri Alaca, “Reading” Chapter 4; Torr). Picturebooks for children beyond the baby stage are usually composed of paper printed in hardbound or paperback editions, while the use of other materials such as cloth, leather, plastic, rice paper, or slate is usually reserved for artists’ books. The latter mostly address an adult readership but also occasionally slip into children’s bookshelves (Drucker). However, even picturebooks printed on paper show a high level of distinctions in paper quality with respect to thickness, coloring, and surface (Pristed). While some picturebooks are printed on glossy paper to the extent of resembling art prints, others use rough, granular, and yellowish paper, thus evoking the impression of an aged book. Yet another strategy consists of inserting thin translucent pages between the double-​page spreads so that the illustrations can still be seen but their colors, outlines, and content will appear blurred. An outstanding example is Bruno Munari’s Nella nebbia di Milano (The Circus in the Mist, 1968), in which the transparent tissue guards serve to provide the effect of a city in the fog (Campagnaro).

Materiality and Types of Picturebooks By and large, the choice of material is highly dependent on the type of the picturebook. While many picturebook categories refer to the content, the intended age group, or the relationship to other media, others focus on the different formats employed. Different book formats such as harlequinades, fanfold books, carousel books, and flap books already existed in the eighteenth century (Reid-​Walsh). These different types of books are lumped together under the umbrella term “movable book.” The main feature of movable books is their playful character, since they invite the reader to pull strings, to open flaps, to unfold pages, to look through cut-​out holes, and so on. Due to their often complicated structure, these books are quite fragile and demand careful handling if they are not to be damaged. Fanfold books or accordion books allow different reading strategies. The viewer may look at the individual pages or folds, but she may also unfold the whole book to look at the complete picture sequence, thus having access to the underlying story at a glance. Fold-​out books or mix-​match books –​as a specific category of the flap book –​invite the reader to fold in and out individual pages or parts of pages to open up new vistas of an illustration of which only parts were previously visible. Finally, pop-​up picturebooks provide a three-​dimensional pictorial space, such as in David Carter’s 600 Black Spots (2007), whose individual spreads show constructions of abstract forms in different colors (Montanaro Staples). Other picturebooks have inserted fabric or faux fur elements that imitate the skin of animals, thus stimulating the child to touch and feel the picturebook’s surfaces while simultaneously listening to the text and looking at the illustrations. An early forerunner of this trend is Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny (1940), which is still available as a reprint. These strategies are not new; they were used as long ago as the Enlightenment to attract customers. An early example of such a marketing strategy is provided by some picturebooks printed with woodcut illustrations and sold with added toys, such as card games, by British publisher John Newbery (Whalley and Chester 23–​28). While the tie-​ins in question were quite simple giveaways, technical advances enabled the continuous development of a sophisticated picturebook design, such as lithography, intaglio, and screenprinting. Moreover, the tendency to direct the reader’s attention to the material quality of the book is not restricted to picturebooks addressed to small children. Movable books, pop-​up books, and artists’ books for children go a step further as they strive to surmount the book’s inherent two-​dimensionality. By broadening the child’s spatial concept, movable books require the viewer to pay full attention to the picturebook’s material quality, as in pop-​up books, which challenge readers by their sophisticated spatial arrangements, or accordion books, which by 97

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unfolding gradually reveal the story’s overarching meaning. Whatever the formats or designs of movable books, they transform the text-​picture relationship into a “game” in which the reader is invited to manipulate the mechanisms to fully understand the underlying story, thus engaging the reader as an active “player.”

Materiality and Interaction Apart from what Barbara Bader calls the “drama of the turning of the page” (1), movable books encourage interactivity by requiring flaps to be opened, buttons to be pressed, or cogs to be turned to reveal hidden parts of pictures and text. By interacting with the book, readers may realize its material character as an object, thus adding a third dimension to the picturebook as a multimodal art form (Veryeri Alaca, “Materiality”). This concept goes in line with Hannah Field’s idea of the “embodied reader” (31), who gains agency by potentially being able to change the narrative when operating the movable mechanisms. All these views obviously broaden the concept of reading as they deviate from the standard situation that relies on close attention to the picturebook story –​ which is either read aloud by an adult mediator or read on one’s own –​by simultaneously requiring looking at the images. As soon as the reader is encouraged to actively do something with the picturebook, she is made aware that the book design is not fixed but can be altered, which in turn has consequences with respect to potentially changing storylines (Mackey). By turning wheels or opening flaps, readers cause previously hidden figures or things to pop up, while books that deviate from the codex format, such as single sheets with illustrations gathered in a folder, may invite one to rearrange the illustrations in any order to create one’s own story. Apart from intentionally inserted movable items, the codex itself cannot be altered in any way, but a changing reading position may make readers aware of the physicality of the book. A case in point is the picturebook Otto in de Stad (Otto in the City, 2007) by Belgian artist Tom Schamp. As in a wimmelbook, the spreads are teeming with characters, objects, and situations that demand attentive viewing to grasp the fictional world represented (Rémi). Since there is no prescribed story, the child reader is completely free to choose which elements she wants to focus on in whatever order. Schamp’s picturebook, however, stimulates the reader to turn the pages 90 or 180 degrees to understand the actions and things shown at the margins of the spreads, which would otherwise be upside down. To distinguish this kind of picturebook from the popular wimmelbook, the new term “loop book” has been suggested (van Meerbergen 10). By moving loop books around and around, readers may learn that there are different ways to arrange items in an illustration and that the typical order from left to right is a norm, predominant in Western societies, that can be broken in a playful manner. There’s a Monster in Your Book (2017) by Tom Fletcher and Greg Abbott goes a step further, as the reader is asked to shake and turn the book, even blow on it or make loud noises to get the monster out of the book, thus demonstrating that one can perform different and unexpected actions with this physical object. Holes in picturebooks are sometimes quite challenging for children, since they may think that these books are damaged, thus contradicting the concept of integrity. In a next step, they may be tempted to put their fingers into the hole or to attentively look through the cutout that gives a preview of what may be shown on the next page. Moreover, children may even hold the book up by peeping through the hole at their immediate surroundings. One of the most popular books with holes is Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969). While the holes on the endpapers and the first and final pages are depicted, the holes in the other pages are cutouts. Since small children tend to touch the pages in picturebooks, the holes in this book explicitly invite them to insert their fingers. By doing so, the child gets an impression of the eating behavior of the caterpillar who bites into different foods, such as an apple, a plum, and a leaf, leaving holes behind. The child is thus able to follow the track of the caterpillar from one food to the next by imitating the caterpillar’s movement with her finger put 98

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into the holes. This sensor-​motoric engagement may facilitate the understanding of how a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly and the conditions needed for such a metamorphosis. Tana Hoban’s wordless photobook Look Book (1997) may be allocated to the peephole tradition, that is, spying through a keyhole or a hole in walls and fences to get an insight into what is hidden or happening on the other side. Hoban’s entire book consists of black pages. The first page on the recto has a cutout in the middle that shows a part of an object, an animal, or a plant, encouraging a guessing game of what may be hidden behind the hole. When one turns the page, the item in question –​ for instance a sunflower, a cabbage, and a butterfly –​is displayed in close-​up. On the subsequent double-​ page spread, the photo on the verso shows the same object from a far distance, putting it into a broader context, such as a bouquet of sunflowers in a shop, while a new cutout on the recto invites the next guessing game. Hence, Hoban discloses a cognitive challenge: The closer the camera zooms in to an object, the more difficult it is for the viewer to recognize it. The hybrid combination of picturebook and toy, which is particularly prominent in the so-​called baby book sector, stimulates specific interactive measures. The simplest strategy consists of attaching a small soft toy to the book or putting it between the pages. The toy usually refers to the main character or topic of the book in question and can be seen as an extension of the picturebook story, as it may encourage the child to play with the toy. A more sophisticated strategy is to design the book as a toy itself, for instance by giving it the shape of a car with plastic wheels attached. The child reader may then read the picturebook by turning the pages and looking at the pictures. At the same time, the child can use the book as a car by making it drive on the floor. As a result, the boundary between book and toy becomes blurred, because children can employ a single book in different ways.

The Impact of Materiality on the Picturebook’s Storyline The materiality of the picturebook can have an impact on the story, as the previous sections indicate. While many movable books do not prescribe the order in which the movable parts of the book should be handled to get to the bottom of a potential story, others compel the reader to obey instructions provided in the text. Allan and Janet Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters (1986) corresponds to this latter type, since the reader needs to open the folded envelopes glued on the pages. The inserted letters written by some of the fictional characters visualized in the book propel the story and provide an explanation for the postman’s shifting emotional reactions in view of the unusual letter recipients he meets on his tour. The letters can refer to future events that happen on subsequent pages, but also show past ones in a new light. A variant of the combination of materiality and storyline is the picturebook Hullet (The Hole, 2012) by Norwegian author-​illustrator Øyvind Torseter. Conceptualized as an almost wordless picturebook, in which a cutout hole goes right from the front cover to the back cover, the hole adopts diverse functions and meanings. In the beginning, the hole is an opening in the wall near the door between a bathroom and a kitchen. But then it moves to the front of a washing machine as a hole on the floor, which causes the protagonist to stumble. In turn, he catches the hole in a parcel, taking it to a laboratory where it is stored in a glass. However, the protagonist does not acknowledge that the hole also appears in other spots, as a wheel of a car, a traffic light, a human eye, a nostril, the opening of a pipe, and the moon in the night sky. When the protagonist is going to sleep, the hole reappears again on the wall in his flat. Due to the reductionist cartoonlike style and the sparsely inserted speech bubbles, readers may easily follow the protagonist’s route from his flat to the laboratory and back. However, more challenging is the fact that the meaning of the hole in the middle of the page continuously changes from one page to another. Moreover, in some contexts the hole cannot be perceived as a hole per se anymore, since it replaces round and complete objects, such as a lamp, a camera eye, and a wheel. In this case the child is asked to fulfill two cognitive tasks: to distinguish between holes and objects on the one hand and on the other to substitute a hole for an object that shares its contours –​but 99

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not its substance. Finally, to grasp the humor of the story, children should also be able to comprehend that a hole cannot be caught and stored in a parcel. Another issue connected with the hole is its capacity to move and to interact with people so that it might even be regarded as a character. In its material treatment, the hole is a rather simple form of changing the book codex, and yet it seems to be analytically complex. In cutting out the material, a gap is created in the book, which in turn is filled with meaning to enable the reader to assign a function to it. Thus, Hullet is a book with a hole and at the same time a hole in a book, which is unmistakably the focus of the story as well as of the character of the book as a codex. This observation points to the story’s metafictional character, as the reader is encouraged to reflect on the status of the hole and its multiple functions. As Maria Cecilia Silva-​Díaz puts it, metafiction “shows the gap between the world represented in literature and reality and with that aim lays bare the conventions with which realist fiction builds the world of fiction, demonstrating that narratives are word constructions and not a reflection of reality” (69). A combination of materiality and metafiction can also be found in picturebooks in which figures seem to step out of the book or in which the creative process is thematized. The first aspect is addressed in Emily Gravett’s Wolves (2006), while the latter is taken up in Kathrin Schär’s Johanna im Zug (Johanna in the Train, 2009). Wolves plays with the materiality of the book in two ways. First, the pictures are collages of drawings, torn paper, and rags, thus referring to different materials deployed to create illustrations. Second, envelopes glued to the pages contain a library card and a letter that interrupt the reading flow, as they invite the reader to peruse the two documents, which add another nuance to the picturebook’s story. Moreover, the main story refers to the “book-​within-​a-​book” topic by showing a figure stepping out of a book that the main character is reading. On top of everything else, this book bears the same title as the book the reader is holding, thus conflating the positions of the “real” reader and the fictional reader inside the book. Hence, the reader is asked to put herself into the main character’s shoes by considering whether fictional figures may become “real,” at least in imagination. In Johanna im Zug, the main characters enter into a fictional dialogue with the picturebook artist and communicate their demands regarding the text and the image design. In accordance with this metafictional approach, the illustrations point to the creation of this very picturebook by showing the fictional characters in the upper part of the image, turning their faces in the direction of the picturebook maker, of whom just the hand is visible in the lower part of the picture. The employment of two different artistic styles stresses the distinction between both spheres: While the story characters are rendered in full-​color illustrations in a cartoonish style, the sphere of the artist is characterized by black-​and-​white realistic drawings. The ensuing picture sequence gradually visualizes the changes required by the characters with respect to their appearances, the setting, and the resulting actions. The paradoxical, exciting, and challenging thing about metafictional picturebooks is that, given their acknowledgment of their own fictionality, they actually seem to be closer to the real world than fictional texts that present and maintain an illusion. At the same time, metafiction is considered the main feature of literary postmodernism to the extent that the terms are often used interchangeably, disregarding their differences. This observation also applies to postmodern picturebooks, a form that reached a peak in the 1990s and still shapes the production of picturebooks today. While it is difficult to develop a concise and fully fledged definition of this picturebook category, picturebook researchers agree that postmodern picturebooks subvert the devices of conventional narratives, an aim largely achieved through the employment of metafictive elements and strategies such as narrative disruptions, polyphonic narratives, intertextuality, and irony (Allan, Chapter 6).

Hybridity and Materiality in Picturebooks Against this background, it is evident that postmodern picturebooks are closely related to those picturebooks that blur the boundaries between genres and media forms, thus broadening the scope 100

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of the picturebook per se (Lierop-​Debrauwer). The blending of different materials –​ as outlined in the previous sections –​is just one facet that points to the hybrid character of numerous picturebooks. Others fuse fiction and nonfiction, which is evident in many informational picturebooks. The latter often include texts that provide factual information alongside a fictional narrative to immerse the reader in the story (von Merveldt; see also Giorgia Grilli’s discussion of nonfiction picturebooks in this volume). By the same token, picturebook makers have been inspired by different visual media to expand the picturebook’s pictorial and textual possibilities. By and large, they have shown a preference for comics and film as inspiration sources, since both media formats are particularly suited to add further nuances to the storyline and the perception of the depicted world. British author-​illustrator Raymond Briggs is known for integrating elements of comics into his picturebooks. The wordless picturebook The Snowman (1978) captures the reader’s eye by its page layout, which uses the typical panel structure of comics to convey the dramatic events that visualize the emotional bonds between a boy and a snowman he built on a snowy day. Other picturebooks by Briggs, such as Father Christmas (1973) and The Man (1992), display further key elements of comics, including speech bubbles, cartoonlike depiction of the characters, and comic-​specific features used to express emotions, movements, and the passing of time (Hatfield and Svonkin). Yet even the influence of manga is discernible in the picturebooks created by Allen Say and Chen Jianghong (Kümmerling-​ Meibauer, “Hybrids”). Both artists, who grew up in Japan and China, respectively, were familiar with the artistic traditions of manga (Japan) or manhwa (China) and adapted them to Western picturebook art, as their major works Grandfather’s Journey (Say, 1993) and Mao et moi (Jianghong, Mao and Me, 2008), drawn on rice paper with traditional Chinese ink technique, demonstrate. The medium of film in turn plays a major role in picturebooks by Istvan Banyai and David Wiesner. Both picturebook makers deploy film codes to varying degrees. Zoom (1995) by Banyai captures the aesthetic impression of a camera gradually moving away from its subject. From one page to another, new perspectives unfold, as the individual images reveal themselves as part of a larger picture in each case, thus triggering an inverted mis-​en-​abyme effect. Wiesner, in contrast, arranges some pages in his picturebook Flotsam (2006) like a film storyboard. At the same time, he visualizes the depicted events as if taken from different camera angles and by using various camera setups (Kurwinkel 329–​31). These picturebooks, and there are more of their kind, are distinguished by their hybrid character, pointing to the observation that borrowings from other visual media contribute to the enrichment of picturebooks’ artistic potential. Moreover, by referring to the materials and technical equipment used –​whether rice paper, black ink, or a camera –​the picturebook artists additionally stress the physicality of their artworks and thus demonstrate the synergy of narrative and materiality (Do Rozario). Ultimately, owing to their sophisticated text-​picture relationship, these different picturebook types attract a broader audience. The fact that picturebooks are aimed both at children and adults and can be interpreted on several levels can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. However, the crossover appeal of the picturebook intensified in the last decades of the twentieth century. Following the increasing popularity of crossover literature for teenagers and young adults, publishers and picturebook artists felt inspired to produce multi-​addressed picturebooks, for which the term “crossover picturebooks” has been established (Beckett, Chapter 1). The ability to appeal to adult readers is a characteristic feature that crossover picturebooks share with artists’ books (Drucker). Many artists have created books that can be classified as belonging to both fields. These include, for example, the textless picturebooks by Iela and Enzo Mari and the picturebooks with playful elements by Bruno Munari (Maffei et al.). These works are characterized by a complex book design, unusual typography, and a playful approach to the properties of the material (Beckett, Chapter 2). In doing so, these artists certainly address children as potential readers by pointing to their creativity and imaginative power. Even so, picturebooks may have such sophisticated content and structure that they can only be fully dissected by an adult reader who is in possession of a greater knowledge of the world, let alone a solid 101

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treasure trove of experience with respect to the understanding of visual codes, ironic textual messages, and potential shifts caused by ambiguous text-​picture relationships. In some cases, these picturebooks even disregard children’s interests and cognitive capacities by elaborating on subjects that are usually beyond the child’s horizon, such as aging, falling in love, and experiencing problems in professional life. This tendency, observable since the late twentieth century, first emerged in the Nordic countries, where publishers launched picturebooks solely aimed at adult readers. Promoted as “picturebooks for adults,” this trend opened up new perspectives and attracted a new audience for the picturebook as an art form (Ommundsen). Previously regarded as a medium closely connected with children as readers, picturebooks for adults completely detach from this idea by adopting the design and format of the picturebook but at the same time addressing issues that are of no interest to child readers or whose tongue-​in-​cheek stories could not be fully grasped by children. Compelling examples are the political parodies of the famous picturebook Goodnight Moon (1947) by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. This popular goodnight story has instigated numerous authors and artists to turn it into new versions that criticize the political ideologies of leading American politicians, such as Goodnight Bush (2008) by Erich Origen and Gan Golan and Goodnight Obama (2016) by Jerome Corsi and M. G. Anthony. Another picturebook for adults is the bestselling Go the F**k to Sleep (2011) by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés, which caused a fierce debate in newspapers and social media about parental care and whether parents are allowed to admit that they sometimes have mixed feelings towards their own children (Abate 178–​83). Ultimately, these picturebooks are not the only ones to evoke ambivalent feelings about whether they are suitable for children. This question also applies to picturebooks that deal with disturbing topics such as death, sexual abuse, and war, and/​or display unusual pictorial styles, such as the Pop Art picturebooks that flooded the international book market in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Kümmerling-​Meibauer and Meibauer, “Strangeness”). Often described as “strange,” “shocking,” and “controversial” due to the subject matter and the mode of presentation, these picturebooks gave rise to the notion “challenging picturebook,” which has gained acceptance in picturebook studies in the last few years (Evans; Ommundsen, Haaland, and Kümmerling-​Meibauer).

Material Challenges of Digital Picturebooks The greatest challenge for the picturebook as a print medium is the digital picturebook or picturebook app. While the first digitized picturebooks could be purchased in the form of e-​books, which hardly differed from the print versions in terms of content, the technical possibilities of the new medium are increasingly being exploited by animating image sequences, inserting short film sequences and computer games, developing a sound design with music and noises, and opening up the possibility of obtaining further information through hyperlinks. Developed as a niche product, the digital picturebook took off after the release of Alice for the iPad (2010). Initially, people produced picturebook apps of popular picturebooks. Early examples include The Heart and the Bottle (2010) by Oliver Jeffers (app version 2011) and Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (2003) by Mo Willems (app version Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App, 2011). The success of these and other digital picturebooks has led to the production of an increasing number of standalone app versions, which are also available in multiple languages (Al-​Yagout and Nikolajeva). Digitization is also penetrating the print medium of picturebooks. When the reader holds some pages of What Lola Wants … Lola Gets (2001) by David Salariya and Carolyn Scrace against a webcam, the characters and setting depicted emerge in 3D animation. Julia Neuhaus’s Was ist denn hier passiert? (What Has Happened Here?, 2015) depicts an absurd situation on each page. Via a QR code on the appropriate book page, one can use a smartphone or tablet to watch a short animated film that tells how this situation came about (Kümmerling-​Meibauer, “Baby Books” 260–​61). However, the possibilities of the digital medium have also influenced artistic design practices, in that many picturebook artists produce their illustrations on the computer or edit on the computer images created 102

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by hand. Norwegian author-​illustrator Stian Hole applies this technique to Garmanns sommer (Garmann’s Summer, 2006). Hole scanned drawings, collages, and photographs, assembled them on the screen, and processed them in color (Druker 54). Although the inexhaustible possibilities of digitized picturebooks are often praised enthusiastically, there is only scant research on how children’s literacy is shaped by the quickly evolving changes brought about by digitization. Since contemporary children’s texts, including digital picturebooks, are accessed via a range of media and are likely to embed images, sound, and movement, this issue has implications for the reading process, because children need to navigate quite complex texts and images on screen (Stichnothe). Consequently, digital picturebooks challenge publishers and readers in different ways. First, they affect the reading process, which turns from an attentive reading session to a joint, interactive activity where children are invited to touch dots on the screen instead of turning pages. Second, digital picturebooks, with their complex format of image, text, sound, film, and hypertextual markers, address several senses simultaneously: seeing, hearing, and touching. Third, picturebook apps combine diverse media formats, such as film, computer games, and audio drama, thus demanding the child’s acquisition of digital literacy. To this concept also belongs the capacity to navigate between different levels, which adds a hypertextual structure to the picturebook story. Finally, digital picturebooks offer the possibility of changing the narrative flow by selecting various sidelines and supplements, which can extend and expand the story considerably. The combination of reading, playing, and learning (for example, drawing a picture, learning new words, answering simple questions, and singing songs) encourages children to use different reading and comprehension strategies simultaneously (Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Meibauer, Nachtigäller, and Rohlfing). In any case, children today may read a printed and an app version of the same title in different situations and locations, thus experiencing different media formats. Although critics and publishers express concerns about the cannibalization of print sales by digital picturebook versions, most of the professionals involved in the production process of literature for children do not worry that digital products will eventually supplant traditional books. On the contrary, if the digital version brings the text’s materiality back into view, the narrative and self-​reflexivity of the movable books tap into the changing conceptualization of the book, bringing its material qualities to our attention. As new technologies have left their imprint on picturebooks as a paper-​based medium in the digital era, it is theoretically and pedagogically significant to explore the ways in which books in print form reconceptualize or endow with new meaning the book’s physical features and the act of reading.

Conclusion: Future Prospects Despite all prophecies of doom, picturebooks still occupy an important place in children’s lives today. Neither the emergence of digital apps nor the unstoppable rise of the Internet have outstripped the picturebook. Quite the opposite: these new challenges have given fresh impetus to this multimodal art form. The picturebook has always been exposed to external influences, whether pedagogical, artistic, or ideological ones, and has thus gained new ideas from diverse spheres. Whenever a new visual medium prevailed, interfaces with the picturebook arose at some point, laying the basis for the development of novel hybrid picturebook forms. Most recently, these synergistic effects have led to the creation of picturebooks with implemented QR codes that allow the reader to transgress the physical borders of the codex by simultaneously accessing a virtual space as an extension of the printed story. Against this backdrop, it is more than likely that analog alongside digital formats of picturebooks will remain in place in the future, with the prospect that the two forms will cross-​fertilize. At least it can be said with certainty that the impact of materiality –​regarded as an umbrella term that covers different dimensions of this concept –​and the resulting interactions will continue to mark the picturebook’s further development. By and large, the picturebook continues to be a door opener 103

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for emergent readers, since it introduces children to the visual codes of pictures, the understanding of narratives, and the concept of the book per se. Finally, the picturebook can be regarded as a suitable medium to turn children, even adults, into active readers who thus may get an insight into the multifarious interactive possibilities this multimodal art form offers.

Works Cited Abate, Michelle Ann. No Kids Allowed: Children’s Literature for Adults. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Alice for the iPad. Picturebook app. Atomic Antelope, 2010. Allan, Cherie. Playing with Picturebooks: Postmodernism and the Postmodernesque. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Al-​Yagout, Ghada, and Maria Nikolajeva. “Digital Picturebooks.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 270–​78. Bader, Barbara. American Picturebooks: From Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within. Macmillan, 1976. Banyai, Istvan. Zoom. Viking, 1995. Beckett, Sandra. Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages. Routledge, 2012. Beveridge, Lian. “Chewing on Baby Books as a Form of Infant Literacy: Books Are for Biting.” More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/​Verbal Texts for Young People, edited by Naomi Hamer, Perry Nodelman, and Mavis Reimer, Routledge, 2017, pp. 18–​29. Bosch, Emma. “Wordless Picturebooks.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 191–​200. Briggs, Raymond. Father Christmas. Hamish Hamilton, 1973. —​—​—​. The Snowman. Hamish Hamilton, 1978. —​—​—​. The Man. Julia McRae Books, 1992. Brown, Margaret Wise. Goodnight Moon. Illustrated by Clement Hurd, Harper and Brothers, 1947. Campagnaro, Marnie. “Bruno Munari’s Visual Mapping of the City of Milan: A Historical Analysis of the Picturebook Nella nebbia di Milano.” Maps and Mapping in Children’s Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes, and Cityscapes, edited by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, John Benjamins, 2017, pp. 147–​66. Carle, Eric. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. World, 1969. Carter, David. 600 Black Spots. Little Simon, 2007. Cope, Peter, and Dawn Cope. Dean’s Rag Books and Rag Dolls. New Cavendish Books, 2009. Corsi, Jerome. Goodnight Obama: A Parody. Illustrated by M. G. Anthony, Post Hill Press, 2016. Do Rozario, Rebecca-​Anne. “Consuming Books: Synergies of Materiality and Narrative in Picturebooks.” Children’s Literature, vol. 40, 2012, pp. 151–​66. Drucker, Johanna. “Artists’ and Picturebooks: Generative Dialogues.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 291–​301. Druker, Elina. “Collage and Montage in Picturebooks.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 49–​58. —​—​—, and Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, eds. Children’s Literature and the Avant-​ Garde. John Benjamins, 2015. Evans, Janet, ed. Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts. Routledge, 2015. Field, Hannah. Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Gravett, Emily. Wolves. Simon and Schuster, 2006. Hatfield, Charles, and Craig Svonkin, eds. Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books. Special issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 4, 2012, pp. 429–​97. Hoban, Tana. Look Book. Greenwillow, 1997. Hole, Stian. Garmanns sommer. Cappelen Damm, 2006; English translation Garmann’s Summer, Eerdmans, 2008. Jeffers, Oliver. The Heart in the Bottle. HarperCollins, 2009. —​—​—​. The Heart in the Bottle. Picturebook app. HarperCollins, 2010. Jianghong, Chen. Mao et moi. L’école des loisirs, 2008; English translation Mao and Me, Enchanted Lion Books, 2008. Juska-​Bacher, Britta, Matthew Grenby, Tuija Laine, and Wendelin Sroka, eds. Learning to Read, Learning Religion: Catechism Primers in Europe from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. John Benjamins, 2023. Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Bettina. “From Baby Books to Picturebooks for Adults: European Picturebooks in the New Millennium.” Word and Image, vol. 31, no. 3, 2015, pp. 249–​64. —​—​—​. “Manga/​Comics Hybrids in Picturebooks.” Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, edited by Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Routledge, 2013, pp. 98–​118.

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Picturebooks —​—​—​, ed. The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Routledge, 2018. —​—​—​, and Jörg Meibauer. “First Pictures, Early Concepts: Early Concept Books.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 29, no. 3, 2005, pp. 324–​47. —​—​—​, and Jörg Meibauer. “On the Strangeness of Pop Art Picturebooks: Pictures, Texts, Paratexts.” New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship, vol. 72, no. 2, 2011, pp. 103–​21. —​—​—​, and Jörg Meibauer. “Picturebooks as Objects: Exploring Cognitive Aspects of Materiality.” Libri and Liberi, vol. 8, no. 2, 2019, pp. 257–​78. —​—​—​, Jörg Meibauer, Kerstin Nachtigäller, and Katharina Rohlfing, eds. Learning from Picturebooks: Perspectives from Child Development and Literacy Studies. Routledge, 2015. Kunhardt, Dorothy. Pat the Bunny. Golden Books, 1941. Kurwinkel, Tobias. “Picturebooks and Movies.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 325–​36. Lewis, David. Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text. RoutledgeFalmer, 2001. Lierop-​Debrauwer, Helma van. “Hybridity in Picturebooks.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 81–​90. Mackey, Margaret. “Postmodern Picturebooks and the Material Conditions of Reading.” Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-​Referentiality, edited by Lawrence R. Sipe and Sylvia Pantaleo, Routledge, 2008, pp. 103–​17. Maffei, Giorgio, Valerio Deho, Barbara Nestico, and Annie Pissard. Children’s Corner: Artists’ Books for Children. Corraini, 2007. Mansbach, Adam. Go the F**k to Sleep. Illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, Akashic, 2011. Meerbergen, Sara van. “Play, Parody, Intertextuality and Interaction: Postmodern Flemish Picture Books as Semiotic Playgrounds.” Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics, vol. 3, 2012, doi:10.3402/​blft.v3i0.20075. Merveldt, Nikola von. “Informational Picturebooks.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 231–​45. Montanaro Staples, Ann. “Pop-​Up and Movable Books.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 180–​90. Munari, Bruno. Nella nebbia di Milano. Corraini, 1968; English translation The Circus in the Mist, World, 1969. Neuhaus, Julia. Was ist denn hier passiert? Tulipan Verlag, 2015. Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picturebooks Work. Garland, 2001. Nodelman, Perry. Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. University of Georgia Press, 1988. Ommundsen, Åse Marie. “Picturebooks for Adults.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 17–​36. —​—​—​, Gunnar Haaland, and Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, eds. Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education. Routledge, 2022. Origen, Erich, and Gan Golan. Goodnight Bush: An Unauthorized Parody. Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Pristed, Birgitte Beck. “The Fragile Power of Paper and Projections.” The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children, edited by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine, University of Toronto Press, 2021, pp. 181–​205. Reid-​Walsh, Jacqueline. “Activity and Agency in Historical ‘Playable Media.’ ” Journal of Children and Media, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012, pp. 164–​81. Rémi, Cornelia. “Reading as Playing: The Cognitive Challenge of the Wimmelbook.” Emergent Literacy: Children’s Books from 0 to 3, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, John Benjamins, 2011, pp. 115–​39. Salariya, David. What Lola Wants… Lola Gets. Illustrated by Carolyn Scrace, Scribbler’s Books, 2011. Say, Allen. Grandfather’s Journey. Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Schär, Caroline. Johanna im Zug. Atlantis, 2009. Schamp, Tom. Otto in de stad. Lannoo, 2007; English translation Otto in the City, Tate Publishing, 2013. Silva-​Díaz, Maria Cecilia. “Picturebooks and Metafiction.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 69–​80. Stichnothe, Hadassah. “Engineering Stories? A Narratological Approach to Children’s Book Apps.” BLFT: Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics, vol. 5, 2014, doi:101.3402/​blft.v5.2360.2. Torr, Jane. Reading Picture Books with Infants and Toddlers. Routledge, 2023. Torseter, Øyvind. Hullet. Cappelen Damm, 2012; English translation The Hole, Enchanted Lion Books, 2013. Veryeri Alaca, Ilgim. Consumable Reading and Children’s Literature: Food, Taste and Material Interactions. John Benjamins, 2022. —​—​—​. “Materiality in Picturebooks.” Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Companion, pp. 59–​68. Whalley, Joyce Irene, and Tessa Ross Chester. A History of Children’s Book Illustration. John Murray, 1988. Wiesner, David. Flotsam. Clarion/​Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Willems, Mo. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Disney-​Hyperion, 2003. —​—​—​. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive This App. Disney-​Hyperion, 2011.

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9 BOOKS FOR BEGINNERS Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec

When we ask our college students to discuss their favorite childhood books, they often are most excited to talk about the series books they read as emerging readers. They share stories with one another about how they collected every book in the Junie B. Jones series or how they loved the silliness of the Captain Underpants books or the adventures in the Magic Tree House series. Today’s American university students, most of whom were born after 2000, have always had access to a literary marketplace that includes funny, story-​driven tales with well drawn characters designed specifically for the newly independent reader. While books for beginner readers have existed, in one form or another, for almost 200 years, the last decade of the twentieth century ushered in a golden age of books for this group, enabling writers to create literature within a somewhat controlled rhetorical space, and also delineating the “rules” of Easy Readers and Early Readers as two separate entities. Here we explore the primarily American history and golden age of beginner readers and the cultural influences, marketplace concerns, and touchstone works that make up this category of children’s books. Despite their commercial success, beginner readers remain neglected in the world of children’s literature scholarship. A 2012 Publishers Weekly article reported that Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus (1992), the first in that series, had sold “3.3 million copies and is currently in its 64th printing. Twenty years and 29 books later, there are a total of 52 million Junie B. Jones books in print” (Lodge, “Random House”). The Captain Underpants series has had similar success, with Publishers Weekly noting (again in 2012) that “[t]‌he series is published in 19 languages, and has more than 50 million books in print in North America alone. The three most recent Captain Underpants installments each debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list” (Lodge, “Scholastic”). We speculate that this popular category of children’s literature hasn’t received significant critical attention for three main reasons: beginner books are a relatively new form of literature; books in this category are viewed as being transitional, pedagogical texts meant to move readers from one level of reading to the next; and books written as part of series are often dismissed as lowbrow and formulaic. Beginning readers are indeed all of these things: these inexpensive books help emerging readers to gain fluency in reading so that they can eventually move on to reading novels, and many of them do adhere to a formula of sorts. Because they are still evolving as a form, beginner books are slippery to define. They go by many names: early, easy, or independent readers; leveled readers; early chapter books; and beginning readers, to name a few. These various names have been coined by publishers as a way to market books in narrower and narrower categories meant to move the youngest of readers along a series of steps from newly literate to fluent. 106

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-12

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Here, we distinguish between two types of beginner books popular in the American market: Easy Readers and Early Readers. Easy Readers are short books with few words, such as Mo Willems’s Elephant and Piggie books, that can be read by a new reader in one sitting. While Easy Readers often look like picturebooks, the difference lies in the implied reader: picturebooks are meant to be read aloud by adults and often contain complex syntax, rhythmic language, and an advanced vocabulary; Easy Readers are meant to be read independently by new readers, which means they feature a limited vocabulary made mostly of sight words. Books in the Early Reader category are created for an audience of newly literate children between ages five and eight; they have short sentences, large print, low-​stakes conflicts, one primary plot, and black-​and-​white illustrations; and they typically follow the same characters through a series of books, each around 100 pages long with about ten short chapters. The lines between these two categories of readers blur, especially when the spaces between Easy and Early Readers are filled in with more and more leveled categories of books at various places along the newly literate-​to-​fluent continuum. While they are not primers or textbooks, beginner books resemble training wheels on a bicycle, in that they are designed to help newly independent readers read confidently until they can read more advanced literature on their own. Beginner books deserve more critical attention than they have received because they “are, for many younger readers, their first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and, ideally, to experience pleasure from the act of beginning to read independently” (Miskec and Wannamaker 1–​2). While beginner books may seem at first glance to be simple, they must do the very complex work of luring newly independent readers away from being read to or reading with help to reading fluently entirely on their own. Indeed, the very best beginner books do this difficult task using simple yet carefully crafted language and, as in picturebooks, illustrations that work in tandem with the words to create an immersive and interactive reading experience.

Proto Beginner Books Before beginner books could develop as a category of literature, literature for older children had to develop first. If novel reading is the next step after mastering Early Readers, novels for children had to exist and had to be met with some level of acceptance. As noted above, Early Readers have existed, in some form, for almost 200 years, and throughout their development they have woven their way in and out of classrooms and debates about literacy education. For example, in the mid-​1800s some of the books in Jacob Abbott’s Rollo series, published in the United States between 1835 and 1842, were accessible to young, newly independent readers. While books such as Rollo Learning to Read (1835) and Rollo at Work, Or The Way to Be Industrious (1837) seem overly didactic by today’s standards, these books anticipated the contemporary Early Reader book in several ways: they were published as part of a series, they were both instructive and entertaining, and they straddled the line between education in the home and education at school. Ramona Caponegro notes that Rollo Learning to Read is made up of stories “both about Rollo’s small domestic activities (such as sailing on a raft, learning to obey his mother, and preparing for his father’s homecoming at the end of the day) and about similar experiences and lessons encountered by other children” (16). The tales in the book tell the story of how Rollo learns to read, and child readers are invited to learn to read alongside him. Other precursors to contemporary beginner books appeared in the late 1800s when there were a number of children’s books published that were written almost entirely in words of one syllable. Some of them were adaptations of classic texts that had long been popular with children even though they weren’t written directly for an audience of child readers, books such as Aesop’s Fables, The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. But others were original collections of stories written specifically for young children. For example, The One Syllable Book by Emma B. Brown, published in 1879, is a collection of brief stories illustrated with black-​and-​white 107

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etchings. Each one-​page story describes the illustration on the accompanying page. Thus a story titled “Out in the Snow” begins, “Here are my three pets, Beth, Ralph, and Kate. And oh! such fun as they have in the soft new snow” (2). The description directly references the illustration on the opposite page of three cherubic children holding snowballs. The simple and direct language about subject matter of interest to the youngest of readers, paired with illustrations that interact with the text, mark these as direct ancestors of today’s Early and Easy Readers. Another particularly instructive ancestor is Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, which underwent almost two decades of revision in order to transform from a book for older children to one that beginning readers could navigate. Warner, who worked as a teacher, revised the book so as to make it accessible to all of her younger students. As Michelle Ann Abate explains, Warner first published the story as The Box-​Car Children in 1924 but continued to revise it in ways that “scaled back the original book’s vocabulary, streamlined its plot, and simplified its sentences, all while retaining the excitement and adventure of the story” (29). Abate traces the changes in the book from 1924 to 1942, citing numerous examples: The original novel commences the following way: “About seven o’clock one hot summer evening a strange family moved into the little village of Middlesex.” By contrast, in the rewrite, Warner simplifies this remark, trimming and tightening it to read: “One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery.” This type of alteration applies to nearly every sentence in the 1942 text. (29) Warner’s eighteen-​year-​long efforts to revise the book show how difficult it is to craft simple-​seeming stories that appeal to the youngest of readers. As is the case with contemporary Early Readers, The Boxcar Children crossed between home and school and between instruction and entertainment as it became a book bought by parents for their children to read at home even as it was created in a classroom. This example highlights the skillfulness needed to write books for beginners that are both accessible and entertaining, simple but not simplistic. Maurice Sendak likened writing for children to composing music. In an interview he told a story about opera singer Christa Ludwig, who liked Schubert and was challenged by a critic who claimed that Viennese waltzes are too simple: “[B]‌ut what he did was pick a form that looked so humble and quiet so that he could crawl into that form and explode emotionally, find every way of expressing every emotion in this miniature form.” And I got very excited. And I wondered is it possible that’s why I do children’s books? I picked a modest form which was very modest back in the ‘50s and ‘40s. [...] But, my thought was – that’s what I did. I didn’t have much confidence in myself – never. And so, I hid inside [...] this modest form called the children’s book and expressed myself entirely. (Moyers) Like Schubert, Sendak, and Warner, writers of beginner books work within tight constraints; they must find creative ways to shape texts with limited vocabulary, length, and subject matter that the very youngest readers can follow and enjoy. Most importantly, the best writers of beginner books create texts that captivate new readers and entice them to continue to read.

The Mid-​Twentieth Century “Reading Wars” In the mid-​twentieth century in the United States, debates about education, specifically reading instruction, strongly influenced the development of beginning readers, especially when these debates became public. In 1954, novelist John Hersey wrote an article for Life magazine arguing that American 108

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children were being bored into illiteracy; he urged writers and illustrators to produce entertaining books that could aid early literacy. At a time when public schooling was expanding to include greater populations of students, early reading instruction moved from homes to schools, where most students learned from primers and basal readers. Literacy in schools in the early grades in the early parts of the twentieth century was dominated by the Dick and Jane books, published in the United States from the 1930s to 1990s; the Janet and John books, published in the United Kingdom and New Zealand from the 1940s to 1970s; and the Peter and Jane books, the “Keyword Reading Scheme” series published by London’s Ladybird Books from the 1940s to 1970s. Hersey wasn’t the only critic of these “boring” readers. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published his book Why Johnny Can’t Read –​And What You Can Do About It, which also, in part, blamed primers for illiteracy. Rebekah Fitzsimmons explains, “This narrative of parents taking control of their children’s reading instruction […] provided an opportunity for publishers to market instructional books directly to parents, rather than focusing on the educational market, which was comprised of schools and libraries” (42). Beginner books began to flourish as the market continued to expand both within and beyond schools. In the late 1950s, after the public debates spurred by these publications, a new market opened up for books created for the youngest of readers, which led presses to develop works especially aimed at a target audience of parents seeking to improve their child’s reading fluency. Random House started the Beginning Readers series in 1957 with The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel). In discussing the way the book was marketed to parents, Fitzsimmons points out that an advertising campaign of the moment “notes this book was designed to allow children in the early stages of reading to master a text on their own, which fit with child-​rearing experts’ advice to allow children to develop autonomous activities as a natural part of development” (44). In addition to giving their children an advantage, reading was an activity encouraged by parenting experts: “The child could entertain him or herself by quietly reading books, rather than watching television or listening to the radio, two pastimes which had already gained a negative reputation in parenting magazines and child-​ rearing advice books” (44). While Random House’s The Cat in the Hat was the first beginner book on the mass market, HarperCollins followed shortly behind, creating a series of books for beginners called I Can Read!. Editor Ursula Nordstrom launched this series in 1957 with Little Bear, written by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Sendak. Advertising materials accompanying Little Bear describe it as a book children should be able to read independently once they’ve finished the first grade. While The Cat in the Hat was, famously, written using a limited vocabulary of 225 words, Little Bear’s author had no such prescription. Both texts manage to engage newly literate children but in different ways, Seuss with his playful rhythms and rhymes and Minarik with elegant, imagistic descriptions. For example, The Cat in the Hat uses rhythmic verse punctuated with onomatopoeia: Then Sally and I saw them run down the hall. We saw those two things Bump their kites on the wall! Bump! Thump! Thump! Bump! Down the wall in the hall. (n. pg.) Little Bear, in contrast, is gentler and more subtle in its rhythms: He could hear the wind sing. And he could feel the wind On his fur, on his eyes, 109

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On his little black nose. He shut his eyes, and let the wind brush him. (12) Both series were innovative and important touchstones in the development of the beginner book as a category of children’s literature. The I Can Read! series went on to include the popular Frog and Toad series of books by Arnold Lobel and the Amelia Bedelia series by Peggy Parish. Random House’s Beginner Reader series led to more books by Seuss and the Thomas and Friends franchise begun by Wilbert Awdry and continued by other writers.

Expanding the In-​Between in the 1980s and ’90s The titles first developed in the 1950s dominated the beginner reader market for decades because leveled reading remained entrenched in American reading instruction, and schools and libraries were still the main market for children’s books. According to Wayne D’Orio, “The general premise of leveled reading is that kids learn the most when they understand more than about 95 percent of a text’s words and score more than 75 to 80 percent on reading comprehension.” Parents, teachers, and publishers alike embraced this “common sense” approach to reading instruction. However, children’s series such as Frog and Toad and Amelia Bedelia are quite a few reading levels away from children’s novels such as Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) or Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (1978), for example, so publishers in the 1980s started to attend to the gap. Jennifer Arena, an editor for the Stepping Stones line at Random House, told Publishers Weekly in 2004 that until the mid-​1980s, there existed a need for “early chapter books to bridge you between early readers and 200-​page books for older children” (qtd. in Bean 231). As publishers began to tend to that need in earnest, what would come to be called Early Readers began to flourish. A confluence of social conditions in the 1980s further paved the way for what would become a golden age of Early Readers. To begin with, the decade saw higher birth rates but decreased federal funding for public schools, from libraries to talented and gifted programs to teacher training programs (Verstegen 358). Parents, then, realized their role in picking up the slack. The 1983 government report “A Nation at Risk” and its “narrative of failing schools –​students being out-​competed internationally and declining educational standards” (Kamenetz) further enlisted children’s books in literacy education. As was the case during the “Reading Wars” of the 1950s (Fitzsimons 38), books were seen as a panacea to the crisis in public education –​but only “appropriate” books. As Peter N. Stearns notes in Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, in competition with videogames, cable television, and, thanks to the Parents’ Music Resource Center, “filthy music,” parents sought increasing control of their bored children’s entertainment, and maintained higher standards for it as well (184). Early Readers could promise all of these things, combatting the forces of popular media with accessible and collectable books that provided an appropriate educational supplement. Another important development that spurred the growth of the Early Reader in the United States was the late twentieth-​century proliferation of chain bookstores and big box bookstores. Leonard Marcus writes that in the 1970s, “The rapidly expanding chain bookstores, led by B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Barnes and Noble, had vast expanses of shelf space to fill and the need to freshen their inventory each month in hopes of luring customers back” (275–​76). Books released as series that young people could collect were a perfect way to bring back repeat customers. Additionally, Random House Vice President and editor-​at-​large Janet Schulman notes that chain stores “just ate [leveled readers] up when they came out […] because they didn’t need to handsell them” (TeachingBooks). Parents, increasingly, could browse through shelves arranged according to the age of readers in ever bigger children’s sections. 110

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Amid these cultural changes, the American Girl books hit their stride, providing “good play” for young readers. Stearns explains, “Toys, for example, were good if they stimulated imagination, physical and mental abilities, and good social habits” (174). American Girl dolls were toys –​ albeit expensive ones –​that encouraged reading, and the books that accompanied the dolls taught moral values and history. They were, as Jan Susina calls them, Barbies with a sense of history. According to Susina, “Pleasant Rowland’s American Girls Collection is part of the tradition of the commodification of children’s literature that marches under the banner of offering instruction and age-​appropriate delight” (130–​31). The American Girl books weren’t terribly exciting, and they certainly were heavy handed, especially in their constructions of girlhood, although Susina writes, “Parents might view the American Girls Collection, with its pro-​girlhood stance, as a positive alternative to help combat media pressures placed on their daughters to act older than their actual age” (131). Despite these drawbacks, these books filled the gap, providing young readers quick, confidence-​building stories in a formulaic fashion. It didn’t hurt that they could also have the cultural capital of owning a doll that was the subject of their books. Amid the success of the American Girl books, the year 1992 marked an even more significant moment in the history of Early Readers. Barbara Park, the author of the immensely popular Junie B. Jones series, was asked to write beginner books by a publisher: according to Park, “Janet Schulman, the publisher at Random House, wanted to start a series of easy readers called ‘Step-​Into-​ Reading.’ She asked four different authors to write a four-​book miniseries of short chapter books” (Teachingbooks). Park’s series about a sassy first-​grade girl went on to include thirty-​two books that are still popular thirty years later. She speculated that their popularity comes from the fact that “Junie B.’s problems are everyday issues that all kids encounter. Those include dealing with other kids and being embarrassed, afraid, hurt, and scared to speak in front of somebody. They are essentially just daily life hitting her from all angles.” Some of the other series started by Random House in 1992 met with popularity as well, especially the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne, which diversified Early Readers readership with less gendered, more energetic series. Similarly, Paula Danziger’s Amber Brown series was a significant addition to the 1990s Early Reader game. For twenty years, Danziger’s young adult (YA) books had been wildly popular. Beginning with The Cat Ate My Gymsuit (1974), Danziger struck a chord with readers for her gritty realism, sense of humor, and frank treatment of issues such as family dynamics, teen romance, and body image. Much like her teen characters, third grader Amber Brown faces real-​life issues with honesty and heart. In the first book, for example, Amber struggles with the emotions of her best friend moving away, recalling the feelings she had when her parents divorced and her father moved. Danziger’s entrance into the beginning reader space was welcomed by readers and critics alike, perhaps due to her commitment to creating dynamic human characters who face problems without easy answers, as well as her refusal to talk down to readers. Writing for the new reader crowd was a departure for Danziger, a confirmed YA author, but it also brought Danziger into what Kathleen Krull, author of Presenting Paula Danziger (1995), explains was “a comparatively new genre considered to be a bridge between picture books and middle-​grade novels for ages six to nine […] the first books children read that are divided into separate chapters, with larger-​than-​usual print and one or several illustrations per chapter” (79–​80). The challenge to beginner reader writers, Krull notes, “is to extend the attention span of second-​through-​fourth-​graders by using deceptively simple language to capture their interest. Not a word can be wasted, snappy dialog is essential, and humor is always a plus –​ three particular strengths of Danziger’s writing” (80). To be sure, Danziger didn’t hesitate to maintain a sense of trust in the imagined reader of the eighty-​page Amber Brown chapter books. In turn, “The first Amber book has generated some of the most positive critical commentary of Danziger’s entire career” (79). Alongside Park and Osborne, as well as authors such as Sharon Draper (Clubhouse Mysteries) and Jon Scieszka (The Time Warp Trio), Danziger led the way for authors to create stories with rich characters for the new reader crowd. No longer basal and often with an edge, these high-​energy series 111

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about newly independent readers for newly independent readers continued to fill the beginner reader market well into the 2000s. In fact, in May 2000 Shannon Maughan at Publishers Weekly noted the “astounding number of book series dedicated to emergent, beginning and early readers,” wondering, “[I]‌s there really room in the market for all the books in this genre?” Citing an “overarching concern about improving children’s education, in the presence of a strong economy,” publishers, editors, and booksellers noted a shift toward parents seeking books to supplement their schoolwork, books that didn’t feel like homework. As the publishing industry parsed out the often conflated subcategories of Easy and Early Readers, publishers circled back to the “gap between traditional easy-​reader series and chapter books” (Lori Haskins, qtd. in Maughan). Known properties such as Junie B. Jones, Captain Underpants, and the Magic Tree House series continued to do well, and publishers were on the lookout for books that could bridge the narrower gaps between. Big-​name authors for older readers were enlisted by publishers to write in these spaces: Andrew Clements’s Jake Drake series began in 2001, and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Say What? was published in 2004. Even Newbery winners Lois Lowry and Kate DiCamillo got in on Early Reader action, Lowry in 2002 with the first book in the Gooney Bird Greene series and DiCamillo in 2005 with the first book in the Mercy Watson series. The ongoing success of the megaseries from the 1990s and the big-​name contributions of the early 2000s paved the way for the ubiquity of American Early Readers we have today. As this category of books solidified, this new breed of Early Readers had an altogether different demeanor. In her article “ ‘Just think –​ how many girls have special powers like you?’: Weird Girls and the Normalizing of Deviance in Early Readers,” Michelle Beissel Heath codes the trend as “weird girl-​ness” (129). Heath argues that characters such as Annie Barrows’s Ivy and Bean and Wanda Coven’s Heidi Hecklebeck “[normalize] disobedience and transgression” in their “weird girls” (133), while maintaining their “general realness” (129). This new brand of Early Reader series managed to find a humanizing balance with the protagonists, characters who are full of creative energy but who remain grounded and thoughtful. Characters such as Bean have great ideas, “like seeing how many backyards they could cross without touching the ground,” but she also takes care of the little kids in the neighborhood: “When they fell down and got blood all over their knees, Bean would take them home to get Band-​Aids” (25). Ivy, too, is multidimensional. Ivy is learning to be a witch and cast spells, and she loves it when Bean paints her eyes black and uses red face paint to make “blobs of red on [her] cheeks, for blood” (68), but she also wears a dress and a sparkly headband every day. And Ivy would never hurt an animal, not even if a spell calls for a dead frog, opting instead to dig a pond in her backyard, where she hopes a frog might come to die (45).

Beginner Books Mature: The Early Twenty-​First Century By the early twenty-​first century, beginner books had established themselves in the world of children’s literature. In fact, so many beginner book series had emerged from every major American children’s publisher that, in 2004, the American Library Association established the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award, a prize honoring “the most distinguished American book for beginning readers published in English in the United States during the preceding year.” To use Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr.’s words from their book Prizing Children’s Literature, awards can help in “understanding, affirming, and promoting” (1) beginning reader books, and in helping librarians and parents sort through the fray. Yet as Sylvie Shaffer, a former member of the Geisel Award Committee, explains in a 2019 article titled “New for New Readers: What (Exactly) IS an Easy Reader?”, even the criteria for the award leave a lot of room for interpretation: THE GEISEL criteria also indicate that eligible books should be intended for pre-​K through Grade 2 –​or, said a different way, for readers as young as three years old or as old as eight. This 112

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is a huge range, developmentally speaking, both in terms of physical and emotional growth and in terms of the real-​world experiences that generate background knowledge necessary for readers to understand the text beyond decoding it. The daily lives of preschoolers and of second graders are radically different, making what’s relatable, funny, or interesting to them radically different, too. And what about the age outliers? Because children come into literacy at various ages, it is difficult to find easy-​to-​read books written about topics geared toward particular age groups: Would a newly literate eight-​year-​old want to read about children in kindergarten? Does a precocious four-​year-​old have the repertoire needed to understand books focused on experiences in school? To be sure, the prestigious Geisel Award legitimized beginner books as a category to be taken seriously. But it also concretized a divide between Easy and Early Readers as two different categorical spaces. For example, HarperTrophy’s Easy Reader I Can Read! line –​ which claims to have set the standard for beginning readers since 1957 –​moves from “Shared Reading” to “Beginning Reading” to “Reading with Help” to “Reading Alone” to “Advanced Reading.” Series such as Alyssa Satin Capucilli’s Biscuit and James Dean’s Pete the Cat titles promise to “Introduce children to the wonderful world of reading on their own.” Easy Reader levels are clearly printed on the cover of the book. Early Readers, though, aren’t explicitly leveled. They are slightly longer and less colorful, which signals that a reader should move away from Easy Readers and into Early Readers as the logical next step. More to the point, the rhetorical purpose of Easy and Early Readers is explicitly different, as Easy Readers are meant to help teach basic reading skills while Early Readers are designed to help readers read more.

The Present and Future of Beginner Books: Diversity The early 2000s ushered in new attention to Early Reader series with an eye also toward diversifying. In 2004, Scholastic, for example, released its Just For You! series, leveled books “created by African American authors and illustrators from diverse backgrounds […] that support literacy learning.” Sweet and simple, included in the twenty-​four-​title set were stories by Nikki Giovanni and Nikki Grimes, the latter of whom went on to write the Dyamonde Daniel Early Reader series beginning in 2009. Fresh off the success of bilingual Dora the Explorer, and with the same cultural consciousness, Scholastic launched Marisa Montes’s Get Ready for Gabi Early Reader series around the same time. Right in step with the spunky weird-​girls trend, in the first book in the series, A Crazy Mixed-​Up Spanglish Day (2003), protagonist Gabi is so tired of being picked on by a class bully that she loses her temper and tries to kick him. Gabi is told that she needs to control her temper –​and her “spunky feet” –​and the injustice of it all gets her so rattled that her English and Spanish get mixed up. The early 2000s had its share of growing pains. While more interesting stories were being published, and more publishers were conscious of the need for diversity in characters and authors, noticeable holes still existed in the beginner book market –​ Hispanic characters, for example (the Pura Belpré Award was, after all, only bestowed every other year from its inception in 1996 until 2009). Asian characters, too, were few. Thus, Lenore Look’s Ruby Lu Brave and True was a welcome addition to the Early Reader catalog in 2004. What is especially clever about the Ruby Lu series is how it is aware of itself as an example of a limited pool of Chinese American Early Readers, both working to tell an easy-​to-​read and lighthearted tale about a second grader named Ruby Lu, her little brother Oscar, her school, and the kids in her neighborhood, and also taking responsibility for itself as one of few in a category. Midway through the first book in the series, Ruby Lu learns that relatives from China, including their second-​grade daughter, Ruby’s cousin Flying Duck, will be moving to the United States to live with Ruby Lu and her family. In preparation, Ruby Lu’s house gets painted and her room gets reorganized. Even Ruby Lu’s second grade class prepares for Flying Duck’s arrival by 113

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learning about Chinese culture. However, it’s hard to take this scene at its face value since “Chinese culture” is represented here by Mr. Tupahotu, a Japanese American teacher, having the class watch Ruby Lu demonstrate traditional ink and brush, which she has been notoriously bad at in Saturday morning Chinese school; listening to Ruby sing Chinese opera, which she learned from her toddler brother; and watching Ruby Lu demonstrate Chinese fan dancing, an art that she has not studied. American-​born Ruby has little to no real expertise in contemporary Chinese culture, and neither has Mr. Tupahotu. Furthermore, none of these preparatory acts offers insight into a contemporary Chinese girl’s lived experience. In these ways, Ruby Lu, Brave and True adds a needed layer of diversity to Early Readers while mocking the category’s limitations at the same time. In recent years, beginner books have continued to be defined by publishers’ commitment to diversity, especially in the last decade. Children’s publishers such as Karen Lotz at Candlewick claim that finding creators of children’s books “is at the forefront of our day-​to-​day acquisition strategy” (Patrick and Reid). While the most recent data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) still show that “the number of books with BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] creators and protagonists lags far behind the number of books with white main characters –​ or even those with animal or other main characters” (Tyner), in its 2019 statistics the CCBC chronicled small improvements in some of the least represented categories in American publishing, children’s books about Indigenous characters and children’s books about Arab/​Arab American characters. Two beginner reader series of note are Pakistani-​American author Saadia Faruqi’s Meet Yasmin Easy Reader series and Ojibwe author Dawn Quigley’s Jo Jo Makoons Early Reader series. Faruqi’s Meet Yasmin series began in 2018 and was enthusiastically received. Illustrated by Egyptian-​born Hatem Aly, the series follows second grader Yasmin’s school and home adventures. These adventures are low-​stakes; in the first book, Yasmin is briefly separated from her mother at the park, wins an art contest, contributes to a class project, and plays dress-​up with her grandmother. What sets the book apart, though, is that Yasmin’s Pakistani culture is showcased in the bright, cheerful illustrations, as when Yasmin is playing in her mother’s large closet where “brightly colored clothes hung from the rack. Satin kameez, silky hijabs, and beaded saris” (73). Cultural references are explained in the glossary, and the books include recipes, art projects, and facts pages at the end. What’s more, when Yasmin is separated from her mother at the park, it is her mother’s sky-​blue hijab that stands out in a crowd and reunites the pair. The Jo Jo Makoons series is likewise low-​stakes, a typical sweet and simple book for beginning readers, but it is also a loving image of an underrepresented community, in this case a young Ojibwe girl who lives on the fictional Pembina Ojibwe Reservation. Seven-​year-​old Josephine Makoons Azure, called Jo Jo, might drive her teacher crazy with her too-​literal sense of the English language, but she also calls him to task when his language arts lessons don’t include Ojibwe (or art). She also points out how his math is individual rather than communal. The Jo Jo Makoons series is a 2021 entry to HarperColllins’s Heartdrum books, an imprint dedicated to offering “a wide range of innovative, unexpected, and heartfelt stories by Native creators” in partnership with We Need Diverse Books (Heartdrum). As is the case in Meet Yasmin, an outsider audience is appealed to with a glossary and pronunciation guidance of Ojibwe words. Jo Jo asks the reader, “Do you wanna know what moushoom means? It means ‘grandpa’ in the Michif language. Michif is one kind of Native American language[…] Michif [is] like a part of the big, beautiful Ojibwe world” (4). Betsy Bird notes in School Library Journal that there has been a marked increase in Hispanic books for beginner readers since 2015, including Pura Belpré winner Juana and Lucas (2016). Much like its Early Reader contemporaries, Juana and Lucas explores school challenges and does the work of shaping attitudes about language and learning. Gretchan Papazian discusses how Early Readers shape attitudes about reading in her book chapter “Reading Reading in the Early Reader: Mindset, Emotion, and Power” (76), and something similar can be said about Juana and Lucas regarding second language learning. In Medina’s story, Juana lives in Bogatá and speaks Spanish. When her 114

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teacher tells the class that they will be learning English, Juana is initially hesitant: “There are also big Ws and long Ls […] THs tickle her tongue” (28), not to mention words such as “eyes” and “ice” (40). However, when Juana’s grandparents promise to take her to Spaceland in Orlando, Florida, a place where she must speak English, Juana becomes an inspired English learner, and everyone is surprised at how quickly she learns to speak English (64). Papazian says about reading, “Early Readers model, codify, and enact [learning language] as a powerful and empowering conceptual, intellectual practice” (73). In other words, Early Readers such as Juana and Lucas don’t explicitly teach reading or language lessons, but do reinforce positive attitudes about learning. Juana’s relationship with her grandparents also highlights another common element in contemporary Early Readers: intergenerational relationships. As in the Meet Yasmin, Jo Jo Makoons, and even British-​Nigerian author Atinuke’s Too Small Tola series (2020–​), it is the influence of the grandparents that brings the young protagonist into new perspectives on perceived challenges. Juana’s grandparents’ offer to introduce her to her hero, Astroman, is enough to change Juana’s language block into a “big and loud fountain of English” (64). The titular protagonist in the Too Small Tola series (which, unlike the same author’s Anna Hibiscus and No. 1 Car Spotter series, locates her heroine in Lagos, Nigeria) learns strength from both her tiny grandmommy and her neighbor Mrs. Shaky-​Shaky, who is the same height as Tola and tells her, “Don’t let anyone tell you that you are too small. […] One can never be too small” (37). To be sure, in the last few years, beginner books series with protagonists of color are increasingly common. For instance, lighthearted fantasy series such as Dave the Unicorn (2019) by Pip Bird; Desmond Cole, Ghost Patrol (2017) by Andres Miedos; Mighty Meg (2019) by Sammy Griffin, about a girl with superpowers from a magical ring; Zoey Sassafras (2017) by Asia Citro, about a girl who can heal magical animals; and Mia Mayhem (2018) by Kara West, about a young girl who enrolls in a superhero academy, all have African American main characters. Other more realistic series follow characters such as Korean American Mindy Kim (2020) by Lyla Lee and African American Frankie Sparks (2019) by Megan Frazer Blakemore, which is billed as “Ivy and Bean Meets Aliens in My Pocket.” Other series, including Claudia Mills’s After-​School Superstars and DiCamillo’s Tales from Deckawoo Drive, weave a diverse cast of characters throughout the series by maintaining setting but changing protagonists from book to book. Mills’s Lucy Lopez (2020) is a Latina coder, for example, and the Endicott siblings, who are African American, are the center of books five (2020) and six (2021) of DiCamillo’s new series. The diversity of the authors, though, remains lacking. According to the CCBC, while they receive a fair number of requests for statistics on how many books are #OwnVoices (that is, works written by authors of color), “The answer is no, these numbers alone cannot determine the extent of #OwnVoices” (Tyner). Books for beginner readers continue to evolve as publishers and authors attend to the larger concerns of the field of children’s literature. We posit here that beginner books might be a modest form that clever writers can work well within, but also that books for beginning readers are at the mercy of trends in literacy instruction, perhaps more so than other categories of children’s literature. While books for beginner readers are often dismissed as disposable pre-​literature, they carry the weight of cultural anxieties about children, literacy, and learning on their shoulders.

Works Cited Abate, Michelle Ann. “The Boxcar Children and The Box-​Car Children: The Rewriting of Gertrude Chandler Warner’s Classic and the Origins of the Early Reader.” Miskec and Wannamaker, pp. 26–​37. Barrows, Annie. Ivy and Bean. Illustrated by Sophie Blackall, Chronicle Books, 2007. Bean, Joy. “In Search of New Readers: A Look at Some Developments in Easy-​Reader and Chapter Book Lines.” Publishers Weekly, 31 May 2004, www.publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​print/​20040​531/​28769-​in-​sea​rch-​of-​new-​ read​ers.html. Bird, Betsy. “The Rise in Latino Children’s Literature: A 2015 Accounting.” School Library Journal, 3 April 2015.

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Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec Brown, Emma. The One Syllable Book. D. Lothrop and Co., 1879. Caponegro, Ramona. “From the New England Primer to The Cat in the Hat: Big Steps in the Growth and Development of Early Readers.” Miskec and Wannamaker, pp. 13–​25. D’Orio, Wayne. “Reading Levels Unfairly Label Learners, Say Critics. And Then There’s the Research.” School Library Journal, 3 February 2020, www.slj.com/​story/​Where-​did-​Level​ing-​Go-​Wrong-​leve​led-​read​ing-​lexi​les-​ AR-​librar​ies-​books-​foun​tas-​pinn​ell. Faruqi, Saadia. Meet Yasmin. Illustrated by Hatem Aly, Picture Window Books, 2018. Fitzsimmons, Rebeka. “Creating and Marketing Early Reader Picture Books.” Miskec and Wannamaker, pp. 38–​56. Heath, Michelle Beisel. “ ‘Just think –​ how many girls have special powers like you?’: WeirdGirls and the Normalizing of Deviance in Early Readers.” Miskec and Wannamaker, pp. 38–​56. Kamenetz, Anna. “What ‘A Nation at Risk’ Got Wrong, and Right, About U.S. Schools.” NPR, 29 April 2018, www.npr.org/​secti​ons/​ed/​2018/​04/​29/​604986​823/​what-​a-​nat​ion-​at-​risk-​got-​wrong-​and-​right-​about-​u-​s-​ scho​ols. Kidd, Kenneth, and Joseph T. Thomas Jr., eds. Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards. Routledge, 2017. Lodge, Sally. “Random House Celebrates Junie B. Jones’s 20th Anniversary.” Publishers Weekly, 26 April 2012, www.publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​childr​ens/​childr​ens-​book-​news/​arti​cle/​51684-​ran​dom-​house-​ celebrates-​junie-​b-​jones-​s-​20th-​anni​vers​ary.html. —​—​—​. “Scholastic Announces the Return of Captain Underpants.” Publishers Weekly, 12 January 2012, www. publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​childr​ens/​childr​ens-​book-​news/​arti​cle/​50161-​sch​olas​tic-​announ​ces-​the-​ ret​urn-​of-​capt​ain-​und​erpa​nts.html. Look, Lenore. Ruby Lu Brave and True. Illustrated by Anne Wilsdorf, Atheneum, 2006. Marcus, Leonard. Minders of Make-​Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Maughan, Shannon. “PW: Readers for Early Readers.” Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2000, www.publi​sher​sweekly. com/​pw/​print/​20000​522/​28034-​pw-​read​ers-​for-​early-​read​ers.html. Minarik, Else Holmelund. Little Bear’s Friend. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak, HarperCollins, 1960. Miskec, Jennifer, and Annette Wannamaker, eds. The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture: Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers, Routledge, 2015. —​—​—​. “Introduction: Early, Easy, First, Beginner, Chapter.” Miskec and Wannamaker, pp. 1–​12. Moyers, Bill. “Maurice Sendak: Where the Wild Things Are.” NOW on PBS, 2004, www.shop​pbs.pbs.org/​now/​ arts/​sen​dak.html. Patrick, Diane, and Calvin Reid. “The Book Biz Learns to Embrace Our Diverse Reality.” Publishers Weekly, 19 November 2021, www.publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​indus​try-​news/​publis​her-​news/​arti​cle/​87948-​the-​ book-​biz-​lea​rns-​to-​embr​ace-​our-​dive​rse-​real​ity.html. Papazian, Gretchen. “Reading Reading in the Early Reader: Mindset, Emotion, and Power.” Miskec and Wannamaker, pp. 71–​87. Quigley, Dawn. Jo Jo Makoons: The Used-​to-​Be Best Friend. Illustrated by Tara Audibert, HarperCollins, 2021. Seuss, Dr. The Cat in the Hat. Random House, 1957. Shaffer, Sylvie. “What (Exactly) Is an Easy Reader?” The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 95, iss. 2, March/​April 2019, pp. 24–​30. Stearns, Peter N. Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America. New York University Press, 2003. Susina, Jan. “American Girls Collection: Barbies with a Sense of History.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 3, January 2009, pp. 130–​35. TeachingBooks. “In-​Depth Written Interview with Barbara Park.” TeachingBooks, January 2008, www.teachi​ ngbo​oks.net/​interv​iew.cgi?id=​78&a=​1. Tyner, Madeline. “The CCBC’s Diversity Statistics: New Categories, New Data.” The Horn Book, 2 February 2021, www.hbook.com/​story/​the-​ccbcs-​divers​ity-​sta​tist​ics-​new-​cat​egor​ies-​new-​data. Verstegen, Deborah A. “Education Fiscal Policy in the Reagan Administration.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 12, no. 4, Winter 1990, pp. 355–​73. We Need Diverse Books. “Heartdrum.” https://​diver​sebo​oks.org/​progr​ams/​heartd​rum/​, accessed 1 June 2022.

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10 MAGAZINES Kristine Moruzi

Historians of children’s periodicals have outlined the changing understanding of childhood in the nineteenth century and how magazines aimed at children reflected these shifts. As Marjory Lang writes, “Nowhere is the Victorian preoccupation with childhood manifested more eloquently than in the books and magazines they produced for the young” (17). Diana Dixon makes a related claim that the “special period called childhood” that typifies the nineteenth century is “clearly exemplified” in children’s periodicals published between 1824 and 1914 (63). Her evidence for this argument includes the rapid increase in children’s magazines from the five published in 1824 to the more than 160 appearing in 1900. Kirsten Drotner’s study of English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–​1945 (1988), the first book-​length examination of children’s popular print culture, argues that juvenile magazines are the “aesthetic organizers of [the] contradictory experiences” of childhood and youth (4). The complexities of childhood are experienced differently by children based on age, class, gender, and race, and consequently how children read and interpret magazines can vary substantially. The role of periodicals in print culture is not simply a reflection of the ideas circulating at any given time. As Lyn Pykett explains about Victorian periodicals, “Far from being a mirror of Victorian culture, the periodicals have come to be seen as a central component of that culture […] and they can only be read and understood as part of that culture and society, and in the context of other knowledges about them” (102). As we consider children’s periodicals, then, we need to examine the extent to which these magazines are reflecting but also constituting an idea (or ideal) of childhood. In this chapter, I focus specifically on English-​language magazines published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they established many of the traditions that subsequent periodicals expand upon later in the twentieth century and in other languages. Moreover, magazines published during this period were central to the development of children’s print culture in ways that were specific to the period as literacy improved alongside rapid advancements in print technology. I examine the specific features of children’s magazines –​ including serialized fiction, illustrations and photographs, correspondence columns, fundraising campaigns, and contests and competitions –​ that expose, but also facilitate, the changing nature of childhood in English print culture from the beginnings of missionary magazines to evangelical and commercial publications and special-​interest magazines. I draw on a range of British and American periodicals to analyze the similarities in children’s magazines to show how ideas about children and childhood shifted over time and are reflected in the related, but also evolving, strategies employed by editors to attract and retain readers.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-13

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Defining the Ideal Child Reader An important function of early children’s magazines was literacy, which was connected to religious faith and understanding. Children needed to be able to read the Bible to have access to the word of God. Throughout the eighteenth century, as Alan Richardson explains, “The view of literacy as a means of inculcating religion and morality, and the project of ‘civilising’ the English poor […], are conceptions which would continue to dominate discourse of popular education” (83). Both the Wesleyan Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society launched children’s magazines in 1844 with two main objectives in mind: first, these publications would enable children to learn important religious lessons, and second, they would keep child readers apprised of mission activities to encourage their ongoing support. The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering (1844–​74) and the Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844–​87) thus provide some of the earliest examples of the complexities of childhood in this period, in which children were seen as subjects to be educated but also as an important source of fundraising. The ideal child found in these magazines was not only a religious subject but also an object of charitable promotion and fundraising. Aimed at both working-​ and middle-​class children with different levels of education and literacy, these magazines encouraged all children to maintain their faith and to reflect on how they could raise funds for missionary activities. In the nineteenth century, children were understood as potential sources of income, both through paid work (for working-​class children) and for their ability to attract other, typically adult donors. In the first issue of the Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, the editor comments on the “happy results” of the Christmas and New Year’s Offering of 1843 (“To Our Young Readers” 2), a fundraising campaign that began in 1841 and continued annually. The Juvenile Missionary Magazine ran a similar campaign encouraging child readers to help finance their missionary ship, the John Williams, eventually raising funds to pay for multiple ships. These missionary magazines set the stage for children’s active engagement with their charitable causes. Although, as Frank Prochaska writes, children had been a source of financial contributions for charities from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the emergence of the juvenile publications marked the beginning of serialized print offerings to encourage child readers to participate. The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering provided updates about various missionary activities including letters from missionaries and their wives, stories about children who have been influenced by their religious education, and editorials encouraging children to continue fundraising. In the initial editorial, child readers are addressed in the second person to bring them into the community of readers and remind them of their responsibilities to others: “We shall also tell you about various other things which you may like to know, in order that you love the Missionaries, and encourage you to increase your efforts for them, that they may have the opportunity of preaching to the ignorant and lost” (“To Our Young Readers” 2). This direct address promotes the idea of a religious child who not only reads about mission activities but also takes action. The missionary activities are regularly reported in the magazine so that children can see the connection between the funds they have raised and the activities performed by the missionaries overseas. These reports on missionary activities would presumably have been one of the features that attracted child readers during this mid-​century period when fiction, and especially serialized fiction, was still relatively uncommon in children’s magazines. Magazine editors wanted their products to be attractive and entertaining, and fiction was an important component of this entertainment. Yet if they included too much entertainment, they might be seen to be too amusing and not sufficiently instructive. Indeed, Charlotte Yonge was chastised for featuring too much fiction in her High Anglican magazine The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the Church of England (1851–​99). In a letter “To Our Readers” in November 1864, Yonge explains that readers had written in to complain that the magazine had become too “frivolous” with multiple serialized stories that focus too much on “love and marriage” (553). Although The Monthly Packet had an older implied 118

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readership than the juvenile missionary magazines, Yonge’s reflections on the appropriateness of fiction are consistent with broader contemporary concerns about children’s reading. Concerns about the types of texts available for children to read are perennial and speak to contemporary ideas about how definitions of childhood might be shifting. The inclusion of advertising in children’s magazines certainly suggests children were increasingly positioned as consumers. These concerns became especially relevant after the economies of book and magazine publication began to change. Reductions in the paper tax in the 1850s meant that magazines became much more affordable. As Lang explains, “[After] the 1850s the so-​called ‘gutter press’ began more and more to converge on the juvenile market” (21), with publishers such as Edmund Brett, W. W. and George Emmett, and Charles Fox making fortunes with penny weeklies that “closely resembled the bloods and pennyworths of crime” they had published in the 1840s (22). Sensational publications such as Brett’s The Boys of England (1866–​99), a widely popular weekly magazine, attracted boys to its pages with “thrilling fiction and rousing non-​fiction, plus a thriving correspondence column, all led by a tempting cover illustration,” a format that became the “industry standard for decades to come,” as Christopher Banham puts it (69). The disturbing popularity of such exciting, if morally dubious, titles prompted the emergence of other kinds of children’s magazines that equally sought to attract both boys and girls by providing appropriate materials that were entertaining and also morally upright. Aunt Judy’s Magazine, launched in 1866, was edited by Margaret Gatty, a naturalist and children’s writer, and featured frequent content by Juliana Ewing, Gatty’s daughter and also a writer for children. The first issue begins with Sydney Grey’s “The Cousins and Their Friends,” followed by the initial installment of Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances, by Ewing. The diverse range of articles in this issue include an article on “coral,” unattributed but possibly written by Gatty herself, as well as some poetry and a song. A new feature, “May Memoranda,” discusses the origin of the month’s name and historical events occurring in May including Queen Victoria’s birth, her lineage back to William the Conqueror, and the end of the War of the Roses. Gatty remarks, “If these are but a few of the great historical events of May connected with kingdoms and kings, our readers must try to hunt up others for themselves” (“May Memoranda” 64). These wide-​ranging articles, with almost half the volume consisting of fiction, but the remainder including natural history, poetry, and history, indicates an implied readership of well educated middle-​class readers, especially since its sixpenny price per issue would have placed it out of reach of poorer children. These contents provide important indicators about how women such as Gatty understood childhood as a time of natural curiosity and imagination, but also as a time when reading and independent study was to be encouraged. Aunt Judy’s Magazine focused on including high-​quality fiction for child readers, as did another contemporary publication, Good Words for the Young (1868–​87), published by Alexander Strahan after the success of his adult publication Good Words. It is aimed at a similar mixed readership of boys and girls, albeit with a more explicitly religious tone, signaling the importance of religious faith that began with missionary magazines and continued in other forms throughout the century. Its advertising pages include a list of children’s books by different publishers, such as James Nisbet, Hatchard’s, Hodder and Stoughton, and Macmillan, once again highlighting the interconnection of book and magazine publications during this period. The first issue in November 1868 begins with a story, “Madam How and Lady Why,” by Charles Kingsley, who published The Water-​Babies in 1863. It also includes the first installment of At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald, which ran serially over the next two years, eventually concluding in October 1870. Other authors of note included Dinah Craik, “Sarah Tytler” (the pseudonym of Henrietta Keddie), Jean Ingelow, and Hans Christian Andersen. Despite including contributions from these well-​known authors, however, the magazine was never a great success. Like Aunt Judy’s Magazine, its sixpenny price meant it was targeting a relatively small, middle-​class readership. The ideal child defined in these expensive 119

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magazines was expected to enjoy high-​quality fiction from popular writers alongside informational articles covering a range of scientific and historical topics. The presence of high-​profile authors in the pages of these periodicals signals the importance of quality fiction to the success of a children’s magazine. Juvenile missionary magazines had a relatively captive audience through their Sunday School distribution networks, but commercial magazines such as Aunt Judy’s Magazine and Good Words for the Young needed to attract readers and hoped that having familiar authors in their pages would induce potential customers to purchase an issue and eventually subscribe to the publication. These well-​known authors could also reassure adult buyers of the quality of the writing and its appropriateness for young readers since, Susan Gannon points out, the “significant secondary audience of adults” was a “key factor in the success of any literary magazine for children” (153). Moreover, serialized fiction offered an opportunity to attract subscribers over the longer term, as child readers eagerly sought the next issue to see the latest installment of the story. As Linda Hughes and Michael Lund explain, the serial novel published in the press is “a whole made up of parts that at once function as self-​contained units and as building blocks of a larger aesthetic structure” (149). The quantity and quality of fiction appearing in the pages of a children’s magazine contributed to definitions of readership and encouraged new subscribers. The ideal child reader was increasingly attracted by visual content as the century progressed. Illustrations were heavily featured by the turn of the twentieth century since they were a vehicle through which new magazines could be defined and sold. According to Brian Maidment and Aled Jones, “the proprietors of magazines gained an understanding of the value of images in negotiating social values, thus reinforcing such cherished ideas as the domestic, temperance, and self-​ improvement through a range of visual tropes and codes available even to barely literate readers” (305). Good Words for the Young led the way with a number of high-​quality illustrations in each issue. By adding illustrations to appropriate content for children, publishers hoped to attract and retain readers. Arthur Hughes, a distinguished artist, was one of the main illustrators. Others included John Pettle, Francis Arthur Fraser, W. S. Gilbert, Edward Dalziel and Thomas Dalziel, and Tom Hood (Oakley). In relation to children’s magazines, illustrations would have included the “tropes and codes” of childhood, but they also had a more practical objective of clarifying the intended readership of young people and encouraging them to purchase or subscribe to the magazine. By including images of children and elements of childhood such as animals, hobbies, toys, and the natural world, the magazine could hope to attract child readers.

American Publications In the United States, related developments in children’s periodicals are evident. One of the best known American children’s magazines of the nineteenth century, St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys (1873–​1943), offered features similar to those of many popular British children’s magazines. Launched in November 1873, the magazine calls attention in its subtitle to its visual elements, reflecting the importance of illustrations during this period. In the table of contents, each illustration, and sometimes its author, is identified, making it easy for readers to find the images in each issue. The first page of advertising hawks the “beautiful story” of Hans Brinker; Or, The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland (1865). Scribner was already known for its children’s books, including Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth (published in English in 1871), and it had installed as editor of the magazine one of its successful authors, Hans Brinker’s creator Mary Mapes Dodge, hoping to attract readers through both its books and its magazines and then directing them to the other publications. This was a common strategy employed within the book and magazine publishing industry, in which readers who were already consuming some of the publisher’s products could ideally be enticed to read others. 120

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In the nineteenth century, magazines understood their child readers as a collective audience. Dodge begins the first issue with an opening salutation, “Dear Girl and Boy,” but quickly amends this phrase: “No, there are more! Here they come! Here they come!… coming by dozens, hundreds, thousands, troops upon troops, and all pressing closer and closer” (1). These great numbers of children are all eager to get their hands on the first issue of the magazine and join the community of readers. They are, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, an “imagined community” of active, engaged children who wish to become part of the group of “friends” (Dodge, “Dear” 1) united by their shared interest in St. Nicholas, both the magazine and the figure. Dodge makes a promise to her readers when she describes St. Nicholas as “the kindest, best, and jolliest old dear,” who is “fair and square,” “comes when he says he will,” “and casts a light upon the children’s faces that lasts from year to year” (1). The aim of the magazine, she concludes, is “Never to dim this light, young friends, by words or token, to make it even brighter, when we can, in good, pleasant, helpful ways, and to clear away clouds that sometimes shut it out” (1). The magazine’s goal to shed light reflects an ideal of childhood in which children are encouraged to be positive and help others. Although not explicitly religious, the Christian undertones are evident here and throughout the magazine. In the first issue, a full-​page illustration of “Grandmother” sitting in her rocking chair with her Bible in her lap (16) is accompanied by a short story from Elsie G, who describes how her grandmother has fallen asleep in the sun. Elsie explains that she and her sisters “were supposed to love her” but thought of her as “quite different from the rest of the world” and far away from the concerns of girlhood (17). When Elsie sees her grandmother sleeping in the sun, however, “God helps her to see the secret of her grandmother’s life”: that even “in the wonderful sunset of her life […] she needed a share of what God was giving us, –​ friends, home interests, little surprises and expectations, loving offices, and, above all, a recognition in the details of our fresh, young lives” (17). This experience is transformative for young Elsie as she opens her heart to God and sees her grandmother entirely differently. Explicitly religious tales of this kind are set alongside other articles in St. Nicholas that speak to the diversity of childhood interests. In “By the Sea,” for instance, Noah Brooks imagines what boys who live in the country do for fun, writing that “as a boy, I used to think that the poor fellows who never knew salt water nor saw the furious breakers dash on the rock coast of New England, were much to be pitied” (10). Margaret Evtinge’s “What the Worm Could and Did Do” also describes a young boy who asks “And why?” so often that he is called Andy. The natural curiosity of the boy is rewarded when he meets a worm, who tells him he will continue to live even after Andy chops him in half. These short stories are not only entertaining but also offer visibility into the kinds of content seen to be appealing to child readers. The inaugural issue also includes poetry, natural history, history, and the first serialized story, “What Might Have Been Expected,” by Frank R. Stockton, assistant editor of the magazine (Bowen 475). The range of content is designed to appeal to a variety of interests, but it also reflects an understanding of children as naturally curious. Yet the magazine also understands children and childhood as marked by temporal difference. Its attempt to appeal to both younger and older children is evident in its “For Little Folks” page, with its larger font and short, simple stories. In contrast to the remainder of the forty-​eight-​page issue, “For Little Folks” is aimed at beginning readers, with an illustration of a dog, Major, whose first-​person narrative on the facing page begins, “I am Major. Come smooth my head and pull my ears. I won’t bite” (“For Little Folks” 33). The magazine’s desire to attract very young readers was abandoned by the end of the first year, however, perhaps reflecting the complexity of creating a magazine that appeals to young children while remaining relevant and topical for its primary readership of older boys and girls. Children’s magazines were always challenged by the need to be fresh while also retaining readers who wished to see their favorite features remain. The advertisement for the second volume explains how St. Nicholas, now “aided by a year’s experience in meeting the wants of young readers, will aim 121

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to be an improvement” (“The Second Volume,” n.pg.) on the previous volume: “The plan is to have such a variety […] so that, for a family of boys and girls, St. Nicholas shall be at once playmate, elder companion, sympathizing friend, and co-​explorer into the truths and wonders of the world” (n. pg.). It advertises serial stories by J. T. Trowbridge and Louisa May Alcott as the “leading attractions” in the next volume, as well as “a capital stock of short stories and sketches” plus “bright papers” (n. pg.) on history, biography, travel, adventure, outdoor and indoor sports, boys’ and girls’ handicrafts, natural history, literature, popular science, puzzles, and riddles. The immense variety that the advertisement boasts demonstrates both the diversity of children’s interests and the magazine’s desire to be attractive to children regardless of their specific tastes. The success of this goal is evident in a letter from Mattie B. Westall published in “The Letter-​Box” in 1883. She writes, “I cannot find words to express the pleasure I felt when I received a letter with a recent number of your dear magazine” as a gift from her aunt. With eight children in the family, four boys and four girls, “You can imagine what a commotion there is in our house when it arrives, for the little ones want to see the pictures, and the large ones to see the pictures and read the stories” (“The Letter-​Box” 76). Maggie’s letter reflects the varied interests of readers, even within one family. The complexities of defining magazine readerships are highlighted in another letter appearing in “The Letter-​Box.” The content suggests a relatively young readership of probably eight-​to fourteen-​ year-​olds. Yet Josephine B. writes that she works in an office taking shorthand and typing it up from 8 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. each day. She does not have much leisure time but “always takes time to read your interesting stories” (“The Letter-​Box” 76). The editor’s response is telling: [Josephine’s] welcome letter is but one out of many which we have received from [readers] who are already supporting themselves or who are intending soon to begin the battle of life in earnest. And it is very gratifying to us to know that all of these budding men and women who have been reading ST . NI CHOLAS refuse to outgrow the magazine, as they outgrow their juvenile toys and pleasures, and that they find it as interesting and helpful a companion on their return from officedesk or counter as when, in past times, they rushed home from school to greet it. (“The Letter-​Box” 76) Although the magazine may not have anticipated that young people would continue to be interested in its contents as they begin to earn their living, the editor is happy to discover this is the case. Unlike the childish pleasures that they “outgrew,” the magazine transcends the limits of childhood. The innocent amusements contained within the pages of a children’s magazine can be enjoyed by readers of any age.

Correspondence The ideal child reader of most children’s magazines was an active participant in creating its reading and writing culture. As paper prices decreased, children’s contributions to their magazines were increasingly evident. Prior to this shift, paper for letters as well as space in the magazine itself would have been too expensive to permit the development of an active correspondence culture in and through a magazine. In the second half of the century, however, many magazines strongly encouraged children to write in with questions, stories, or poetry. Children could hope to see their name and their contribution in print, further developing the sense of magazine community as well as defining a literate selfhood. Correspondence pages varied significantly from magazine to magazine depending on both editorial and child readers’ interests. Sîan Pooley’s discussion of children’s contributions to provincial popular newspapers between 1876 and 1914 considers how child writers created “authorial selves” through their submissions. She argues that a “vibrant culture of juvenile writing that flourished outside 122

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the schoolroom” was produced through children’s participation in these columns (77). A related, although not identical, form of writing culture was produced through children’s magazines, wherein children were able to seek out information, tell stories, and share experiences with other children. The popularity of a correspondence section depended on children’s engagement, which often developed over time. The correspondence sections implicitly define an ideal child reader as participatory, literate, and invested in the magazine’s success. Typically, these columns started off quite small, but the space dedicated to them was often expanded if they proved popular. The “Notice to Correspondent” (in some months, “Notice to Correspondents”) section in the Monthly Packet begins in March 1851 when Yonge responds to E. M. to say that her “first chapter is promising” (208); the next month she agrees to provide some comments if E. M. will send her address. From this modest beginning, with correspondence taking up just a couple of lines at the bottom of the page, this section in the Monthly Packet appeared regularly as readers sought publication in the magazine. Yonge reminds correspondents of the demands of print, with limited pages and time constraints, explaining: “Our correspondents must remember that there cannot be room for every one at once” (“Notice to Correspondent” 160). She occasionally accepts submissions for publication via this section, although more frequently they are “declined with thanks” (“Notice to Correspondents” 112). In other cases, she urges patience among her young writers, advising L. F. to “wait at least seven years before you try to put [your stories] into print” (“Notice to Correspondents” 112). The Monthly Packet’s correspondence section is unique in terms of how Yonge connected with prospective writers and facilitated the development of a writing culture among readers.1 Editorial personas were sometimes used to encourage children’s engagement with their magazine. Aunt Judy’s Magazine is one such example. Gatty used the “Aunt Judy” persona in reference to her daughter Juliana, informally known as Judy, to indicate her editorial role. That persona was tightly aligned with the magazine from its first issues, where the title of the magazine and its persona were intertwined. In the provincial popular press, “[e]‌ditors always wrote under familial noms-​de-​plume, most commonly ‘Uncle’ ” (Pooley 79). At Home and Abroad, retitled from the Wesleyan Juvenile Offering in 1874, instituted a column by “Uncle Ned” in 1903 and included whimsical line drawings to attract readers’ attention. Uncle Ned draws on the familial relationship when he declares that “all you Missionary Collectors [are] my nephews and nieces” and encourages his readers to “try to get as many more as you can to become the same relation” (“Notes by Uncle Ned” 88). This familial relationship –​ whether with an “Aunt” or an “Uncle” –​ encouraged affection and intimacy between child readers and their magazines. In a missionary magazine such as At Home and Abroad, that intimacy could be used to mobilize readers to find new subscribers to join the missionary cause and contribute to its fundraising. In Aunt Judy’s Magazine, the objectives were not as explicitly financial, although Gatty did encourage her readers to contribute to funding a cot at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, eventually named the “Aunt Judy’s Magazine Cot” and inspiring other children’s magazines to sponsor similar charitable causes for sick children. The vibrant correspondence pages of the Boy’s Own Paper (1879–​1967) and the Girl’s Own Paper (1880–​1956) did not employ editorial personas, but their popularity undoubtedly reflects the interest with which young readers sought to overcome “their limited access to information” (Chen and Moruzi 31). These two magazines, launched by the Religious Tract Society, were part of the ongoing quest to ensure that children had access to affordable and appropriate reading materials. While letters from children were rarely published in these magazines, even the editorial responses provide a view of how children participated in their magazines. Scholars including Richard Altick have speculated that many of the queries in family magazines, “especially the ones which today would be addressed to reference librarians,” were fabricated (360), but the sheer volume of the queries means they are more likely to be authentic. In its first decade in print, the Boy’s Own Paper received three to four hundred letters per week (Cox 20), and the Girl’s Own Paper similarly claimed that it received “hundreds” of letters weekly (“Answers to Correspondents” 383). It simply would not have been practical to make 123

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up such a large number of questions, nor would it have produced the reader engagement that was a clear objective of magazines during this period. The volume of correspondence created problems that the editors attempted to control by developing rules for letter writers. The editors had a practical problem in which a set number of pages had to be allocated across all the regular features. When faced with an expanded correspondence section, they had to negotiate with child readers to manage its length. Writers in the Girl’s Own Paper are told that “any letters containing more than two questions will be destroyed unanswered” (“Answers to Correspondents” 512). Boys are told to submit questions only when they can see “no way out of it” (“Correspondence” 576). The editors of both magazines aimed to direct readers to certain types of questions that they deemed most suitable for their readers, and their responses were at times rather harsh. As Pooley notes, the editors were “actively dismissive of the quality of submitted writing,” and their responses were “tightly-​focused editorial agendas centred on showing readers how to grow into more moral, strongly gendered adults” (82). However, Cynthia Ellen Patton makes a compelling case that the correspondence section in the Girl’s Own Paper provided girls with health information that was not otherwise available to them and offered readers “an optimistic sense of control over their own health” (112). While many of the questions submitted by readers may have been repetitive and mundane and were simply discarded by the editor, other questions were evidently relevant and topical. Recurring categories that appeared in the Girl’s Own Paper correspondence section, including employment, emigration, and health, offered practical information that readers would find useful when making plans for the future. In the 1880s, emigration to British colonies was at its height, and readers wrote regularly to inquire about agents and what they might expect if they decided to emigrate. The magazine responded to this interest by including informational articles and some fiction that focused on the emigration experience. In many children’s magazines, children were understood to be interested in contemporary topics. As the focus on emigration declined, other areas of interest such as women’s suffrage began to take precedence. Of course, few magazines dared to take on such topics. Children’s magazines perennially had to balance the interests of their readers and the interest of their parents. However, correspondence sections presented a space where readers felt free to express themselves. In the Girls’ Realm (1898–​1915), for instance, despite editor Alice Corkran’s reluctance, girl readers insisted on discussing the increasingly violent protests in favor of women’s suffrage. In a 1904 “Chat with the Girl of  the  Period,” a recurring column, Corkran writes that “I am not concerned with woman’s claims for the suffrage, because The Girl’s Realm is not a political publication” (692). By 1908, however, she is forced to accede to demands to discuss “the great, the burning, question of the franchise for women” (525). What followed was a series of letters from girl readers who were interested in debating the topic and who demonstrated their engagement with their magazine with articulate arguments both for and against women gaining the vote.

Competitions The ideal child was also defined through a love of play. Editors encouraged children’s active contributions to their magazines through puzzles, riddles, and competitions. These kinds of activities were designed to attract children’s attention, and they sometimes included prizes for the winners. Riddles and puzzles not only offered a fun challenge but were also designed to encourage children to read the next issue of the magazine, where the solutions were published. Beth Rodgers examines two similar competitions in the Girl’s Own Paper and the Girl’s Realm, in which readers of the former magazine were invited in 1887 to submit entries on notable women during Queen Victoria’s reign and readers of the latter were asked in 1901 to vote for their most prized heroine. Such competitions, Rodgers argues, contributed to the development of a magazine’s “coherent textual identity” (277), which aimed to reconcile tensions emerging from readerly differences in class, nationality, and age. 124

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In other magazines, competitions were designed to celebrate skills in hobbies such as woodworking, painting, drawing, and embroidery, but these efforts were considerably more logistically complex. Whereas writerly efforts could be printed in the magazine and otherwise discarded, craft submissions could not be easily returned to their creators. Children’s participation in these contests nonetheless reflects their dedication to a variety of hobbies that were part of how childhood was defined at the time. Some competitions were quite scholarly, which reflects a particular focus for certain magazines committed to education as a feature of the ideal reader. For example, Atalanta (1887–​98), a girls’ magazine with a keen interest in education, developed a series of strategies designed to encourage readers to improve their literary writing skills. Edited by the popular girls’ author L. T. Meade for its first five years, the magazine attracted contributions from other notable authors, among them H. Rider Haggard, Mary Molesworth, and Grant Allen. It included content that reflected girls’ interests in their future, such as a series on potential employment and a number of articles about education. A regular series was “The Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union,” which featured articles on such well-​ known literary figures as Sir Walter Scott, John Keble, Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Each month, subscribers to the “Union” were asked to write a 500-​word essay from a choice of topics around the novel under consideration for the month. Girls were expected to read the novel and then write an essay for assessment. In the year-​end competition, a university scholarship was offered as a prize. Girl readers are presented with opportunities for further education through material and financial support for their intellectual goals. Children’s magazines became even more visual with advances in technology. Competitions designed to attract readers were promoted through the widespread use of photographs. This technology was used in 1900 to encourage child readers in At Home and Abroad to raise money for missionary activities by publishing photographs of successful fundraisers. John Pritchard observes that Methodist periodicals were “lavishly illustrated with photographs” in the early twentieth century, becoming “more effective at putting readers ‘in the picture’ ” (61). That religious periodicals were keeping up with the latest innovations in the press is unsurprising. Like their commercial counterparts, they were keenly interested in attracting and retaining readers and needed to be seen as modern and attractive. The editor’s plan to publish photos of successful fundraisers proved so popular, however, that he was soon forced to implement more formal guidelines requiring children to have raised at least £2 in the previous year. This amount was increased to £4 just two years later, suggesting that the high volume of photographs continued to be difficult to manage. The inclusion of an index to “Our Juvenile Collectors” in the 1903 annual (n. pg.) enabled child readers to find their photographs more easily, indicating the eagerness with which they sought to see images of themselves. The importance of children seeing themselves in their magazines is especially apparent in twentieth-​century titles such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Brownies’ Book (1920–​21), a short-​lived American monthly magazine aimed at Black children. The inaugural cover features a young girl in ballet shoes with her arms stretched out confidently over her head. The frontispiece image of Her Royal Highness Zaouditou, Empress of Ethiopia, is similarly striking, as she sits in an elaborately embroidered robe with a magnificent headpiece. The pages are full of images of “little friends” of the magazine (11), and in “The Jury” correspondence section, children express their interest and ask questions. Franklin Lewis explains that he is “very glad” to have a magazine “about colored boys and girls” because he wants information about “some of the things which colored boys can work at when they grow up” (15). He wishes to learn how to draw a house and hopes that Du Bois will explain where he can go. Another correspondent, a fifteen-​year-​old girl from Seattle, wants to attend boarding school, but has not “been able to get anyone to help” with her plan, finding that “the people are very down on the Negro race. In some schools they do not want colored children” (15). Twelve-​ year-​old Eleanor Holland asks for book recommendations on the Negro, for she wants to learn more about her race and hopes to “bend all of my efforts for the advancement of colored people” (15). The inclusion of a correspondence section as well as the many images of Black children reflect not only 125

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the contemporary expectations of children’s periodicals, but also the importance of representation during this period. The final page of the first issue concludes with a “Dedication” from coeditor Jessie Fauset, who writes: To Children, who with eager look Scanned vainly library shelf and nook, For History or Song or Story That told of Colored Peoples’ glory,–​ We dedicate THE BROWNIES ’ BOOK . (32) The editors –​and the child readers –​were alive to the possibilities of a magazine written specifically for African Americans. The features of children’s magazines including photography and competitions intersect to further define the ideal child as healthy. The Canadian Red Cross Junior magazine, first published in 1920, supported the Red Cross Society’s goal of improving children’s health and promoting healthy habits. Child readers were regularly taught the rules of “The Health Game,” which was designed to encourage children to follow good eating habits, practice hygiene, and get regular exercise. This international initiative was shared worldwide, but each country’s magazine was able to adapt the rules depending on what it felt was suitable for its readers. In Canada, one initiative to encourage children to take up the health rules was a competition in which readers under age fifteen were asked to illustrate one or more of them. In 1923, the winning poster was published alongside a photograph of fourteen-​year-​old Gladys L. Cook. In the same year, the magazine also promoted a short story competition where readers were asked to provide examples of how health challenges could be overcome. The winning story by W. Owen Conquest features a poor, unhealthy child who learns the rules of health to eventually become “one of the best athletes in the West” (11). These competitions were specifically designed to promote the organization’s objectives, and the magazine was able to capitalize on the prize-​winning entries to further encourage child readers to participate in its programs and adopt its values.

Conclusion The development of children’s magazines in the nineteenth century set the stage for many of the features that became commonplace in the twentieth. Child readers were actively encouraged to engage with their magazines through content specifically written for them that defined and reinforced middle-​class ideologies about children’s innocence. Even cheaper magazines that were ostensibly aimed at a working-​class readership were aspirational, encouraging child readers to imagine different lives for themselves. Children became target markets for books and magazines, even if they did not have money of their own. Instead, they were expected to influence the adults in their lives to purchase magazines on their behalf, which meant that publishers were always aware of the adult buyer alongside the child reader. By the turn of the twentieth century, child readers and their interests are more evidently at the forefront of magazines’ concerns. Instruction gives way to entertainment, and the religious focus dissipates. Technological advances in illustration and photography mean that children’s magazines become increasingly attractive, with more visual elements and eventually much more color. This visual content also becomes increasingly child-​focused, with images of children more prevalent. The contributions of children, through correspondence, competitions, and photographs, make these magazines more vibrant and relevant to child interests and concerns. Yet the inevitable need to attract and retain readers is an ongoing problem that continues throughout the centuries. 126

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Note 1 Yonge also directed a group of young women writers called the Goslings as they worked on a manuscript magazine, the Barnacle. Many of these writers were eventually published in the Monthly Packet and elsewhere (Courtney).

Works Cited Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900. Ohio State University Press, 1957. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1991. “Answers to Correspondents.” The Girl’s Own Paper, vol. 1, 1880, pp. 383, 512. Banham, Christopher. “The Boys of England.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-​Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Academia Press and The British Library, p. 68. Bowen, Edwin W. “Frank R. Stockton.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 11, no. 4, October 1903, pp. 474–​78. Brooks, Noah. “By the Sea.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1873, pp. 10–​12. Chen, Shih-​Wen Sue, and Kristine Moruzi. “Children’s Voices in the Boy’s Own Paper and the Girl’s Own Paper, 1880–​1900.” Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 29–​52. Conquest, W. Owen. “The Runt and the Red Cross Rules.” Red Cross Junior, September 1923, pp. 10–​11. Corkran, Alice. “Chat with the Girl of the Period.” The Girl’s Realm, vol. 6, 1904, pp. 691–​92. —​—​—​. “Chat with the Girl of the Period.” The Girl’s Realm, vol. 10, 1908, pp. 525–​26. “Correspondence.” The Boy’s Own Paper, vol. 10, 1888, p. 576. Courtney, Julia. “The Barnacle: A Manuscript Magazine of the 1860s.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-​American Girl 1830–​1915, edited by Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 71–​97. Cox, Jack. Take a Cold Tub, Sir! The Story of the “Boy’s Own Paper.” Lutterworth Press, 1982. Dixon, Diana. “From Instruction to Amusement: Attitudes of Authority in Children’s Periodicals before 1914.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 19, no. 2, Summer 1986, pp. 63–​67. Dodge, Mary Mapes. “Dear Girl and Boy.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1873, p. 1. Drotner, Kirsten. English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–​1945. Yale University Press, 1988. Evtinge, Margaret. “What the Worm Could and Did Do.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1873, pp. 13–​14. Fauset, Jessie. “Dedication.” The Brownies’ Book, vol. 1, 1920, p. 32. “For Little Folks.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1873, p. 33. G., Elsie. “Grandmother.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1873, p. 17. Gannon, Susan R. “ ‘The Best Magazine for Children of All Ages’: Cross-​Editing St. Nicholas Magazine (1873–​ 1905).” Children’s Literature, vol. 25, 1997, pp. 153–​80. Gatty, Margaret. “May Memoranda.” Aunt Judy’s Magazine, vol. 1, 1866, pp. 59–​64. Hallock, Miss. “Grandmother.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1873, p. 16. Hughes, Linda, and Michael Lund. “Textual/​Sexual Pleasure and Serial Publication.” Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-​Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 143–​64. “The Jury.” The Brownies’ Book, vol. 1, 1920, p. 15. Lang, Marjory. “Childhood’s Champions: Mid-​Victorian Children’s Periodicals and Critics.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 13, nos. 1/​2, Spring-​Summer 1980, pp. 17–​31. “The Letter-​Box.” St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, vol. 11, 1883, p. 76. Maidment, Brian, and Aled Jones. “Illustration.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-​Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, Academia Press and The British Library, pp. 304–​306. “Notes by Uncle Ned.” At Home and Abroad, vol. 25, 1903, p. 88. “Notice to Correspondent.” The Monthly Packet, vol. 1, 1851, p. 208. “Notice to Correspondent.” The Monthly Packet, vol. 7, 1854, p. 160. “Notice to Correspondents.” The Monthly Packet, vol. 13, 1857, p. 112. Oakley, Maroussia. “Good Words for the Young.” Victorian Web, https://​victo​rian​web.org/​peri​odic​als/​gwfty/​ oakley.html, accessed 15 July 2022. “Our Juvenile Collectors.” At Home and Abroad, vol. 25, 1903, n. pg. Patton, Cynthia Ellen. “‘Not a limitless possession’: Health Advice and Readers’ Agency in The Girl’s Own Paper, 1888–​1890.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 111–​33.

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Kristine Moruzi Pooley, Sîan. “Children’s Writing and the Popular Press in England 1876–​1914.” History Workshop Journal, vol. 80, 2015, pp. 75–​98. Pritchard, John. Methodists and Their Missionary Societies 1900–​1996. Taylor and Francis, 2014. Prochaska, Frank. “Little Vessels: Children in the Nineteenth-​Century Missionary Movement.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 6, no. 2, 1978, pp. 103–​18. Pykett, Lyn. “Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Content.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 22, no. 3, 1989, pp. 100–​108. Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780–​1832. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rodgers, Beth. “Competing Girlhoods: Competition, Community, and Reading Contribution in ‘The Girl’s Own Paper’ and ‘The Girl’s Realm.’” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 45, no. 3, Fall 2012, pp. 277–​300. “The Second Volume of St. Nicholas.” St. Nicholas, vol. 1, 1874, n. pg. “To Our Young Readers.” Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, vol. 1, 1844, p. 2. Yonge, Charlotte. “To Our Readers.” The Monthly Packet, vol. 28, 1864, p. 553.

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11 COMICS FOR CHILDREN ACROSS CULTURES Joseph Michael Sommers

“Comics” ‘and Graphic Novels’ for “Children”: A Defensive Introduction Upon first consideration, the notion of defining comics and graphic novels for children seems deceptively easy. However, even the comics community is still debating the difference between a “comic” and a “graphic novel,” with one of the generally agreed-​upon defining differences between the two being that the latter is slightly more “serious” in addition to being a complete story within itself.1 And, of course, that construction is a nonsensical bifurcation of a medium that, depending upon the culture, carries different names, including the Japanese manga, the Franco-​Belgian bande dessinées, the Scandinavian tegneserie, and the Anglophone … comics.2 Alan Moore, one of the most recognized and respected practitioners of the medium in English, once opined in an interview: It’s a marketing term. I mean, it was one that I never had any sympathy with. The term “comic” does just as well for me. [...] The problem is that “graphic novel” just came to mean “expensive comic book” and so what you’d get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics –​because “graphic novels” were getting some attention, they’d stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-​ Hulk Graphic Novel, you know? (Kavanagh) Moore has a point. A comic can be as short as a one-​panel illustration or a multipanel strip, or it can be a twenty-​page set of panels bound with a staple and sold in a store specializing in comics or on a spinner rack adjacent to a grocery checkout lane. Contrarily, it can be an overpriced hardcover volume sold at a bookstore in a specialized section, separated from nonpictorial texts yet sharing shelf space, as Moore argues, with trade paperbacks of once serialized comics now bound together by a narrative arc and three staples at a slightly inflated price point. And that description is a simplification that exists merely in certain Anglophone cultures.3 Accordingly, like Moore, I find myself “uncomfortable” with the term “graphic novel”4 and its many theoretical intonations and elevations (Kavanagh) when there exists a perfectly reasonable one that has been around for many years: comics.5 Which is not to say that that term is any easier to define. Nevertheless, before one can begin to consider children’s comics across cultures, one must define what even constitutes a comic (whether for children or not). Fortunately, this is a significantly easier task. Cartoonist and formalist comics critic Scott McCloud may have devised the simplest definition when he argued in his seminal work DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-14

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Understanding Comics that a comic is little more than “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/​or aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). He derived that admittedly unwieldy definition from “master comics artist” Will Eisner (5), who more simplistically labels the form “sequential art” in his book of the same name, Comics and Sequential Art. Here, Eisner defines comics as “a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangements of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea” (5). In both examples, the critics are considering print iterations of, in Eisner’s words, “text [that] reads as an image” and vice versa (10). Of course, historically that focus on print is accurate, but as technology improves, even the terms “comic book” and “graphic novel” are antiquated by the fact that electronic comics sales on a mobile device or computer are as ubiquitous as holding a bound volume in one’s hand. Such technological advances also dramatically increase the ability to disseminate comics across borders and into different cultural spheres.6 Inevitably, the next definitional issue comes by way of the term “children.” The Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards, named for the aforementioned artist, are inarguably the highest regarded set of prizes within the medium of comics. Since 2008, the awards have specifically sought to prize comics work for “kids,” and in subsequent years they have diversified that term into three non-​adult categories: The Best Publication for Early Readers (up to age eight), The Best Publication for Kids (ages nine to twelve), and The Best Publication for Teens (ages thirteen to eighteen; Abate and Tarbox 5). While all those categories possessed age requirements at some point, and the Teens category, by name, still does, since 2020 all age requirements and designations have been dropped, leaving one with little more than the name and the nebulous idea of prizing a work for “creative achievement.” Admittedly, different cultures, which have their own distinct sets of difficult connotations and labels, have different designations for all these categories. Thus, it might be pragmatic to not try and define “children” so much as to consider them, culturally speaking, as that audience whom Eisner’s and McCloud’s definitions best fit. Accordingly, this chapter will be considerably less denotative than some in its articulation of terms. While it is easier to grasp if not comprehend comics assigned to adults, as, for whatever reasons, there do seem to be culturally demarcated boundaries separating content for the adult from that for the pre-​ adult, what belongs to the child is a far less precise body of work whose nuance is not defined by genre, artistic style, or semantic construct, among many other criteria. As the prizing communities themselves articulate, even considering a comic as specifically for children as opposed to another audience is a relatively new phenomenon. Contrast this concept with that operating in past eras in the newspaper industry, when one might find strips with child protagonists, such as R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley (1895–​98) and Buster Brown (1902–​23) or Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–​14 and 1924–​26), in the comics section, addressing readers of all ages. Moreover, none of this effort to arrive at a definition even begins to address the more global phenomenon of comics. Comics, even held to restrictive definitions, are not beholden to Anglophone histories; much of what newspaper magnates gravitated towards as comics came by way of adaptation of the Swiss cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer’s multi-​paneled art project, which came to be known in the United States in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (Kunzle 175). And acknowledging Töpffer’s contribution does not account for the Franco-​Belgian movements to come in the earlier twentieth century or the relatively recent manga and anime cultural explosion worldwide. All of which goes to say that, while one might absolutely know a children’s comic when one sees it, defining it is much more difficult.

Definitions Most Relative: Definitely Maybes In their edited collection Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults, Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox make a valiant effort to place brackets around what might be comics intended for children without nominalism or equivocation. Rightly, they hearken back to the 1950s, 1954 in 130

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fact, when Fredric Wertham’s intentionally flawed study Seduction of the Innocent alleged purported “scientific proof of the dangers of comics reading” (3). As Carol L. Tilley proves, Wertham’s claims were hogwash;7 however, in its time his study provoked United States Senate hearings looking to forestall the “juvenile delinquency” that he suggested might follow (3). That is to say, as an audience, children were seen as those who needed to be protected from the art form for which they were a target or, as Abate and Tarbox put it, “a clientele” (4). Asking what exactly this product is, however, brings us out of the times of the original run of Peanuts by Charles Schultz and company into the more contemporary moment when publishers began to consider moving comics into bookstores, a place of considerably greater acceptance and orthodoxy, in compiled and/​or collected runs. Those spaces were joined by libraries when librarians were overwhelmed by patrons’ requests for bound collections (Abate and Tarbox 7–​8). These seats of entrenched acceptance –​ the library, the bookstore, the place where a family could go together to peruse readerly wares with some degree of certitude that what was on the shelves had been curated for their usage –​seem to have given rise to an idea that markets existed for the crafting of comics specifically to children whose parents would purchase or borrow said books for their education and entertainment. In many ways, children’s comics as a subgenre of comics more generally is simply the construct of the old adage of supply and demand. Comics historians Randy Duncan, Matthew Smith, and Paul Levitz attempt to tackle the making of children’s comics somewhat more structurally; that is, they define the category by what it most frequently seems to contain rather than by any defining age bracket. What they call “kid comics” are “filled with small characters and big laughs[;]‌ kid comics began in newspaper pages with Rudolph Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids. They and their imitators promoted imaginative interaction with the adult world around them” (185). Citing such imitators as Little Lulu (1948–​84) and Richie Rich (1960–​ 94), they push the goalposts back on the era of comics by virtue of not what they are but what they do –​these books provoke imaginative interaction with kids by dealing with the fun and foibles of the surrounding adult world (185). Given that these strips were written by adults arguably for children, this approach makes sense as a pragmatic definition that does not exclude others reading comics of this type in moments of nostalgic longing to feel like a kid again. That definition correlates with my own earlier thoughts on the subgenre: Comics, as a medium, are primarily all designed for this age bracket (a notion that is an overgeneralization of the idea that there is no difference between the child reader and the adolescent, or young adult, reader). CYA [children’s and young adult] comics are most often characterized along the lines of the collapse of the word “comic” with “humor,” which fails as even a basic designator from psychoanalytic studies of literature forward. However, there is truth to the notion that many of the comics designated for the CYA reader are, in fact, funny –​giving rise to the antiquated terminology of comics as “funny books.” (“Genre” 80) I do disagree with Duncan, Smith, and Levitz in matters of subdividing children and young adults from each other, as it has been my experience that to do so would mean separating the genres by way of subject matter and plot as opposed to along generic lines. Which is to say, in Archie Comics (for example) teenagers do teen things, such as dating and attending high school, to humorous and somewhat chaotic ends; in children’s comics, children embark upon more childish exploits. What aligns these categories, though, as Duncan, Smith, and Levitz suggest, is that both groups behave as they do even as “dealing[s]‌ with those obnoxious adults (teachers, parents, bosses) [...] permeate the humor in these books[,] building an immediate response with the YAC reader whether from a position of empathy with the adolescent reader or envy with the child reader awaiting access to this mysterious world of fast cars and girl[s]” (80). While my argument for not separating these books by age markers 131

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does not currently align with their view, it’s not mutually exclusive either, as these considerations change over time. Such was the case in 2004 when Pulitzer-​winning author and then burgeoning comics creator Michael Chabon castigated the comics community at an Eisner Awards ceremony for “the medium’s abandonment of children” (Hatfield 360). Charles Hatfield, perhaps the preeminent American comics critic of our day, notes that the tone was “admonitory” but fair, as “the gap between comic books and today’s children has long been a source of concern among professionals –​certainly within the transatlantic, English-​language comics business” (360). The panacea for this trend? “All-​ages comics” –​a comic for everyone, as it were. Hatfield is quick to note, however, that the children’s literature community, again not mutually exclusive of the comics community, was eager to acknowledge, if not champion, the comic specifically built for the youth set (however “youth” might be divided). As such, he argues that the reconsideration of the bracketed “children’s” comic coincides with the reconsideration and rise of the “scholarship” in children’s comics (emphasis mine, 366). No agonism comes with this identification; however, in “Children and the Comics: Young Readers Take on the Critics,” Tilley addresses the matter of children responding to critics’ consideration of their comics. In one such instance, Tilley uncovered a letter from one Harley Elliott, who states quite plainly: WE BUY THEM FOR THE STORIES: THE READING EXPERIENCE I am thirteen years of age and a normal American boy. I read comics every day and also collect them. Many war comics have historical stories in them. Thus I learn more about the world. Science-​Fiction stories boost my dreams for the future. Horror stories increase my imagination. Humorous comics make me forget my worries and troubles. (169) If academics and critics have issues with defining what a child’s comic is, this thirteen-​year-​old certainly didn’t: the form embraces history, fantasy, and humor, wielding an influence therapeutic for what ailed a child entering his teens. Tilley adds, “Young comics readers were also frustrated by a different sort of gap between them and many adults, one pertaining to the role that reading comics played in their lives. Adults, especially librarians and teachers, frequently dismissed comics as frivolous junk, a passing fad, or a stepping stone on the way to more meaningful reading” (169). Here, she ameliorates points made by Hatfield and Duncan, Smith, and Levitz, annotating the frustrations of children in the 1950s with the idea that children’s comics, as both children and the artifacts themselves testify, more often than not show children dealing with arguably their greatest nemeses: the adults who think they not only know better but know what children need. That the writers of these books acknowledge this agonism appears to demonstrate that it was and remains a known issue throughout the history of the medium. And while that may be as slippery an identification as any to use to try and define a medium, it does have the benefit of over a hundred years worth of comics to support it. Or, in other words, you likely know a children’s comic when you see it. Children certainly seem to, at least. From this point onward, this chapter will address geographic and cultural distinctions of children’s comics of some considerable influence and importance, bearing in mind that designators are apt to engage in interpretation and revision.

Children’s Comics Across Cultures: Great Britain and the United States As mentioned earlier, there is no singular starting point to children’s comics in almost any culture, least of all Great Britain and the United States.8 However, if one can trace to Töpffer in the 1840s9 the genesis of the form, particularly its formal attributes, one can also begin to trace the lineages that 132

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arose from him. In the English language, that brings us to Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, but how that strip made it to children requires illumination. The Katzenjammer Kids was intended to be published as a Sunday comic and indeed was originally published as such in a supplement, The American Humorist, to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. However, Hearst’s rival Joseph Pulitzer predated him by two years in this competition when his New York World published The Yellow Kid, by Outcault (also renowned for Buster Brown and Hogan’s Alley). So why not list Outcault first? The Kid’s name is associated with the term “yellow journalism,” a phrase characterizing the sensationalist practices that Hearst and Pulitzer engaged in as part of an effort to outsell one another; Frank Mott argues that the Sunday comics supplement was part and parcel of that journalism (539). Lara Saguisag adds that this time period, the Progressive Era of comics in America, is characterized by this type of overlap: “the theme of childhood was essential to the emergence and development of comics in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [...] the two strands of comics and childhood were tightly braided with contemporary discourses of citizenship and nationhood” (1). That accurate contention makes the form’s history and the demarcation of lines between comics and intended audience even more difficult, as, for Saguisag, Outcault “coaxed readers to sympathize with doleful waifs, admire the resourcefulness of bell boys and street urchins, and chuckle at the sight of city kids who found themselves out of sorts in the countryside. Outcault’s persistent fascination with childhood obviously paid off: his work made him a fortune and turned him into a national celebrity” (1). Who was chuckling, however, is certainly open to debate. Outcault unequivocally inspired others to replicate his work for consumerist means (3), but in consideration of a term determined by audience, children’s comics, that audience does matter.10 As the years march on, audience becomes a significantly less contentious issue but never a topic that can readily be abandoned, even in the contemporary moment. Jeff Smith, the author and illustrator of Bone, one of the paramount and most awarded comics regarded as for children in the late twentieth century, frequently finds himself reminding readers that “Bone was never intended for children. It was always written mainly for me and, second, for other cartoon heads. I never dreamed that it would have a huge audience of children around the world because comics in the early 1990s, when I started, were primarily sold in comic book shops and all the customers in comic bookstores were like me, namely, 30 year old guys” (qtd. in Wannamaker 26). This hybrid audience is hardly surprising and is a narrative told and retold due to what appears to be an overlap in the Venn diagram of American comics and picturebooks for children (29). In that manner, one can find picturebook artists such as Dav Pilkey parodying the form of comics, not to mention his own childhood, and creating a work that is something of a comic and something of a picturebook. In his Captain Underpants series (1997–​2015), Pilkey draws from his own childhood experiences reading comics and dealing with adults to create George and Harold, two young boys who read comics and make their own, only to find themselves in one. Their (mis)adventures come by way of their school principal, Mr. Krupp, who becomes the focus of the boys’ comic, the eponymous Captain Underpants. It is an inherently silly comic series from an illustrator who was a runner-​up for the Randolph Caldecott Award in 1997 for his work The Paperboy (see Sommers, “Humor” 93), and the silliness both valorizes and parodies childhood and its discontents. And as Duncan, Smith, and Levitz articulate, the history of overlap between the field of children’s literature (and its publishers) and the field of comics reaches well back into that early twentieth-​century moment when publishers such as Cupples & Leon began to reprint comic strips into discrete bundles –​until 1934, when they decided to change their focus and worked on book series for children, such as Tom Swift and The Hardy Boys (12). At a certain point, one must also address the man with the red cape. While it’s established that modern constructions of children’s comics are, essentially, what were once called “funnies” and dealt with content that reflected that focus, no one can or should deny the importance and effect of the superhero books of the 1930s and their immediate impact upon children. As Duncan, Smith, and 133

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Levitz observe, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman (introduced in Action Comics #15, June 1938) is inarguably the most important comic and comics character in American comics history (17). That is not a debatable point. All comics superheroes either model, respond to, or mimic the blueprint the two established (18–​19), including Pilkey’s parody of the character and his origins cited above. Following on the red-​booted heels of Superman’s success, a year later in 1939, Bill Finger and Bob Kane created Batman in Detective Comics #27. Neither of these characters is a child or is funny, and certainly they do not aspire to do childish things. They fight crime, and on occasion during this period, they use lethal, if only implied, measures to do so. They are vigilantes. Neither Batman nor Superman is endorsed by the police or the American government. As it happens, they frequently operate in light of the fact that the peacekeepers of the entrenched orthodoxy cannot effectively do their jobs. Young people were fascinated by these characters and valorized them with their pocket money to the tune of over a million copies purchased a month (Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 18). Collectively, by 1941 in America, comic books were selling approximately “10 million copies a month” (19). So, at that point, the question becomes: Who was reading them? Overwhelmingly, the answer to that question was children. According to comic book historian Bradford Wright, by 1943 ninety-​five percent of American boys and ninety-​one percent of American girls between the ages of six and eleven were reading comic books, forming part of an audience that extended to half the country (57). Across the Atlantic, the British comics industry bore some resemblance to its American counterpart and had similar precursors. As in the United States, strips predated books; one of the first (if not the first) was Funny Folks (1874), published in The Weekly Budget (James 238). Again as in the United States, the matter of priority is open to debate; some comics historians point out that the Glasgow Looking Glass, a humor publication first appearing in 1825, held pictorial content that could be considered at least proto-​comic, and, by 1841, Henry Mayhew and his engraver Ebenezer Landells coined the term “cartoon” with the weekly publication of Punch (Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 373). Here too, the audience varied considerably as these works were frequently satiric in nature, and that which they were satirizing was not inherently aimed at the younger generation. Less contentious were The Beano (1938–​present) and The Dandy (1937–​2013), two of the longest running comics magazines in British history and cemented within a period (1914–​60) when British publishers actively “targeted the children’s audience” to the tune of two million of those comics sold weekly (Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 374). Interestingly enough, by comparison to the American market, the British children’s comics industry was an undoubted industry targeting and marketing to children specifically and more or less without rival; according to Anita O’Brien, “these comics were almost the only entertainment available to children” (qtd. in Armstrong). As in the United States, the British children’s comics industry thrived through the end of the Second World War before becoming complicated by the same horror and pulp content that was becoming ubiquitous and equally challenged in America. More recently, children’s comics have been plentiful; they come in every imaginable mode and medium, from webcomics to strips to indie zines and tabletop games, and they occupy a healthy percentage of shelves at bookstores, comic stores, spinner racks, and Comixology. Coming from major comics publishers such as Marvel and DC and from niche imprints within the children’s units of larger presses such as Scholastic or Macmillan, any list offered should include youth-​oriented editions of what are now considered more adult comics, such as Gene Luen Yang’s Superman Smashes the Klan (2019) or Batman: Li’L Gotham (2013) from Derek Fridolfs and Dustin Nguyen, as well as original stories such as Roller Girl (2015) from Victoria Jamieson or Elanor Davis’s Stinky (2008). Recent offerings also include works adapted from different media and now published in comics, such as Marvel’s take on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young (2009) or Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell’s adaptation of Gaiman’s own The Graveyard Book (2015). They can cover delicate subject matter such as hearing impairment (CeCe Bell’s El Deafo [2014]) or racism (Yang’s American Born Chinese [2006]) or retrench old mythologies for a younger generation, as in Emily Carroll and Marika McCoola’s Baba Yaga’s Assistant (2015). In sum, the 134

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English-​language comic for children may have come from complicated beginnings, but there need be no doubt that it has become one of the predominant mediums for the contemporary child.

Children’s Comics Across Cultures:11 Canada and Mexico At this point, it might not be a poor idea to examine comics from ports of call around the world, noting places where similarities and differences express themselves within the medium. Canadian comics (not to be confused with representations of Canada or Canadians in comics), per Duncan, Smith, and Levitz, share strands of DNA with American comics while also trying (with a degree of agonism) to display a “distinct cultural identity” (366). As these historians mention, comics seem largely to have come to Canada in the late 1930s as an export from the United States. This exchange ceased in the 1940s as a result of the War Exchange Conservation Act of 1940, leading, according to Justin Chandler, to what’s regarded as Canada’s first homegrown comic book,12 Better Comics #1 in 1941, and its unique version of “The Iron Man,” who was not Tony Stark of Marvel Comics fame. This invigoration of comics indigenous to the Great White North led to the wartime production of what scholars have dubbed “Canadian Whites” (Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 367), so called “by historians and collectors because, to save money, they were usually printed without colour pages)[; they] had more in common with comics from England than with those from the United States” (Chandler). These comics, including others such as Johnny Canuck (first printed in 1869, but revitalized in Dime Comics #1 in 1942) and Nelvana of the Northern Lights (1944), “effectively became the first social network for Canadian children, connecting them with one another through letter columns” (Chandler). This effort would not last; with the end of the Second World War, homegrown comics could not compete with the more popular American and British fare. Their story doesn’t end there, however, as Johnny Canuck would be revitalized again in the 1970s while, at the same time, Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark would appear in 1977 and last until 2004, becoming Canada’s longest-​running comic with an original run of 300 issues. Likewise, Canadian artists, cartoonists, and writers such as Chris Bachalo (Generation X, Death: The High Cost of Living), Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim), and Todd McFarlane (Spawn, Spider-​Man) have been ubiquitous across the international comics scene for decades. These writers and artists may not work on uniquely Canadian titles or within Canadian imprints, but their work in the medium began in the North, and their style and sensibilities permeate different comics worldwide. South of the United States border, the Mexican comics industry tells a markedly different story than Canada’s when it comes to competition with American titles. Their historietas or “little stories,” according to Duncan, Smith, and Levitz, remain popular, telling any number of “distinct genres, including adventure, romance, humor, horror, and detective stories” (369). Again finding its footing through newspaper strips, the comic Pepin (1936–​54) became so popular that it became a daily strip in Mexican newspapers (and twice on Sundays) (370). Pepin, and its ancestor Paquín (1934–​47), would be collected like the earlier American strips and resold as bound comics frequently referred to as pepines in emphasis of the appeal of these books to the Mexican people. In terms of audience, it’s difficult to know or identify who was reading what when. However, certain series fitting the most generic rubric of children’s comics (humor, family, and child protagonists) are renowned. Near the top of that list would be Gabriel Vargas’s La Familia Burrón (1948–​2009), one of the longest running comics in history at sixty-​plus years in publication. The comic deals with a lower-​income family living in Mexico City and is known for its clever wordplay and “family fun” (Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 371). The superhero set does not go ignored in Mexico, with works such as Kalimán: El Hombre Increíble (1965–​91), a spin-​off from a popular radio drama, whose title character possesses psychic abilities acquired from study under Tibetan monks and works in service of the Hindu goddess Kali (371). And while Mexicans may have read more comics per capita than any other culture (372), their books are not nearly as universal in terms of the age of their audience –​ specialty books from 135

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fotonovelas and the aptly titled sensacionales assuredly do not fit the mold for a younger audience, even though both would likely fit under the larger rubric of historietas (372). Mexico’s contemporary cultural exports include prominent cartoonists such as Sergio Aragonés (Groo the Wanderer), who, though born in Spain, emigrated to Mexico as a young boy and became a cartoonist for the popular youth publication Mad magazine. More recently, penciler Humberto Ramos has come to considerable public attention after working on high-​profile Marvel titles such as The Amazing Spider-​Man (2018–​20) and Runaways (2008–​2009). In the twenty-​first century, Marvel and DC both have played host to a number of Mexican-​born artists, such as Jorge Molina and José Ladrönn, who have used the companies as ingress towards making independent books of their own through smaller indie presses.

Children’s Comics Across Cultures: Greater South America Though more diverse than my presentation allows, popularly, South American comics seem to be broken down into two major geographical camps: Brazilian comics and Argentine comics. The former, more specifically regarded as Brazilian Portuguese comics, arose, as elsewhere, in newspaper strips of the nineteenth century offering satirical political commentary. However, in 1905, cartoonist Renato de Castro crafted a children’s magazine of comic art modeled after the French magazine La Semaine de Suzette and called O Tico-​Tico (Naranjo, “O Tico-​Tico”). Its main character, Chiquinho, was inspired by Outcault’s Buster Brown, and it may be considered the first comic book for children in Brazil. But from 1929 onward, American imports of popular comics such as Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Flash Gordon began to populate the strips and books in the Suplemento Infantil and later Suplemento Juvenil of the newspapers, although O Tico-​Tico would continue until 1977 in special edition formats (Naranjo, “O Tico-​Tico”). Similarly, Argentinian comics arose in what we can consider the standard fashion, originating as single-​panel editorial comics in nineteenth-​century newspapers. American imports would come at the end of the century with the translation of Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan in 1900. By 1912, indigenous Argentinian strips such as Las aventuras de Viruta y Chicharrón, by Manuel Redondo, began to populate print culture, and a popular children’s magazine, Billiken, appeared in 1919 as the first Spanish-​language magazine for young people (Guazzone). Argentina’s golden age arose after the Second World War, spurred by the arrival in the country of many international writers and artists. While this migration fueled a growth in indigenously constructed comics work, the children’s comics scene was dominated by American imports until the arrival of Mafalda (1962), a comic strip drawn and written by Quino. The book, starring a six-​year-​old girl, largely concerns itself with cultural and political satire at the expense of the title character, who is overly concerned for the general state of the world, and, as such, its status as a children’s comic is somewhat debatable (Gibson). However, since it inspired multiple cartoon adaptations and uses humor as its main device in imparting the message of its pessimistic protagonist, it certainly resonated with children to a large degree.

Children’s Comics Across Cultures: The Japanese Manga Explosion Last, but certainly not least, if there is an unambiguous leader of global comics culture for children (or anyone else), that leader would be Japanese manga, roughly translated as “irresponsible pictures” by some and more broadly just as “comics” by most critics (Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 358). As Duncan, Smith, and Levitz write, there is “nowhere else in the world [that] comics appeal to a wider audience or achieve greater financial success than in the land of the rising sun” (358). A major reason for this success is that Japanese manga has such a great diversity of comic subject matters and entrenched and established audience stratifications: shonen manga tends to target boys, while shojo manga tends to target girls, and kodomo manga targets younger children across the board. Perhaps surprisingly, 136

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kodomo manga has released work that has grown globally popular across many audiences (possibly due to many titles’ longevity), with works such as Satoshi Tajiri’s Pokémon (1996)13 originally for young boys and Yuko Shimizu’s mind-​bogglingly ubiquitous Hello Kitty (1974) created for young girls. Both franchises have appealed to both sexes and all age brackets globally. Manga, like most comics, arrived as an industry in the nineteenth century and encompasses all types of indigenously crafted Japanese comics and subject matter (Gravett 8). Like comics’ other major cultural forms, it can be traced back considerably further than this generally accepted origin; some historians push it back into the twelfth century, others to the Edo period, while the term manga dates to the late eighteenth century (Prohl and Nelson 6). As with most of the histories surrounding various cultures’ versions of comics, this account has attracted considerable argument and deviation in terms of the specific whos, whens, and wheres,14 but there are some generally accepted facets that differentiate manga’s history from that of other comics traditions discussed thus far. First and foremost, historically speaking, what we today tend to regard as manga arrived in the late 1960s after diverging types and styles gave way to a more “low-​ end manga industry” coming out of Osaka (Mazur and Danner 63). This grittier form of manga was so successful that it inspired and propelled the diversification for which we now celebrate it (63). Next, and possibly the distinction most immediately noticeable from the manga in hand, is that they are read right to left, consistent with Japanese tategaki. And while manga articulates specific elements of the originating history and culture, just as Anglophone, Mexican, or South American comics do, an unusual feature is the aforementioned fairly strict and regulated lines drawn between what is for adolescent boys (for example, Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto [1999] or Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece [1997]), adolescent girls (for example, Fruits Basket [1998] from Natsuki Takaya), and children. Interestingly enough, however, as this work travels abroad or becomes anime, those enforced boundaries frequently shift, with an anime adaptation of One Piece being seen as younger children’s fare in America and a dark adult fantasy such as Tokyo Ghoul (2014) by Sui Ishida being considered suitable for young adults and teens. In the end, expectations about audience really become a matter of personal preference, but American consumption of manga does not seem to hold with general otherwise conservative considerations of international content. Chapters such as this one are both refreshing to undertake and impossible to complete, as there is no way to satisfactorily address the idea of “comics” in its many shades and forms even with a generous word limit and a set of brackets limiting the topic to literature for children. Thus, this work should be seen only as a starting point to an expansive critical discourse field that requires further work and research to account for many more traditions and their cultural histories. And that, I would argue, is the challenge with which to conclude: taking up the hard work of tracking down these historical traces and integrating children’s comics into greater recognition within youth literature. Comics offer many children their first ingress into reading, an inexpensive juxtaposition of picture and word used to make meaning and convey messages. Comics are as much a part of children’s literature as any other medium, and, as the dual fields of comics studies and children’s literary studies become increasingly diversified in efforts to understand the connections among disparate but connected peoples and cultures, it would be wise for comics scholars and children’s literature scholars to come together in order to understand their shared history.

Notes 1 The term “graphic novel” was likely coined by Richard Kyle in a 1964 issue of the fanzine Capa-​Alpha (Schelly 117), but the first piece of sequential art to which historians typically assign the designation is Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), a book arguably not constructed for children. In fact, Glen Weldon argues that the term and its supposedly “serious” and “important” nature is an inherently defensive response to those who are unable to take comics, as a medium, seriously (“Term”). 2 Predictably, this chapter cannot list everything, let alone cover everything. Some cultural phenomena, such as Chinese liánhuánhuà and the especially large school of comics constituted by bande dessinée, can only be discussed to the extent that they fit into the word count. The latter, for example, France’s so-​called “ninth

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Joseph Michael Sommers art,” is touched on, as it is the bedrock upon which much of what followed in Western comics was built. However, covering its history, even just as regards children’s works, would require an article unto itself. The names of such comics, though, Hergé’s Tintin or René Goscinny’s Asterix, are nearly as famous in the Anglophone world as they are in continental Europe. Selections here form part of a diasporic narrative of work and style that moved, more often than not, from the Old World to the New. 3 Read: Nerd Culture. 4 A way of considering the matter differently: In a 2012 colloquium in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Philip Nel approaches the idea of comics’ generic attributes by juxtaposing comics with picturebooks. Beautifully encapsulating the issue within his title, “Same Genus, Different Species,” Nel examines the one against the other in a manner both respectful to history and tolerant of the minutia that separate the forms from one another. He writes: Picture books and comics are kin: adjacent branches of the same literary-​artistic family tree, cousins with slightly different expectations of their readers. They are not fundamentally different genres. To put this in terms of the biological taxonomy we learned back in grade school (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), the distinctions between the two rank down at the end of smallest differentiation –​the “species” end. Comics and picture books differ in degree, rather than in kind. (445)

5

6 7

8 9

10 11

For our purposes, where he writes “picture books,” a reasonable person could substitute the words “graphic novels.” And while the arguments are not identical and may certainly be contested, either in their original context or when part of a discussion of graphic novels and comic books, the tenor holds. As he concludes, “literary genres can admit variation. […] Comics are and are not picture books not just because they share many formal features, but because genre itself is multiple, unstable, and always evolving” (453). Substituting “graphic novel” for “picture book” again, the civil both/​and logic may be the approach this debate has always needed. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey address this business of the term “graphic novel” with more decorum. They discuss Art Spiegelman’s Maus (published in book form in 1986), noting that Spiegelman considers the dilemma of definition as “a spate of well-​dressed comic books finding their way into legitimate bookshops. Sadly, a number of them are no more than pedestrian comic books in glossy wrappings” (2). They respond by quoting Moore’s thought that “[y]‌ou could just about call Maus a novel, you could probably just about call Watchmen a novel, in terms of density, structure, size, scale, seriousness of theme, stuff like that. The problem is that ‘graphic novel’ just came to mean ‘expensive comic book’ ” (2). Even leading with that skepticism, Baetens and Frey are quick to argue that this discussion need not necessarily be elitist, as they themselves struggle unsuccessfully to find a definition for the term in less than a chapter. In the interest of brevity, I will adhere to the term universally agreed upon: comics. Angela Colvert discusses digital media elsewhere in this volume. In 2012, Tilley, a reference librarian and comics scholar, published a groundbreaking article on Wertham’s intentional falsifying of his research on comics and their effects on youth culture. She details her look through Wertham’s papers to show how he “manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence –​especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people –​for rhetorical gain” (“Innocent” 383). Seeking to complete the larger Anglophone set, one might reasonably ask, “What of Australia?” In truth, cause and effect between the colonies and the former empire dictate the arrangement more than exclusions imply. It would not be wrong to point out that, around 1754, Benjamin Franklin was publishing editorial cartoons in Poor Richard’s Almanack. However, this observation brings the conversation back to questions of audience and purpose, and using Lara Saguisag’s considerations towards a definition, Franklin’s editorial cartoons, though satirical, likely do not hit the metrics for a “children’s comic” (1). Likewise, Duncan, Smith, and Levitz would push the history back even further to 1731 when William Hogarth strung several painted works together and crafted what would become known as “A Harlot’s Progress” (3). But in the interest of not splitting hairs, they also divide comics history in America into eras, with the “Era of Proliferation” of the medium established in 1934 with the publication of Famous Funnies #1 (6). Robert Harvey’s “How Comics Came to Be” addresses this history at considerable length while allowing the conversation to move back and forth across the Atlantic. What he doesn’t do, however, is distinguish between audiences in any culture. As this chapter leaves the Anglosphere and meanders about the planet, it is imperative to note that I am by no means an expert on global comics, nor can I readily obtain (or in many cases read) comics in other

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Comics for Children Across Cultures languages. Hence, I rely on better scholars and scholarship in an effort to provide coverage but by no means completionism. 12 As Chandler notes, there were certainly unique comic strips in Canadian news media, but Maple Leaf Publishing’s Better Comics #1, by most accounts, represents the nation’s first domestically crafted comic book. 13 As a point of clarification, Pokémon, a portmanteau of “pocket monsters,” is a global media franchise with the arrival as a manga in 1997 largely shepherded by writer Hidenori Kusaka and illustrator Mato in the manga Pokémon Adventures. 14 In particular, Eike Exner’s Eisner award-​winning volume, Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (2021), has sought to reexamine the form’s history and context from perspectives not considered before. New as it is, as of this writing it is an outlier among the larger histories, but its emphases on materialism and the interconnectedness of global manga are being seen as a more compelling argument for manga’s history than prior attempts.

Works Cited Abate, Michelle Ann, and Gwen Athene Tarbox, eds. Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. —​—​—​. “Introduction.” Abate and Tarbox, pp. 3–​16. Armstrong, Stephen. “Was Pixar’s Inside Out Inspired by The Beano?” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 27 July 2015, www.telegr​aph.co.uk/​cult​ure/​pixar/​11766​202/​Was-​Pix​ars-​Ins​ide-​Out-​inspi​red-​by-​The-​ Beano.html. Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bellis, Mary. “The Colorful History of Comic Books and Newspaper Cartoon Strips.” ThoughtCo, 27 November 2019, www.though​tco.com/​hist​ory-​of-​comic-​books-​1991​480. Chandler, Justin. “The Story behind Canada’s First-​Ever Comic Book.” TVO, www.tvo.org/​arti​cle/​the-​story-​ behind-​cana​das-​first-​ever-​comic-​book. Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz. The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. W. W. Norton, 2008. Gibson, Andrew. “The Celebration of Comic Strip and Cartoon Art.” Smashing Magazine, 28 December 2008, www.smash​ingm​agaz​ine.com/​2008/​12/​the-​cele​brat​ion-​of-​carto​ons-​and-​comic-​strip-​art/.​ Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. Collins, 2010. Guazzone, Vicky. “Periodismo para los Chicos.” Noticias, 7 April 2019, https://​notic​ias.per​fil.com/​notic​ias/​gene​ral/​ 2013-​04-​12-​per​iodi​smo-​para-​los-​chi​cos.phtml. Guitarlessguitarist. “Did You Know That Most Manga Is Read Vertically from Right to Left?” Sushi and Adobo, 1 March 2016, https://​sushia​ndad​obo.wordpr​ess.com/​2016/​02/​23/​did-​you-​know-​that-​most-​manga-​is-​read-​ ver​tica​lly-​from-​left-​to-​right/.​ Hatfield, Charles. “Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comics Studies.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 30, no. 3, 2006, pp. 360–​82. James, Louis. “Funny Folks.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-​Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Academia Press, 2009, 238. Kavanaugh, Barry. “Northampton/​Graphic Novel: The Alan Moore Interview.” Blather.net, 17 October 2000, www.blat​her.net/​proje​cts/​alan-​moore-​interv​iew/​north​hamp​ton-​grap​hic-​novel/.​ Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Mazur, Dan, and Alexander Danner. Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present. Thames and Hudson, 2014. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1994. McEvoy, Ben. “How to Start Reading Manga (the Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Comics).” Benjamin McEvoy, 28 August 2019, https://​ben​jami​nmce​voy.com/​start-​read​ing-​manga-​beginn​ers-​guide-​japan​ese-​com​ics/.​ Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years 1690 to 1940. Macmillan, 2000. Naranjo, Marcelo. “O Tico-​Tico em Volume Luxuoso da Opera Graphica.” Universo HQ | Quadrinhos, https://​ web.arch​ive.org/​web/​201​0041​5095​657/​http://​www.uni​vers​ohq.com/​qua​drin​hos/​2006/​n1301​2006​_​05.cfm. —​—​—​. “Universo HQ: Quadrinhos: Via Lettera Lança O Tico-​Tico: Cem Anos de Revista.” Universo HQ | Quadrinhos, https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​200​9092​9060​713/​http://​www.uni​vers​ohq.com/​qua​drin​hos/​2005/​ n1410​2005​_​05.cfm.

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Joseph Michael Sommers Nel, Philip. “Same Genus, Different Species? Comics and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 2012, pp. 445–​53. Prohl, Inken, and John K. Nelson. Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Religions. Brill, 2012. Saguisag, Lara. Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics. Rutgers University Press, 2019. Schelly, Bill. Founders of Comic Fandom: Profiles of 90 Publishers, Dealers, Collectors, Writers, Artists and Other Luminaries of the 1950s and 1960s. McFarland, 2010. Sommers, Joseph Michael. “Parodic Potty Humor and Superheroic Potentiality in Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants.” Abate and Tarbox, pp. 93–​111. —​—​—​. “Negotiating Popular Genres in Comic Books: An Impossible Mission. Against All Odds. Yet, Somehow, the Chapter Is Saved!” The American Comic Book, edited by Joseph Michael Sommers, Salem, 2014, pp. 77–​89. Tilley, Carol L. “Children and the Comics: Young Readers Take on the Critics.” Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865, edited by James L. Baughman, Jennifer Ratner-​Rosenhagen, and James P. Danky, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015, pp. 161–​79. —​—​—​. “Seducing the Innocent: Frederic Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics.” Information and Culture: A Journal of History, vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 383–​413. Wannamaker, Annette. “ ‘This Is a Well-​Loved Book’: Weighing (in on) Jeff Smith’s Bone.” Abate and Tarbox, pp. 19–​31. Weldon, Glen. “The Term ‘Graphic Novel’ Has Had a Good Run. We Don’t Need It Anymore.” NPR, 17 November 2016, www.npr.org/​2016/​11/​17/​502422​829/​the-​term-​grap​hic-​novel-​has-​had-​a-​good-​run-​we-​ dont-​need-​it-​anym​ore. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

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12 CHILDREN’S FICTION The Possibilities of Reality and Imagination Deborah Stevenson

Introduction Children’s fiction seems an easy category to identify; it’s right there on the shelves in libraries and in bookstores physical and virtual. But what makes it a book for those shelves, and how did it get there? Children’s fiction can be defined, crudely, through exclusion –​ what isn’t picturebooks, isn’t aimed at young adults, and isn’t factual. This chapter will additionally exclude graphic novels, a format explored by Joseph Michael Sommers elsewhere in this volume. But categorical borders are always blurry, and a definition of exclusion leaves a gap where the most knowledge should lie. Ultimately, children’s fiction balances the real and the imagined, focusing on the needs and understanding of its nonadult audience. Content, format, length, sophistication of vocabulary and conceptions, protagonist age, authorial and editorial intent, the template created by past books, and sales possibilities are all relevant considerations when determining whether a book is fiction for children. Beyond the question of what the book is, however, lie the matters of who the child is, what child readers need, and who is answering those questions. Given adults’ enduring desire to educate children and the existence of textbooks and nonfiction, genres seemingly better suited to conveying information, one might also ask why fiction for children even exists. Fiction, with its reliance on the invented, has long raised suspicion, exemplified by Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-​century concerns about what the newly popular genre of the novel might do to the “young, the ignorant, and the idle” (Johnson). Yet children’s fiction has been used as a way to teach, often on the “spoonful of sugar” principle; to model a behavior or lesson in a way that fact can’t always manage; to inculcate the importance of religious faith or the perils of misbehavior; to help children navigate the challenges of relationships; even merely to hone reading skills. Nor is the division between fiction and nonfiction always a bright line, given books such as Mason Weems’s History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of George Washington (1800), which frames as biographical fact the invented fable of young Washington nobly confessing to his father that it was he who cut down the father’s cherry tree, or Joseph Bruchac’s Jim Thorpe (2006), which is classified as nonfiction though written as a first-​person memoir. But to focus purely on the instructive possibilities of fiction is to overlook the history of storytelling as a compelling art form, whether oral or in print. Adults who create children’s fiction find it valuable for reasons beyond the didactic: it invites children to experience the joys of imagination; it affords an opportunity for authorial creativity and experimentation; it offers a way that fact cannot to explore others’ internal lives and experiences; it provides a pleasurable pastime. DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-15

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The genre, reflecting the larger culture’s intentions for children as readers, members of society, and potential adults, is often discussed in terms of polarities: adventurous and domestic, outward and inward, or, in eras where gender was treated as binary and immutable, boys’ and girls’ fictions. Critics have argued that fiction is an educational tool, an ideological tool, a sustainer of hegemonies, and a disruptor of norms. It can be imbued with what Maria Nikolajeva terms aetonormativity (7), the characteristic of viewing adulthood as normal and childhood as important merely for being pre-​adult. Yet that very assessment may itself be aetonormative, stemming from, as Beverly Lyon Clark puts it about the literature itself, the “tendency to consider anything that adults find valuable as really adult” (159). Additionally, growth is a common strand in novels for adults as well as those for children, so this characteristic may be narratonormative as much as aetonormative. Nonetheless, children’s fictions are indeed shaped more by adults than by children. Books move from an adult writer’s imagination to a child’s hands with many steps in between, always culturally and institutionally inflected along the way and almost always by adults. Authors may tell the story, but even in the eighteenth century it was up to publishers to decide that a story was marketable and who constituted a market. The fate of a story in an author’s head may depend on such practical considerations as changing tax laws (which may allow publishers to afford keeping a book in print longer), issues in transport that make global printing difficult, publishing hegemonies, and individual editorial faith and vision, to say nothing of good timing and good luck. Children’s fiction is both thermometer, taking the temperature of the culture, and thermostat, inscribing and influencing norms and changes. Thus, the long dominance of the straight white middle-​class child in European and Anglophone children’s literature was a result of the long dominance of the straight white middle class in the marketplace, in publishing, in librarianship, and in education, and the historically gendered texts and marketing reflected cultural assumption of a firm gender binary. The increasing contributions of writers of color have increased the possibilities for future writers and readers, and the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries have seen writers challenge traditional gender norms and, more recently, the concept of gender itself. Children are inexperienced readers, so fiction written for them may make manifest what would only be implied for adult or young adult readers; however, children are often experientially sophisticated, especially in the age of the twenty-​four-​hour news cycle and social media. Indeed, fiction gives children a chance to quietly explore at length their feelings about aspects of life that may come at them too speedily and too fragmentally to parse in real life. Yet in both the past and the present adults have differed over what is desirable or even allowable in children’s books; moral arguments over children’s literature may deploy different book titles and nominal concerns, but anxiety about what children experience in reading literature (with special suspicion of fiction, the genre without the safe protection of factuality) remains evergreen –​look at any list of banned books. What all sides agree on is that children’s literature matters, and fiction is an important genre; these are books that need not be mediated through adult readers but that children can select and read of their own agency, an experience that may be outside parental control. The unlimited possibilities of fiction that make for its brilliance as a means to explore real and imagined worlds can conflict with adult convictions that some possibilities should be limited. Similarly, there can be disagreement over whether books should be prescriptive, depicting only admirable characters doing desirable things, or descriptive, allowing them room to contain morally gray characters and ambiguous situations or to offer pure escapism where the main focus is humor or adventure. Since fiction depends on the balance between reality and imagination, I have divided the discussion into sections according to that balance: the plausible present (realistic fiction), the plausible past (historical fiction), the unreal (fantasy and science fiction), and the unlikely (adventure and mystery stories). Rather than providing these categories as a clear taxonomy of children’s fiction, I offer them as significant but not necessarily unique literary flavors, where one child may choose a book for one quality even as another child appreciates it for another. Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998), for instance, 142

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could be enjoyed as adventure, magical realism, comic exaggeration, and/​or realism. Due to the size of children’s fiction globally, this chapter must largely limit its focus to fictions published in or translated into English.

History of Children’s Fiction Anglophone children’s first fictional reading was not novels written for children, a concept that only arose in the mid-​eighteenth century, but stories popular with adults. These tales were usually encountered in chapbooks, inexpensively produced (“chap” is a variant of “cheap”) and crudely illustrated booklets that contained material ranging from religious instruction to almanacs to poetry; most importantly for the history of fiction, they also offered retellings of popular legends such as that of Bevis of Southampton, a bold and entirely fictional knight, and were often sold by traveling peddlers who roamed from town to town in Europe. Formal publishing aimed at children was likely to be educational, either morally or scholastically. While James Janeway’s A Token for Children: Being the Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671) reads to the modern eye as horrifying as well as didactic, it was extremely popular with children in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The work isn’t usually examined critically as fiction, but it is a collection of short, fictional (even if claiming to be factual) stories featuring child protagonists who become moral exemplars for the considerably less important adults around them, which meant a reader-​pleasing preeminence of children over adults; it also presaged much later fiction in demonstrating that engaging readers’ imaginations can make them feel a point more deeply. As industrialization and literacy grew, so too did publishing, with children happily reading books now considered adult works, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), sometimes in their original length, sometimes in cheerfully pirated and abridged chapbook editions. That same era of the early eighteenth century began to see the establishment of a book-​hungry middle class and publishers and bookshops in Britain eager to fill that need. That industry included publishing and selling books designed for children; John Newbery, publisher and bookseller, is the best-​known early publisher if not actually first. However, the first standalone novel for children is not a Newbery product but The Governess (1749), a lively school story written by Sarah Fielding, sister of novelist Henry Fielding. With parents and children a demonstrable market, more titles aimed at young readers soon followed. Theories of childhood, especially those of John Locke in England and Jean-​Jacques Rousseau in France, aroused interest in children’s cognition and development. Maria Edgeworth’s collection The Parent’s Assistant (1796) and Thomas Day’s History of Sandford and Merton (1783–​89) brought those theories to a child audience in fictional form, while Mary Martha Sherwood’s History of the Fairchild Family (1818/​1842/​1847) offered a moral family story for youthful improvement as well as enjoyment. It’s not until Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839) that we see a family novel whose comedy is appreciable; in F. J. Harvey Darton’s words, “Catherine Sinclair was the first to rollick” (221). The nineteenth century also saw the Golden Age of fantasy in British children’s literature; Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-​Glass (1871), George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and multiple other titles, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-​Babies (1863), and Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869), among other works, were hugely popular both in and beyond Britain. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) established the prominence of the adventure novel for boys and the indelible template for pirate stories thereafter; it was also an early example of a children’s book quickly taken up by adults, who appreciated its escapist glories. As young countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia developed their identities, children’s books became a part of nation-​building. Literature from Britain was available in the 143

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colonies and in the United States after independence, sometimes in a brazenly copied or pirated format as well as in direct imports. Travel narratives, either fictional or nonfictional, dominate the first tales of Canada and Australia, but homegrown fictions developed alongside or soon after those. Catherine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852) is claimed as the first Canadian children’s novel; nineteenth-​century British writers such as G. A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne set adventures in the Canadian land mysterious to their usual readers, but adventure tales were also a popular creation of Canadians themselves. Ernest Thompson Seton was most famous for his animal stories, starting with Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), but he wrote human-​focused adventures as well in Two Little Savages (1903) and other works, often echoing Traill’s problematic theme of the wildness and need for civilizing of the Indigenous Canadians. The most famous early Canadian children’s book, however, is undoubtedly L. M. Montgomery’s enduring favorite Anne of Green Gables (1908), a domestic fiction in contrast to the adventurous earlier narratives. Australia also began to find its own voice for children in the late nineteenth century, with Ethel Turner’s lively family story Seven Little Australians (1894) a landmark text. Louise Mack followed soon after with a school story, Teens (1897), set in Sydney. The early twentieth century saw the Billabong novels (1920–​42) by Mary Grant Bruce, which celebrated rural life on a station in Victoria; though contemporary readers will note in them the racism and imperialism of European settlers of the time, they are steeped in love of the countryside. More fantastical works also appeared in the early twentieth century; May Gibbs created an enduring Australian narrative in her stories of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918), set in a plant-​based fantasy world. New Zealand too saw the birth of nationally focused literature in the nineteenth century, with Isabella Aylmer’s Distant Homes, or the Graham Family in New Zealand (1872) a fictional travel narrative of a new settler family. Esther Glen’s Six Little New Zealanders (1917) was a deliberate move to create the kind of domestic fiction for New Zealand that Turner had for Australia. While particularly notable for a gentle early contribution to sex education in The Cradle Ship (1922), New Zealand author Edith Howes also wrote fiction for children, ranging from fairy fantasies (Fairy Rings [1911]) to adventure tales. Similarly, the United States began to publish homegrown children’s literature, in addition to importing, with or without license, texts from the United Kingdom. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–​69) is the quintessential American girls’ story and children’s novel of its era, proving that lively stories of family life were readable and, perhaps more importantly, saleable, even abroad. While Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) wasn’t aimed explicitly at children, its child hero and comedic energy made it an influential favorite among young readers. Susan Warner’s sentimental tale The Wide, Wide World (1850) drew tears from readers (including Little Women’s heroine Jo March), while Lucretia Hale’s satirically comedic The Peterkin Papers (1880) drew giggles. Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872) echoed Little Women in its combination of robustness and self-​abnegation, as its tomboy heroine learns humility and patience from her disability. And Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore books (1867–​1905) followed the eponymous heroine, often torn between faith and situational exigencies, in a twenty-​eight-​title series that paved the way for protagonist-​focused series in later decades.

The Plausible Present: Realistic Fiction Realistic fiction is set in the real, nonhistorical world with a focus on believability; while the setting may not be a real place on the map, there are no magic wands, ghosts, child-​piloted spaceships, or other elements that don’t exist in our physical world. The most common narratives in realistic fiction are school and family stories, which can range from the humorous and affectionately mundane to the tragic. From the nineteenth to the twentieth century domestic realism was associated with girls’ reading, with books such as Little Women and Swiss author Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881) classic examples, while adventure was considered more suited for boys; though it’s likely that reading was 144

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never completely gendered in practice, such a binary often framed the conceiving and sale of books for youth. The emergence of young adult literature and its more sophisticated and adult themes has meant that children’s realistic fiction can seem tame by comparison; additionally, it’s sometimes easier to find a picturebook or nonfiction title that addresses a serious topic than a children’s novel. However, the New Realism of the 1960s, heralded by titles such as Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), moved away from prescriptive to more descriptive stories, opening up possibilities for harder challenges and grittier stories and acknowledging children’s capacity for rebellion and darkness. This trend aroused unease in some adults who wanted fictional protagonists to be good role models and fictional milieus to be idyllic, but young readers flocked to works by Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, and Jacqueline Wilson, who depicted with candor such challenging realities as bullying or parental job loss or menstruation. While sometimes a book would be a true “problem novel” that would focus on a single serious issue, more commonly, as in Betsy Byars’s The Burning Questions of Bingo Brown (1988) or Meg Medina’s Merci Suárez Changes Gears (2018), a weighty issue or two exists alongside the exigencies and joys of daily life, just as it tends to in reality. Realistic fiction is most akin to respected adult literature, and yet it is most subject to adult dismissal, because its narratives focus on children’s concerns, which can seem small and insignificant to adults. Yet agemate friendship is the first volitional relationship that most children have, schoolmates are grade-​schoolers’ work colleagues, and the anguish of a friend’s drifting away is akin to that of an adult facing divorce. Titles such as Karen English’s Nikki and Deja (2007) or Rachel Vail’s Bad Best Friend (2020) are among many chronicling such vicissitudes with age-​appropriate language, a keen eye for the nuances of relationships, and an uncondescending appreciation of their importance. Yet reality is a big place. Texts can be experimental in format, as in Virginia A. Walter’s Making Up Megaboy (1998) or verse novels such as Janet Wong’s Minn and Jake (2003) and Hope Anita Smith’s The Way a Door Closes (2003). Realistic fiction can include Claudia Mills’s novels of ethical dilemmas (such as Standing Up to Mr. O, 1998) and child-​level thought experiments such as Andrew Clements’s Frindle (1996). It includes animal stories, whether the horse and pony books of Marguerite Henry (Misty of Chincoteague [1947]) or a dog-​focused tale such as Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Shiloh (1991). Focuses range from a secure home in Cleary’s Ramona books (1955–​84) to the refugee experience in N. H. Senzai’s Escape from Aleppo (2018). Youngsters in search of humorous stories often find them here, whether in the breezy comedy of Hilary McKay or the broad folksiness of Gary Paulsen or Richard Peck. However, books in this area have long grappled with the harder edges of the world; Sherwood’s nineteenth-​century Fairchild family’s trip to see a hanged man on a gibbet may seem like didactic excess to modern eyes, but it’s the inclusion of a real aspect of life for a literary purpose, just as is the child death in Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (1977). And of course reality in fiction is always manipulated, since real life rarely has a neat arc and most children’s fiction still ends happily or at least with a satisfying resolution. Tone is a crucial determinant: it can make the tragic comic, as in the outsize antics of Joey Pigza in Jack Gantos’s Joey Pigza books (1998–​2015), or the weird matter-​of-​fact, as in the poker-​faced strangeness of Polly Horvath’s family dramas such as Everything on a Waffle (2001). While children’s literature generally lags behind equitable representation of underrepresented minorities, realistic fiction has become one of the most diverse genres. While one frustrating reason is that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) authors have tended to receive more editorial encouragement for writing about their own experience than for less realistic explorations, the result is nonetheless that there is a multitude of compelling, inviting books and often series featuring a wide variety of characters of color. Renée Watson’s Ways to Make Sunshine (2019) and its sequels are conscious complements to the Ramona books, focusing on a young Black girl’s family and daily life. Protagonists such as Lenore Look’s Alvin Ho, Nikki Grimes’s Dyamonde Daniel, Zanib Mian’s Omar, and Angela Dominguez’s Stella Diaz are only a few examples of the growing representation 145

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of children who have long inhabited and read in the Anglosphere, yet who have long been largely invisible in its youth literature. While protagonists in children’s literature are less likely than those in literature for young adults to have a sexual orientation or transgender identity expressed, some characters, such as Harriet the Spy, read as queer to the contemporary queer theorist. More open LGBTQ themes reached children’s literature in the latter part of the twentieth century. Children’s authors began by exploring queer sexuality in protagonists’ families, friends, and teachers in books about the AIDS crisis such as Marilyn Kaye’s Real Heroes (1993), about a protagonist’s torn loyalties between his father and his HIV-​ positive teacher; Morris Gleitzman’s Two Weeks with the Queen (1989), about a boy supported by an adult friend whose lover has AIDS; and books of family drama such as Cristina Salat’s Living in Secret (1993), featuring a girl living under the radar with her lesbian mother. Jacqueline Woodson’s The House You Pass on the Way (1999) is one of the first examples of a children’s literature protagonist with her own queer identity, and the twenty-​first century saw more child protagonists dealing with issues of their own sexuality and identity, as in Kacen Callender’s Hurricane Child (2018), about a girl who realizes her romantic interest in a female classmate, and Alex Gino’s George (2015, later Melissa), about a transgender girl. But sexuality and gender identity have also become part of the landscape, as in Akemi Dawn Bowman’s Generation Misfits (2021), a classic drama about middle-​school kids with a club, in this case including a nonbinary member and a girl romantically involved with them, or in Jo Knowles’s Where the Heart Is (2019), wherein a girl realizes her lack of romantic interest in her long-​term male friend. Sexual identity is gradually becoming a natural part of youthful literary discovery for orientations other than the cisgendered and heterosexual.

The Plausible Past: Historical Fiction Historical fiction seems at first easy to define: it’s fiction set in history, as the name suggests. But as with every genre, deeper exploration reveals blurred edges and challenging questions. Books that are written as contemporary texts will read historically to later readers, so children with a taste for historical fiction may enjoy Alcott’s Little Women as much as Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton (2007). Stories that are set only a few years ago in recent memory for adults may focus on events before their readers were born; books about the September 11th terrorist attacks are as historical to a 2010-​born child as books set during the Second World War. Other critical assessments differentiate historical fiction from period fiction, the former using its historical platform and often real elements within it to explore a time, the latter more akin to costume drama, using the past as a decorative setting as in adult Regency romances. There are also historical fantasies, which may be timeslip stories allowing a contemporary protagonist to travel back in time, or a treatment of history that blends with myth or folklore. Then there are books that name no date but default to the past with their dated treatment of contemporary technological, political, or social details. For the purposes of this chapter, historical fiction is realistic fiction whose writer sets it in a time significantly different from the current day in the eyes of its author and young readers, exploring the impact of elements of that time large or small on its characters. Many young readers encounter historical fiction in school, as it has been a popular teaching tool; it has especially been appreciated by children resistant to nonfiction –​or educators who fear children will be resistant to nonfiction. Historical fiction also chronicles people that nonfiction sources have not or cannot, and it affords the chance (or perhaps contains the weakness) to feature characters who can add contemporary insight to events of earlier eras. To that end, a common trope in historical fiction is the great event with the young person as witness, as in Esther Forbes’s Newbery-​winning novel Johnny Tremain (1943), featuring a young apprentice during the American Revolution. A fictional hero permits authors to place a witness at key places, with less rigorous authors sometimes stretching plausibility to provide more historical fact or allowing didacticism rather than energy to 146

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drive exposition. Yet historical fiction has also focused on the experience of daily life, with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (1932–​43) some of the most beloved examples, following the nineteenth-​century Ingalls family as it moved from the woods to the prairie, and Laura from young girl to adult woman. Indeed, one of the differences between contemporary and historical fiction, at least intentional historical fiction, is often the attention to details that may be unfamiliar to a young audience, in order to set the scene and convey the texture of daily life; for an author to give granular descriptions of how a contemporary kitchen works, for instance, would be destabilizing, but historical fiction readers revel in the attention to a way of life different from their own. It’s also worth considering what historical novels are implicitly as well as explicitly addressing. Johnny Tremain, a stirring story of the birth of America, was published during the height of America’s participation in the Second World War. Conversely, James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974), a bleak story of the chaos and personal prices paid during the American Revolution, was published as America’s contentious involvement in the Vietnam War was drawing near its ignominious close, and Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners (1975), set in Britain during the Second World War, similarly supported a Vietnam-​era anti-​patriotic ethic. Historical fiction can shape and further myths and also puncture them; the genre has moved from unquestioning support of rule and majority to documenting and interrogating past tragedies and injustice. British author Geoffrey Trease was a significant force in modernizing the historical novel for young readers, breaking with imperialistic tradition, giving strong prominence to the less privileged, and carefully researching politically informed novels that ranged widely in subject matter from the French Revolution to, in his most famous title, Bows Against the Barons (1934), a retelling of the Robin Hood legend. Strongly inspired by Trease was Rosemary Sutcliff, who focused on early Britain, with her best-​known book, The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), treating Roman Britain. Leon Garfield acknowledged a debt to Charles Dickens and Stevenson in his colorful, cleverly written novels beginning with Jack Holborn (1964). In the United States literature, Scott O’Dell emerged mid-​century as one of the foremost practitioners of historical fiction, with his focus often the Indigenous people of the New World, as in The Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960); O’Dell was also unusual in his frequent use of Mexico as a setting in books such as The King’s Fifth (1966), a story of the Spanish conquest. Translations have been particularly significant in historical fiction, especially in Holocaust narratives such as Israeli author Uri Orlev’s semi-​autobiographical The Island on Bird Street (1984) and German author Gudrun Pausewang’s The Final Journey (1996). Historical fiction has also proved a genre well suited to verse novels, such as Karen Hesse’s Newbery-​winning free verse tale Out of the Dust (1997) and Helen Frost’s inventively formal poetry in All He Knew (2020). Historical fiction’s popularity made it a profitable genre for series fiction, such as the successful Dear America series of fictional girls’ diaries, first published in 1996. At the same time, minority authors were still underrepresented, often in favor of white outsiders writing history with a minority protagonist, as in Ann Rinaldi’s My Heart Is on the Ground (1999); this controversial entry in the Dear America series featured a Sioux girl at the legendarily genocidal Carlisle Indian School but underplayed the impact of the school in Native history. Increasingly, historical fiction has raised questions not just of authenticity and accuracy but of whose story is history. As Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera discuss in their contribution to this volume, the greater inclusion of BIPOC authors in children’s literature has meant more contesting of established narratives and the exploration of overshadowed experiences, making visible often erased pasts and demonstrating how much history had been left unexplored with the tradition of white authorial dominance. Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), treating an African American family in the 1930s, was a landmark for its representation and its topic. Feminist history championed a departure from the popular themes of wars and great men, focusing instead on the domestic experience in titles such as Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985). Emblematic is Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl (1992), a narrative about the daily life of a fifteenth-​century Taino child on the island of Hispaniola that 147

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concludes with the arrival of Columbus’s ships and a brutal contrast with Columbus’s short historical text about the Taino people. Louise Erdrich created her Birchbark titles (1999–​2016), treating a nineteenth-​century Ojibwe community, as a counternarrative to the Little House books. Authors such as Laurence Yep, Yoshiko Uchida, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Christopher Paul Curtis, Cynthia Kadohata, Nicholasa Mohr, Linda Sue Park, and Rita Williams-​Garcia have explored America’s complicated racial history and the diverse ancestries of its people.

The Unreal: Fantasy and Science Fiction, but Especially Fantasy The term “unreal” here covers fiction ranging from high fantasy to science fiction, magical realism to ghost stories to dystopias, that either in a created or existing setting focuses on events that don’t occur in our current conception of the physical world. Such fictions have long had a special place in children’s literature, which treated the genre as mainstream well before it was considered serious adult fiction. What adults often see and envy as the child’s prerogative for imagination allows writers for this audience a full range of creativity. This is the category of fiction to which nonfiction offers no parallel, and the imaginative qualities (and incorporation of historical folk tropes of the supernatural) can also make fantasy the youth literature most alarming to adults, as witness the many challenges to the Harry Potter series. Yet ever since the second Newbery Medal went to Hugh Lofting’s fanciful Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922), novels ranging from the living toy story of Carolyn Sherwin Bailey’s Miss Hickory (1946) to Lois Lowry’s dystopian The Giver (1993) have appeared with regularity on prize lists. Following the Victorian Golden Age of fantasy, the best-​known twentieth-​century English-​language fantasies were almost all British, to the point of a children’s literature publishing truism: Britain was better at fantasy, the United States at realism. While L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its many sequels brought a distinctively American flavor to the fantasy arena, it was E. Nesbit with her Five Children and It (1902) and subsequent titles, J.R.R. Tolkien with The Hobbit (1937) and accompanying legendary trilogy, and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950–​56) that dominated the scene; Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series (1965–​77) and, of course, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter (1997–​2007) continued to carry the British torch (though Cooper was then a resident of the United States). Even American writer Edward Eager openly pays tribute to Nesbit in his Half Magic (1954) and its successors, establishing the meta-​dialogue between books and experienced young readers that can make books themselves popular fantasy subjects, as later in German author Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart (2005) or Frances Hardinge’s Fly by Night (2005). Fantasy is originally rooted in the traditional literatures of folklore, myth, and legend, and books in this category often still draw on folkloric and mythic tropes and creatures, such as dragons and unicorns. Donna Jo Napoli directly employs folklore as the basis of the narrative in books such as The Prince of the Pond (1992), a frog-​centered novel-​length retelling of “The Frog Prince,” and Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl (2003) is based on the folktale of the same name, while other authors have created fantasy influenced by folklore but not directly replicating any particular tale. New Zealand author Margaret Mahy builds on European folklore in books such as The Haunting (1983), originally receiving pushback in her home country for not employing homegrown myth. Others draw on their own family or ethnic traditions: Joseph Bruchac’s chilling Skeleton Man (1991) was inspired by Abenaki legend; Tae Keller blends Korean folklore and family story in When You Trap a Tiger (2020); Australian author Patricia Wrightson employs Indigenous myth in The Nargun and the Stars (1973) and other titles. Taxonomies of fantasy sometimes divide the form into low or domestic fantasy, which takes place in our realistic world, and high fantasy, which involves the creation of a fantasy world and more mythic components such as quests. As usual, those divisions are cleaner in theory than in actuality. Magical realism, for instance, originally popularized in Latin American adult literature by writers 148

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such as Jorge Luis Borges and Isabel Allende, takes place in a version of the real world that has been invaded by the strange. It’s a term applied to children’s books such as David Almond’s The Fire-​ Eaters (2009), yet that description could also fit older domestic fantasies such as Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting (1975) or even Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). The concept of magical realism may therefore have more utility in adult literature, which has less tradition of domestic fantasy, or it may genuinely identify a hard-​to-​pin-​down difference within narratives about strange events in the real world. Domestic fantasies are often as cozy as they are magical, as in books such as L. M. Boston’s The House at Green Knowe (1954), Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952), or Finno-​Swedish author Tove Jansson’s The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945) and their many sequels, while coziness is harder to find in sweeping quest myths set in fantasized or folklore-​ based worlds such as Erin Entrada Kelly’s Lalani of the Distant Sea (2019) or Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (2009). Animal fantasies, drawing on (and sometimes subverting) the appeal of cuddly critters, have a strong history in children’s literature, with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) and E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) major landmarks, while adventures such as Kate DiCamillo’s swashbuckling The Tale of Despereaux (2003) or Brian Jacques’s militant Redwall (1986) move animal fantasy into high-​adrenaline realms. Emily Jenkins’s Toys Go Out (2008) and other titles starring animated toys also feature prominently in the history of fanciful children’s literature; while Jenkins offers a sweet and homey narrative for younger readers, Holly Black’s Doll Bones (2014) taps into the tradition of the animated humanlike toy as a sinister figure. Time travel or timeslip fantasy often operates as its own subdivision. Such titles, as in Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), often involve young protagonists traveling to a different era in order to learn an important lesson about their family history or their own identity. Also hard to categorie but deeply influential are the comic exaggerations of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking (1945) and its successors and Roald Dahl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), The BFG (1982), and others, which directly influence much current larky, larger-​than-​life current British children’s fiction by authors such as David Walliams. Cinematic gory horror is unusual in children’s literature, but there are plenty of what are sometimes termed simply “scary stories.” Britain’s Westall was a staunch champion of the creepy supernatural tale, ghostly or otherwise, in books such as The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral (1991). British-​ born American resident Neil Gaiman picked up that mantle for his memorable and spooky Coraline (2002), while moving to a gentler treatment in the friendly ghosts of The Graveyard Book (2008). Indeed, the scary story pitched for younger readers is an art form that can be difficult to manage, with rare authors such as Betty Ren Wright and Mary Downing Hahn turning ghost stories into a middle-​ grades specialty. The best-​known scary stories for young readers in the last few decades, however, are undoubtedly R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, a 1990s publishing phenomenon published in paperback the better to reach child budgets, and subsequently spun off into a television show and a series of feature films. Like Alvin Schwartz with his indelible Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981), Stine hits that sweet spot of spooky enough to tell around a campfire but sufficiently controlled to allow shivers to stay enjoyable rather than overwhelming to child readers. Science fiction, involving explorations of the future and of technology, is more often the purview of young adult and even adult literature than of children’s literature, though spaceships are sometimes a fine but inconsequential setting for adventure stories and comic tales. The dystopian flavor of science fiction is more prevalent, with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) and Lowry’s The Giver among the most prominent examples. Some popular titles, such as the high-​selling Animorphs series, may be more properly termed science fantasy, in that they incorporate elements from both science fiction and fantasy. Such stories of the otherworldly, with their evocation of the unreal and incorporation of elements such as magic and witches, are frequently a lightning rod for objections from adults who oppose such elements as irreligious or dangerous and challenge their use in curricula and collection in libraries. Yet these speculative, imagined world explorations are often the most moral 149

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of books, as A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver wrestle with ideas about individuality or freedom of thought and speech in child-​accessible terms. Fantasy, especially children’s fantasy as opposed to that for young adults, has been slower than realistic fiction to address the problem of white hegemony among authors and characters. Despite Nancy Larrick’s 1965 call to action in “The All-​White World of Children’s Books” and the painfully slow inroads of the underrepresented into children’s literature, fantasy remained predominantly white. Eventually, white authors of series books with big casts, such as the Harry Potter series or Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2005–​2009), began, sometimes awkwardly, to incorporate diverse representation into their character lists. More important contributions came from Black authors such as Virginia Hamilton and, more recently, Kacen Callendar and Justina Ireland, Asian American authors Lin and Kelly, Latino author Carlos Hernandez, and Native author Darcie Little Badger. Diversity of gender identity and sexual orientation is a more recent development, appearing in titles such as Lisa Bunker’s Felix Yz (2017), and Mark Oshiro’s The Insiders (2021).

The Unlikely: Action/​Adventure, Survival Stories, Mysteries, and Spy Stories If fantasy and science fiction are the unreal, spirited narratives set in the real world such as action/​ adventure tales, survival stories, mysteries, detective stories, and spy stories are the unlikely. The events of Treasure Island or Nancy Drew mysteries or Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) could technically occur in our real physical world, but they almost certainly won’t; the appeal lies in the fragrance of plausibility that makes such narratives opportunities to imagine oneself into the adventure. Lemony Snicket’s comic pastiche A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–​2006) and standalone titles such as Sachar’s Holes can also fit this category; these too play with reality in unlikely but possible ways. Such titles often fall into the category of “genre fiction,” a term in adult literature that centers the realist novel as primary and books that fall into other recognizable genres as secondary. It’s true that neatly repeatable series entries driven almost entirely by externals are a common phenomenon in this category, but so are exquisitely interior narratives with just a touch of plot formula. To dismiss such archetypal storymaking as secondary is to miss the point: such books are classic examples of Perry Nodelman’s concept of the “urge to sameness.” These are genres that often work to a formula and spawn series, as in the Enid Blyton books, and (as Shih-​Wen Sue Chen points out elsewhere in this volume) young readers develop in confidence and appreciate the literary companionship of recurring characters within a predictable template. Of course, formula is not special to children’s literature –​ mystery novels with ongoing appearances by the same detective are a staple of adult literature as well –​ but such repetition may be under more severe scrutiny when it comes to books for young people. Many libraries, for instance, refused to carry the popular Stratemeyer Syndicate series of the twentieth century, preferring to use the space for titles considered more deserving. Another strong pull in many of these books is that high-​stakes situations make young protagonists independent experts, solving mysteries that stump grownups or acting as heroes in the face of less competent adults: “Every step, it’s you that saves our lives,” says a doctor to the young protagonist Jim in Treasure Island (Stevenson, Chapter 30). It’s that moving of the young protagonist to center stage that often provides the key difference between much adventurous nonfiction and adventurous fiction, between Apsley Cherry-​Garrard’s Antarctic memoir The Worst Journey in the World (1922) and Geraldine McCaughrean’s Antarctic adventure The White Darkness (2005). And while these books were originally perceived as boys’ books (Treasure Island’s original title was The Sea-​Cook: A Story for Boys) in contrast to the domestic realism that was girls’ territory, exhilaration and adventure are now firmly gender-​neutral, with girls happily solving crimes and sailing the high seas. Robinson Crusoe and its many imitations and spinoffs were devoured by children as well as adults, so much so that it lent its name to the survival genre in the term “robinsonade.” The nineteenth 150

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century saw writers aiming adventure novels directly at young readers. One of the first was Frederic Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841), a classic shipwreck tale, written in response to Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) but aimed at juvenile readers. Scottish author Ballantyne wrote over 100 books for young readers, most of them set in what would be exotic climes to Britons (and viewed through an imperialist lens); Henty rivaled Ballantyne’s prominence with his scores of historical adventures, steeped in British nationalism, which retained popularity, especially nostalgic popularity, for a century after their publication. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) inspired Stevenson to write Treasure Island, a high-​energy story of pirates and loot that created many tropes (the parrot crying “Pieces of eight!”, for instance) indelibly associated with pirate tales even today. These stories were strongly nautical, and the lure of the fictional ship persisted into even such softer-​ edged adventure narratives as Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930), a tale of summertime lake adventures on boats, and Carol Ryrie Brink’s Baby Island (1937), one of the rare early female-​focused survival stories, which focuses on a pair of girls shipwrecked with a quartet of babies. The appeal of the survival story, of making do with one’s wits and a few circumscribed resources, may be eternal; it remains a strong draw in narratives fictional and nonfictional and in screen media as well as print, appealing strongly to children’s desire for independence. While shipwrecks and survival at sea continue to be popular tropes, the survival story developed mainland iterations, often drawing on a more contemporary approach to outdoorism. Jean Craighead George, a member of a legendarily outdoor-​loving family, wrote both Julie of the Wolves (1972), where survival in the Alaskan tundra is a necessity for the heroine, and My Side of the Mountain (1959), where the preteen protagonist chooses outdoor life in New York’s Catskills out of enthusiasm and preference rather than need. Indeed, some runaway stories take the survival story to surprising places, as in E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-​ Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), which treats a pair of siblings hiding out in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gary Paulsen, another outdoorist whose enthusiasm imbues many of his novels, created a landlocked version of the shipwreck narrative in Hatchet (1986), about a boy who is the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness. More recently, survival stories have been rooted in historical and sociopolitical realities, as in Alexandra Diaz’s Santiago’s Road Home (2020), the tale of a Mexican boy whose running away from home becomes a mission to cross the United States border, or Park’s A Long Walk to Water (2010), which provides two parallel stories of young people surviving in Sudan. As they are in adult literature, mysteries are another perennial favorite in children’s literature, offering novice readers the chance to decode both the text and the mystery, often while scaffolded by a familiar protagonist and formula. The twentieth century saw the juggernaut that was the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the first book packager to focus on a child audience; under a variety of pseudonyms, the syndicate released mysteries featuring Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and others from 1899 to 1987 (and new adventures of Nancy Drew continued from a different publisher into the twenty-​first century). Gertrude Chandler Warner’s Boxcar Children, a series in which she wrote nineteen books starting in 1924, has swelled to over 100 titles since her death. German author Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) also early featured the unstoppable gang of kids for whom criminals were no match. Keeping up the tradition of multi-​book series, Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown titles (1963–​2012) loomed large in the later twentieth-​century landscape. Sometimes mysteries have a period setting to add atmosphere, as in Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes books (2006–​); sometimes they’re an occasion to learn history, as in Sharon M. Draper’s Clubhouse Mysteries (2011–​12); sometimes, as in Ireland’s Ophie’s Ghosts (2021) or Varian Johnson’s The Parker Inheritance (2018), they interrogate and expose history. They can range from the sweet and harmless, such as Crosby Bonsall’s The Case of the Cat’s Meow (1966), an entry in the I Can Read Books beginner series, to the surprisingly gritty, as with Yep’s three Chinatown Mysteries titles (1997–​99). At the other end of the spectrum from the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s accessible formula are books such as Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (1978) or Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer (2004), 151

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which are tricky puzzles as much as mysteries. Ultimately, mysteries are an elastic category that can range in age from early readalones such as Marjorie Weinman Sharmat’s Nate the Great series (1972–​2019) to titles verging on young adult. Slightly less ubiquitous but no less popular than mysteries are stories of young spies and secret agents. While Harriet the Spy and Rebecca Stead’s Liar & Spy (2012) are realistic titles featuring young people who spy for amusement, the real genre favorites involve young people learning the professional spy ropes or cast involuntarily into high-​stakes espionage, such as Stuart Gibbs’s Spy School series (2012–​) or Beth McMullen’s Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls books (2017–​19).

Conclusion Over the last three centuries, there have been hundreds of thousands of children’s novels. In that time fiction has moved from an alarming novelty to a pillar of literature, even as adults continue to disagree about its legitimacy and its value. Some themes have remained strong and consistent, while others have transformed or receded in the face of changing tastes, changing culture, or changing recognition of needs. Throughout it all the genre thrives, providing children throughout those centuries with uncountable hours of reading, providing truths beyond mere facts and inventions beyond lies, as multitudes of authors create realities that allow readers to encounter psychologies, experiences, times, and places beyond the limits of their own lives.

Works Cited Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. 3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1982. Johnson, Samuel. The Rambler, No. 4, 31 March 1750. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​43656/​ 43656-​h/​43656-​h.htm. Larrick, Nancy. “The All-​White World of Children’s Books.” Saturday Review, 11 September 1965, pp. 63–​65. Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, Voice, and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. Routledge, 2010. Nodelman, Perry. “The Urge to Sameness.” Children’s Literature, vol. 28, 2000, pp. 38–​43. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Cassel and Co., 1883. Project Gutenberg, updated 20 June 2022, www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​120/​120-​h/​120-​h.htm.

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13 NONFICTION Giorgia Grilli

Introduction In the field of children’s literature, nonfiction is the term used to define –​ and arrange on bookstore and library shelves –​ publications that in North America are usually called “information” or “informational” books and in Great Britain “topic” books. Historically, this genre can be traced back to the tradition of the so-​called “books of instruction”: books containing the kind of information that adults think children should know. What is necessary, important, or appropriate for children to know, of course, changes with the cultural context and from generation to generation. But besides their content, what has changed and continues to change in these books is also the way in which knowledge is communicated to children, and the role of the child reader in the process of sharing knowledge. Children can either be considered passive recipients of notions, data, and objective, authoritative, and indisputable explanations to be learned and memorized, or they can be seen as readers to be actively involved, not just from a cognitive but also from a sensual and emotional point of view. Accordingly, books can be planned and designed as mere tools to transmit specific content/​messages, or else as dialogical works that try to spark children’s curiosity and sense of wonder and that are structurally conceived not to provide definitive answers, but to raise questions, doubts, and comparisons; trigger inferences and interpretations; and prompt aesthetic awareness. The figure of the child reader implicit in nonfiction titles is, however, not always so sharply distinguishable. Moreover, the distinction between books whose content is presented as “given” and those that demand the involvement of the reader to produce meaning is not neatly separated by the fault lines of past and present. There have been informational books potentially able to enthrall and engage the child reader in past centuries, just as there are dogmatic, nondialogical books characterized by a unilateral, monolithic transmission of knowledge published today. Scholars with a critical interest in these books, as well as educators who use them with children, should approach and analyze nonfiction bearing these aspects in mind. It is of course essential to distinguish between information and ideology, but also to ponder the difference between information and knowledge (Aronson); to recognize the textual and visual strategies (Goga, Iversen, and Teigland) employed by books to achieve one or the other; to decide whether what we want to share with children is, for example, scientific results or the intuitions and procedures that led to those conclusions; to understand whether the focus of a book should be the certainties the author (and a community) consider acquired, or the precarious, relative, and reviewable nature of any notion; to ascertain whether what is offered to children is closed knowledge or knowledge that is open to forms DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-16

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of negotiation (Sanders). In short, it is essential to ask ourselves whether nonfiction’s ultimate role is to transfer a series of pre-​established accepted truths about the world or to develop curiosity, interest, passion, and critical thinking.

Definition and Evaluation of Nonfiction The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature defines nonfiction as the corpus of books “written to impart information and to treat ideas relating to various topics in the social sciences, sciences, technology, fine arts, recreation, humanities and history” (vol. 3, 160). Broadly speaking, children’s nonfiction includes textbooks and trade books. The present chapter deals with the latter, namely, nonfiction books not conceived as schoolbooks, even though they can obviously be used by teachers in the classroom in addition to textbooks. Nonfiction trade books for children today are of many different types and formats, the issues they cover potentially endless, and their target audience extremely wide. They encompass “early-​concept books” for toddlers (Kümmerling-​Meibauer and Meibauer), conceived to explain an idea, object, or activity by pairing a word with an image (through a design that may be linear –​a pictured object linked unequivocally to its written label –​or that may present combinations that are less obvious, more original, and open to interpretation), but they also encompass long and complex works for teenagers on the most diverse range of topics. Instances of the latter include the idea of death in different cultures, the most famous and strategically important roads in the history of humanity, and the many possible zoophobias, among many other examples. By far the largest category of children’s nonfiction is the science book, particularly natural science titles examining the inexhaustible features of the animal and vegetable kingdoms (fossils; dinosaurs and other extinct species; evolution; the most common or the rarest animals and plants, including their shapes, characteristics, habits, and habitats), geography (maps, mountains, volcanoes, oceans, rivers, landscapes, but also cities and other anthropic formations), astronomy (space, planets, the solar system), meteorological phenomena, climate and –​ increasingly frequently –​ climate change caused by the Anthropocene. Books on language also form a wide and varied category of nonfiction. They include titles on the history of writing, alphabet books, and books on strange or untranslatable words, such as Nicola Edwards and Luisa Uribe’s stimulating What a Wonderful Word: A Collection of Untranslatable Words from Around the World (Little Tiger Press, 2018). Many particularly creative titles focus on wordplay and the peculiarities of language use, including figures of speech, idiomatic expressions, comparisons, homographic terms, synonyms, and opposites. Mathematics is another large nonfiction category, giving rise to the simplest counting books –​ often whimsically conceived and illustrated –​but also to books on dimensions, measurements, distances, lengths, widths, speeds, records, and other numerical concepts concerning the physical world, usually chosen to surprise, impress, and provoke thought in the reader. There are books on human anatomy and physiology, their titles always among the most controversial for what they show and how they show it (see Rosie Haine’s clever It Isn’t Rude to Be Nude [Tate, 2020]); books on architecture and technology, pioneered by David Macaulay’s internationally successful titles in the 1970s and 1980s; books on art, music, sports, religions, philosophical or existential questions. There are books on historical topics, ranging from summaries of the entire history of humanity to specific events, anecdotes, or persons worthy of note. And starting in the 1970s, an increasing number of books on multicultural issues has been published, with titles highlighting the contexts, traditions, and daily habits of people belonging to many different countries, cultures, and social classes. Whatever their focus, in theory these books all have to do with what we call “reality.” Indeed, another expression often used to indicate the many and various nonfiction publications is “literature of facts,” a formulation clearly intended to distinguish this kind of book from fiction and poetry on the assumption that nonfiction provides objective explanations and representations of “true” things, in contrast to narrative or creative publications based on unreality, imagination, whim, and, in any 154

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case, the subjectivity of the author. The generally accepted idea of nonfiction is as a corpus of titles providing children with reliable information on the world, which, as the name suggests and contrary to fiction, does not entail invention, fantasy, arbitrariness, or originality in the representation of the natural, human, social, or cultural universe. If we compare the two publishing realms in terms of their intentions, the aim of nonfiction is clearly, directly, and explicitly educational: nonfiction books inform, instruct, or introduce children to shared notions, data, rules, and knowledge acquisition. Fiction, in contrast, pursues different goals altogether: to entertain, delight, thrill, move, unsettle, and maybe subvert official beliefs, and if it does have educational intentions, these are indirect, implicit, concealed within a plot whose narrative mechanisms often appear more powerful than the implied message. Yet the more we try to define what distinguishes nonfiction from fiction, the more we become aware of the ambiguities, and the fact that these realms, not to mention the intentions behind them, are very easily blurred. For as Milton Meltzer wrote in his famous essay “Where Do All the Prizes Go? The Case for Nonfiction,” published in The Horn Book in 1976, the best nonfiction always implies “imagination, invention, selection, language, form,” qualities that we should not hesitate to call artistic and that, by their very nature, cast into question the idea of an objective, purely informative literature, somehow different from the “other” literature (18). According to Nikola von Merveldt, the term nonfiction is misleading, because it tends to confuse an author’s intention to present some aspect of the real world with the communicative strategies employed to do so. Such strategies could –​ and indeed often do –​include narrative, imaginative, and stylistic devices that are typical of fiction, alongside logical argument and the stark exposition of facts (Merveldt, passim). Narrative, imaginative, and stylistic devices are not only legitimate but crucial for any effective communication. This insight has led scholars such as Meltzer to claim that nonfiction, including children’s nonfiction, should be considered part of the broad category of literature, judged precisely according to the aesthetic value critics systematically search for in children’s books but have until recently neglected to expect, require, or pay attention to when it comes to informational books. In 1972, Margery Fisher was the first scholar to complain that “because of an unexpressed feeling that information books are not ‘creative,’ they are far more often reviewed for their content than for their total literary value” (9). As a rule, reviewers generally ascertain that the content is accurate, precise, and “scientifically” grounded. If it is, the book tends to pass the critical test. According to Fisher, though, when judging nonfiction as part of children’s literature, even the most precise or rigorously informative title should be considered inadequate if it fails to engage the reader. Pedantry or dullness in a nonfiction book, implying a view of the reader as a passive person asked simply to accept and memorize content, is as grave a mark of failure as factual inaccuracies or approximations. For Fisher, only a book that avoids an assertive tone and definitive explanations, leaves certain questions open, and reveals the unknown as well as the known –​ in other words, only a book that shows the complexity, stratification, and elusiveness of reality –​ leads the child to speculate, wonder, and activate critical thought, which is what all literature should do. Absorbing information is a predictable and passive process, while acquiring knowledge is an open experience that requires active participation. We need, says Fisher, nonfiction books that offer children knowledge (and the process that goes with it) rather than mere information, books that encourage reasoning and help readers become independent thinkers, not books telling them what to think in a dogmatic way. More than twenty years after these first critical reflections on nonfiction, the British educationalist Margaret Meek wrote: “By itself, information is neither experience nor knowledge” (15). For Meek, the best nonfiction books are grounded on a concept of information “that includes uncertainty, probability, hypothesis making”; they always “demand interpersonal dialogue” (18–​19). A nonfiction book that obliterates wonder and speculation, replacing it merely with exact data and notions, is not a good nonfiction book, since “The best nonfiction books are the books that suggest there is more to be known” (102).

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And yet the prevailing view of nonfiction continues to be very different. Returning to this issue in 2018, Joe Sutliff Sanders has noted that the consensus view is still “that nonfiction is, and should be, a literature of final answers” (40): in other words, a truth-​telling literature, a literature of facts whose most important elements/​values are accuracy of information and reliability of content. However, considering nonfiction as a group of books providing “answers,” understood as a merely factual knowledge of the world, devoid of creativity and interpretative openness, is not only misleading but groundless. Partly since its beginnings, and particularly starting with the new millennium, children’s nonfiction has taken on the characteristics of literature, and like all literature, it often presents as subjective, aesthetic, and artistic while remaining true to its basic purpose of dealing with the world’s most tangible, documentable, “real” aspects. But these aspects are not all there is to these books. According to Jo Carr, good informational books go beyond facts: “Gifted writers work with facts as sculptors work with clay –​or artists with paint, composers with melody, poets with words –​to give meaningful form to their perception of things” (7). Form is as central to nonfiction as it is to fiction. For Evelyn Freeman and Diane Person, “The art of fiction is making up facts; the art of nonfiction is using facts to make up a form” (3), while Meltzer writes that a good nonfiction author “makes art,” where “the verb ‘makes’ is all-​important. Art does not begin when the artist chooses his subject. It is what he does with it, what he makes out of it, that counts” (“Fact” 27). A good nonfiction author is first of all a craftsman, “which means he has a superb technique” (28). The work of any author (of fiction or nonfiction) begins to exist only when s/​he finds the language/​images to express what s/​he wants to communicate, a process that Meltzer terms craft: “Lacking craft, many books of nonfiction contain nothing but dead words. A nonfiction author has to find a form and a voice that will enlarge the reader’s experience, deepen it, intensify it” (29). Calling nonfiction books “informational” is therefore correct not simply because they contain notions or information, but especially on account of their authors’ commitment to “in-​form”: that is, to give knowledge “a form,” offering it to children in a creative manner so that the result is something different from a mere transfer of data. Nonfiction authors should be concerned “not with covering a subject as the curriculum-​constructor thinks of it, but with discovering something meaningful in it and finding the language [more generally: the art] to bring the reader to the same moment of recognition” (Meltzer, “Fact” 31). The author/​illustrator must have what Meltzer calls “quality of vision,” since as Fisher puts it, “Fact is a cold stone, an unarticulated thing, dumb until something happens to it. [...] Fact must be rubbed up in the mind, placed in magnetic juxtaposition with other facts, until it begins to glow, to give off the radiance we call meaning” (302). A nonfiction book can qualify as “literature” when it revolves around an idea, when there is an authorial approach to the subject matter, and when “the author’s style is good enough” (Carr 7). It is precisely the stylistic choices and the original perspective on any content (as opposed to an impersonal approach) that elicit understanding and knowledge in readers, encouraging them to think and feel deeply, even when the subject matter is rigorously scientific. In Freeman’s view, “A good science book touches the mind, the heart, the imagination” (104). And this is true, of course, not only for strictly scientific publications, but for all kinds of informational books. “Style” in nonfiction can concern the writing, when it adopts a narrative or poetic style –​ as opposed to flatly explanatory, neutral tones. It may revolve around the choice of the topic, when it deals with uncommon, little-​known aspects of reality rather than more mainstream and predictable subjects. Style may also concern the point of view from which the topic is presented, when it is deliberately unorthodox or unconventional. Style can involve the material quality of the book (design, format, paper, and so on), the graphic composition of the spread, or the illustrations, when they are conceived not as a mere support to the text but as expressive, forceful, evocative elements in themselves. All these features offer scope for the author’s imaginative insight, which when successfully harnessed makes for nonfiction “literature,” a type of communication about the world that is not banal, neutral, objective, or deterministic, a mere registration/​transmission of dry facts, but intends to 156

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involve readers emotionally, aesthetically, and critically, prompting intuitions, connections, doubts, and excitement as well as enlightenment. In other words, nonfiction somehow needs to be artistic, creative, and aesthetically sophisticated, not only to elicit the appreciation of experts, but also to more successfully achieve its ultimate function: sharing knowledge with young readers. Nonfiction does not work, does not achieve the aim for which it exists –​promoting children’s understanding of the world –​ if it is not beautiful, intriguing, able to amaze, attract, launch cognitive, interpretative, and emotional challenges, if it cannot activate forms of involvement and arouse pleasure. When we consider quality in any book for children, we imply that children deserve beautiful writing and art. These are values that are as relevant as accurate data and notions. Form is as important as content in nonfiction no less than in fiction if literature is to engage readers and mean something to them.

Historical Overview Conventionally, the beginning not just of nonfiction but of all children’s literature is traced back to the publication, in 1658, of Orbis Sensualium Pictus, by the Czech theologian Johann Amos Comenius (1592–​1670). The aim of the book was to teach children to read in both German (the book’s original language) and Latin. Yet the work is much more than a reading and translating exercise. It presents as a thorough, compact, illustrated encyclopedia opening with the alphabet and moving forward with the representation of various aspects of the “visible world” that children should know: facts concerning nature, geography, sports, hobbies, moral virtues, and more. The book displays a broad selection of illustrations, considered fundamental for information to be communicated effectively. Indeed, ever since children’s books were first printed, it was implicitly realized that knowledge cannot be transferred from book to child unless the reader is aesthetically engaged and unless the process gives the reader pleasure. Comenius was clearly convinced that alongside any factual content, some kind of aesthetic element aspiring to beauty was needed in order to touch the reader’s senses, evoked in the title of the book. The idea behind the creation of the Orbis Pictus is that facets other than the child reader’s intellect need to be engaged; otherwise, what is taught fails to strike a chord and leave an impression. The sensual appeal of his book, with its 150 illustrations, was crucial to Comenius, who had already understood that arousing readers’ senses meant allowing them to “feel” –​ and therefore understand –​ the scene depicted in a more empathic and radical way than any description, explanation, analysis, or strictly logical argumentation could do. Comenius’s idea was embraced and strengthened in the eighteenth century by philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, who in turn were followed by the greatest pedagogues and developmental psychologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Friedrich Fröebel, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Jerome Bruner. Indeed, their approach has been so assimilated as to sound obvious today. Nevertheless, there are still many examples of publishing products for children conceived with an exclusive concern for the notions and messages the authors want to (mechanically) transfer to children, a concern not accompanied by any textual and visual strategies aiming to trigger deeper reader engagement, arouse interest, or elicit wonder, fascination, and questions about the aspects of the world dealt with in the books. For although the concept of the first nonfiction book for children was very modern –​ even if still rudimentary in execution –​ countless authors down the ages have eschewed and continue to eschew Comenius’s pioneering aim of reconciling “Instruction and Amusement” (an expression used later, in 1744, by the English publisher John Newbery, referring to Horace’s precept that poetry must “instruct and delight”). Nor should we understand “amusement” as mindless entertainment, but as reader engagement that is not merely rational but also emotional and aesthetic, active enthusiastic participation in the book’s content rather than its passive acritical consumption. For Comenius, this kind of incitement and motivation was possible thanks to the images. The technical means available at the time of Orbis Pictus were woodcuts of the earliest type, but the 157

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grounding idea had already taken hold: the text by itself may not be enough to engage the reader, a point that in children’s literature is true for both nonfiction and fiction. We might consider the opening of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which the protagonist expresses her boredom with books without pictures, to find an example. Before that, one of the very first novels interested in the child psyche, Jane Eyre (1847), had shown how important a book with beautiful illustrations can be for a child. In the household where she is mistreated and humiliated, little Jane finds shelter in A History of British Birds (1821) by Thomas Bewick, the English printer who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, invented an etching method for reproducing much more refined drawings than previously possible. A magnificently illustrated book can become, for a child, a comfort zone, a beautiful physical and metaphorical realm in which to enter and lose herself. Entranced by Bewick’s images –​highly sophisticated nonfiction ­illustrations –​Jane can forget her wretched condition for a moment. According to some cognitive scientists, images trigger a specific part of our brain, the right hemisphere, responsible for intuition, emotions, empathy, participation, and deep connection with what we are looking at (see McGilchrist; Crago). In this respect, images are different from the verbal code, especially when the verbal code takes the shape of a rigorously logical, objective, detached written text, the kind of text that nonfiction has traditionally aspired to in order to appear authoritative and believable. The written text, when used to explain, analyze, or define, seems to activate more directly the left hemisphere, whose job is to rationalize, distinguish, and distinguish us from the rest of the world (McGilchrist). Even if the idea of two separate hemispheres with specific cognitive functions can be misleading and arguable in light of the complexity of the human brain, which normally seems to entail bilateral processing and interhemispheric integration, we can easily assume that an informational book that is full of images, especially when the images are skillfully and creatively illustrated, provides additional stimulation and a more deeply integrated cognitive experience. Combining words and pictures, it instructs us on the things of the world, a process for which some detachment is necessary, yet at the same time makes us feel part of the subject matter, thoroughly involved in its assimilation. As we shall see in the final paragraph of this chapter, it is around these oxymoronic stimuli that the new nonfiction picturebook –​ an international and coherent twenty-​first-​century publishing phenomenon –​has developed. Over and above the images, specific qualities of the written text also clearly engage the reader more deeply than strictly logical, neutral, or aseptic language (Carr 45–​46). Poetic forms of speech, with their musicality, assonances, rhymes, onomatopoeias, and ellipsis, touch the senses and captivate the reader. And they have been characteristic components of instruction books from the earliest rhyming alphabets, for example, the most famous of which can be found in The New-England Primer by Benjamin Harris, published at the end of the seventeenth century. Their purpose was clearly to teach children to read and, at the same time, to instruct them in religious matters through formulae (“In Adam’s fall /​We sinned all”) that sound pedantic and rigid to us today. Yet these very simple, didactic texts reveal an understanding that in order for learning to happen, the book has to have an aesthetic appeal. And perhaps because the words of alphabet and concept books are so few and therefore have to be chosen carefully if one wants to create rhymes, assonances, alliterations, synaesthesias, and other kinds of auditory and semantic frictions, over the centuries such books for very young readers have presented and continue to present a unique poetic quality. In recent years, this quality has reached peaks of extraordinary artistry and creativity. Two international examples are L’Imagier des gens (Albin Michel, 2008) and Seasons (Albin Michel, 2009), both by the French author Blexbolex. Although seemingly simple and didactic, they do not impose an association between a word and its visual referent in a deterministic way. Each pairing is surprising, dialogical, open to multiple interpretations, and designed to elicit speculation, questions, and doubts as to the accepted naming/​classification of the world. Another example is Anthony Browne’s One Gorilla (Candlewick Press, 2013): apparently a typical, elementary counting book, it has an 158

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unexpected philosophical twist that makes it unique as a primer for the very young. Among the alphabet books conceived not just to teach letters but also to delight and challenge the reader, ABCD by Henry Galeron (Editions des Grandes Personnes, 2017) shows objects and living beings beginning with the same letter grouped together in surreal landscapes, while Hoje sinto-​me by the Portuguese Madalena Moniz (Orfeu Negro, 2014) is a surprising alphabet of feelings with both unusual words and their poetic visual representation. Returning to the musicality, rhymes, and assonances already used in the seventeenth century –​yet with a much higher degree of sophistication –​mention should be made of Alphabet des plants et des animaux by Emilie Vast (Memo, 2017). Not only the expressly poetic, but also the narrative style of the text has a power of attraction far greater than the stark exposition of data and notions, explanations, or neutral information. And even very early books of instruction adopted colorful narrative styles. Major examples are travel books, particularly the popular travel books of Peter Parley, pen name of the American author Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793–​1860). After the success of Tales of Peter Parley about America (1827), many other titles by the same author followed in which the protagonists move to different countries with unfamiliar characteristics. The fictional journey as a frame for descriptions and explanations of various regions of the world has been imitated by countless authors ever since. The voyage is both a real and a metaphorical agent of adventure and exploration: as the act of leaving behind what is known in order to discover something new, it situates itself perfectly in the space between fiction and nonfiction, a space where the knowledge acquired is indistinguishable from the emotions, sensations, doubts, and questions it generates. For many scholars, this is what the best nonfiction is all about. After all, the same space is occupied also by scientific research before results become apparent and data become certain and consolidated. The scientific method is based initially on intuition, uncertainty, openness to the unknown. It is driven by motivation and the emotions stirred by the unintelligible and what has yet to be discovered, two elements that, in the field of literature, dominate fiction, but that should also belong to nonfictional discourse. Yet according to several critics, informational books are still mistakenly associated by many with an assertive communicative approach, with an “analytical mode and sometimes pompous certainty” (Carr 160), with a literature of answers rather than a literature of questions (Sanders 29). Like travel books, the field of biography has always made ample use of narrative devices, thereby blending information and imagination, nonfiction and fiction (Carr 117–​53). Biographies for children have always mostly dealt with people whose lives were considered exemplary: initially, saints or kings, followed by Greek and Roman heroes (after Plutarch) or national champions, often told from a patriotic perspective. Interestingly, the freedom allowed by the narrative mode is not necessarily used by authors to portray their characters in a more layered and complex way, for instance imagining their characters’ thoughts, moods, inner turmoil, and so on. With very few exceptions, authors have mostly conceived biographies for children as clearly and unmistakably edifying books, inevitably simplifying reality. Even though the spectrum of individuals dealt with has widened enormously compared to titles of the past, and now increasingly includes men and women who are representative of socially marginalized categories, still today biographies for children are essentially hagiographies, blatant eulogies of their subject, rather than opportunities to ponder on the complexity and discrepancies of that subject’s personality. This trend contrasts with the nuanced approach to biographies for adults, practiced with increasing sophistication since James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (Wilms 137). Indeed, there is no difference between the key intentions of a book such as Famous Girls Who Have Become Illustrious Women: Forming Models for Imitation for the Young Women of England, by John M. Darton, published in 1864, and those of the international bestseller Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Stories of Extraordinary Women, by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, published in 2017. Both books choose exemplary women’s lives told in the form of short, mainly anecdotal stories intended to inspire imitation by young girls. In methodological terms, it matters little that the first book extolls nineteenth-​century female virtues of modesty, patience, and mildness while today’s exemplary women are independent, enterprising, energetic, and rebellious. In both cases, only one 159

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mode of being a woman is presented as right, in line with the cultural trends of the time in which the authors write. Influenced by the legitimate claims of the #MeToo movement, the role model of today is imposed upon readers in an assertive, monolithic, indisputable way, sidelining any real investigative study of the lives of the women portrayed in these biographies. Favilli and Cavallo’s book has had countless imitators. Yet what emerges from this stream of biographies is a feminine universe that does not allow for any exception to the women held up as role models. Although rejecting the acquiescence expected of women in the past, the gutsy rebellious characters lauded today might well trigger feelings of being somehow “wrong” in less adventurous types, just as rebellious girls must have felt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 If we consider their communicative style –​assertive, oversimplified, unquestioning, nondialogical with respect to the reader –​ these new biographies for children, apparently innovative for their feminist content, are carbon copies of the most old-​fashioned, prescriptive, and ideological (not to mention gender-​ based) children’s books ever written: the so-​called conduct books for girls. A development of the more ancient courtesy books, which aimed to instruct the children of aristocratic families on courtly manners in medieval times, conduct books were widespread during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to instruct the children of the rising middle classes in the rules of polite behavior, with a clear distinction made between the sexes. To contemporary mindsets, these books seem extremely out-​of-​date, not least for their recommendation to distinguish addressees according to their gender. Yet many recently published women’s biographies aimed at inspiring certain behaviors in girls differ little from their older counterparts. Nonfiction took a great leap forward in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as societies became increasingly industrialized, rational, and scientific. Informational books for children focused on the great technological inventions of the day with publications such as The Wonders of the Telescope (1805) and The Wonders of the Microscope (1806). This kind of book has been successful ever since, exploding during the 1950s, when the launch of Sputnik by the Russians took the rest of the world –​ and especially the United States –​ by surprise and it was decided that the young generation had to have more scientific and technological knowledge. In turn, technology has helped to shape the form of nonfiction for the young. Specifically, developments in printing methods have allowed more and more formal innovations in nonfiction books, such as the insertion of color illustrations positioned in each page next to the text to which they are related, rather than a block of images on separate pages. The use of photography became widespread in the 1970s thanks also to the success of the many titles produced by the English publisher Dorling Kindersley. Focused on various aspects of the natural and artificial world, these publications were among the first to subvert the proportion of text and images in nonfiction in favor of the latter, using text as little more than simple captions explaining the pictures. This innovation revolutionized the use of visual elements, formerly conceived as strictly functional in a book that relied on the written text to convey information and meaning. Dorling Kindersley’s photographic books took a first step in the direction of what at the end of the twentieth century, and especially since the 2010s, has been defined as the “pictorial turn” of nonfiction (Merveldt 231). With this expression, Merveldt refers to a reversal not only of the quantitative but also of the qualitative, conceptual, philosophical, and more specifically gnoseological relationship between text and images. She sees “an epistemic shift in the relationship between text and image, fundamentally changing the way in which knowledge is constituted, understood, and communicated” (231). As Merveldt notes, possibly the most interesting phenomenon of this shift has been the explosion, at an international level, of the production of the nonfiction picturebook: “The privileged status of images in knowledge transmission has led to an exciting convergence of informational literature and the picturebook format in the past three decades, resulting in innovative informational picturebooks that more often than not transcend the boundaries of media, genre, gender and age” (231).

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The Nonfiction Picturebook As explained by the flourishing studies on the subject, the picturebook is a specific communicative form, a unique multimodal book with its own grammar and rules. The picturebook is anchored on the attribution of meaning to all aspects of the book: within it, content and form are conceived to inextricably contribute to its semantic value. Not only text and images, but also format, cover, paper, and endpapers all participate in the overall significance of the picturebook. It is this richness of elements, considered as important both in themselves and for the orchestration they require, that makes the picturebook such a challenging work for both its makers and its readers. The organization of graphic design, illustrations, and written text within the double-​page spread, along with all the other formal and material elements of the book, requires a careful search for harmony of the various parts, making this kind of book particularly sophisticated, vibrant, and “open” (Eco) in both creative and hermeneutical terms. Any successful picturebook contains multiple levels of meaning and leaves interpretative spaces for the reader to fill in, spaces that may present anew at every new encounter with the same or different readers. And over the last couple of decades, opting for the picturebook form in nonfiction has meant giving more and more weight to paratextual, illustrative, graphic, and material aspects, which in turn has contributed to radically changing the way knowledge is conceived and shared with the reader. Nonfiction picturebooks share the same ground as narrative picturebooks, in that their authors work within the same grammatical framework, designing the book so that the physical elements (format, size, type of paper), the structural elements (title, endpapers, a possible table of contents or appendix, the paratexts), the graphic/​pictorial elements (fonts, colors, illustrations, layout of the spreads) –​in short, the aesthetic quality of the book as a whole –​are all crucial to the creation of the work and an integral part of the content to be communicated. In particular, the role of the visual code in the nonfiction picturebook is neither just decorative nor merely aimed at eliciting an aesthetic response in the reader, parallel to the cognitive response supposedly activated by the verbal code. In this kind of book, it is the images that contribute most to organizing and arranging the informational content, and to interpreting it according to their own rules. As Merveldt writes in comparing nonfiction picturebooks to more traditional nonfiction, “illustrations in informational picturebooks not only document or illustrate facts, they also visually organize and interpret them” (54). Indeed, the underlying “visual idea” makes these books become global artistic endeavors whose content is completely revolutionized, compared to traditional nonfiction. Typically, the nonfiction picturebook is a composite, multilayered project, a creative as well as informative undertaking, in which the aesthetic aspects carry a genuine gnoseological value in themselves and make knowledge a potentially open, dialogical, intuitive dimension, as opposed to a mechanically transmitted set of notions. An emblematic example is Zooptique, by the French author and illustrator Guillaume Duprat, published by Gallimard in 2013. The focus of the book is the visual acuity of different animal species, a subject that leads to philosophical reflection on the different ways of seeing the world and the relativity of each specific vision. This sort of subject matter could not be conveyed as effectively and convincingly were the book not designed as a magnificent gallery of animal portraits with flaps on the eyes that can be lifted for the reader to see how each animal sees the world around it. Although displaying the “same” landscape on every page, that landscape is represented differently on account of each animal’s specific vision, one that readers can make their own every time they lift the flaps. Another book revolving around a visual idea is Zoologique, by Joëlle Jolivet, published in France by Seuil in 2002. In it, the author and illustrator arbitrarily groups animals from traditionally unrelated taxonomic categories that nonetheless have some common denominator: striped fur; a spotted coat; black and white coloring; a cold, temperate or hot habitat; underground dwelling; aquatic environment. Grouped together according to subjective rather than scientific criteria, the animals are skillfully arranged in surreal double-​page spreads that resemble a sort of mesmerizing puzzle, even more 161

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impressive because of the book’s gigantic format. The author’s communicative urgency is clearly perceptual and compositional much more than rigorously classificatory. The animals are matched according to what strikes our senses and how well they fit in a harmonious pattern, and this organizing principle brings to light unexpected and thought-​provoking associations/​connections among them. Again, A toute Vitesse!, by the French artist Crushiform (Gallimard, 2013), groups humans, animals, and artificial objects that have no apparent connection. Their common feature is the speed at which each moves, from extremely slow to very fast. Yet what the author/​illustrator clearly had in mind when creating her elegant spreads that hark back to posters of the 1920s was as much an object of beauty as a factual (and indeed extremely accurate) book on different speeds. Another example of this complex and often ingenious mode of communicating knowledge typical of the “new” nonfiction picturebook is the German Meister der Tarnung: Überlebenskünstler in der Tierwelt, by Annika Siems (Gestenberg, 2012). As her subject is animal camouflage, the author/​artist appropriately “hides” in the pictures the explanatory written description of how the various animals conceal themselves, blurring the text within the image so that the reader has to look carefully to spot it. In this way, the reader gets first hand experience of the phenomenon of camouflage. The book design allows understanding through the senses as well as through the intellect, and knowledge is acquired by active reader engagement rather than passive assimilation. Although nonfiction picturebooks sometimes have a final appendix presenting their subject in a more traditional way, the aesthetic and semantic strength of books of this kind lies in the beauty and inventiveness of their more creative, expressive, evocative pages, deliberately designed to intertwine –​ and not dissociate –​ information and sensory solicitation, facts about the world and their creative representation. In other words, nonfiction picturebooks suggest ways of approaching knowledge by fusing the aesthetic dimension with the learning experience, a path that has been tentatively walked since the beginning of children’s nonfiction but that is currently being explored and exploited to the full by publishers all over the world. By making creative and stylistic research their expressive characteristic, these books organize information in an original manner that may often be surprising, unsettling, and sometimes irreverent yet that always aims to engage the child readers, who are invited to look carefully, connect, find, and interpret, using their senses and capacity for marvel in the learning challenges that the book presents. In the last two decades, experimentation combining the communication of knowledge with the picturebook form has filled shelves with some of the most innovative children’s literature, mixing languages, blurring boundaries, and blending the very concepts of fiction/​nonfiction, science/​art, instruction/​delight to produce new hybrid works conceived to share knowledge in a way that allows the child reader to think, marvel, wonder, and be actively engaged in the learning process.

Note 1 By the end of the nineteenth century, one could find a number of biographical accounts for girls privileging strong-​mindedness; emerging role models included such figures as Florence Nightingale and Grace Darling, for instance. Female meekness was officially encouraged and considered “normal,” but it wasn’t uniformly admired in the Victorian era; consider the success of fictional characters such as Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–​69).

Works Cited Aronson, Marc. “New Knowledge.” The Horn Book Magazine, 1 March 2011, pp. 57–​62. Carr, Jo, ed. Beyond Fact: Nonfiction for Children and Young People. American Library Association, 1982. Crago, Hugh. Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale and Teller from Infancy to Old Age. Routledge, 2014. Eco, Umberto. Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee. Bompiani, 1967. Fisher, Margery. Matters of Fact: Aspects of Non-​Fiction for Children. Hodder and Stoughton, 1972.

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Nonfiction Freeman, Evelyn B. “Nonfiction: A Genre Comes of Age.” Children’s Literature Remembered: Issues, Trends, and Favourite Books, Libraries edited by Linda M. Pavonetti, Unlimited, 2004, pp. 101–​17. —​—​—​, and Diane G. Person. Using Nonfiction Trade Books in the Elementary Classroom: From Ants to Zeppelins. National Council of Teachers of English, 1992. Goga, Nina, Sara Hoem Iversen, and Anne-​Stefi Teigland, eds. Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks: Theoretical and Analytical Approaches. Scandinavian University Press, 2021. Grilli, Giorgia, ed. The New Non-​Fiction Picturebook: Sharing Knowledge as an Aesthetic Experience. ETS, 2020. Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Bettina, and Jörg Meibauer. “Early-​Concept Books and Concept Books.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Routledge, 2018, pp. 149–​57. Mallan, Kerry, and Amy Cross. “The Artful Interpretation of Science Through Picture Books.” Picture Books and Beyond, edited by Kerry Mallan, Primary English Teaching Association Australia, 2014, pp. 41–​60. McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009. Meek, Margaret. Information and Book Learning. Thimble Press, 1996. Meltzer, Milton. “Beyond Fact.” Carr, pp. 26–​33. —​—​—​. “Where Do All the Prizes Go? The Case for Nonfiction.” Horn Book, 8 February 1976, pp. 17–​23. Merveldt, Nikola von. “Informational Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Routledge, 2018, pp. 231–​45. Sanders, Joe Sutliff. A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Wilms, Denise M. “An Evaluation of Biography.” Carr, pp. 135–​40. Zarnowski, Myra, and Susan Turkel. “How Nonfiction Reveals the Nature of Science.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 44, no. 4, December 2013, pp. 295–​310. Zipes, Jack, editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. 4 volumes, Oxford University Press, 2006.

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14 CHILDREN’S POETRY Michael Joseph

Pre-​Nineteenth Century We might say children’s poetry in English1 began with the first recorded English lullaby in 1372: John de Grimstone’s “Lullay, lullay, litel child, /​ Softë slep and faste” (Opie 18).2 Small bits of religious verse appeared on hornbooks in the fifteenth century. The Babees’ Book (1475) taught manners and included the first children’s alphabet poem. The early Elizabethan Book in Englyss Emtre of the Great Marhaunt Man Called Dyves Pragmaticus, Very Pretye for Chyldren to Rede, by Thomas Newberry, combined practical knowledge with instruction. It shows up among the books brought to Massachusetts in 1630, although published a hundred years earlier (Earle 20–​21). Seventeenth-​century advice books, “which grew out of a struggle to come to grips with changing conceptions of childhood” (Johns 120), also offered poetry for the young. In 1604, Elizabeth Grymeston authored a collection of poems for children compiled from secular and liturgical sources. Dorothy Leigh’s verse “Counsell to My Children,” whose central metaphor (the bee) anticipates Isaac Watts, surfaces in another example of this genre, The Mother’s Blessing (1616). Grymeston and Leigh present themselves as dying Christian mothers who wish to impart final instructions to their children, and then, through publication, to all who might benefit. Outwardly simple and hearth-​centered, the texts are surprisingly artful. Grymeston’s Miscelanea, Meditations, Memoratives repurposes Edmund Spencer’s sour complaint against the English stage (The Teares of the Muses, ca. 1580) as a lament on the moral degeneracy of the world. Her bricolage anticipates a poem in John Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls: Or Country Rhimes for Children (1686), the first ever collection of children’s poems in English, published eight years after his chart-​topping Pilgrim’s Progress. Conversely, the opening of Bunyan’s “Of the Going Down of the Sun” clearly rewrites John Donne’s erotic “The Sun Rising,” published forty-​two years earlier. The children’s poems of Grymeston, Leigh, Bunyan, and their seventeenth-​century successors are formally identical to poems that many English poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Robert Smith, addressed to their children. Asserting traditional Christian beliefs and values, these poems demonstrated the appropriate relationship between parent (father) and child for an adult audience. They are the antecedents of twentieth-​century poems that, for literary purposes, were ostensibly directed toward children, some of which have been absorbed into the body of children’s literature. In 1690, the Puritans’ paradigmatic alphabet poem “In Adam’s Fall /​We sinned all” appeared in The New-​England Primer. Unlike Bunyan’s verse, which proved ephemeral, it remained in print into the nineteenth century. One can feel its influence in Goody Two-​Shoes, published in 1765, in the 164

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aphoristic verse “He that will thrive /​ Must rise by Five” (Goody). In the longevity of “In Adam’s Fall,” and its emanations among later children’s poems having far different ideological substrates, we observe the recursive nature of children’s poetry. A children’s poet whose poems would survive well into the nineteenth century, both in their original form and in Lewis Carroll’s famous parodies, Isaac Watts wrote his Divine Songs (1715) for children’s ears and minds. In Divine Songs, children’s poetry has attained aesthetic self-​consciousness. Its making requires lyrical skill, a specific kind of attention, and sensitivity to the expressive potential of visual and aural imagery; it possesses a value that might coexist with or even outlast other sublunary uses –​pedagogical, moralistic, informational, mnemonic, and so on. Watts’s lyrics are admirable for their exclamatory, paratactic lines (one thinks of Emily Dickinson) and effortless rhyming.3 So significant were Watts’s poems, Morag Styles nearly credits him with having invented children’s poetry, writing, “Martha England suggests that ‘the English hymn as a literary form may almost be said to have come into being with the lyrics of Watts.’ His contribution to children’s verse is at least as significant” (13). His music echoes in early nineteenth-​century children’s poetry, for example Jane and Ann Taylor’s Original Poems for the Infant Mind (1805), in which we find the lullaby “Twinkle, twinkle little star,” credited to Jane –​another poem lovingly mocked by Carroll. Several impulses cooperate to create eighteenth-​century children’s poetry. Under the impetus of the Enlightenment, lyrical verse moves through Watts toward the secular verse of the Taylors. In the Colonies, stirred by the religious fervor of the Great Awakening, dramatic verse retreats toward the traditionalism of the advice books. Generally underemphasized in the discourse, this latter impulse finds memorable expression in the homiletic ballad The Prodigal Daughter, first issued in 1736 by Thomas Fleet, who advertised it as a “small book in easy Verse, very suitable for Children.” The poem dramatizes the Evangelical fear of the world and yet concedes that individuality and self-​regard are compatible with religious obedience. Surely, young readers were shocked by the Daughter’s nonchalant reception of the Devil behind locked doors, and, again, at her readiness to murder father and mother. Yet for the text to achieve its primary purpose, to trigger the crucial emotional conversion experience, they needed to be made to identify with her –​ and thus to have their eyes opened to their own sinful behavior. The Daughter’s courage and plucky wit in her debate with the dreadful gatekeeper of the Underworld accomplishes that. But while viewing their own sinful ways in the Prodigal Daughter, they also could value their own ingenuity and independence. Thus, even as conservatism in children’s poetry consolidates itself against emerging modernist values, it simultaneously absorbs and represents and even fosters those values. And of course, while the more lyrical, contemporary children’s poetry scorned traditionalist constraints, focusing on the natural world, on commonsense, it also reaffirmed traditional values such as piety and obedience. A third impulse, a nostalgic, musical vox populi, appeared in the form of nursery rhymes –​an orally based body of lyrics gathered from miscellaneous sources. Nourished by an emerging pluralistic publishing industry, nursery rhymes would attain an unprecedented stature, becoming virtually synonymous with childhood. In one form or another, these impulses would continue to shape children’s poetry for the next three centuries.

Nineteenth Century The nineteenth century saw the normalization of printed children’s poetry in English; the recognition of children’s poetry as literary work facilitated through serial as well as single-​author publications (Kilcup and Sorby 557); the development of an official body or canon of nursery rhymes, which required and valorized an enduring relationship between illustration and children’s poetry; and the growth of children’s poetry’s educational uses, leading in the United States to a fusion of children’s poetry with nationalism. The century also widened the scope of topics treated in children’s poems. 165

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In addition, the genre of children’s poetry coalesced in the writings of a sodality of women poets empowered by an international marketplace; the Enlightenment valorization of the pursuit of knowledge; and Romantic ideals of individuality, personal experience, and engagement with nature. Just as earlier authors had sidestepped patriarchal prohibitions by addressing texts to their own offspring, implicitly disclaiming the status of author, nineteenth-​century women poets avoided censorship by directing themselves toward education. Older poets, such as Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld and Hannah More, modeled authorship (refining the personas of Grymeston and Leigh) by composing educational and pietistic poems. Lucy Aikin, the Taylors, Mary Elliot, Felicia Hemans, Sarah J. Hale, Lydia Sigourney, and other women born within a ten-​year period, 1781–​91, produced poetry encompassing a broader thematic palette with a more overt emphasis on aesthetic play. Eliza Fenwick, a transitional figure between the Barbauld and Aikin generations, published Songs for the Nursery (1805) under the imprint of Tabart’s Juvenile and School Library, commissioning poems from contemporaries including Dorothy Wordsworth (Paul, Fenwick 104, 111–​12). Neither Fenwick nor any of the authors is named in the volume. By contrast, in her anthology Poetry for Children: Consisting of Short Pieces to be Committed to Memory, Aikin included her poem “The Swallow,” revealing a familiarity with contemporaries Percy Shelley and John Keats in its opening invocation: “Swallow, that on rapid wing /​Sweep’st along in sportive ring” (20). Although the 1801 edition introduces children to venerable Augustan poets such as Dryden and Pope, it includes none of the Romantic poets, an oversight Aikin corrected in the 1825 edition. The increasing influence of the Romantic poets and greater aesthetic sophistication are evident in “The Lost Star,” by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, published in The Young Ladies’ Offering of 1848. Praised by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, “The Lost Star” displays an openness to revelation. Pondering the absence of a familiar star, Landon lets her imagination sift through various mundane explanations, until she is struck by the idea that the star’s leave-​taking might symbolize, even presage, her own. Terence Hoagwood suggests that Landon is offering the poem, itself, as a symbol: “[Landon’s] poetry is characteristically about artifice and artificial narratives. [...] Her works are not about the experiences and feelings of the narrated characters; they are about the narration of those feelings and experiences.” Another Romantic concept, that of the Romantic Child, influenced much nineteenth-​century children’s poetry. The Romantic Child is “innocent, associated with nature, and semidivine” (Paul, “Verse” 1124). In Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood, Judith Plotz notes that in Romantic literature, childhood played a normative role. The Romantics claimed the “discovery” of childhood as a “privileged state on its own ‘distinct peninsula,’ ” and believed that childhood is “endowed with a special power of listening for the tones of truth” (Plotz 2). For the Romantics, the child was a model human being essentially connected to immutable nature, rather than to history; thus “To write about childhood, to reconstitute the self as a child, to live one’s adult life as if one actually were a child became for many writers a lifelong vocation as well as a refuge” (3). Blake calls upon this emblematic figure to perform the services of a muse in the opening lines to his Songs of Innocence (1789), “Piping down the valleys wild,” though it appears more than a decade earlier in Barbauld’s “To Wisdom” (1773): “Hail to Fancy’s golden reign! /​ Festive Mirth, and Laughter wild, /​ Free and sportful as the child.” Karen Kilcup and Angela Sorby characterize nineteenth-​century children’s poems as “contact zones between adults and children” (2) because their audience included readers of all ages. Magazines and anthologies emphasized the “impurity” of the audience by offering poems written for adults alongside poems for children. The Poetic Wreath for 1840 includes an All-​Star selection of authors: Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Keats, along with popular children’s authors such as Felicia Hemans, author of “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.” Presumably, the grab bag of values on display in the collection, goodness, piety, independence, 166

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filial affection, tenderness, compassion, justice, loyalty, charity, self-​awareness, and self-​sacrifice, would be reinforced for children in the “ageless” poems. This didactic strategy of flattering children’s poetry by placing it in a gilded poetic context also served to pique children’s interest in the wider world, which editors encouraged by combining homely vignettes of hearth, nature, and village life with more exotic material, such as tragic tales of Indian maidens, wearied sons returning from the Crusades, and brothers slain in battle. On the latter theme, Hemans’s poem “The Meeting” tells the story of two devoted brothers who, having taken different paths during their adolescence, happen to meet again on the battlefield, on opposing sides. In a slight variation of the tale-​type, the brothers are slain together by a “well-​guided” (sic) bullet. Young readers will have been relieved to learn the brothers are happy to die, because death has united them inseparably; the poem insists on this point in language that some may find unsettling. Their dying, it suggests, might well be the envy of all who, while capable of love, are condemned to isolation and loneliness: Happy, yes, happy thus to go! Bearing from Earth away Affections gifted ne’er to know A shadow –​a decay, A passing touch of change or chill, A breath of aught whose breath can kill. And they between whose sever’d souls, Once in close union tied, A gulf is set, a current rolls For ever to divide,–​ Well may they envy such a lot, Whose hearts yearn on –​but mingle not. (Hemans) Paratext and pictorial matter reinforced the connection between Romanticism and children’s poetry. The frontispiece of The Young Lady’s Book of Elegant Poetry (1835) presents a portrait of the ideal reader: pensive, somnolent, properly Neoclassical, with abundant leisure and, significantly, a cultivated taste for self-​presentation. Just as prescriptive Elizabethans directed children how to behave in polite society, rockstar Romantic poets demonstrated proper modes of self-​presentation and self-​consciousness.

Nursery Rhymes Companioning the development of serious lyric poetry during the nineteenth century was a demotic, occasionally bawdy poetry generally offered, as it had been before this era, in small chapbooks. Early publishers ascribed authorship of anonymous nursery verse to an emblematic figure, such as Nurse Lovechild, Gammer Gurton, or Tommy Tit, to associate it with the condition of childhood and thus underscore its nostalgic value and pedagogical necessity. Around 1821–​22, the Boston publishers Munroe and Frances published Mother Goose’s Quarto. Or, Melodies Complete, soon republished in an expanded edition carrying an expanded title as garrulous as the old Mother herself: Mother Goose’s Melodies. The only pure edition containing all that have ever come to light of her memorable writings, together with those which have been discovered among the mss. of Herculaneum. Likewise every one recently found in the same stone box which hold [sic] the golden plates of the Book of Mormon. The whole compared, revised, and sanctioned, by one of the annotators of the Goose family. Adding to the volume’s amusing bombast was a rhetorical prologue by Mother Goose, claiming a 167

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spiritual bond with Shakespeare and grousing about didactic poetry written by women who, having no children of their own, could not know what children needed. (This complaint was surely a swipe at progressive attitudes in contemporary children’s poetry.) Munroe and Frances’s success compelled rivals to imitate their efforts, making Mother Goose the tutelary deity of the nursery, at least in America. John Higham observes, “Over the course of American history, image makers have crafted a small number of real or imaginary human beings to symbolize the nation and so to shape its meaning and character” (24). Mother Goose was not quite a national type –​more a New Englander. Higham points out that regional types preceded national. Yet as an archaic generatrix of timeless children’s verse, and perhaps an embodiment of the generative principle, the American Mother Goose seemed archetypal, and in synthesis with patriotic sentiments moved the idea of the Union closer to acceptance. Whether intentionally or not, Mother Goose effected the marriage of children’s poetry to nationalism –​ a marriage from which it has never entirely recovered. One sees this in the so-​called schoolroom poets (see below) who became dominant in scholastic children’s poetry during the second half of the century, and in the present day in the more commercial collections. Mother Goose also helped to consolidate the canon of nursery rhymes. While nineteenth-​century publishers would occasionally sneak new rhymes into their collections or publish poems that purloined the form’s easy style, the American Melodies soared largely intact and unchanged through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Tyranny of Illustrations During the second half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between image and rhyme flipped, and poetry became the plus-​one, especially in the catalogs of low-​end American publishers such as Robert H. Elton and his successors, McLoughlin Bros. Maurice Sendak praises Randolph Caldecott for introducing the idea that pictures could co-​narrate a story in conversation with text: “Words are left out –​but the picture says it. Pictures are left out –​but the word says it” (21). The texts to which Sendak is referring were intact nursery rhymes, so we might ask, what did he think was left out, and what is it left out of? Why had something greater than poetry become necessary, and how had the words grown so thin they needed thickening with pictures? With the popularity of ever-​larger picturebooks in the 1880s, simple poems could provide pictures with context (and a dash of respectability) but stay out of their way. Sendak inadvertently describes this kind of debased composition in extolling Caldecott as an illustrator who could “take four lines of verse that have very little meaning in themselves [sic] and stretch them into a book that has tremendous meaning” (24). By the end of the century, the blobby, ersatz poems disseminated widely in the popular picturebook chased true poetry out of the latter form. Readers ignored or perhaps sounded out bite-​size nuggets of meaningless jingles. The rhythm of the picturebook dictated that poems should be read quickly, the more vapid and rapid, the better. Four Footed Friends and Favorites (ca. 1871), illustrated by the journeyman Justin H. Howard and published in The Big Picture Series by McLoughlin Bros., provides a sublime example of this serviceable verse in the couplet “Our pretty goat was born in Wales /​She and her kids have little tails.” We have before us an explanation for why children (or at least American children) became so anxious about not getting a poem. Who wants to fail to get “Our pretty goat was born in Wales… .”?

Schoolroom Poets In post-​Civil War America, poetry’s association with nationalism conferred celebrity status on American poets. According to Sorby, “The so-​called ‘schoolroom poets’ were the best-​known literary figures in the nation” (xii). Poems such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855) and John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-​Bound” (1866) were memorized and recited 168

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by generations of American schoolchildren deep into the next century. Although the currency of these “best loved” poems faded around the time of the Second World War, Americans growing up at the trailing edge of that tradition in the 1950s and ’60s recited a form of schoolroom poetry, the “Pledge of Allegiance” (1892), before every school day. It’s likely that some American students are still made to recite the “Pledge” today. Many of the verses of the “schoolroom poets” were written earlier, but it was not until the second half of the century that they became memorialized or marmorealized –​transformed into marble in the form of statues and public buildings named to honor deathless poet-​patriots such as James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Walt Whitman, and the aforementioned Longfellow and Whittier.

Nonsense British children’s poetry after mid-​century spurned Romanticism and didacticism. The poems of Edward Lear, the “Father of Nonsense” (Heyman 2), were slightly anarchic. In his limericks particularly, the content’s absurdity is at variance with its formal coherence. This symmetry masks the chaos it appears to signify. Michael Heyman points out that early dismissals of Lear’s work as giddy or childish were unfair. His silliness camouflaged hidden depths, including a philosophical stoicism, and because of this complex identity (one thinks of Jean-​Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot [c. 1718–​19], Emmett Kelly, and Buster Keaton), Lear’s influence on children’s poetry has been both widespread and lasting, as one sees, for example, in the twenty-​first-​century children’s poems of Anushka Ravishankar. Nineteen years after Lear, Lewis Carroll published nonsense in a different key. His literary parodies seduced young readers with a jaunty irreverence. “Jabberwocky,” a silky nonsense, refutes Lear’s denial of truth-​value to language. While the words in “Jabberwocky” have no dictionary meaning, nor any apparent referential relationship to material actuality, they evoke experience by their sounds. “Brillig” and “frabjous” make readers think of “brilliant” and “fabulous”; a meaningful narrative slips into view. There is an objective world in Carroll’s musical doublespeak, fuzzy and fleeting though it appears. Language, “Jabberwocky” demonstrates, cannot help but conform to thought, and thought is engendered within an engagement with the world. The popularity of nonsense poetry for children diminished after Lear and Carroll (Heyman 4), but skeptical interpretation as play remained a core component of children’s poetry. Rebecca Sophie Clarke’s Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother’s (1868) depicts children learning how (not) to write. Clarke poses Dotty romantically “leaning on her elbow, and looking with dreamy eyes at the engraving of Christus Consolator at the foot of the bed.” She says: “I love poetry when they read it in concert at school. Don’t you know,–​ ‘Tremendous torrents! For an instant hush!’ Isn’t that splendid?” “Very splendid, indeed,” replied Prudy, pinching herself to keep awake. (98) In 1872, on the heels of Carroll’s Through the Looking-​Glass, Christina Rossetti published Sing-​ Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book of 120 short lyrics –​her sense of “nursery rhymes” following Fenwick’s sense of the primacy of the lyrical rather than the oral. The sister of painter-​poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina’s poetry expresses a sensibility antithetical to that of the Pre-​Raphaelites, attending to everyday experiences and momentary observations and drawing on objects to express emotions. There is an introversive, analytical impulse in her work, an easy self-​awareness in her observations, so that her persona suggests Alice spared the wearisome illogic of Wonderland. Rossetti’s vision

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influenced later children’s poets such as Walter de la Mare, who created a selection of her work for the Gregynog Press in 1930 and in his introduction labeled her a genius. While Rossetti models a Victorian sensibility for children, Robert Louis Stevenson models the voice and viewpoint of a Victorian child, impersonating a child’s subjectivity. The metaphorical garden in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) configures an imaginary of worldly things –​ships at sea, trains, ocean voyages, soldiers, pirates –​in terms of toys, books, and dreams, which allow the reader to experience exotic images without sacrificing the security of the home (or garden) or abandoning the child’s perspective. In the United Kingdom as well as the United States, the children’s poetry emerging from the nineteenth century was richer and more comprehensive than previous iterations, in terms of representing the child’s voice and experience; it occupied a recognized literary niche and, though retaining its didactic purpose, engaged more openly with questions of aesthetic form and purpose; it demonstrated an absorptive and mimetic character, picking up and shedding the influence of literary and cultural fashions, and previewed a marketability over a range of audiences on which the twentieth century would capitalize.

Twentieth Century Twentieth-​century children’s poetry, particularly after the First World War, can be characterized by a softening of didactic and moralistic impulses (although nonmainstream poetry published by houses owned or affiliated with religious organizations would continue to issue children’s poems populated by bible verses and homilies, as they had done during the previous century), an ongoing diversification of authors and audiences, formal innovation in step with developing literary attitudes and movements, a shifting relationship to adult poetry, a degree of academic credibility, the emergence of stylized hybrid poetry-​picturebooks, and greater institutional support. While size limitations prohibit delving further, I note in passing that popular music in the latter part of the century created by and for young adults represented a kind of poetry that sometimes pointed to the influence of earlier children’s poems (Brown 326). More significantly, the poetry of popular music transcended regional boundaries. Although children in Britain and in the United States tended to read different books, children’s poetry as music united audiences across the ocean –​ and reached young audiences elsewhere in the world as well. Anthologies and magazines, which had been a nineteenth-​century staple for the publication of poetry for adolescents, consolidated their place in the market and shifted the relationship between reader and writer. Preeminent among American children’s magazines were The Youth’s Companion (which published the first printing of the Pledge of Allegiance) and St. Nicholas Magazine, founded in 1873 with Mary Mapes Dodge as editor. In 1899, the magazine organized the St. Nicholas League, and each month contests were held for the best poems by the magazine’s young readers, thus empowering readers and blurring the line between poet and reader. Subsequently, numerous magazines for children seized on the idea, publishing poetry by young readers. Magazine publishing also crossed the informal racial barrier. The Brownies’ Book (1919–​21), edited by W.E.B. Du Bois (with the poet Jessie Redmon Fauset as its literary editor), published poems by Black poets including Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Effie Lee Newsome, recognizing an audience for children’s poetry previously underserved. Twentieth-​century American anthologies for children continued the nineteenth-​century practice of publishing adult poems by notable poets, such as Dickinson, e. e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg. Arna Bontemps, a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, again redrew the boundaries of children’s poetry in his Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941), reprinting poems by Countee Cullen and Paul Laurence Dunbar alongside spirituals, lullabies, and blues lyrics. English magazines founded in the nineteenth century, such as Little Folks and The Girl’s Own Paper, continued to print poems well into the twentieth century. 170

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Emerging from the Victorian influence, English children’s poetry entered into an Edwardian/​ Georgian phase. Poised chronologically between Stevenson and de la Mare, Kenneth Grahame, primarily a writer of prose fiction, published liminal poems embodying the elegance of old-​world privilege and taste, yet reflecting on its shortcomings. His sensibility was largely shared by A. A. Milne, whose bucolic children’s poems written in the 1920s gained renewed popularity on both sides of the Atlantic in the countercultural movements of the 1970s. De la Mare found his subject in rustic scenes; colorful, marginal characters; ghosts; villainy; and village tales with ironic twists. His children’s poems possess a transparent artistry, their subtlety and humor inviting readers to share his pleasure in poetry. In foregrounding craftsmanship (a word he uses to praise Rossetti), de la Mare encouraged the notion that children’s poetry could cultivate critical acuity, anticipating the arrival of the Creative Child, a construct one finds in the work of twentieth-​century poets as well as in the poetry-​based educational theories of Myra Cohn Livingston and Kenneth Koch. Where the Romantic Child retreated from the world, emphasizing the superiority of nature to human society and modeling an iconic perfection for adults, the Creative Child acted upon the world, conceptually and imaginatively. De la Mare’s poems abandon recitation and song for solitary reading. Whereas the agency of the reciting child had been directed toward performance, the reading child shaped the meaning of poetry through interpretation and understanding. De la Mare’s verse became exemplary for mid-​century British poets, notably James Reeves, Charles Causley, and Ted Hughes, each publishing books of poems with the highest level of formal precision and refined taste. Of these, Causley’s poems have demonstrated the greatest staying power, but Hughes has had a greater impact. Underlying Hughes’s children’s poetry is an educational philosophy, which, at the famous Exeter conference “Recent Children’s Fiction and Its Role in Education” (1970), helped to launch the academic discipline of children’s literature. Thus, his influence can be seen in this very chapter. Hughes believed that imaginative literature, and the myths by which it is governed, provide children with a blueprint for self-​understanding: what affects the imagination of children “affects their whole life” (61). Poems and stories can nourish empathy and stave off feelings of “detached, impersonal passivity,” imposed on us by a technocratically based education that has renounced imagination (60). Perhaps the oldest of mid-​century poets writing for children, Robert Graves published two books of children’s poetry in his seventies –​The Penny Fiddle (1960) and Ann at Highwood Hall (1964) –​ although he composed most of these poems four decades earlier. The younger Graves was influenced by de la Mare, and in the thick of the War, imagined a career for himself as a children’s poet. His later friendship with Reeves undoubtedly influenced him as well. Graves believed that a predisposition to see the world as a poet sees it was possible at any age, and the ability to respond to a poem was the same for child and adult. In 1927, he memorably praised nursery rhymes as poetry in The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes: the “best of the older ones are nearer to poetry than the greater part of the Oxford Book of English Verse” (3). He mischievously included a couple of his own poems in the volume, without attribution, which William Stuart Baring-​Gould republished as traditional verse in his Annotated Mother Goose. By the middle of the century, children’s poetry attracted contributions from a generation of established male poets, who also played with the trope of the child in their poetry for adults. Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi, William Jay Smith, and Richard Wilbur, among others, all wrote poems for children. Looking at their writings within a sociocultural context will provide an empirical, bottom-​up examination of American children’s poetry of the mid-​twentieth century. Born a year before Reeves, Roethke published Party at the Zoo (1963) in the Modern Masters Books for Children series midwived by Louis Untermeyer, then Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Untermeyer had conceived of inviting preeminent authors to write books for children. While some authors, such as Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller, declined the invitation, others accepted. Roethke’s children’s poems drew on nursery rhymes, playground chants, and nonsense. One sees 171

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grotesque and transgressive elements in his work, an effort to conjure up an illogical, primitive ethos to glimpse truths unavailable to a nominally adult perspective. Among this group of mid-​century American poets writing for young readers, Jarrell was perhaps the most analytical. In The Bat Poet (1964), he locates poems within a dialogue between a younger poet (the bat), and an older poet, perhaps slightly in decline (a mockingbird). The text poses questions about poems and poetry that might spur readers young and old to explore their own subjectivities and value poetry as a tool for introspection. Jarrell’s meditations on craft, inspiration, and poetic truth crystalize the tendency of twentieth-​century American poets to see poetry as its own subject, as noted by Richard Flynn, who calls The Bat Poet the “finest primer on poetry for young readers” (“All” 8). A younger contemporary of Jarrell’s, Wilbur wrote three books of poems for children that foreground a love of language and speak to a dual audience. The Disappearing Alphabet (1998), written in Wilbur’s late seventies, teases children with the amusing pitfalls of an unreliable alphabet whose letters twinkle in and out of existence. It simultaneously muses on the surprising unfamiliarity of a world for a man exiting middle age. The status of British children’s poetry continued to rise in the latter half of the century. In 1970, the year of the Exeter conference, Nancy and Aidan Chambers inaugurated the Thimble Press to launch Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books. Signal awarded an annual prize to the best book of children’s poetry published in English. Winners formed a distinguished roster of poets including Causley, Michael Rosen, Roger McGough, Gareth Owen, James Berry, Allan Ahlberg, and two poets laureate, Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy. In 1999, the United Kingdom created the position of Children’s Laureate to recognize major contributions to the field of children’s literature. In contrast to the position of Poet Laureate, after which it was modeled, to date only two poets, Rosen and the current children’s laureate, Joseph Coelho, have been honored with the position. As briefly noted above, African American poetry for children in the twentieth century entered the mainstream from the pens of poets who never wrote for children. Editors and anthologists reasoned that Dunbar’s dialect poems belonged in the canon of children’s poetry because they had been an essential part of the experience of growing up for many Black Americans. Bontemps notes: “The name of Paul Laurence Dunbar was in every sense a household word in the black communities around Los Angeles when I was growing up there. It was not, however, a bookish word. It was a spoken word. [...] You didn’t say a Dunbar poem –​ you performed it” (45). The performance of Dunbar’s dialect poetry required a multimodal sensibility. Complementing its sheer musicality, Kate Capshaw observes that African American dialect works on the meta-​level to mock stereotypical depictions, conversely affirming African American cultural traditions and values (Smith 26). Bontemps’s contemporary Langston Hughes wrote poems for adults that also engaged young audiences. Influenced in childhood by Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Whitman, and Sandburg, Hughes adopted their populist sentiments and plain, declarative sentences in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921). David Levering Lewis tells us Hughes wrote this poem on the same train to Mexico on which he had been forced by his autocratic father to stare at a group of African American laborers “trudging out of view into oblivion” (79). “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is a defiant and quintessentially Hughesian rejection of his father’s contempt for the laborers and “an affirmation of the folk whose oblivion was a matter of perspective” (ibid.). Here one notes that poems marked for children now feature children talking back to adults. This innovation flips the directionality of pedagogical poetry and recalls the rebelliousness of poets such as Carroll and Lear. What seems new to this century is the phenomenon of the poet speaking as both adult and child. The poems of Cullen (second perhaps only to Hughes in reputation) were also drawn into anthologies of verse. His “For a Lady I Know” (1924) aphoristically satirizes classist and racist prejudices. If milder than Hughes’s biting class critiques, Cullen’s epigram circumvents race and class barriers to “deligh[t]‌the redcaps at Grand Central station” (Lewis 77):

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She thinks that even up in heaven Her class lies late and snores, While poor black cherubs rise at seven To do celestial chores. (Cullen 77) Among the first African American poets deliberately writing for children in the twentieth century was Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950). Before the peak of the civil rights movement, her illustrated collection of poems A Street in Bronzeville (1945) offered a suite of poetic portraits of people in her Chicago neighborhood. (Here again we see the cultural phenomenon of children’s poetry touching on the taut dynamic of American race relations.) In 1962, at the invitation of President John Kennedy, she became the first African American to read at the Library of Congress since Dunbar in the 1880s. Brooks’s influence has been acknowledged by many contemporary poets writing for children, including Nikki Grimes and Marilyn Nelson (“Marilyn”).

British Caribbean Poets Children’s poetry in Britain proceeded along a comparable multicultural track. In the 1980s, accomplished British Caribbean poets James Berry, John Agaard, and Grace Nichols began to write for children. Flowing from an oral tradition, their poetry dignified English-​based creole languages and, as Lara Saguisag notes, made poetry more accessible to “the disenchanted, ghettoized Caribbean community in Britain” (52). Saguisag also notes that postcolonial poems can be cagey. Nichols’s “Come into My Tropical Garden” seems to invite “the outsider-​tourist to enjoy the pleasure of island life [...] then subtly mocks him” (52). Arguing that hospitality and affection govern satire, Lissa Paul suggests that “Nichols speaks [...] to the cultural sensibilities of those who have watched the dismantling of the old colonial world and are participating in a rearranged postcolonial society” (“Being” 95). At the end of the century, the Jamaican-​born poet Valerie Bloom began to write poems that introduce children to the rich tapestry of Jamaican life in the vibrant tones of Jamaican English. While critics contend that the field(s) of children’s poetry continue to be predominantly white and middle class, one cannot ignore the impact of liberal and progressive social values on the creation (and criticism) of children’s poetry.

Urchin Verse/​Urchin Poetry John Rowe Townsend coined the term “urchin verse,” describing this development of the 1970s as follows: “It is about family life in the raw, with its backchat, fury and muddle, and instead of woods and meadows are disused railway lines, building sites and junkheaps” (qtd. Styles 262). The poetics of Urchin verse/​poetry disdains the structures of power, as it ignores or ridicules traditionally sanctioned poetic models and insists on the authoring agency of the child. Perhaps the best-​known practitioner of Urchin poetry in the United States was Sheldon Alan (Shel) Silverstein. Many critics have lamented that Silverstein’s rough-​and-​tumble lyrics intensified academic prejudices against children’s poetry, while others have countered that those prejudices are peripheral to the cultural, socializing, and even aesthetic value of children’s poetry in its most natural and thus authentic state. In any case, the American reading public has never wavered in its affection for Shel. It’s likely that if you find two small shelves of children’s poetry at your local bookstore, one of those shelves will be his. Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., a Silverstein scholar, recognizes Ciardi’s The Reason for the Pelican (1959) as producing the first note of an “adult-​produced playground poetry” (Playground 62), a subgenre of Urchin verse/​poetry, generally oral, generally composed by children. Thomas also argues that 173

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the chants and jingles of the playground are real poems in themselves, if not literary, and that their uninhibited use of profanity is deliberate and strategic. In this chapter I have suggested anticipatory echoes of Urchin poetry reaching back into the nineteenth century, to the chirping of Mother Goose against pedagogical authorities, and back even further, to a backchatty couplet in “The Prodigal Daughter”: “Her Father he did ask her where she’d been? /​ She straitway answer’d, What was that to him.”

Picturebooks All but left for dead at the turn of the century, picturebook poetry made a miraculous recovery in the late 1930s under the influence of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), whose best-​known work, The Cat in the Hat (1957), became an American classic. In her New York Times review, Ellen Lewis Buell calls it “one of the most original and funniest of books for early readers” (BR21). Phil Nel agrees. The Cat made Seuss an “icon of American children’s literature” (Seuss 9). If his galloping anapests “rescue[d]‌children from the Dick and Jane primers,” as Buell claims, the medium of rescue was not novel. Anapests were an integral part of children’s poetry of the nineteenth century. Seuss simply rediscovered them. Another iconic picturebook poet who found inspiration in nineteenth-​century poetics was Edward Gorey, who mashed up Victorian verbal and pictorial language into a campy stew for children and adults. Lesser-​known contemporaries writing poetry wed to the picturebook format include Alvin Tresselt, who developed a minimalist prose-​poetry style, creating “mood” picturebooks comparable to tone poems. Although Sendak composed conventional poems for The Nutshell Library (1962), the texts of his picturebooks after Where the Wild Things Are (1963) would be impossible to extract from their material/​pictorial setting. Engaging Sendak’s hybrid poetry, the notional Creative Child makes new meanings, imaginatively enacting the explorations of the creative protagonists. Unlike the magnetic appeal of the Romantic Child, around whom a history of nineteenth-​century children’s poetry could be organized, the Creative Child was more limited in scope. By the 1960s, children’s poetry was shaped by a matrix of social, intellectual, ideological, economic, cultural, educational, and technological forces. While we can indicate a throughline of children’s poetry from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth through a progression of emblematic tropes, by mid-​century that line dissolves into a multiplicity of colorful, irreducible threads. Poetry picturebooks developed the previous century’s nascent fascination for other places and cultures. Books such as Moon-​Uncle, Moon-​Uncle: Rhymes from India (trans. Sylvia Cassedy and Parvathi Thampi, 1973) represented the first wave of multiculturalism in North America, a decade that saw two multicultural Caldecott winners, Gerald McDermott’s Arrow to the Sun (1974) and Margaret Musgrove’s Ashanti to Zulu (1976). Two decades later, Maples in the Mist: Poems for Children from the Tang Dynasty (trans. Minfong Ho, 1996), with its use of Chinese characters and chops, helped to establish a higher standard of authenticity and documentation. The growing acceptance and establishment of children’s poetry engendered a critical and didactic literature, which exploded after 1970. Toward the end of the century, the proliferation of methods for teaching and writing children’s poetry verged on chaotic, regarding which, Flynn warned: “If we wish to be of service both to children and to poetry, we must recognize the contradictory nature of our pedagogies” (“Poetry” 42).

Twenty-​First Century The “contradictory nature of our pedagogies” regarding children’s poetry points out its rising legitimacy as an academic discipline in the twentieth century, and thus its rising cultural status –​a trend that continued into the twenty-​first century. In both Britain and the United Ststes, institutional support 174

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for children’s poetry assumed various forms, some backed by financial resources and some merely exhortatory. As noted above, Britain created the position of Children’s Laureate in 1999; the Poetry Foundation in the United States created the post of Young People’s Poet Laureate in 2006. The first incumbent of the latter position was Jack Prelutsky, a bard of Urchin poetry and like Silverstein, commercially successful. The British Library held an exhibition and conference, Poetry and Childhood (2009), at which Andrew Motion, then Britain’s Poet Laureate, and Duffy, soon to succeed him, were present. The Urban Word NYC created the National Youth Poet Laureate program (2016). Its first recipient was eighteen-​year-​old Amanda Gorman, who read at the inauguration of Joseph Biden (a moment with symbolic overtones and symmetries with the inauguration in 1961 of Kennedy, the youngest American president, and the reading by Frost, at eighty-​six a symbol of timeless truths). Children’s poetry continued to be refreshed by texts based on oral traditions. For example, Benjamin Zephaniah writes poems for children that, like Bloom’s, borrow the musical traditions of their native Jamaica. In 2012, Lakota poet and storyteller Timothy P. McLaughlin edited a book of poetry and prose written by Lakota youth at Red Cloud Indian School. The Lion and the Unicorn bestowed its 2011 Award for Excellence in North American Poetry on Arnold Adoff’s Roots and Blues. In addition, the growing popularity of multimodal performance poetry in Britain and the United States, in the form of poetry slams, which originated in the 1980s, enabled younger poets to share their work with large audiences of their peers in poetry competitions. The National Poetry Slam in 2014 drew seventy-​three groups from across North America (Dingfelder). While the Signal issued its final award in 2001, its spirit lives on in The Lion and the Unicorn Award, inaugurated in 2005 by Paul. This award recognizes “excellence in North American poetry” written for young readers, and often critiques books of poetry that in the judges’ estimation fall short of “excellence.” Judges (including me) have bewailed the prevalence of the latter –​Flynn despairingly termed the majority of these books “Classic, Comic, Cute, [or] Consoling” (“Prize” 66).4 Nevertheless, praiseworthy books of genuine poetry continue to be written and published (and read, one hopes). Poets who have recently received the award include three-​time winner JonArno Lawson, Elizabeth Acevedo, Nikki Grimes, and Kwame Alexander. Emerging in the 1990s, the formally versatile verse novel achieved unusual popularity. Patricia McCormick’s Sold (2006), Ellen Hopkins’s Crank (2004), Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again (2010), Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), all earned critical praise. Nelson’s Carver (1997), the gold standard, remains popular, alongside her A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), one of the most moving books of poetry of its generation. The verse novel has drawn many young readers to poetry –​becoming “one of the most [...] commercially successful genres in Anglo-​American children’s literature” (Abate 6). Modest literary anthologies also appeared, for example Inside Out: Children’s Poets Discuss Their Work (2008), compiled by Lawson. These brightened the ranks of splashy illustrated collections of nursery rhymes and other classic children’s poetry out of copyright that perpetuated the nostalgic tendency to associate children’s poetry with an idealized Golden Age. As the century unfolds, it becomes possible to envision multiple futures for children’s poetry: among these would be one in which the cow perpetually jumps over the moon, although readers hardly recall what cows were or which moon is intended, and another in which a few poets write poems that matter for real children.

Notes 1 My discussion looks exclusively at Anglo-​American children’s poetry. Until the late twentieth century, Anglophone children’s poetry remained largely a discrete phenomenon, complex and comprehensive enough to demand its own study; a companion volume would be poorly served by a chapter comprising only bland generalizations or the size of an encyclopedia. 2 Opie is probably referring to the Nativity song “Lullay, lullay, litel child, child, rest thee a throwe.”

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Michael Joseph 3 We see parataxis in lines 5 and 6 of Watts’s “Against Idleness and Mischief”: “How skilfully she builds her cell! /​How neat she spreads the wax!” 4 Flynn is subtly echoing Anthony Hecht’s earlier warning that children’s poetry might succumb to “cuteness, coyness, archness and condescension” (Hecht).

Works Cited Abate, Michelle Ann. “Verse-​atility: The Novel in Verse and the Revival of Poetry.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 42, no. 2, April 2018, pp. v–​viii. Aikin, Lucy, ed. Poetry for Children: Consisting of Short Pieces to Be Committed to Memory. Hibernia Press, 1813. Bontemps, Arna. “The Relevance of Paul Laurence Dunbar.” A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Jay Martin, Dodd, Mead, 1975, pp. 45–​53. Brown, Craig. 150 Glimpses of the Beatles. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2020. Buell, Ellen Lewis. “High Jinks at Home.” New York Times Book Review, 17 March 1957, p. BR21. Clarke, Rebecca Sophie. Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother’s. Lee and Shepard, 1870. Cullen, Countee P. “A Lady I Know.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, vol. 24, no. 2, May 1924, p. 77. Dingfelder, Sadie. “D.C.’s Beltway Poetry Slam Triumphs at the National Poetry Slam.” The Washington Post, 15 August 2014, www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​expr​ess/​wp/​2014/​08/​15/​d-​c-​s-​belt​way-​poe​try-​slam-​trium​phs-​at-​ the-​natio​nal-​poe​try-​slam/​?vari​ant=​95d42​e19c​24b0​3e7. Earle, Alice Morse. Child Life in Colonial Days. Macmillan, 1915. Flynn, Richard. “ ‘All that I never thought of –​ think of me!’: Jarrell Cross-​Writing Child and Adult” [n.d.]. Academia, http://​perso​nal.geor​gias​outh​ern.edu/​~rfl​ynn/​Jarr​ellT​alk.pdf. —​—​—​. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 17, no. 1, June 1993, pp. 37–​44. —​—​—​. “Consolation Prize.” Signal 100, edited by Nancy Chambers, Thimble, 2003, pp. 66–​83. Four Footed Friends and Favorites. Illustrated by Justin H. Howard, McLoughlin Bros., n.d. Goody Two-​Shoes, a Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1766, Griffith and Farran, 1881, www.gutenb​erg. org/​files/​13675/​13675-​h/​13675-​h.htm. Graves, Robert. The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes. The Augustan Books of English Poetry Series, Benn, 1927. Hecht, Anthony. Preface to Walter de la Mare, Songs of Childhood. Garland, 1976, Project Gutenberg, www. gutenb​erg.org/​files/​23545/​23545-​h/​23545-​h.htm. Hemans, Felicia. “The Meeting.” New Monthly Magazine, vol. 20, 1827, https://​en.wik​isou​rce.org/​wiki/​ Page:Felicia_​Hemans_​in_​The_​New_​Mont​hly_​Maga​zine​_​Vol​ume_​20_​1​827.pdf/​21. Heyman, Michael. Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s Literary Nonsense in Context. University of Glasgow, PhD dissertation, 1999. Higham, John. “From Boundlessness to Consolidation: The Transformation of American Culture, 1848–​1860.” Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, edited by Carl J. Guarneri, Yale University Press, 2001. Hoagwood, Terence. “Life of Letitia Elizabeth Landon.” L.E.L.’s “Verses” and The Keepsake for 1829, edited by Frederick Mansel Reynolds; hypertext edited by Terence Hoagwood, Kathryn Ledbetter, and Martin Jacobsen. Romantic Circles: A Refereed Scholarly Website Devoted to the Study of Romantic-​Period Literature and Culture, 1998, https://​roman​tic-​circ​les.org/​editi​ons/​lel/​index.html. Hughes, Ted. “Myth and Education.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 1, March 1970, pp. 55–​70. Johns, Judith Gero. “I Have Been Dying to Tell You: Early Advice Books for Children.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 29, no. 1, 2004, pp. 52–​64. Kilcup, Karen L., and Angela Sorby, eds. Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-​ Century American Children’s Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. Knopf, 1981. “Marilyn Nelson and Nikki Grimes in Conversation.” Poetry Magazine Podcast, 23 March 2021. Poetry Foundation, www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ion.org/​podca​sts/​155​722/​mari​lyn-​nel​son-​and-​nikki-​gri​mes-​in-​conve​rsat​ion. Opie, Iona and Peter, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Clarendon Press, 1973. Paul, Lissa. “Come ‘to sing their being’: The Poetry of Grace Nichols.” Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 83–​96. —​—​—​. Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist. University of Delaware Press, 2019. —​—​—​. “Verse.” The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English, edited by Jack Zipes, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, and Gillian Avery, W. W. Norton, 2005, pp. 1117–​1291. Plotz, Judith A. Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood. Palgrave, 2001.

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Children’s Poetry The Prodigal Daughter: or A Strange and Wonderful Relation. Thomas Fleet, 1736. Saguisag, Lara. “Caribbean Poets.” My Infant Head: A History of Children’s Poetry in English, edited by Michael Joseph, Rutgers University Libraries, 2008, p. 52. Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Seuss, Dr. The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats. Introduction and annotations by Philip Nel, Random House, 2007. Smith, Katharine Capshaw. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana University Press, 2004. Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–​1917. University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Styles, Morag, ed. From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children. Cassell, 1998. Thomas, Joseph. Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry. Wayne State University Press, 2007.

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15 THEATRE AND DRAMA Global Perspectives Manon van de Water

Theatre and drama for children was not clearly defined until the turn of the twentieth century, in multiple cultures almost simultaneously yet bound to the specific material circumstances (social, cultural, political, economic, ideological) under which it emerged. In Russia it was Natalia Sats, a fifteen-​ year-​old and in many aspects a child herself, who started to organize theatrical activities for youth as the head of the children’s theatre section in Moscow in 1917. In the United States, children’s theatre activities became part and parcel of the settlement houses, in part as a response to the professional children’s theatre activities that were also gaining steam on Broadway. In other cultures, artists started making theatre specifically for children based on folk and fairy tales and extant children’s literature. As these movements developed over the decades, different aspects of theatre became prominent –​ some of which became culturally specific and significant, even recognizable. These characteristics ranged from an emphasis on dramatic literature and adaptations of familiar books, used in schools, that could be used for enhancing the curriculum to an emphasis on aesthetic and emotional perception where words, sound, movement, light, set, and other visual aspects all communicated a certain idea that could or could not be drawn from well-​known written literature. This chapter examines how theatre and drama and its relationship to children’s literature developed in select regions and cultures, and how in some it became a literary genre of its own. Throughout the regions and cultures discussed, fairy and folk tales, myths, and legends have been and are, to varying degrees, an important source for theatre for children and youth. While the UTA index shows an emphasis on the range of Western European tales (https://​fairy-​folk-​tale.fan​dom.com/​wiki/​Aarne-​ Thomp​son-​Uthe​r_​In​dex), many cultures and regions outside of Western Europe and Eurocentric North America have their own traditional tales that form a source of inspiration for theatrical performance. This chapter starts with a discussion of the development of theatre and drama and its relationship to folktales, myths, and legends in North America and Western Europe before moving to observations of these developments in other regions.

The Tyranny of the Title in the United States The American academic and specialist in TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences1) Roger Bedard used to say: “It doesn’t matter what you put on stage, as long as you call it Cinderella.” In the United States this quip rings true to this day, for reasons that are very much rooted in cultural, social, and ideological developments in the country.

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The historical development of the field started around the turn of the twentieth century. While there were Broadway shows that were “a place for personal pleasure on the most festive occasions,” as Laura Gardner Salazar writes, these productions were also seen as “empty fun” or “charming escapism” (25, 28, 32). They included shows based on popular comics, the Buffalo Bill shows, vaudeville, and the most popular performance, James Barrie’s Peter Pan. But around the same time settlement houses, created to help immigrants assimilate into their new homeland, and the Junior League, an organization led by debutantes founded in 1901 by young New York socialite Mary Harriman, incorporated among their many social work activities theatre by and for youth, often as an antidote to commercial entertainment. This interaction of social and aesthetic forces not only demanded a definition that clearly separated children’s theatre from that for adult audiences but also laid the foundation of children’s theatre as closely tied to educational values (van de Water, “Constructed” 103). The notion of children’s theatre as appropriate, educational, and moralistic (and in many cases “amateur”) was perpetuated through the most prolific writer/​practitioners/​ scholars in the field (Constance D’Arcy Mackay, Winifred Ward, Nellie McCaslin), so that by the mid-​twentieth century, the hold of the familiar story or fairy tale as a basis for plots was firmly established (108). Coleman Jennings, longtime professor of Theatre for Young Audiences at the University of Texas at Austin, reiterated in a 1998 publication, among a list of “musts” and “shoulds” relating to plays for young people, that “the most important part of any play is the story” (3), by which he meant the well-​made play formula, with a clearly recognizable protagonist with whom a child could identify and a clear beginning, middle, and end. Bridgett Vanderhoof describes in her dissertation, “Constructed Hierarchies: An Examination of the Relationship between Capitalist Ideology, Institutional Practices, Productions, and Performances in US Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA),” the general emphasis on narrative plays in the United States, quoting Jordan K. Stovall, the director of Outreach and Institutional Partnerships at the Dramatists Guild of America: The “well-​made play” has long been the standard in play analysis and writing courses around the country. We know the familiar diagram and terminology: a series of events, conflicts, and cause/​effect actions that ultimately lead to some sort of climax, and finally a denouement. A series of unspoken rules have crept their way into our playmaking processes –​ a formulaic and understood approach to story construction, trickling down to producers, educators, literary departments, and selection committees. (110) This emphasis on fairly straightforward plays, including adaptations, is reinforced by the typical American production methods, which are not conducive to experimentation, whether in theatre for adults or theatre for young audiences. Seasons, advertised well before the production year, typically start with the selection of the play(s), by the artistic director of the company or a committee. Then the directors are chosen for individual productions. They communicate their vision to the designer, and the design process starts, with the principal set and costume design in place even before auditions. Beyond their individual talents, actors have little say in the process or vision of what has already been “set.” The rehearsal process usually lasts four to five weeks, after which the production opens. Seldom is there a restaging of the same production except for annual holiday shows. In the second half of the twentieth century, many companies coming out of the Junior League activities professionalized, but the repertoire kept a similar emphasis on familiar titles, whether folk or fairy tales or adaptations of classical and contemporary literature. Beyond the reasons above, another major factor in this emphasis on known quantities is the ontological connection with schools, on which companies are greatly dependent for audiences and hence for their financial wellbeing. In “Negotiating Marginalization,” Bedard describes the effects of this dependency: 179

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To maintain this relationship, theatre companies, as viewed historically, must engage in an interplay of signification that projects something other than a traditional theatre company –​ a theatre but not theatre –​ that lodges comfortably within the school culture, supports the dominant ideologies of the schools, and minimizes problematic aesthetic interrogations of these ideologies. (91) In practical terms this means that it is easier to sell The Diary of Anne Frank, in any adaptation, than And Then They Came for Me by James Still, even if both plays are based on real events in Frank’s life; and a straightforward adaptation of Esperanza Rising by Lynn Alvarez, based on the novel by Pam Muñoz Ryan, is more appealing than original plays such as Marriage Girl or Señora Tortuga by Roxanne Schroeder-​Arce, one of the most prolific American playwrights for young audiences on Latinx culture and experiences. A caveat of staging well-​known literature is that it can raise false expectations if the young audience is already familiar with the source texts as part of the school curriculum, making the plays predictable as far as the narrative is concerned and prompting responses along the lines of “the book was better,” if the production values do not match the way the reader imagined it. Paradoxically, the prevalence of the familiar doesn’t reflect the diversity of award-​ winning playwrights and plays in the United States, especially in the last two decades. However, by and large, in Bedard’s words again, “History demonstrates that economic considerations, and other material influences, would require significant reconstitution of TYA companies in disentangling from school alliances” (“Marginalization” 99). Twenty years after its publication date, this statement still rings true.

Emancipatory Theatre in North-​West Europe Northern European TYA started among lines similar to those in the United States in its emphasis on dramatizing folk and fairy tales; however, after the 1960s a group of young theatre makers took a distinctly different path, very much in tune with the altering cultural and ideological circumstances and the protests against the established theatre. In 1966 Volker Ludwich and Rainer Hachfeld created the Grips Theater in Berlin, an emancipatory theatre that in a Brechtian way wanted to activate its audience to thinking critically rather than being passive spectators of predictable moral productions with a didactic message. The company was anti-​authoritarian, emancipatory, sociocritical, and optimistic. They wrote and produced original plays dealing with issues faced by children and became one of the most influential new theatre companies for young audiences in Western Europe at the time. The Grips Theatre has undergone several changes over the decades but operates to this day at the Hansaplatz in Berlin (www.grips-​thea​ter.de/​de/​). Another big influence in the 1970s was the Unga Klara Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, established in 1975 within Stockholm’s Municipal Theatre under the artistic leadership of Suzanne Osten. The theatre was part of the “free theatre groups” movement, avant-​garde companies that, following changes in Swedish children’s literature, created a new type of theatre for young people, a theatre that was more rooted in reality and politically engaged (Lysander and Osten 236). Unga Klara’s playwrights concentrated upon problems of families, school, and everyday life, stressing “situations which encourage problem solving and consciousness raising and give theatregoers the chance to experience all of the child’s world” (237). Osten proclaimed, rather daringly, that both aesthetically and thematically young audiences deserve art, not just theatre for amusement or educational purposes (Elnan 39). Her productions broke taboos surrounding topics that at the time (and in many cultures still) were considered to be impossible to stage, including divorce, suicide, eating disorders, and schizophrenia. Alongside original productions, Osten adapted multiple Greek tragedies, transforming them to take a contemporary 180

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child’s perspective. One of the first and best known of these dramas is Medea’s Children (1975), co-​written with Per Lysander, “a children’s tragedy.” With this tragedy they connected to the theory that children are a “historical and socially determined category” with something to contribute and accomplish (Lysander and Osten 237) –​what today is commonly referred to as the notion of a child as a “human being” rather than a “human becoming.” They saw as the greatest tragedy that children live in an adult world with no rights and very little scope for action. In Medea’s Children, little Medea and little Jason, using modern speech, discuss the problems of their parents (who use classical or heightened speech), the idea of divorce, and their mother’s depression. They contemplate running away and toy with suicide. In the end, though, it is the children who convince Jason and Medea to divorce. Unga Klara still exists as a company, albeit under different leadership, and its motto is still “Children’s Perspective=​Revolution” (www.ungakl​ara.se/​teat​ern). Theatre for Young Audiences in the Netherlands was also a product of the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s and had similar emancipatory goals to those of the free theatre groups movement in Sweden. One of the most celebrated productions of this time was Pauline Mol’s Iphigenia, Royal Child (1989) by Tejater Teneeter, directed by Liesbeth Coltof. Mol’s plays are strongly influenced by fairy tales and myths. They are written in a rhythmic and poetic language, and can be both harsh and consoling. Her work emphasizes the spirituality and intuition of the child. Iphigenia, Royal Child retells the familiar story of Iphigenia in Aulis through Iphigenia’s eyes. She is shown struggling with her feelings of loyalty to her parents, with her fears, and her strengths. Written in short, clear sentences, the play reads very differently to children than to adults, yet it brings them together: IPHIGENIA

 I am Iphigenia my daddy loves me because he is a real father and then you have to CHILD  the king had a big role he was the general and the father his name was Agamemnon AGAMEMNON I have the role of Agamemnon and the problem is the wind there is no wind without wind we cannot sail not to troy nowhere without wind nothing happens (qtd in van de Water, Dutch Theatre 2–​3) Dutch TYA reached its heyday in the 1990s, in terms of both funding and possibilities for experimentation. Plays no longer avoided extremes or existential questions. Values intrinsic to children, such as spontaneity, fantasy, surprise, and associative thinking, were highlighted. A linear story was no longer a priority, and often text itself became but a theatrical signifier among many others, such as movement, lights, set, costumes, sound, and other visual and aural elements. To be sure, this shift does not mean that literature cannot be an inspiration. Moniek Merkx’s Falling Girls was inspired by Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry, although few would suspect as much. The text of this play consists of ten vignettes; everything between the lines has to be filled in. The result is enormous freedom for the theatre makers as well as a demand for imagination and creation. The production by Merkx’s company, MAX., was therefore very different in scope and size than the university production at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison. And, referring back to the discussion above, the 181

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amount of improvisation and testing required in creating the aesthetics of this production demanded a flexibility on the part of the whole production apparatus, which, practically speaking, is in the United States only possible in a university setting. The vision and diversity of this North-​West European theatre, and its ability to create a text without words as its primary narrative element, has become an axiom in the world of international theatre for young audiences. One must keep in mind, though, that this development very much depends on the particular material circumstances under which this theatre is made and perceived –​ social, cultural, ideological, and economic.

The United Kingdom and France In the United Kingdom, TYA developed still differently, with the theatre closely aligned to the educational system in the “Theatre in Education” (TIE) movement of the latter half of the twentieth century. Productions were made for the schools and consisted of immersive experiences where the students were often placed in roles and characters. As such, they were to experience historical or social events and engage deeply with difficult and complex subjects previously considered unsuitable for young audiences (Broster 477). This rather successful approach has mostly been abandoned now, in part because of changing school ideologies, teaching practices, and funding models, and professional theatre for young people in Britain has taken off. Nonetheless, award-​ winning British playwright Mike Kenny says that in the United Kingdom he’s often commissioned to write adaptations of children’s tales, whereas in France he feels free and is invited to write contemporary plays (Serres). French playwright Karin Serres maintains that yes, in France there is a good number of plays based on folk and fairy tales. However, as with Falling Girls, described above, according to Serres these plays are “almost always re-​written in a contemporary transposition, sometimes very far away from the original.” Marie Bernanoce, stating in 2012 that the rewriting of tales in a direct or indirect way has been predominant in the last three decades, calls this phenomenon a “sign of a new kind of writing” –​ “a form of narrativity whose aesthetics can be called ‘the stage direction of the tale’ with a very pregnant narrative bend.” I have seen several productions exemplifying this new kind of writing around the world. One I remember well was a one-​person version of “Little Red Riding Hood” in Malmö, Sweden at the XVIIth ASSITEJ World Congress and Festival in 2011. Called Faim de Loup (Wolfed Down), it was a co-​production by Ilke Schönbein, Theatre Meschugge (Germany) and Le Grand Parquet (France). It combined the story of Red Riding Hood with the story of a young girl who is alone at home and starts her own dreamlike exploration of the tale. Played on a large bed, it becomes a brutal nightmare of the struggling girl who is constantly corrected by her mother’s voice on the telephone, strongly cautioning her to stay away from her grandmother. It is the story of a free spirit, with comical episodes, surreal and sometimes scary sequences, and the use of masks and puppets. The girl’s excessive hunger for pasta turns her into a hungry wolf herself at one point. But for me the most interesting part of this show was the genuine indignation of part of the adult and professional audience, in particular regarding the portrayal of the grandmother (by the girl). Their response demonstrates that age-​old tales in “a new kind of writing” can stay relevant for a contemporary audience, young or old.

Professionalizing Theatre for Young Audiences in Russia As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, in 1917 a precocious fifteen-​year-​old, Natalia Sats, became the head of children’s theatre within the Theatre and Music Section (Temusek) at the Department of Education of the Moscow Soviet. She organized programs for children in the city’s eleven districts, from theatre to music concerts to circus acts, all performed by established artists 182

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(Sats, Deti 35–​39; Sketches 64–​68). The ideological thought behind this development was that all children, regardless of class or socioeconomic background, should be able to see the best artists and performances for free, the first children in the world who were offered this opportunity (Sats, Nash Put’ 5). The program reached out to children who in the period of “economic dislocation” could not come to the theatre without transportation or proper shoes. To travel to the children, however, was not easy either, and the lack of appropriate plays, ballet, or music specifically for children became palpable. While the outreach performances were not stopped, Sats wanted to establish a theatre specifically for children, in a special house. In October 1918, on the first anniversary of the revolution, the Children’s Theatre of the Moscow Soviet, a government-​supported children’s theatre of puppets, ballet, shadow, and marionettes, opened at 10 Mamonovsky Alley. It was the first state-​supported, professional theatre run by adults for children with its own house in the world (Sats, Nash Put’ 5). The head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, or Narkompros (Narodnyi Kommissariat Prosvecheniia), was impressed with Sats’s enthusiasm and with the theatre (albeit appalled by the quality of the shows) and ordered a committee to plan and subsidize a State Theatre for Children under the auspices of the Narkompros. The theatre was to be housed on the premises of Sats’s Children’s Theatre of the Moscow Soviet, which itself was absorbed into the new children’s theatre. Sats was one of the six members of the directorate of the theatre, but the rapidly emerging leader was Henriette Pascar, who was ideologically directly opposed to Sats (and most of the others in the directorate). Pascar wanted to create a “festive corner of comfort and beauty, a world of bright colors, and happy sounds, a world of fairy tale heroes” that would direct “a radiant beam into the soul of the contemporary child.” Pascar believed that due to the difficulty of the (the time of the civil war, immediately following the revolution) “children left their enchanted kingdom” and needed to be returned to that world (Shpet 46–​47). Fairy tale plays, filled with music, dance, and magic, offered children a chance to escape from reality and delve into a world of fantasy and imagination. Although in 1921 Pascar became the sole director of the First State Children’s Theatre, her concept for children’s theatre could not endure in the new Soviet state. The Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 passed a resolution urging all Soviet theatres, including those for children and youth, “to formulate in practical terms the question concerning the use of theatre for the systematic mass propaganda of ideas related to the struggle of communism” (qtd. Shail 683). Pascar lost her job “after she refused to accept the concept of children’s theatre as a tool for educating children and youth in the principles of communism” (van de Water, Moscow 45). Meanwhile, Sats had founded a new theatre for children and youth of her own, the Moscow Theatre for Children, which opened in 1921, in temporary quarters, with a fairy tale production, Zhemchuzhina Adal’miny (The Pearl of Adalmina). Sats and her partner and later husband, Sergei Rozanov, advocated “theatre for children that served the political goals of the new Soviet state,” and because of a lack of plays they “favored a repertory of adjusted fairy tales as the most appropriate material for children. Each play had to convey an important political message or ‘social idea’” (van de Water, Moscow 48; Shpet 65). The Pearl of Adalmina makes this message obvious. The play features “a sensitive young princess who flees the cruelty and stupidity of the course to embrace the simpler and nobler life among ‘the people’” (van de Water, Moscow 48). “Not everyone is sated, because not everyone works,” she tells the audience, and “the country does not need a king; the people must rule the country” (qtd. Shpet 66). Marxist adaptations of folk and fairy tales, as well as dramatizations of Marxist-​Leninist novels, continued throughout the Soviet period, particularly after the doctrine of Socialist Realism was established in the early 1930s and censorship increased. Mandatory field trips secured a steady school audience and sold-​out theatres. Each theatre for children had an artistic and pedagogical section that made sure the plays were interpreted the way they were intended to be. They also recruited the “delegate assembly,” a body of child representatives who assured communication between the theatre artists and the audience (van de Water, Moscow 50). 183

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By the time of glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-​1980s, it became clear how stultified state theatre for children and youth had become. The Soviet slogan “All the Best for Our Children” had gradually lost most of its power, the repertory was stilted as there was great lack of new plays, the average age of the actors in 1987 was forty-​three, and the theatres were only full thanks to the mandatory field trips (van de Water, Moscow 91–​111). Sats –​who, after being arrested and exiled during Joseph Stalin’s purges, was allowed back to Moscow –​ had founded her latest theatre, The Children’s Musical Theatre, in 1963. She headed this theatre until her death in 1993, ironically literally emulating Pascar’s idea of the First State Children’s theatre. The new building of the Children’s Musical Theatre (https://​teatr-​sats.ru) is a festive corner for children, with different play corners, artists dressed as fairy characters, and a repertoire of musical fairy and folk tales. The theatre has had its own following during the stagnation and glasnost and qualitatively had mostly avoided the pitfalls of the other children’s theatres. One exception to the fate of children’s theaters during glasnost and perestroika and its aftermath was the Moscow Theatre for Children and Youth (MTIUZ), located in the same theatre at 10 Mamonovskii Street where Sats opened her first theatre for children. While this theatre was as stagnant as the others, it was assigned a new artistic director, Genrietta Ianovskaia, a talented director who had been hampered by the regime and was never allowed her own theatre as was customary in the Soviet Union. Her appointment led to an immediate controversy within the company as well as within the Russian theatre world. A major issue was that she became the director of a Tiuz, a theatre for young audiences. While it was obvious that Ianovskaia was not sold on perpetuating the old ideological paradigms, the issue was more that she rejected the notion of a theatre specifically for children. Under the motto that “good theatre appeals to all ages,” Ianovskaia set out to turn her theatre into an “art theatre.” The mutiny that resulted from her policy led to the defection of about half the company, including actors, crew, and staff (van de Water, “Mister” 88–​89). Her first production, Heart of a Dog (Sobache Serdtse), was based on the 1920s novel of the same name by Mikhail Bulgakov, a novel that at the time of the premiere in 1987 was still forbidden in Russia. The production took Moscow by storm and toured Western Europe as an example of “perestroika theatre.” In it, Professor Preobrazhensky (from “transformation,” i.e., Lenin) performs an operation (the revolution) to implant the pituitary gland of a recently deceased dog (the proletariat) with unforeseen results. In the context of glasnost and perestroika, the production was highly topical and political, directly touching upon the issue of responsibility and contesting the validity of the monolithic ideology, whether reconstructed or not. Goodbye America! (1989) was a dramatization of a well-​known anti-​American Soviet children’s poem by Samuil Marshak, Mister Twister, written in 1933 and revised in 1952. The original is a parody of an American millionaire, Mister Twister, who decides to take a trip to the Soviet Union with his wife, his daughter, and her monkey. “When you go to a foreign country, try to observe its laws and its customs to avoid misunderstanding” is the epigraph of the poem. In essence, the poem tells about the foolishness of the rich, racist, and capitalist Twister and his family and the kindness and righteousness of the Soviet people, who teach him a lesson, especially with respect to his racism. Mister Twister Former Minister Mister Twister Is Millionaire Owner of factories,

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Newspapers, Companies Enters Hotel “Angleterre”

(309)

Thus goes the refrain of the poem, which at the time practically every Soviet citizen knew by heart. Marshak’s Mister Twister is especially sensitive to “Negroes, Malays, and additional rabble, Twister does not like people of color” (306). Whereas in America he is still able to travel on a steamboat without “colored people,” in the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad he finds to his horror a Black man as his neighbor: “with his black hand he touched the handrail of the stairs, calmly descending and smoking a pipe” (311). The image is multiplied into an army of Black men in the mirrored walls of the hotel. Twister immediately packs up his family and his belongings in order to find another place to stay. When all hotels claim to be full, Twister and family return to the Angleterre to find their original rooms occupied too. The benevolent Soviet porter, however, gives the mother his bench in the porter’s lodge and installs the daughter in the snack bar. Twister himself falls asleep on the doorstep in the lobby, where he has a terrible nightmare: the almighty Cook picks him up in his helicopter to go back home, but when they reach America, his housekeeper tells him there is no vacancy. In the morning Twister accepts the key to a room adjacent to the rooms of a Chinese, a Malay, a Mongol, a mulatto, and a Creole. Ianovskaia subtitled the production a “show parody,” and thus the production is a parody of a parody. The poem, which takes about ten minutes to read aloud, was turned into a two-​hour production, filled with song and dance without essentially altering the text. Filled with theatrical signifiers, however, the original meaning of the poem-​parody by Marshak is totally turned around, and the production can communicate on a variety of levels: a parody of the original parody for those who know the poem and live(d) in the Soviet Union; a parody on the Soviet Union for those who may not know the poem but do know the particulars of Soviet life (foreigners, for example); or an original funny show with song and dance (children, visiting foreign artists). As a site for the production of meanings, Goodbye America! functions essentially as a paradigm for the interdependence of meanings and material conditions in a rapidly changing society (van de Water, “Mister” 85; see full article for a more elaborate semiotic reading). After its struggles during glasnost and perestroika and the tumultuous 1990s, Russian theatre and drama for young audiences was blooming again, with a diverse repertoire including but not limited to adaptations. In particular, its theatre (“New Russian Drama”) for young adults dealing with contemporary problems of contemporary youth, featuring plays written by young adults, was rather advanced and often text based (Iaroslava Pulinova, Yuri Klavdiev, for example). However, recently the strict “decency” laws (no swearing, nothing against the government, no homosexual “propaganda”) and now the Russia-​Ukraine war have turned everything around, and there is no saying how these developments will affect the theatre in the long run. It will definitely be a while before we can again see a play like The Raven’s Children (Deti Vorona), based on the 2016 bestseller for youth by the same name by Iulia Iaklovleva. The play describes the sudden disappearances in raven black cars in 1938 during Stalin’s purges, told through the eyes of two boys who have been left behind. The production is still listed on the site of the Novgorod Theatre for Children and Youth, “Malyi,” but it is unclear when it will be played again (www.kingf​esti​val.ru/​maly/​spe​ctac​les). Malyi is unique in its repertoire and output; by all accounts it is one of the most successful theatres for children and youth in Russia. Its energetic artistic director, Nadezhda Alekseevna, started the theatre in 1990 and gave it its own face. Her plays are based on books she adapts herself, giving them her own theatrical spin while staying true to the books’ principal ideas. Among the literature Alekseevna adapted and staged are the award winning I Am Not a Slow Poke (Golden Mask 2019) by Nina Dashevskaia, about a

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teenager thriving on speed until he finds the calm in himself; My Grandfather Was a Cherry Tree by Angela Nanetti, about an unusual grandfather who could listen to the trees breathing and believed that “A person can’t die if someone still loves him”; and The Diary of a Killer Cat for younger children by Anne Fine, which relates the shenanigans of Tuffy and his family, told by the killer cat himself.

Argentina: TV Live and Independent Theatres The July Winter Break in Argentina is a time for families to take to the streets, especially in Buenos Aires and other big cities, to see theatre. Costumed actors clamor in front of every theatre, trying to lure the audience in with songs, jokes, and free trinkets. Vendors display on the sidewalks paraphernalia related to specific shows. The most popular shows everyone knows already, because they are television serials, but now people can see these serials live with the real actors from TV. Tickets are not cheap, but attending is the thing to do if you can afford it. Houses are packed and noisy because the majority of the teenage audience already knows what is coming, especially if there are songs involved (for more, see Goldfinger). TV Theatre for children and youth emerged in Argentina about four decades ago. It uses the same actors and the same plots as the related TV shows, even though the actors are not trained for the stage. During the winter holiday they often perform two or sometimes three shows per day, while still also taping their regular shows. Although large sums are invested in the TV shows and large revenues are made from the full houses, TV shows are not considered a valuable theatre experience, but rather a commercial industry product. The valuable theatre is the independent theatre, mostly operating on the outskirts of town in small, intimate spaces. One of these theatres is Grupo de Teatro “Buenos Aires,” led by director Carlos de Urquiza. This theatre is at the forefront of the independent theatre movement ATINA (Associación de teatristas independientes para niños/​as y adolescentes), which galvanizes all independent artists. De Urquiza and his wife, novelist and playwright María Inés Falconi, are perhaps the most visible and vocal artists in the independent theatre for young audiences to have emerged in the past decades. Falconi frequently adapts her popular novels into plays directed by de Urquiza. The novels and subsequent plays often tackle problems facing youth in Argentina, including homelessness (Juan Calle), disability (Sobre Ruedas), and war violence (Cantata de Pedro y la Guerra) –​all seen through the eyes of the child protagonist. Pedro in particular is a moving and bittersweet play about the young Pedro, who gets buried in a shed with the old caretaker of the school, Don José, during a bombing. To keep each other alive, they make up stories. When they are finally found and brought to a hospital, they lose each other. But as Pedro is back home mourning his friend, Don José’s roommate from the hospital visits and brings back a picture of a dragon, a reference to the last story Pedro told. Both de Urquiza and Falconi are also internationally active, among others in the Ibero-​American Performing Arts network for Children and Youth (https://​redibe​roam​eric​ana.assi​tej.net/​es/​).

The Controversial Folk Tale Dramatizations in South Korea South Korea’s theatre for young audiences is known for its aesthetically beautiful productions of folk and fairy tales, using movement, sounds, and spectacular scenery. One of the most viewed productions at international TYA festivals in the 2000s was the award-​winning The Tale of Haruk by performance group Tuida, which is based on a number of Korean folk tales. Tuida, formed in 2001 by eight graduates of the Korean National University of the Arts, gave the tale its own spin, combining Western and Eastern traditions, using recycled materials for making music, and creating the masks and puppets from traditional Korean paper. The tale tells the story of Haruk, given by a Spirit to a lonely old couple who has prayed for a child. The only condition the Spirit has is that the child never be given cooked rice. As he grows up, the child begs for rice until the couple gives in. From that moment on Haruk is always hungry; he leaves the house and starts to eat everything he can find, but 186

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he is never satiated. When he returns, lonely and hungry, the couple offer themselves to Haruk to eat, and he then is finally satisfied. In Haruk’s belly the couple lives on just as before; when they hear the sound of thunder, they think Haruk is lonely, and they sing a song to comfort him. The production was rich with images, a blend between tradition and contemporary, and while the majority of audiences greatly enjoyed it, part of the Western audience had questions about the suitability for young viewers of both content and stark, if not scary, imagery. Here the difference between a Western cultural perception and an Eastern perception came clearly to the fore, as the company itself did not see any lack of appropriateness for a young audience. Joohee Park, in her 2010 dissertation “A Decade of Transformation: A Critical View of Theatre for Young People in South Korea Between 1992 and 2002,” studied the changes that took place in theatre in that time period under the changing political, cultural, social, and economic circumstances. As South Korean theatre wrests itself away from the image of “theatre-​but-​not-​theatre” mentioned early in this chapter and fuses a number of elements as described in Haruk above, the majority of its productions remain folk-​ and fairy-​tale-​based, with the exception of plays for adolescents. That this adherence to tradition is not necessarily detrimental to aesthetic achievement, as I described in other productions above, mostly depends on the amount of freedom the artists take with the familiar source text. In addition to Haruk, one of the most successful productions in the early 2000s was The Dwarf Who Loved Snow White by You Theatre (2001). In a twist to the original plot, one of the dwarfs, Bandal, falls in love with Snow White but never gets the chance to express it. He brings her to life three times, yet she decides to marry the prince. Bandal dies of a broken heart. Years later Snow White finds out through the magic mirror that it was Bandal who loved her most. Park describes the production as a mixture of styles: the wicked stepmother is represented by a giant puppet, the seven dwarfs are played by five actors, and nonrealistic traditional Korean elements are incorporated into the action, such as a piece of cloth that represents an ocean as well as a mountain (141–​42). But as Park points out elsewhere, emphasizing folk and fairy tales without rooting theatre more imaginatively in contemporary society with its altered norms and values can have some unwanted repercussions (and create controversy). In a 2019 article, “Innocent TYA for the Innocent Audience?”, she discusses a production of Zeralda and the Ogre based on a 1967 picturebook by Tomi Ungerer, Zeralda’s Ogre. This ogre is a terror to his community, eating small children until Zeralda starts to cook for him. He never eats children again, and when she grows up into a beautiful woman, he asks her to marry him, and they live happily ever after. Park questions the simplicity of the story and the message it sends to children, asking for a more thorough and critical analysis of the original story. She is especially concerned with how these adaptations reinforce traditional gender roles and admonishes defenders of the “innocent” story that there is no such thing, but that each story has its impact. Park makes a salient point here, one whose relevance is not limited to South Korea; I have seen similar work in Romania, among other places.

Africa: Dramatizing Folk Tales In many countries of the African continent, folk tales, often featuring animals, were, and to a certain extent still are, passed on through storytelling. While the African countries –​ indeed, the many populations within them –​ differ vastly and often communicate in their own language, there are common features in overall storyline and intended meaning as well as vast differences in performing details dependent on the individual storyteller. As Cheela Chilala points out, “The African narrative tale, which may also be referred to as the oral narrative or folk tale, is one of the most significant traditional art forms whose effectiveness as a tool for educating children and young people can not be overemphasized” (159). Through the animal characters a variety of human behaviors, vices, and virtues are displayed, and the intent is for young and old to learn a moral lesson, frequently taught via a trickster character. Chilala notes that in Zambia this hero is often Kalulu, the hare, who outsmarts 187

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the hyena through trickery and manipulation. This trickster is able to identify the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and uses them to advantage. Chilala’s example is the story of Kalulu being caught in a trap set by farmers because he was stealing their maize cobs. When Hyena asks what’s going on, Kalulu tricks him into thinking the farmers trapped him because Kalulu refused to become their chief as the farmers had asked. Hyena sees a chance of power and agrees to take Kalula’s place in the trap, and upon the farmers’ return he gets beaten up. According to Chilala, “Such a story teaches children and youth not to be greedy or to have unholy ambition” (160). The tales are performed by skilled storytellers who traditionally dramatize all roles. However, in a school context these roles can also be divided and performed by the children. In addition, as Chilala points out, the stories can be adapted to address more contemporary issues such as HIV/​ AIDS advocacy (the hyena standing for sexual desire and being punished by the virus) and to disseminate information on children’s rights (160). Theatre for development, which often uses a mix of performance and improvisational drama, also often uses these stories as springboards. Chilala sees this pattern as a way to keep these stories and the African traditions alive, especially for urban children and youth (162). Pamela Arnold Udoka discusses a similar use of folktales and narrative storytelling in Nigeria. There too, anthropomorphized animals are often the vehicle to teach a moral lesson through the trickster character, in Udoka’s example the Tortoise versus the Lion (38–​39). In this story Tortoise tricks Lion into eating his own eyes; he even plucks them out for him, fooling him into believing that they are delicious. When Lion wants to go home, he cannot because he can no longer find his way. According to Udoka, “in this particular story, children learn not to trust anything at first sight, but to weigh their decisions in order to avoid deception in any guise and from anyone, friends and/​ or associates” (39). It should be noted that the folk tradition is of course not the only source of drama in Africa; there are also many original dramas in Zambia and Nigeria and other parts of the vast continent, albeit most not specifically for children. One more African example of adaptation for children and youth comes from South Africa: an adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by Neil Coppen (2015). Coppen weaves in contemporaneous local (political) references, and the production featured many local and traditional visual references. Reviewer Lesley Stone was so taken by the production that she writes, “Animal Farm really is a magical experience, and not only for students. This deserves to be seen in mainstream theatres. In fact, forget that –​this show should be performed in Parliament.” In 2017, this production was featured on the XIXth ASSITEJ World Congress and Festival in Cape Town and easily became a favorite of the (international) audience, who, interestingly, could read their own local politics in it, despite vehement objection from the creators that this was a typical South African show.

Conclusion To start with a caveat: the above examples are just a handful of the examples of theatre and drama and their relation to literature in different cultures I happen to have studied and experienced. By no means can they be interpreted as generalizations of entire cultures. Nevertheless, it is apparent that in theatre and drama regional and global children’s literature, folk and fairy tales, myths and legends remain an important source of inspiration, whether they are close textual adaptations or imaginative reworkings where text is but one theatrical element and the source is hard for the uninitiated to detect. How individual theatre artists and dramatists deal with the relationship between extant literature and performance varies by culture, cultural expectations, institutional practices, social norms, ideological convictions, funding, and imagination. As much as we are now living in a global society, with access to many cultural and social phenomena that were hidden to most of us before the Internet, we also have to acknowledge the limits of deep understanding of social and cultural differences, and simultaneously be conscious of our privileges. Yet, with all its limitations, an encounter with these 188

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differences and respect for their various manifestations will enhance appreciation for the global diversity in theatre and drama adaptations and reworkings of literature for children and youth.

Acknowledgments I thank Karin Serres for permission to quote from our email correspondence

Note 1 TYA or Theatre for Young Audiences is the current name to refer to the field of professional theatre for young audiences. In this chapter, I also use Children’s Theatre and Theatre for Children and Youth, terms used in other parts of the world.

Works Cited Bedard, Roger L. “Junior League Children’s Theatre: Debutantes Take the Stage.” Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children’s Theatre, edited by Roger L. Bedard and C. John Tolch, Greenwood, 1989, pp. 35–​50. —​—​—​. “Negotiating Marginalization: TYA and the Schools.” Youth Theatre Journal, vol. 17, 2003, pp. 90–​101. Bernanoce, Marie. “Place et nature des adaptations de contes dans le repertoire du théâtre pour la jeunesse: questions posées aux esthétiques théâtrales contemporaines.” Revue d’Histoire du Théâtre, no. 253, 2012, https://​sht.asso.fr/​place-​et-​nat​ure-​des-​adap​tati​ons-​de-​con​tes-​dans-​le-​rep​erto​ire-​de-​thea​tre-​pour-​la-​ jeune​sse-​questi​ons-​pos​ees-​aux-​esth​etiq​ues-​the​atra​les-​con​temp​orai​nes/.​ Broster, David. “From the Magic Carpet to the Kitchen Sink.” Boletín Iboamericano de Teatro para la Infancia y la Juventud, no. 9, November 2011, pp. 141–​64 (Spanish) and 469–​90 (English). Chilala, Cheela F. K. “The African Narrative Tale as a Tool of Education.” Key Concepts in Theatre/​Drama Education, edited by Shifra Schonmann, Sense, 2011, pp. 159–​64. Elnan, Merete. “Staging the Impossible for Young Audiences.” Youth Theatre Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2009, pp. 39–​47. Goldfinger, Evelyn. “TV-​Theatre: TV Presence in Contemporary Theatre for Children and Young Audiences in Buenos Aires.” Youth Theatre Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2009, pp. 30–​38. Jennings, Coleman J., ed. Theatre for Young Audiences. St. Martins, 1998. Lysander, Per, and Suzanne Osten. Medea’s Children. Theatre for Young Audiences: Around the World in 21 Plays, edited by Lowell Swortzell, Applause, 1996, pp. 235–​78. Marshak, Samuil. “Mister Tvister.” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1973, pp. 304–​21. Park, Joohee. A Decade of Transformation: A Critical View of Theatre for Children and Young People in South Korea Between 1992 and 2002. University of Wisconsin-​Madison, PhD dissertation, 2010. —​—​—​. “Innocent TYA for the Innocent Audience? Not So Fast….” Towards the Unknown: Confronting the Present, ASSITEJ International, 2019, pp. 32–​35. Salazar, Laura Gardner. “Theatre for Young Audiences in New York City, 1900–​1910: A Heritage of Jolly Productions.” Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children’s Theatre, edited by Roger L. Bedard and C. John Tolch, Greenwood, pp. 25–​34. Sats, Nataliia. Nash Put’. Moskovskii Oblastnoi Otdel Narodnogo Obrazobanii, 1932. —​—​—​. Deti prikhodiat v Teatr. Iskusstvo, 1961. —​—​—​. Sketches from My Life. Raduga, 1985. Serres, Karin. “Hello and Question.” Personal correspondence with Manon van de Water, 21 September 2022. Shail, George E. The Leningrad Theatre for Young Spectators. New York University, PhD dissertation, 1980. Shpet, Lenora. Sovetskii teatr dlia detei. Iskusstvo, 1971. Stovall, Jordan K. “Introduction” to “Dream While You Read: A Map for Venturing Beyond Theatrical Realism,” by Danilo Gambino and Roger Q. Mason, American Theatre Magazine, 21 July 2022, www.amer​ican​thea​tre. org/​2022/​07/​21/​dream-​while-​you-​read-​a-​map-​for-​travel​ing-​bey​ond-​the​atri​cal-​real​ism/.​ Udoka, Pamela Arnold. “Conceptualization of Child and Childhood in Nigerian Theatre: A Dwindling Phenomenon?” TYA, Culture, Society: International Essays on Theatre for Young Audiences, edited by Manon van de Water, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 37–​44. Vanderhoof, Bridgett Kay. Constructed Hierarchies: An Examination of the Relationship between Institutional Practices, Productions, and Performances in US Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA). University of Wisconsin-​Madison, PhD dissertation, 2023.

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Manon van de Water Van de Water, Manon. “Constructed Narratives: Situating Theatre or Young Audiences in the United States.” Youth Theatre Journal, vol. 14, 2000, pp. 101–​13. —​—​—​. Dutch Theatre for Children. New Plays/​Dramatic Publishing, 2008. —​—​—​.“Mister Twister or Goodbye America! The Interdependence of Meaning and Material Conditions.” Essays in Theatre/ Études Théâtrales, vol. 16, no. 1, 1997, pp. 85– 94. —​—​—​. Moscow Theatre for Young People: A Cultural History of Ideological Coercion and Artistic Innovation, 1917–​2000. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. —​—​—​. Theatre, Youth, and Culture: A Critical and Historical Exploration. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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16 CHILDREN’S FILM Christine Lötscher

Ever since images learned to walk and cinema was invented, children have been part of cinematic audiences. It’s safe to say that children’s film is as old as cinema itself (Wood 163; Brown, “Introduction” 3). Early cinema, as a “cinema of attractions” (see Gunning; Brown, “Introduction” 1), was calculated to be appealing to children as well as to adults. The work of film pioneers, for example L’Arroseur arrosé (1895) by the brothers Lumière and the films of George Méliès, was intended for “a general public that was not differentiated by age or background” (see Gunning 56; Brown, “Introduction” 1). But very soon, films were produced specifically for children. As Noel Brown observes, the practice of separating child and adult audiences was “based on a presumption that has underpinned the larger history of children’s film: that young people have different aesthetic and moral requirements to those of adults” (“Introduction” 3; see also Giuriato 10). So early on, film screenings for adults were combined with screenings especially for children. At the same time, crossover films for all ages continued to be produced, and the notion of what later came to be known as family entertainment, climaxing in the 1990s with the founding of the Warner Bros. label by that name, was born (Beckett 58; Kurwinkel and Schmerheim 20). But the concept of a cinema addressing children (while still appealing also to their adult companions) has its origins with Walt Disney’s Christmas film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, followed by Metro-​Goldwyn-​ Mayer’s musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1939 (Kurwinkel and Schmerheim 21). Ever since that time, the concept of children’s film has been associated with studios producing movies, often animations, appealing to all generations. At the frontline there is Disney. While it has been followed in recent years by Studio Ghibli in Japan, Pixar Animation Studios, and streaming services such as Netflix, which offer their own range of children’s films –​ Netflix Kids started in 2011 –​Disney is still the most important player in the field, producing films for cinematic release and operating its own streaming service, Disney+​.

Children’s Film –​Impossible to Define? Obviously, “children’s film” consists of much more than what could be summarized under the heading “films for children.” Film and media scholars point out that it’s difficult to define what children’s film may be. One reason is that children watch a great number of films that are not addressed to them (Wojcik-​Andrews 2). Another can be found in the contradictory characteristics attributed to works classifiable as children’s film. In their introduction to the Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television (2019), Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick start out with a long list of features that DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-19

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might be used to distinguish children’s film from children’s television and state: “Only one thing is certain: children’s film and children’s television defy limited definition” (28). They add a question that nicely catches the paradox noted by scholars of the topic: “How is it possible, except in the most technical sense, to group together films such as the animated children’s horror ParaNorman (2012), the blockbuster Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of film adaptations (2020–​2013), and the indie film Moonrise Kingdom (2012) [directed by Wes Anderson] in the same catchall genre?” (30). It is not. But arguably, children’s film should not be studied as a genre at all. For according to Hermann Kappelhoff, genres are media of shared world perception (82). Kappelhoff derives genres from generic forms of poetic making and not from the taxonomies of conventional systems of classification. His starting point is Stanley Cavell’s theorizing of genre, developed, among other things, around the female characters of melodrama. For Cavell, films are explorations of the socially and culturally shaped manifestations of our coexistence. They bring individuality to bear as “particular ways of inhabiting a social role” and pursue the purpose of discovering new individualities (33). New individualities, however, give rise to cycles of films in which cinema differentiates itself in ever new genres, Kappelhoff states (80). Central to this approach is Aby Warburg’s pathos formula, a term for formulaic representations of gestures and forms of emotional expression, images of arousal circulating in culture over time. Kappelhoff understands the recurring, changing expressive formulas in film as circulating affects that can be conceived as generic forms of a collective feeling. Their manifestations are series of expressivities (80; see also Lötscher, Alice-​Maschine 55). There are specific expressions in the interplay of generic modes typical for popular films aimed at children and families –​such as fairy tale, adventure, detective, or buddy films –​but children’s film as such cannot be understood as a genre. It’s more of a corpus, including a variety of films with similarities on several levels: economic, historical, pedagogic, narrative. And in terms of the films’ relationship to genre, seriality and transmediality play a role. Because of their explicit or implicit pedagogic approach, films aimed at children have a specific way of reflecting media and society. As Ian Wojcik-​Andrews puts it, they offer “a metacommentary on film and society” (20). Nor can children’s film be defined by the age of the audience. Of course, there are film screening settings and practices involving real-​life children. Still, in defining children’s film, it is important to recognize that children’s films are aimed at the implicit child and are based on concepts of childhood that are not necessarily in touch with everyday realities children experience, but that are inflected by social, cultural, and pedagogic discourses (Giuriato 10). But from the point of view of children’s media scholarship, it is possible to define at least approximately what children’s film might encompass, according to the model children’s literature studies operates with (see Ewers). There are films produced specifically for children, such as Das kleine Gespenst (2013, The Little Ghost), an adaptation of Otfried Preussler’s novel; there are crossover films for all ages, such as Disney’s Christmas films; and there are films not aimed at children at all but very frequently watched by them, a category including popular franchises such as Star Wars and its companions or the superhero multiverses of Marvel or DC, whose main address is to young adults but that have long been enjoyed by younger children as well.

Children’s Film Scholarship Children’s film only recently reached academic legitimacy and coverage. Even though films and special screenings for children have been common from about 1900 onward, a consistent body of scholarship on children’s film emerged only in the 1980s (Brown, “Introduction” 3). Before, academic interest focused strongly on the psychological and behavioral effects on young minds of watching motion pictures, on children’s engagement with films. Until the 1980s, the primary interest was in children as audiences, which remains a fertile subject to this day (“Introduction” 3).

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Contemporary scholarship on children’s film is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on well-​established disciplines such as cultural studies, film and television studies, and education as well as children’s literary studies, a fact that Brown attributes to “the absence of a disciplinary framework of [film’s] own” (“Introduction” 3). He adds that, until recently, there has been comparatively little interest in children’s cinema in the arena of film studies, due in part to “aesthetic prejudice against what is often been perceived as a ‘low’ cultural practice” (“Introduction” 3). Early studies focusing on the representation of children in film include Ruth M. Goldstein and Edith Zornow’s The Screen Image of Youth: Movies about Children and Adolescents (1980), Kathy Merlock Jackson’s Images of Children in American Film: A Sociocultural Analysis (1986), and Neil Sinyard’s Children in the Movies (1992). Wojcik-​Andrews’s Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (2000) was the first monograph to explore the subject (Brown, “Introduction” 3). In recent years, a variety of handbooks, companion chapters, and introductions to children’s film –​ often in combination with teenage and young adult film and media –​ have been published (see, for instance, Lemish and Toje; Brown, Film and “Introduction”; Hermansson and Zepernick). This new interest is due to the fact that “living with a global media culture is one of the characteristics of childhood in the beginning of the third millennium, as screens –​ of television, cinema, computers, mobile devices and hand-​held electronic games –​are part of everyday life” (Lemish and Toje 1). This technological transformation is the background for a growing attention to transmedia storytelling and its omnipresence in children’s realities, ever since Henry Jenkins’s 2003 coining of the term (see also Jenkins, Culture and “Game”), and the increasingly important role of children’s media in popular culture for all ages. At the same time, children’s blockbusters have generally become mainstream for an adult audience as well. This blurring of audiences, as far as age is concerned, can be traced back to the boom in family entertainment in the 1990s, but mostly to the success of the Harry Potter phenomenon. At present, most international blockbusters aim to appeal to young adults, and a good many of them also to children younger than thirteen, for example Netflix’s ironically apocalyptic Christmas movie Don’t Look Up (2021) or the two Knives Out mysteries (Knives Out [2019] and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery [2022]). The economic reason for this address is obvious: the broader the audience for big franchises, the better (see Wojcik-​Andrews; Hermansson and Zepernick; Brown, “Introduction”). This doesn’t mean that there is no aesthetic or cultural value in popular audiovisual storytelling, even though commercial aspects must always be considered when studying media entertainment. Understanding popular entertainment requires a theoretical premise: as Hans-​Otto Hügel puts it, entertainment cannot be grasped in terms of production, reception, or media content alone, but must be conceptualized as a process (15). Hügel adds, “It is necessary to describe the reception defaults and the attitudes for the readiness for reception that make entertainment possible and thus constitute a specific cultural situation that has a certain cultural-​historical as well as cultural-​systematic place” (17).1 In the last twenty years, children’s film scholarship has become much more sophisticated in this respect. In 2000, Wojcik-​Andrews criticized mainstream films on the ground that they always “reflect the status quo, even when they least appear to support it. Produced by the dominant institutions of capitalism, they recapitulate capitalism’s dominant ideologies” (7). Twenty-​two years later, in contrast, in the introduction to their volume on Disney, Ute Dettmar and Ingrid Tomkowiak note: An undifferentiated devaluation of this prime example of commercially successful popular culture [...] would be too simplistic. A decisive reason for Disney’s success is the fact that throughout its history the company has always skilfully combined technical and aesthetic innovations on the one hand with tried-​and-​true narrative patterns on the other. This strategy also includes the fact that Disney has repeatedly responded to the Zeitgeist and virulent

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contemporary discourses by repositioning itself –​for example on race, gender, diversity, body and human-​animal relations –​but without reinventing itself. (v) At the same time, social transformations taking place since the turn of the century have had a strong impact on the relationship between different generations, promoting crossover formats even more. While biographies are becoming less standardized and, depending on intersectional features, also more precarious, the very concept of age is being challenged (see Joosen, “Parents,” “Childhoods,” Adulthood; Benner and Ullmann). Terms such as chrononormativity, the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity (see Freeman), or aetonormativity, the idea that the adult point of view is the de facto standard, which can result in the monolithic exercise of adult power over the child subject (see Nikolajeva; Curry 254; Beauvais), represent new and critical approaches to questions of age and power. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of children growing sideways instead of straight up into a normative adult biography provides an alternative perspective on developmental potentialities. In articles and handbooks such as the aforementioned Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television and the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film (2022), children’s films are usually defined by their audience demographic (children and tweens up to twelve years), by their child subjects and protagonists, and by their construction of childhood, what makes them “vehicles of enculturation” (Hermansson and Zepernick 1). Children’s films are for and about children, but never produced by children (1). Accordingly, they are more didactic than films not specifically aimed at children, and subject to more censorship and regulation (2). What Vanessa Joosen notes with regard to children’s literature applies to films aimed at children as well: “With its roots in education, children’s literature is an ideological discourse that relies on age for its definition and characterization” (“Childhoods” 203). This chapter does not aim to reproduce or compile everything that has recently and convincingly been written about children’s film, but understands itself rather as a supplement to Brown’s The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative (2017), his Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film, and Hermansson and Zepernick’s Introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television. Given that the notion of children’s film is made up of contradictory characteristics (Hermansson and Zepernick 28), this chapter attempts to take on a slightly new perspective –​ focusing on children’s film as part of popular media culture. Moreover, it considers children’s film as distinct from youth or young adult film, but as part of so-​called family entertainment. And it looks at children’s film as a media format that can be screened in cinemas, broadcast on television, or streamed on various devices (Hermansson and Zepernick 28).

Children’s Film and Adaptation From today’s perspective, children’s film is deeply embedded in aesthetics and practices of globalized popular culture and as such is part of an ever-​expanding transmedia narrative world. As noted above, the concept of transmedia storytelling has been popularized by Jenkins, who defines it as the creation of a storyworld through multiple documents belonging to various media (see Jenkins, Culture; Klastrup and Tosca). But Jenkins also argues that adaptations are not part of the transmedia storyworld and claims a new model for co-​creation rather than adaptation of content that crosses media (“Storytelling”). Adaptation, he charges, produces nothing but redundancy, because it does nothing more than represent an existing story (Culture 195). But adaptation rarely involves a simple retelling (as Jenkins points out later); on the contrary, it always requires “interpreting and creating something new” (Hutcheon 20; Dena 197). Assuming that content and narrative can never be detached from media-​specific aesthetic modes and means of expression and cannot be understood without analyzing 194

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them (Kappelhoff 10), adaptation is always a new reading conveying a new interpretation of the original –​transforming the original through the new meanings it produces. A striking example is the host of cinema and television adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-​Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Through the media transmutations produced over time, a new Alice emerges: an Alice who cannot be distilled out of Carroll’s works alone, but who can only be thought with and through the other media in which she makes her appearance. Thus, Carroll’s texts also change: not only does Alice’s shadow become visible in popular culture, but Carroll’s Alice in retrospect appears as a shadow of her own popular culture appearance in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. No one would deny that there is a chronology of text and adaptation, but the bindingness of this sequence for the understanding of the texts and films can be questioned. If the change of context transforms a text, it is not immune to the reference of later texts to it but is in turn subject to their changing influence (Lötscher, Alice-​Maschine 13; Frey 18). Jade Dillon asserts that the Wonderland storyverse’s conception of Alice is broadened to include the adapted Alices of the twenty-​first century within her scope –​ among others Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), directed by James Bobin. Each film’s characterization of Alice and depiction of her agency, she writes, “creates a female protagonist informed by her cultural context while simultaneously moving the character of Alice from child figure to adult woman through a series of artistic reinterpretations” (132). The logic of seriality that is invariably part of popular storytelling proposes that the original text is always overtaken by that which has followed upon it (Bronfen 6). Elisabeth Bronfen’s approach to adaptations of Shakespeare plays is highly productive for the study of children’s film in the context of transmedia storyworlds. Bronfen treats adaptations not only of entire plays, but also of elements of all kinds –​character constellations, dramatic actions, quotations –​as a form of re-​reading, which saves the Shakespearean text from stale repetition and instead refigures it in terms of the return of the different –​ not, as Roland Barthes puts it, “as the real text, but a plural text: the same and new.” As Shakespeare’s words, figural constellations, tropes, and plot lines return to the screen, the creative reshaping they have undertaken considers something again, from a different perspective; they make something visible again, endow life once more to something. (5) Whenever the Cheshire Cat’s grin, Pinocchio’s growing nose, or sleepwalking Heidi reappear in a film, they “vocalise and legitimate particular twenty-​first-​century cultural concerns” (6). Adaptations have throughout their history been central to children’s film. Children’s classics were among the first novels to be adapted for the screen (Brown, “Introduction” 10). At 800 feet, Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow’s first film based on Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice in Wonderland (1903), was the longest film yet produced in Britain, running about twelve minutes.2 Giulio Antamoro’s Pinocchio followed in Italy in 1911. Fairy tales were particularly popular material for the screen (see Zipes; Liptay). The animated silhouette adaptations of fairy tales by German artist and film pioneer Lotte Reiniger (1899–​1981) had a highly inspirational effect on subsequent animated fairy tale film. At an early stage, she sounded out the potential and possibilities of film (Benner and Ullmann 45). Years before Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, she produced an animated feature-​length film, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Ahmed (1926, The Adventures of Prince Ahmed), but she also created adaptations of classic European fairy tales such as Cinderella (1922). In the beginning, the viewers can see how Cinderella is being cut out of a piece of paper before she comes alive. The making of the film is commented on in a metafictional level, referring to fairy tale telling (Benner and Ullmann 51). This device would become a convention found in almost every subsequent fairy tale film. 195

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Thus, through early adaptations, genres and themes were established as particularly typical for children’s film. Metafictional play and the constant retelling of adaptation history are important parts of it. Fairy tales and fantasy are still among the most common genres today, and children’s film contributed substantially to these genres. But adaptation is limited neither to classics and fairy tales nor to the direction book to film. As Robyn McCallum observes, recent developments in adaptation studies have significant implications for research in children’s literatures and culture: First, the scope of study has broadened to encompass popular-​culture texts, graphic novels, picture books, film remakes, and spin-​offs, as well as adaptations across new media such as computer games, Internet gaming, and fan-​writing, YouTube clips and paratextual discourses, such as franchising, merchandise, novelizations, and marketing. Second, there has been a shift among scholars from “fidelity criticism” toward a dialogic intertextual model of analysis which conceives of adaptation as part of a hypertextual web-​crossing genres, media, and cultures. (37) She also points out the “radically intertextual nature” of the primary material (“Adaptations” 38). So children’s media culture, one could summarize, has always been inter-​ or even transmedial, even in seemingly bookish times. But what does this mean for the study of children’s film? Above all, that it requires an interdisciplinary approach and that it is important to raise questions concerning the role of film in transmedia narrations, in a synchronic and a diachronous perspective. The present transmedia narrative world consists of transmedia franchises, often blockbuster movies at the core, accompanied by videogames, tie-​in books, and merchandise products. Examples of specifically designed successful franchises include Disney’s Finding Nemo, or one of the most recent blockbusters, Disney’s Frozen. There are many franchises based on adaptations of novels, such as the Harry Potter series, or children’s classics such as Heidi, The Jungle Book, or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In this case, there is a central text that functions as a common field of reference for all the other texts. Created by a single author, they expanded to film and computer games by popular demand. Mary-​Laure Ryan calls this phenomenon the “snowball” effect: “a certain story enjoys so much popularity or becomes so prominent culturally that it spontaneously generates a variety of either same medium or cross-​media prequels, sequels, fan fiction, and adaptations” (363). Ryan adds that toys can be starting points as well: quoting Robin Bernstein, she suggests that “a reconceptualization of the field should acknowledge that the ‘history of children’s literature exists not in opposition to, but in integration with, the histories of children’s material culture and children’s play’ ” (459). Such an integrated history of children’s literature, material culture, and play illustrates the ways that children’s literature has long been imbricated in material culture and other media beyond print codices (see Hamer 120). Well-​known examples are Lego or My Little Pony. Besides specifically designed franchises, there is a broad range of intertwined media formats, including a variety of adaptations for cinema. Despite the fact that children’s film, or family entertainment to be precise, has become more and more commercialized since the end of the twentieth century –​ mostly due to its broad audience base (Brown, Film 8) –​there are franchises that evolved without design and a media corporation planning marketing action. In particular, franchises based on classics of children’s literature tend to be adapted over and over again in different periods and different cultural contexts. This phenomenon can be traced through the media history of popular children’s classics. Consider Italian author and journalist Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, first published as a serialized story in an Italian weekly newspaper in 1881 and as a book in 1883. Famously, the tale ends with the wooden puppet becoming a “real boy.” Even though the text insists on the rascal’s progress, 196

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from a transmedia perspective Pinocchio never really remains a “real boy” because, due to constant remediations, he turns into the adventurous puppet over and over again. Even the illustrator of the book edition of 1883 does not leave the ending as it is, but adds a picture to the last sentence that encourages us to focus on the wooden puppet: that is, to continue the story –​a detail gladly received by later illustrations and film adaptations, most forcefully in Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio from 2002. Pinocchio, played by the then fifty-​year-​old Benigni himself, is an eternal child-​head who, if his father Geppetto, the talking cricket responsible for preaching moral values, and the fairy with the blue hair have their way, should grow up and become sensible. After the pleasure principle has been savored to excess on the screen for a hundred minutes, Pinocchio turns into a good boy. In the last shot, he is seen going to school and eagerly shaking hands with the teacher. His shadow, however, is still wearing the costume of the wooden puppet and seems less than enthusiastic about the new task. While the well-​behaved boy goes to school, the shadow stays outside the door, laughing and cheering as he chases a blue butterfly that disappears into the horizon. In Disney’s 1950 animated film, Pinocchio embodies the innocent, wondering child who lets himself be led by the urge to play and thus gets into silly situations entirely without ill will. At the end, when he believes that Geppetto has died through his fault, he regrets his pranks so much that his moral reformation turns him into a real boy in no time. The latest Disney adaptation by Robert Zemeckis (2022) sticks with this inner reversal, but in the end leaves Pinocchio –​in keeping with the new diversity-​friendly house policy –​ with his existence as a wooden puppet. The growth rings are delicately visible on his skin as Geppetto assures him that he loves him just as he is. Matteo Garrone takes a similar approach in his 2019 film, which turns Pinocchio into a psychological figure who must learn to trust others in a social reality marked by poverty. Because Pinocchio is meant to attract the whole family to the cinema, there are not many films that take up Collodi’s ambivalences along with the playful, grotesque logic of escalation. Benigni’s adaptation succeeds best in this task. By separating character and shadow, the film finds a precise image for what drives the novel and what is on the minds of its readers. The two value systems –​conformist behavior versus radical pleasure –​remain connected only as long as they are at loggerheads. And what makes a reader (or viewer) so nervous about Pinocchio is that one can definitively take the side neither of the adults nor of the rascal; the text wants to force us to choose a side, but at the same time it does not allow us to do so. Another striking example is Heidi. Johanna Spyri’s two novels, first published in 1880 and 1881, have made an incredible journey throughout the world in the last 140 years. They are among the most widely read, translated, and adapted literary classics. The impact the books had and still have on children’s literature and culture and on popular media worldwide is unique, as can be seen in the Heidi iconography in countless illustrated editions, comics, and film adaptations. The fascinating point about Heidi’s career is that, as a phenomenon of “glocalization,” it produces a wide variety of interpretations, depending on cultural, social, and political contexts; being a Swiss national (and marketing) symbol is only one of them. Heidi can be read as the ideal Romantic child, but also, in a more contemporary way, as a mediator between urban and rural life or even between the human and the nonhuman. Heidi is also noteworthy in that the character, setting, and plot elements have been multiplied in a transmedia storytelling world and have long since become detached from the original. Heidi is an integral part of popular culture as a figuration through which childhood, society, and nature are negotiated. A global transmedia echo chamber has emerged around her, based less on the novels than on Heidi films, especially Allan Dwan’s Hollywood adaptation from 1937 starring a nine-​ year-​old Shirley Temple, followed by the Japanese anime series produced by the Zuiyō Eizō studio in 1974. But even Luigi Comencini’s version from 1952, produced in Switzerland with a lot of local alpine folklore flavor, was screened in American cinemas. The most recent film version from 2015, directed by Alain Gsponer and starring Anuk Steffen and Bruno Ganz, achieved the most successful international theatrical release of any Swiss film to date. 197

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The examples of Pinocchio’s and Heidi’s transmedia careers show that children’s film must be considered as part of popular culture. From the very beginning of film history, the vast majority of films produced for child or general audiences have corresponded to characteristics of popular entertainment and storytelling. Western popular culture is mediated by modern mass media and commercially influenced by its specific practices of aesthetic experience, pleasure, and experience (Maase 10).

Crossover In films aimed at a child or family audience, as we have seen, fairy tales by the brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault or children’s classics are told over and over again –​ every new adaptation is a new reading and interpretation, but every new adaptation takes into consideration the history of retellings as well. Even though these are contexts that children in the audience cannot grasp, it is part of the multiple addressing of children’s media. So one of the features of children’s film is that it transcends age boundaries (Beckett 47): most children’s films are crossover texts. Of course, there are films made specifically for young people, certain nonfiction films, for example (even though documentaries are a hotspot for family entertainment; see Lötscher, “Bodies”), and movies for very young children, but they are mostly produced for television, often as series: Teletubbies or Sesame Street. Popular children’s films without crossover characteristics are made in various countries, but they usually don’t have international appeal. In the German-​speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), for example, animated films are mostly co-​produced specifically for children by production companies and television channels and first screened in cinemas; later they run on television. They are generally adaptations of children’s books. Preussler’s Räuber Hotzenplotz series is especially popular, as are book series by Cornelia Funke (Die wilden Hühner) or Joachim Massanek (Die wilden Fussballkerle). Promotion of children’s cinema is widespread in continental European countries, not only by supporting popular films, but mostly by encouraging art cinema for children (see Wegener). Cinema screenings are part of recreational activities and take place on afternoons, sometimes on weekends. The Zurich Arthouse Cinema Group, for instance, invites children to a “Little Arthouse Cinemas Club –​ The children’s cinema format of the Arthouse Cinemas.” They announce their selection as “educationally valuable films that are fun for children from the age of three and also make adults smile. Wednesdays, weekends and selected Sundays also with brunch in the Commercio restaurant.”3 This is one of many examples of contemporary efforts designed to educate children to become moviegoers, in the sense of passing on cultural achievements of the twentieth century; hence the emphasis on cinemagoing as a social and culinary event. The films selected for arthouse screenings can otherwise only be watched at festivals, on DVDs, or via arthouse streaming services such as MUBI. The Berlinale film festival, to invoke another example, maintains an advanced program for children’s film called “GenerationKPlus,” actually for tweens between eleven and fourteen years of age. Their selection focuses on films that take children and young people seriously in their narratives and film language. Stories that are told from the perspective of their young protagonists and make their world tangible. Meaningful films that open a gateway to unknown worlds. Films that demand courage, show intersectional perspectives and promote common approaches to solutions. Films that hold up a mirror to the adult world. Feature films, documentary works, animations, genre formats, and films that expand the formal language of cinema.4 All of this can also be said about popular mainstream films for children and families. The difference, however, lies not so much in topics, tropes, and themes, and even less in the desire to tell empowering 198

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stories and convey values. It rather shows in the films’ aesthetics, in timing, camera work, and editing, as well as in acting. Popular films for children rely strongly on genre and different generic modes; like serial storytelling for children, they play with repetition and variation (Dettmar 17). Art films, however, show the signature of an auteur-​director with an individual poetics as opposed to genre poetics; originality is strived for above all, which is realized in the search for a form of expression for emotions and experiences that can’t be expressed easily in everyday communication. So-​called arthouse films for children are crossover media as well, but they are not so much part of the field of popular children’s media in terms of their storytelling style and the themes and tropes they use. Against this backdrop, it makes sense to define children’s film along the lines of popular transmedia storyworlds on the one hand and art or auteur film on the other –​as sharing two different, albeit interlaced, cultural and aesthetic fields of media production and reception.

Children’s Film Tropes and Popular Culture The “curious gap in the scholarship” that Mavis Reimer and her coauthors notice with regard to low-​ culture literary texts for young people applies to children’s film scholarship as well: While series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for children and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people. The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-​alone, high-​quality texts of literary fiction. (1) Considering children’s film and its history as a part of Western popular culture, based on media theory and methodology at the interface of popular culture studies and children’s literature and media studies, means analyzing children’s film not only alongside other media formats, as is the case in transmedia franchises, but also in the context of media aesthetics and practices in a systematic and historical perspective, taking into account phenomena such as seriality and transmediality. From a cultural studies point of view, it is equally important to analyze the tropes circulating in films for children and for general audiences, many of them concerning notions of childhood, but also relationships with parents, peers, and animals and power relations between children and adults or children and institutions such as family and school. Children’s film, like children’s literature, is not only didactic; it’s about fun and entertainment as well. That children’s media always mediate a notion of childhood, of growing up and, thus, of society, either explicitly or implicitly, leads to a phenomenon that is highly intriguing for cultural studies: children’s media are always already a space of negotiation for cultural values and social transformations. A perfect example of the way in which popular children’s films negotiate social and cultural transformations is The Sea Beast (dir. Chris Williams), an animated film aimed at all generations and produced by Netflix in 2022. It refers, even overtly, to the genres that were established as typical for children’s films early on: adventure, action, and fantasy and fairy tale. It picks up on blockbusters such as Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series (2003–​17) and popular children’s animated films such as Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon (2010), establishing a well-​known fictional world with a king and a queen in a castle and a ship on the high seas with a crew made up of a queer bunch of sailors who have spent their whole lives hunting down the terrible sea beasts inhabiting the oceans and terrorizing humankind in exchange for bounty. In other words: the film offers a remix of the most popular elements of adventure cinema for families. One of the most successful ships is The Inevitable, with its infamous Captain Crow and its diverse crew (the first mate is a Black woman). Fighting a terrible sea monster called The Red Bluster, Crow lost an eye years ago; now it’s time for revenge. But the fun the audience enjoys in the first part of 199

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the movie, watching the hunters fight the terrible sea creatures, turns stale as soon as Maisie, an orphan girl, joins the crew. She believes that she knows all about the beasts from her fairy tale book, but realizes that the stories about the sea creatures are all wrong and that she needs to tell them all over again –​in terms of entanglement, of a peaceful coexistence, of what Donna Haraway would call companion species relations. In short, The Sea Beast attempts to square the circle by providing breathtaking action, combined with playful anarchy and fun –​ and at the same time aiming to address issues of gender, diversity, and power, interweaving a critique of colonial domination with a deconstruction of child-​adult and human-​animal power relations. Today, more than ever before, children’s film has become a space for negotiation –​ not only for social and cultural transformations, but also for questions concerning the future of popular transmedia storytelling.

Notes 1 “Es sind die Rezeptionsvorgaben und die Einstellungensweisen für die Rezeptionsbereitschaft zu beschreiben, die Unterhaltung möglich machen und damit eine spezifische kulturelle Situation konstituieren, die einen bestimmten kulturhistorischen wie kultursystematischen Ort hat.” All translations from the German are mine. 2 See www.scree​nonl​ine.org.uk/​film/​id/​974​410/.​ 3 “The Little Arthouse Kinos Club –​ Das Kinderkino-​Format der Arthouse Kinos. Pädagogisch wertvolle Filme, die Kinder ab 3 Jahren Spass bereiten und auch die Erwachsenen zum Schmunzeln bringen. Jeweils mittwochs, am Wochenende und an ausgewählten Sonntagen auch mit Brunch im Restaurant Commercio” (www.artho​use.ch/​lit​tle-​artho​use-​club/​). 4 “die in ihren Erzählungen und ihrer Filmsprache Kinder und Jugendliche ernst nehmen. Geschichten, die aus der Sicht ihrer jungen Protagonist*innen erzählt werden und deren Welt erfahrbar machen. Bedeutsame Filme, die ein Tor in unbekannte Welten öffnen. Filme, die Mut einfordern, intersektionale Perspektiven aufzeigen und gemeinsame Lösungsansätze fördern. Filme, die der Welt der Erwachsenen einen Spiegel vorhalten. Spielfilme, dokumentarische Arbeiten, Animationen, Genreformate und Filme, die die Formensprache des Kinos erweitern” (www.berlineale.de/de/festival/sektionen/generation.html, accessed 15 February 2023).

Works Cited Beckett, Sandra L. Crossover Fiction. Global and Historical Perspectives. Routledge, 2009. Beauvais, Clémentine. The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature. John Benjamins, 2015. Benner, Julia, and Anika Ullmann. “Doing Age: Von der Relevanz der Age Studies für die Kinderliteraturforschung.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder-​und Jugendliteraturforschung, 2019, pp. 145–​59. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama. Manchester University Press, 2020. Brown, Noel. The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative. Columbia University Press, 2017. —​—​—​. “Introduction: Coming to Terms with Children’s Film.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film, edited by Noel Brown, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 1–​34. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Harvard University Press, 1979. Curry, Alice. “The Power and Potential: An Ecocritical Reading of Twenty-​First-​Century Childhood.” Literary Cultures and Twenty-​First-​Century Childhoods, edited by Nathalie op de Beeck, Springer, 2020, pp. 253–​65. Dena, Christy. Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World Across Distinct Media and Environments. University of Sydney, PhD dissertation, 2009. Dettmar, Ute. “Serielles Erzählen.” Handbuch Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur, edited by Tobias Kurwinkel and Philipp Schmerheim, Metzler, 2020, pp. 137–​44. —​—​—​, and Ingrid Tomkowiak, eds. On Disney. Metzler, 2022. Dillon, Jade. “Reimagining Alice Through the Intertextual Realm of Children’s Film and Television.” Hermansson and Zepernick, pp. 131–​46. Ewers, Hans-​Heino. Literatur für Kinder und Jugendliche. Fink, 2008. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. Frey, Hans-​Jost. Der unendliche Text. Suhrkamp, 1990. Giuriato, Davide. Grenzenlose Bestimmbarkeit. Kindheiten in der Literatur der Moderne. Diaphanes, 2020.

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Children’s Film Goldstein, Ruth M., and Edith Zornow. The Screen Image of Youth: Movies about Children and Adolescents. Scarecrow Press, 1980. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the Avant Garde.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, BFI Publishing, 1990, pp. 56–​62. Hamer, Naomi. “Media.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, New York University Press, 2021, pp. 120–​23. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Hermansson, Casie, and Janet Zepernick, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hügel, Hans-​Otto. Lob des Mainstreams. Zu Begriff und Geschichte von Unterhaltung und populärer Kultur. Halem, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006. —​—​—​. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-​Fruin and Pat Harrigan, MIT Press, 2004, pp. 118–​30. —​—​—​. “Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Films to Video Games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling.” MIT Technology Review, 15 January 2003, www.techn​olog​yrev​iew.com/​ 2003/​01/​15/​234​540/​tra​nsme​dia-​story​tell​ing/.​ Joosen, Vanessa. Adulthood in Children’s Literature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. —​—​—​. “Childlike Parents in Guus Kuijer’s Polleke Series and Jacqueline Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum.” Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 2, 2015, pp. 203–​24. —​—​—​. “Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, 2015, pp. 126–​40. Kappelhoff, Hermann. Kognition und Reflexion. Zur Theorie filmischen Denkens. DeGruyter, 2018. Klastrup, Lisbeth, and Susanna Tosca. Transmedial Worlds and Everyday Life: Networked Reception, Social Media, and Fictional Worlds. Routledge, 2018. Kurwinkel, Tobias, and Philipp Schmerheim, eds. Kinder-​und Jugendfilmanalyse. UVK, 2013. Lemish, Dafna, and Asle Toje, eds. The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents and Media. Routledge, 2013. Liptay, Fabienne. WunderWelten: Märchen im Film. Gardez!, 2004. Lötscher, Christine. “Animal Bodies, Human Voices, and the Big Entanglement: Disneynature’s Documentary Series.” Dettmar and Tomkowiak, pp. 25–​35. —​—​—​. Die Alice-​Maschine. Figurationen der Unruhe in der Populärkultur. Metzler, 2020. Maase, Kaspar. Populärkulturforschung. Eine Einführung. Transcript, 2019. McCallum, Robyn. “Adaptations for Young Audiences: Critical Challenges, Future Directions.” Hermansson and Zepernick, pp. 37–​54. Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. Routledge, 2010. Pinocchio. Directed by Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, performances by Dickie Jones and Christian Rub, Walt Disney Animation Studios, 1940. Pinocchio. Directed by Roberto Benigni, performances by Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi, Melampo Cinematografica, 2002. Pinocchio. Directed by Matteo Garrone, performances by Federico Ielapi and Roberto Benigni, Archimede, 2019. Pinocchio. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, performances by Joseph Gordon-​Levitt and Tom Hanks, Walt Disney Pictures, 2022. Reimer, Mavis, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau, eds. “Introduction.” Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, edited by Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 1–​33. Ryan, Mary-​Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today, vol. 34, no. 3, 2013, pp. 361–​88. The Sea Beast. Directed by Chris Williams, performances by Karl Urban and Zaris-​Angel Hator, Netflix Animation, 2022. Staples, Terry. All Pals Together: The Story of Children’s Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press, 2009.

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Christine Lötscher Wegener, Claudia. “Der Kinderfilm: Themen und Tendenzen.” Kino in Bewegung. Perspektiven des deutschen Gegenwartsfilms, edited by Thomas Schick and Tobias Ebbrecht, VS Verlag, 2011, pp. 121–​35. Wojcik-​Andrews, Ian. Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory. Garland, 2000. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text. Columbia University Press, 2003. Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-​Tale Films. Routledge, 2011.

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17 TELEVISION Debbie Olson

Introduction The very first televised images were sent by Lee de Forest in 1907 in New York, and again in 1908 from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France (Barnouw 15–​17, 550). Television was broadcast free over the airwaves until 1948 and the advent of cable TV, which did not become widespread until the late 1970s. By 1979 some 16 million households in the United States were hooked to cable TV (Adgate). At first, most programming was geared toward adults, but when television programming for children did appear, it became very popular. Children’s television has been a staple of modern childhood since the first children’s program, The Children’s Hour, aired on the BBC in 1946, based on the successful radio program that began in 1922. In the early days of children’s television, shows such as Howdy Doody (1947–​60) in the United States, The Little Club (1958) on state-​run CCTV in China, and The Magic Lamp (1972) on India’s first TV network, Doordarshan, highlighted unique aspects of local childhoods. Most early television shows for children were designed by producers to incorporate educational content along with entertainment, working in tandem to foster culturally approved, age-​appropriate knowledge while preserving innocence and play via songs, dance, puppetry, and art. In 1979 the first network dedicated to children’s programming, Nickelodeon, was born, followed in 1983 by The Disney Channel (as a prime network that consumers could subscribe to for a monthly fee) and in 1992 by Warner Bros. Cartoon Network. By 2005 and the launch of YouTube, television had become, as Anna McCarthy astutely argues, “integrat[ed] into everyday environments so well that we barely notice its presence” (2). YouTube signaled a grand shift in television viewing, coupled with new technologies that allowed television and movies to be accessed across multiple platforms such as cellphones, computer screens, and then tablets and watches. Today, thirty percent of viewers stream TV over the internet, twenty-​five percent watch broadcast TV, and thirty-​seven percent watch TV via cable (“Audiences’ Share”). As the popularity of television grew, however, many adults, particularly in the West, worried that children were spending too much time in front of television screens, sparking numerous studies on television viewing effects that reshaped the landscape of children’s television. When television became popular in the 1950s, it marked a transition from what Lynn Spigel calls the public “spectator amusements” of the movie theater to entertainment in the “private space of the home” (1). Television viewing was cast as a family affair in post-​Second World War American society, where families sat together and watched broadcast shows. By the mid-​1950s, households DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-20

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viewed television sets as “a natural part of domestic space” (Spigel 39). But television’s technological evolutions produced specific cultural effects for children and childhood, beginning with the image of the family viewing TV together during the postwar era. This image became central to the cultural ideal of the perfect American family, which was then replicated in television series such as Leave It to Beaver (1957–​63), I Love Lucy (1951–​57), and Father Knows Best (1960–​65), to name a few. This image of the happy family that was presented on television became the cornerstone of American middle-​class culture and was (and is still) held up as the ideal way to live, even if most families don’t look like those represented in TV comedies. These television shows also highlighted wholesome, perfect childhoods, which then became embodied in children’s television images. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie (1947–​57), which was the first color broadcast on NBC and the first to air nationally, was just as popular with adults as with children, garnering four million viewers in its first year (Shine). Other influential offerings included Adventure Time (1958–​79), a Pittsburgh-​based variety show for children featuring puppets, adult hosts, cartoons, and old comedy shorts by performers such as the Three Stooges. Romper Room (1953–​94) and Lassie (1954–​73) showcased American ideologies of good citizenship (“Be a do-​bee, not a don’t-​bee”) and individualism, capitalism, American exceptionalism, and patriarchy. American television constructed a childhood that was innocent and free of real-​world conflict or problems, always white and middle class, leaving no room for other childhoods or ideological positions. The power of the televised image to affect cultural attitudes with images of the ideal family was originally considered a good influence, a way to project the ideal life to a broad audience. But by the late 1960s when television technology advanced and counterculture youth were questioning authority en masse, parents and educators began to worry that televised images were doing irreparable harm to children and the innocence of childhood. The popular children’s author Roald Dahl even created a character in his iconic fantasy Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Mike Teavee, who was so enamored of the TV image that it led to his untimely transformation via TV transmission. Following Mike Teavee’s misadventure in the book is Dahl’s poem “Television,” which speaks to the growing concern over television’s effects upon children: IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND! [...] HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE! HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK –​HE ONLY SEES!

(131, capitalization in the original)

Two decades after Dahl’s novel, Neil Postman published The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), a treatise blaming television and other visual mediums for the corruption of childhood innocence. For Postman, television images “reveal the secrets of adult life” (81), something children should be shielded from. Television also “changed the form of information itself [...] from rationalistic to emotive,” and consequently Postman, who considered reading intellectual, held that passively “watching” images dulls the senses: “pictures do not show concepts, they show things. [...] The printed word requires of a reader an aggressive response to its ‘truth content.’ [...] But pictures require of the observer an aesthetic response. They call upon our emotions, not our reason. They ask us to feel, not to think” (73). For Postman, and others, there was no greater threat to American childhood than television.

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Television Influence: Early Studies As television’s influence grew, researchers looked at the ways television may affect children’s perception of other cultures, races, gender, consumption, and cultural identity (see, e.g., on race, Martins and Harrison, Leonard and Robbins; on gender, Sternglanz and Serbin, Signorielli; Sprafkin and Liebert; on consumption, Seiter, Kapur, Banet-​Weiser). Indeed, since the early 1950s, notes John P. Murray, there have been over “4000 books, articles, reports, and papers published” on the effects of television on children (12). The top concern, however, has been whether or not witnessing violent acts on television causes children to become violent, especially since, according to Maya Götz and Elke Schlote, “television is an emotionally intensive experience [and] children immerse themselves in stories [... and] experience feelings much more strongly than adults.” In 1961 Stanford researchers Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker published a detailed study on the effects of television viewing on young children. Television in the Lives of Our Children was the first comprehensive study of its kind and presented an extensive look at how children view television and what kind of influence television may have on youth violence, which was of great concern at the time. In Sidney Katz’s account, The [study] takes a dark view of the souped-​up life portrayed on the TV screen, constantly bombarding children with high adventure, violence and sexual stimulation. Thus “children viewing TV are in a peculiar position. Experience is exhausted in advance. There is little they have not seen or done or lived through, and yet this is second-​hand experience. When the experience itself comes it is watered down, for it has already been half-​lived but never truly felt.” (n. pg.) The Schramm study concluded that television, as one reviewer puts it, “dominates the leisure time activities of its audiences. It cuts into movie attendance, radio listening, and reading. It reduces time for play” (Janowitz 1066). But Schramm and his colleagues stopped short of confirming a causal link between television viewing and violence in children. They found that television may contribute to the rise in youth violence because it reinforces notions of fantasy as reality and raises aggressive tendencies, though they acknowledge that the causes of youth violence are much more varied and complex than just television viewing (Schramm 143–​44). There were many other such studies throughout the decades of the 1960s and ’70s, reaching varied conclusions. Most early studies of television effects subscribed to the “injection” theory, the belief that television images “inject” messages or ideologies into a passive viewer who cannot do much about it. The injection theory evolved into fears of “subliminal messages” –​the belief that television images secretly broadcast ideological, sexual, or consumer ideas into the minds of viewers (see, e.g., Gratz; Vokey and Read). At the same time, television itself was rapidly evolving, with viewership rising significantly and television production enjoying numerous technological advances. In 1950 nine percent of American households had a television set, but twenty years later, in 1971, that number rose to 98.5 percent (“Number”; see also Krantz-​Kent). More recently, according to a 2021 study by the Leichtman Research Group, at least “82% of U.S. TV households have at least one Internet-​ connected TV device” –​a cellphone, computer, tablet, smart watch, or television set. And children’s programming has also evolved, moving from simple lessons or morality tales with live action or puppets to animated and computer-​generated adventures that often double as advertising vehicles for a seemingly infinite number of ancillary products. Concern about television’s influence on children spawned more regulation of children’s programming, resulting in the formation in 1968 of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), a reform group that sought to make media more child-​friendly 205

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by, in Heather Hendershot’s words, “asking the federal government to hold broadcasters accountable to the nation’s child TV viewers” (64). ACT brought “awareness of how the FCC and the TV industry operate,” though they achieved minimal reforms, and by the 1980s they were ineffectual, essentially dismissed (Hendershot 94). Parents continued to complain about the violent content on television, however. In the mid-​1990s the V-​chip emerged, a device developed in Canada that allows parents to control what their children can and cannot watch. The V-​chip was included in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, requiring all televisions sold in the United States after 2000 to have a V-​ chip (Hendershot 218). For Barrie Gunter child viewership is a more complex issue than previously believed. In contrast to early studies such as Schramm’s, Gunter argues that children are not passive viewers at all, that they are often involved in choosing what they watch, and that they are adept at disregarding images that conflict with their cultural formation. In Children and Television, Gunter and Jill McAleer suggest that television is not injecting ideas into children’s minds, but that children are active viewers who negotiate with the images they see. Gunter and McAleer’s work takes the stance that viewing is a complex activity, even for children, and that television images are revised, rejected, or accepted based on a child viewer’s culture, gender, and family, as well as a whole host of other influences. This rejection of the injection theory has led to new ways of constructing the child viewer. In Children and Television Consumption in the Digital Era (2021), Gunter explores the evolution of television consumption today, particularly the ways children interact with and even create television content via digital media outlets such as TikTok and YouTube. These changes in child viewership and agency made possible by the digital age have marked a shift away from earlier parental concerns as well as how scholars approach researching television programming aimed at children. Parents today are less concerned with violent content in television (that concern has shifted to video games) and are themselves active participants in the global media exchange. Children’s access to the Internet via tablets and cellphones have allowed them a great deal of autonomy in what they choose to watch as well as what they contribute to the media landscape.

Television, Global Flow, and Global Sesame It has historically been the case that much of television media tended to flow in one direction: from the West to the rest of the world. The same is true for much of children’s television programming. While most other countries and cultures do have some local children’s programming, the bulk of television for children has been produced by the United States and disseminated throughout the world. International media research often focuses on the idea that, as Marwan M. Kraidy puts it, “audiences across the globe are heavily affected by media messages emanating from the Western industrialized countries” (359). Dafna Lemish observes that in the view of some commentators, Western television presents “ethnocentric, patronizing cultural imperialism that invades local cultures and lifestyles” in ways that can fundamentally change childhood national identity construction (214), yet she points out that despite these concerns, the global flow of children’s television in some ways creates a “common world populated by people and relationships that are disconnected from defined context and cultural borders” (215), particularly in the case of animation, which is easily dubbed into local language. According to Sara Pereira and Manuel Pinto, “it is important to note how [dubbing] can contribute to improving the quality of a particular program and [help] it to adapt and adjust international products to the culture and identity of a specific country” (109). To quote Lemish again, television can in many ways “connect children to an illusion of a social universal ‘center’ [...] to which all belong” despite their geographical positions, an illusion that works to foster cultural understanding and acceptance (215). Such feelings of connectedness beyond borders have also led researchers to envision a different model for understanding the television audience. 206

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The work of Arjun Appadurai became instrumental in introducing new ways to imagine global television audiences, as well as challenging injection theories. In his groundbreaking article “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” Appadurai introduced the concept of “global flows” in which media are “constituted by their continuously fluid and uncertain interplay” between cultures (306). In other words, media flow tends to be “indigenized” (295) by global audiences that interpret images within their own cultural context, despite that media being produced elsewhere: “The very relationship of reading to hearing and seeing may vary in important ways that determine the morphology of these different ‘ideoscapes’ as they shape themselves in different national and transnational contexts” (Appadurai 300). Television flows through multiple identities and is then “absorbed” into the local “cultural economies” (307). This type of absorption into cultural context is also relevant to how child audiences view television. According to Timothy Havens, global child audiences are astute enough to “draw upon, rework, and recirculate certain definitions and not others” of the images they see (n. pg.). And while “children’s channels such as Nickelodeon, Discovery Kids, Cartoon Network, and Disney have been at the forefront of channel transnationalization,” Havens continues, how those cartoons and children’s programming are interpreted by local children varies greatly by culture. Sonia Livingstone and Kirsten Drotner suggest that a child’s “pleasurable engagement with imported media is often due to an intense negotiation with local contexts of experience” (215), which highlights a cultural layering of content meaning that the child audience negotiates. The Internet age has facilitated the digital flow of television programming worldwide, which simultaneously contributes to challenges of the notion of childhood broadly and raises fears of the global homogenization of childhood itself via broader access to Western media. One program designed for children and disseminated worldwide is Sesame Street.1 Sesame Street is targeted to preschool age children and was developed by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, founders of The Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), now Sesame Workshop. The show premiered on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in the United States in 1969. Sesame Street was an immediate hit with children and many parents. The show was unique in that it mixed educational content with entertainment, was devoid of product advertisement, was multicultural, and had specific goals for children’s “intellectual development” (Morrow 51). In line with counterculture norms of the times, Sesame Street was one of the first children’s programs to regularly feature characters of color; Robert Morrow reports that some reviewers hoped that Sesame Street “could bring about interracial peace” (152). And though the show was not without some controversy, it has become an American cultural icon lasting over fifty years. It was also one of the first children’s television productions to be widely exported. Today, Sesame Street is a staple of children’s programming in over 150 countries with, as Daniel Hautzinger notes, “more than 30 international co-​productions.” The format of the show stays the same, but in the words of producer Gregory J. Gettas, each country’s co-​production “has [its] own scripts, casts, puppet, sets, animation segments, and live-​action films. [...] Foreign producers and researchers rely on the CTW model to help them create programming that faithfully reflects linguistic, cultural, social, or religious diversity of their native lands” (56). The first country to license and broadcast Sesame Street was Germany in 1970, followed by Canada and New Zealand. Both the Canadian CTV and New Zealand TVNZ replaced some content deemed too American with content more suited to the local cultural heritage (Gettas 57). The show has been instrumental in shaping cultural identities and providing early childhood educational (ECE) content, particularly to areas where such ECE programs are limited. Nazli Kibria and Sonali Jain have studied the cultural impact of the Bangladesh version of Sesame Street, Sisimpur, which premiered in “April 2005 on Bangladesh national television (BTV) [... and] is coproduced [...] by the local company Nayantara Communications” (61). Both parents and caregivers view the show as successful, and more importantly, they view it as “a local Bangladeshi production.” There are still subtle Western touches in the content, however; for instance, the Muppets say “thank you” to each other, while in Bangladesh “the practice of saying ‘thank you’ (dhonnobad), 207

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is for the most part reserved for formal settings and not common in daily encounters” (60–​61). Such social niceties are now changing because of Sisimpur’s influence, what Kibria and Jain refer to as the “benefits of modern social change” (71). Kibria and Jain found that while Sisimpur is technically an import, it has been accepted as fully Bangladeshi and “understood to be a source of national culture of Bangladesh coupled with an awareness of the larger world” (72). Indeed, while all co-​productions must adhere to four core licensing standards developed by the CTW,2 they are free to adjust, replace, and add content that better reflects specific cultural identities and practices. Not all core concepts of Sesame Street are so easily adopted by other countries, however. While many importers of children’s television worry about cultural homogenization and westernization, some ideological elements of the show are more difficult to incorporate. In “Can Multiculturalism Be Exported? Dilemmas of Diversity on Nigeria’s Sesame Square,” Naomi A. Moland examines the struggles Nigerian co-​producers have in keeping with Sesame Street’s focus on “teaching intergroup tolerance” in the face of Nigeria’s “ongoing ethno-​religious conflicts” (1). According to Moland, Nigerian co-​producers had to be very careful about representing various ethnic and religious groups equally and fairly on Sesame Square, which debuted on Nigerian television in 2011 (10). Sesame Square’s Nigerian producers have worked hard to incorporate various ethnic and religious groups through segments including speaking a word in multiple languages, varying clothing styles, and filming in different geographic locations (Moland 11). Moland finds that “multicultural education may operate differently in a context where each group sees itself as a marginalized minority fighting for recognition” and where many of the targeted preschool-​age viewers live in poverty (Moland 7; “Sesame Square”). Despite the unique challenges in presenting various ethnicities and religions on Sesame Square, one of the show’s co-​producers commented that even if “depictions on Sesame Square [...] seem unrealistic,” they “could show a more peaceful version of Nigeria that children could hope for” (qtd. in Moland 20). In this way, Sesame Square functions much more as a local production than as an imported Western children’s show. In terms of reach, not all global versions of Sesame Street fit easily into traditional national contexts. Conflicts in various regions of the world have resulted in a growing population of displaced families, including children, who have fled their homelands for safer places. These refugee children struggle to find normality under difficult conditions, and school is often sacrificed in the effort to survive day by day. But there is a growing movement to provide educational media for child refugees who reside in camps. For instance, in 2014, Christian broadcaster Sat-​7 created My School, with lessons in Arabic and English focused on both math and raising literacy rates for Middle Eastern children.3 Similarly, Sesame Workshop teamed up with the International Rescue Committee to provide a locally produced version of Sesame Street to help children who have been “affected by conflict and displacement” (Kohn et al. 34). Ahlan Simsim, which means “welcome sesame” in Arabic, began broadcasting February 2020 in “20 countries across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf,” featuring two best friends, Basma and Jad, as they “explore” their world (Kohn et al. 35). The first season focused on “Emotional ABCs” to help young viewers deal with the “big feelings” that can be aroused when a child is displaced or facing extreme stress (35). Dakota Saunders explains that Ahlan Simsim “introduces situation-​sensitive and culturally relevant media to encourage children’s continued education. The show will focus not only on language and math skills but also on social and emotional development, providing examples for children of problem-​solving and inclusion strategies demonstrated by Sesame Street™ Muppets in situations similar to the children’s.” Shanna Kohn, Kim Foulds, Katie Maeve Murphy, and Charlotte F. Cole find that Ahlan Simsim is “engaging, play-​based programming” that helps children deal with the daily struggle of displacement and instability. The show has spawned videos, coloring books, activity sheets, storybooks, and “other learning materials” that help “increase student engagement” (36). Sesame Street has become a model for successful media convergence in which the local and global weave together in productive and positive ways that underscore Appadurai’s notion of the indigenization of global media. 208

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Glocal Television The global flow of television for children via the Internet has broadened television scholarship about children’s programming in new and exciting ways. Today, the Web allows for more local to global flows through a wide variety of technologies, as children are able to view television from all over the world on wristwatches, cellphones, tablets, and laptop computers. These changes have fostered new questions about how cross-​cultural media flows shape local childhoods and, more importantly, how global to local television has changed the ways children learn about and adopt a cultural identity. While early scholars were concerned with the effects of violent content on children, today global scholars look at television as playing an important role for representing “social customs and traditions (family ties, respect for elders, welcoming newcomers); social values (kindness, compassion, love, integrity); national history; religious practices and principles,” intercultural relations, capitalism, and other important socio cultural contexts (Kohn et al. 35). For instance, in “Growing Up in Wartime” Hayden Bates and Rebecca Joubin show how child characters are used on Syrian state TV as “beacon[s]‌of resilience that hol[d] out the promise of putting the nation back together” (29). They have found that television shows that place children in wartime situations pay “respect” to the audience by showing the “normal fears of a child under abnormal stress,” which in turn help children relate to their own unique situations (33). The production of local children’s programming often falls victim to the ease with which American-​ and European-​produced television can be secured. In “Provision, Protection or Participation? Approaches to Regulating Children’s Television in Arab Countries,” Naomi Sakr shows that it is often a “challenge to find local scriptwriters who could be helped to write to the standards required for international distribution.” Those who finance programming instead look to Western producers who create content “with foreign allusions (to ‘Christmas, Santa Claus, Halloween, witches, pumpkins,’ and so on) that have no place in local culture” (38). As Sakr writes, on “Arab satellite channels [...] non-​Arab imports dominated the small amounts of children’s content” (31). The domination of foreign children’s television content in the Arab world “breaches ‘cultural boundaries and values’ ” and stresses “the need to provide programmes that revere a perceived ‘Arab-​Islamic’ heritage and preserve literary forms of the Arabic language” (31–​32). In a study of the evolution of shows for children on Israeli TV, Yuval Gozansky finds that Israeli “[b]‌roadcasters tried to present to children an environment designed according to national educational goals as perceived by the government and by the dominant ideologies, which were most notably collectivist and nationalist in nature” (127). Israeli producers aimed to create programming for children and youth that directly “connected to the Israeli culture and state ideology” and was filmed in locations that were easily identifiable for children. Gozansky details how these programs highlighted “Israeliness” and “addressed contemporary issues and dealt with culture distinctly associated with Israeli youth and children” (132). Such localized programming resulted in consistently high viewership that directly competed with imported Western children’s programming. So successful were the locally produced shows that Gozansky notes Disney and Nickelodeon had to “create their own Hebrew-​speaking daily drama serials” in order to gain satisfactory market share (140). That child audiences desire local television programming suggests a significant shift in the reception of global media flows and a need for more recognizable visual content for children, rather than the standard images of idealized Western childhood. Local programming does not always fare better than imported programming, however. According to Ruchi Jaggi, “India is the world’s second largest television market” and prior to the 1990s was dominated by locally produced content (“Overview” 240). Jaggi’s study on gender portrayals in children’s programming found that parents were concerned more by local programming than by imported programming: “The parent respondents overwhelmingly found cartoons on Indian children’s television [...] very loud and noisy and criticized them for using bad language. Some parents stated that the narratives were disrespectful towards elders, and especially portrayed parents in [a]‌ bad 209

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light” (“Children” 196). But since the 1990s, children’s television in India has “experienced a significant ‘Asianisation’ with imported Japanese content” in the form of anime (“Overview” 240). Unlike many other non-​Western countries, India does not have regulations that limit imported content or regulations that require a certain percentage of locally produced content, with the result that “90 to 95 per cent of animation shows Indian children watch are either American or Japanese” (“Overview” 244). Because the Japanese animated shows are dubbed into local languages and, in some cases, “position characters and specific narratives” to fit local cultural and geographic contexts, their popularity with Indian children continues to grow. And there is less concern by parents, according to Jaggi, about such programming meeting specific cultural ideologies as there is a feeling of relief from the “monotonous indigenous fare [and the] repetitive American content,” a shift that signals the “emergence of a de-​Westernised television for children and the evolution of the Asian narrative –​the notion of ‘foreign, yet not so foreign’ ” (“Overview” 251). The vast availability of children’s television programming via digital technologies and dubbing has created a “hybrid” cultural experience for child viewers and parents. These hybrid viewing experiences are among the many different ways television works to unite the local with the global, adding a richly textured visual landscape to what used to be dominated exclusively by American content.

Conclusion Television for children has come a long way since the 1950s and its image of the happy family gathered together to watch shows. Today, television for children is a billion-​dollar industry, led by top transnational corporations such as Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network. But the Internet has made television for children –​ both local and corporate produced –​ much more diverse in a variety of ways; for instance, almost every television show mentioned in this chapter is freely available on YouTube. The advent of mobile devices connected to the Internet has allowed televisual images to be accessed anytime and anywhere; children can watch Cartoon Network, say, on a cellphone during lunch or in the car. Katalin Lustyik explains that “localized versions of globally branded children’s television networks such as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney constitute one of the most standardized and uniform categories within the diverse range of transnational television” for children (175). In her examination of transnational media flows, Miyase Christensen finds that local and global television flows “both diverge and intersect” in ways that allow the child viewer to be positioned as culturally interconnective, engaging with local norms while incorporating or rejecting nonlocal norms (2402). But Elizabeth Bullen and Naarah Sawers disagree that a global-​local television synthesis necessarily delivers positive effects. Instead, they find that global media for children tends to present “old ideological discourses about national, cultural, and social differences” that are then “recirculated in the televisual mediascape.” They see the global television market for children as “reinscribed not only with floating signifiers from [European] fairy tales but also with the more problematic signifiers of Otherness” (37). So while television programming for children has moved beyond the restrictions of geography via the Internet, this movement, as Anna Potter points out, has raised important questions about the “social and cultural function of television” in the age of transnational media (217). Such concerns about the ideological and cultural influence of television move beyond earlier parental concerns about the singular issue of violent content as a cause of violence in youth. Television produced for online subscription services, such as Netflix or Amazon, has added another significant change to the production and distribution of programming for children. Potter examines this phenomenon in her study of the Australian children’s show Bluey. She finds that funding the production of quality local programming often depends on a show’s potential international appeal. She adds that the “intersections between culture and screen production in the spaces 210

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of online television providers” have reignited discussions about television flows and the potential cultural impacts on child viewers (217–​18). Moreover, Jeanette Steamers explains that as “children’s viewing shifts from scheduled linear television to internet-​distributed video-​on-​demand services[...] young people are now not only choosing, but also producing as vloggers and influencers, reaching out to peers in new ways across platforms and social media, enabling them to exert forms of agency and interaction that were not possible within the older television paradigm” (101). Children who have access to digital content are often outside of parental control, which allows them to freely choose what content they want to watch. Increasingly, having access to the Internet and digital media has become an essential part of modern childhood. As Vikki Katz notes, those children who live in areas without Internet access, or those children who live in poverty and do not have access to digital content, also experience limited access to education, and in turn limited earning potential because they may not have learned the skills for navigating in a digital landscape (379–​86). The detrimental effect of limited Internet access was borne out during the recent COVID-​19 pandemic when much face-​to-​face education moved online. Today, children can watch multiple television shows from a variety of different cultures, which allows them unprecedented agency in their viewing choices. But modern television is also most often viewed in isolation. Very few families today sit together and watch TV as was common in the 1950s; rather, families may all sit together, but often everyone is on his or her own device watching something unique to each member’s individual interests. In some ways, this individualized and more isolated viewing resembles the individualized and isolated act of reading. Yet the concerns about how much television children watch, and what type of television they watch, are still very much the focus of both parents and educators. Scholars today continue to interrogate notions of television’s influence on the child viewer. There is much potential, however, for researchers to ask new questions about children’s television in the digital age. For instance, what viewing choices do children make and why? How much television do children themselves produce for media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, and what cultural forms emerge through such child-​produced programming? And do the different viewing platforms change the ways children negotiate with the images they see? Questions such as these mark the future of children’s television scholarship. Contrary to early studies that cautioned against too much television, modern children are immersed in visual media but with more agency and interaction than ever before.

Notes 1 International versions of Sesame Street may be viewed on YouTube. They include Sesame Street Israel (www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​1Z2P​NQvB​hzw&list=​PLZy​qIiu​0Hg-​tfvD-​kAp5mj​SV1g​XPm7​9Uh), Sesame Street Bangladesh (www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​A8xA​CJl5​9Kk), Sesame Square Nigeria (www.yout​ube. com/​watch?v=​8nvB​RSWe​DSY), and Sesame Street Rohingya Muppets (www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​b6VK​ RJsp​7n0). 2 These core standards require that all foreign versions must be commercial free, meet high production standards, be produced to “reflect the values and traditions of the host country’s culture,” and be “supervised by a local committee of education experts working in conjunction with [CTW]” (Gettas 57). 3 See “My School 2” and Sfeir for more information about Sat-​7 programming. Sat-​7 episodes are also available on YouTube.

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Jaggi, Ruchi. “ ‘After all, children want mothers to cook and fathers to go to work’: Parents’ Perspectives on Gender Representation on Indian Children’s Television.” Research Journal Social Sciences, vol. 25, no. 3, 2017, pp. 187–​202. —​—​. “An Overview of Japanese Content on Children’s Television in India.” Media Asia, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 240–​54. Janowitz, Morris. “Review of Television in the Lives of Children and The Impact of Educational Television.” Science, vol. 133, no. 3458, 7 April 1961, pp. 1066–​67. Kapur, Jyotsna. Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood. Rutgers University Press, 2005. Katz, Sidney. “First Scientific Study: What Television Does to Children.” Maclean’s, 22 April 1961, https://​ archive.macle​ans.ca/​arti​cle/​1961/​4/​22/​first-​sci​enti​fic-​study-​what-​tel​evis​ion-​does-​to-​child​ren. Katz, Vikki S. “Children, Media, and Digital Inequality.” The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents, and Media, 2nd ed., edited by Dafna Lemish, Routledge, 2022, pp. 379–​86. Kibria, Nazli, and Sonali Jain. “Cultural Impacts of Sisimpur, Sesame Street, in Rural Bangladesh: Views of Family Members and Teachers.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2009, pp. 57–​73. Kohn, Shanna, Kim Foulds, Katie Maeve Murphy, and Charlotte F. Cole. “Creating a Sesame Street for the Syrian Response Region: How Media Can Help Address the Social and Emotional Needs of Children Affected by Conflict.” Young Children, vol. 75, no. 1, 2020, pp. 32–​41. Kraidy, Marwan M. “Globalization of Culture Through the Media.” Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. Vol. 2, Macmillan, 2002, pp. 359–​63. 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Television Livingstone, Sonia, and Kirsten Drotner. “Children’s Media Cultures in Comparative Perspective.” Handbook of Media Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale, Blackwell, 2011, pp. 405–​24. Lustyik, Katalin. “Transnational Children’s Television: The Case of Nickelodeon in the South Pacific.” The International Communication Gazette, vol. 72, no. 2, 2010, pp. 171–​90. Martins, Nicole, and Kristen Harrison. “Racial and Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Children’s Television Use and Self-​Esteem: A Longitudinal Panel Study.” Communication Research, vol. 39, no. 3, 2012, pp. 338–​57. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Duke University Press, 2001. Moland, Naomi A. “Can Multiculturalism Be Exported? Dilemmas of Diversity on Nigeria’s Sesame Square.” Comparative Education Review, vol. 59, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–​23. Morrow, Robert W. Sesame Street and the Reform of Children’s Television. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Murray, John P. “The Developing Child in a Multimedia Society.” Children and Television: Images in a Changing Sociocultural World, edited by Gordon L. Berry and Joy Keiko Asamen, Sage, 1993, pp. 9–​22. “My School 2.” Sat 7 Plus, https://​sat7p​lus.org/​en/​title/​201. “Number of TV Households in America 1950–​1978.” The American Century, www.amer​ican​cent​ury.omeka.wlu. edu/​items/​show/​136#, accessed 6 July 2022. Pereira, Sara, and Manuel Pinto. “Making Sense of TV for Children: The Case of Portugal.” Journal of Media Literacy Education, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 101–​12. Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. Vintage Press, 1982. Potter, Anna. “Globalising the Local in Children’s Television for the Post-​Network Era: How Disney+​and BBC Studios Helped Bluey the Australian Cattle Dog Jump the National Fence.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2021, pp. 216–​32. Sakr, Naomi. “Provision, Protection or Participation? Approaches to Regulating Children’s Television in Arab Countries.” Media International Australia, vol. 163, no. 1, 2017, pp. 31–​41. Saunders, Dakota. “Innovation in Refugee Children’s Education.” National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), 22 January 2019, www.naeyc.org/​resour​ces/​blog/​inn​ovat​ion-​refu​gee-​child​ren-​ educat​ion, accessed 28 July 2022. Schramm, Wilbur, Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker. Television in the Lives of Our Children: The Effects of Television on American Children. Stanford University Press, 1961. Seiter, Ellen. Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture. Rutgers University Press, 1995. “Sesame Square: Nigeria.” Sesame Workshop, www.commi​nit.com/​sesa​me_​w​orks​hop/​cont​ent/​ses​ame-​squ​ are-​nige​ria#:~:text=​Launc​hed%20in%20May%202​011%2C%20the,resp​ect%20for%20diff​eren​ces%20 and%20di​vers​ity, accessed 28 July 2022. Sfeir, Juliana. “ ‘My School’ and ‘Puzzle’: TV Programmes Addressing Marginalized Children in the Middle East.” Cameco, www.cam​eco.org/​en/​commun​icat​ing-​from-​the-​marg​ins/​child​ren-​tv-​mid​dle-​east/.​ Shine, Jacqui. “Together with the Kuklapolitans.” Slate, 16 February 2015, https://​slate.com/​cult​ure/​2015/​02/​ kukla-​fran-​and-​ollie-​the-​gen​tle-​pupp​ets-​that-​bewitc​hed-​amer​ica-​in-​the-​1950s.html. Signorielli, Nancy. “Children, Television, and Gender Roles: Messages and Impact.” Journal of Adolescent Health Care, vol. 11, no. 1, 1990, pp. 50–​58. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sprafkin, Joyce N., and Robert M. Liebert. “Sex-​Typing and Children’s Television Preferences.” Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, edited by Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Walker Benét, Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 228–​39. Steamers, Jeanette. “Children’s Television Culture.” The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents, and Media, 2nd ed., edited by Dafna Lemish, Routledge, 2022, pp. 101–​109. Sternglanz, Sarah H., and Lisa A. Serbin. “Sex Role Stereotyping in Children’s Television Programs.” Developmental Psychology, vol. 10, no. 5, 1974, pp. 710–​15. Vokey, John R., and John Don Read. “Subliminal Messages: Between the Devil and the Media.” American Psychologist, vol. 40, no. 11, December 1985, pp. 1231–​39.

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18 PLAYFUL POSSIBILITIES The Rights of the Reader in a Digital Age Angela Colvert

Introduction: Exploring Playful Reading Practices Increasingly, academics now advocate strongly for the value and importance of child-​led “reading for pleasure,” also referred to as “recreational reading” or “free voluntary reading.” Characterized by Natalia Kucirkova and Teresa Cremin as a “choice-​led affectively engaging, cognitive and social process” (4), it has the potential to enrich children’s lives by developing their understanding of the world. International studies suggest that such reading practices improve children’s achievements in academic settings, particularly –​as John Jerrim and Gemma Moss point out –​when children engage with fiction. The Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) reports that “[a]‌crucial difference between students who perform well in the PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] reading assessment and those who perform poorly lies in whether they read daily for enjoyment, rather than in how much time they spend reading” (2). However, research in this area has largely focused on children’s engagement with print-​based texts, and although some notable work has been undertaken with a focus on e-​books and apps (see, e.g., Kucirkova and Cremin), further investigations are needed to understand, and conceptualize, children’s volitional and interest-​driven reading practices within complex, networked, and connected environments (Burnett and Merchant, “Encounters”). In this chapter I adopt the term “playful reading” to explore the diverse reading practices that emerge as children shape dynamic storyworlds across physical and virtual spaces during self-​led play. This embodied and immersive process is often driven by children’s collective and individual interests, needs, and enjoyment. However, more-​than-​human agentic influences –​ spaces, materials, and technologies –​also shape experiences and practices. Daniel Pennac has proposed ten “rights of the reader” to heighten awareness of children’s need for autonomy when deciding what, when, where, and how to read. His “Bill of Rights” includes the rights to not read, to skip pages, to not finish, to reread, to read anything, to escapism, to read anywhere, to browse, to read out loud, to not be required to defend your tastes (Life 170–​71; see also Pennac, Rights 149–​74). However, in a digital environment broader rights may be in need of protection, requiring us to be vigilant about factors external to the reader. For example, “choice-​led” reading is linked to children’s desires and motivations, but in digital contexts algorithms can shape and direct what digital content is presented. This influence can be beneficial, providing valuable opportunities to personalize content, but it can also have an adverse impact on children’s agency and volition. In relation to the social process of building what Teresa Cremin, Marilyn Mottram, Fiona M. Collins, Sacha Powell, and Kimberly Safford call “communities of readers,” technology can support participatory 214

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-21

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practices as children collaborate and share interests in online affinity spaces, but the latter can also exclude children if environments are not accessible or welcoming (see Jenkins, Culture; Gee 81). It is the responsibility of educators, academics, designers, and policymakers to take collective action to understand and improve children’s agentic reading experiences and protect the right to “rest, leisure, play, recreational activities, [and] cultural life and the arts” identified in Article 31 of the United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (“General Comment No. 17”).1 This chapter is organized in three sections. The first presents a conceptual framework and tool for examining the myriad ways that people, products, and places intersect to shape reading practices in “playscapes” (Abrams, Roswell, and Merchant 9). In the second section, I examine three instances of playful reading taken from diverse ethnographic studies that have investigated children’s engagement with, and co-​construction of, storyworlds across and within physical and digital spaces. These examples span the age range from three to thirteen, raising specific issues in relation to volitional play with connected toys and apps, affective engagement with virtual worlds, and participatory social practices in online fansites. In discussing the methodologies and findings of each research project, I explore issues pertinent to immersive and embodied experiences and the complex and transitory storyworlds that emerge moment to moment. I also demonstrate the ways in which such playful practices require what Kenneth Pettersen, Hans Christian Arnseth, and Kenneth Silseth call “a radical openness to more-​than-​human forces of the world” (7). The third and final section in this chapter revisits and reframes the “rights of the reader” for the twenty-​first century and outlines the roles and responsibilities of educators, designers, researchers, and policymakers in upholding and respecting them.

Understanding Playscapes: Looking Through the Kaleidoscope So, what needs to be in focus as we try to conceptualize, and support, playful reading in a digital world? Social-​cultural approaches to understanding reading practices have tended to center on children’s experiences, with resources and settings considered as contextual factors. However, literacies research has increasingly experienced a shift towards posthumanist and sociomaterialist discourses that decenter the significance of human agents and highlight the impact that technology and materials have on children’s interactions (Marsh, “Internet”). Such approaches emphasize the interactions between human and nonhuman factors and what Karen Barad calls the “ontological entanglements” between the two (332). Playful reading practices are shaped by and within playscapes, which change constantly. Sandra Schamroth Abrams, Jennifer Roswell, and Guy Merchant suggest that playscapes are labile as much as they are situated, as they morph through multiple social, material, and semiotic entanglements. Because playscapes are enacted through improvisations and affect, there is a multiplicity of practices, interpretations, and engagements. Rather than emphasizing space or device, as the traditional definitions of virtual worlds and videogames respectively do, playscapes center on individual and collaborative creativity and practice, as well as human and nonhuman interaction. (12) Understanding and researching playful reading poses significant challenges. Faced with the complexity of investigating human experience, John Law asks: “If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all, then [...] how might we catch some of the realities we are currently missing?” (2). In this chapter I present a three-​part analytical and conceptual framework, a “Kaleidoscope of Playful Possibilities” that I developed for the Digital Futures Commission (DFC) in the United Kingdom (Colvert 15) and that is represented visually in Figure 18.1.2 215

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Figure 18.1 The kaleidoscope of playful possibilities, reprinted from Angela Colvert, The Kaleidoscope of Play in a Digital World: A Literature Review (2021), Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights Foundation.

Its contribution lies in the way it foregrounds the layers of complexity inherent in the digital environment, and it can help tune us into the factors that inflect opportunities for playful reading in the twenty-​first century. Many researchers have used the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to express the nature of children’s play in relation to its “vitality” (Opie ix) and “variety and dynamism” (Potter and Cowan 249). In discussions of play in a digital world, it has also been used to highlight the need to adopt multiple perspectives (Chaudron et al. 7). Applying the metaphor to this new model, I suggest that each side of the triangular framework can be seen to function like the mirrors inside a kaleidoscope, “reflecting and refracting the perspectives and practices of digital play while, in the centre, the possibilities for play shift and slide” (Colvert 16). A focus on people involves attending to the interpersonal and social factors that shape the possibilities for playful reading. When viewed at a micro level, practices are shaped by individuals’ personal interests and desires, their intersecting vectors of identities (including but not limited to gender, ethnicity, and class), and socio economic factors, influencing the types of texts and activities they choose to engage with or have access to. At the meso level, relationships and interactions with family, friends, and educators or social media influencers all shape possibilities. For example, children may participate in social networks to build relationships (Boyd), or engage in online affinity spaces (Gee 83ff) to explore and develop shared interests. All these interpersonal factors are important when developing “communities of engaged readers” (Cremin et al.). However, opportunities to engage in such participatory, collaborative, and distributed literacy practices (Lankshear and Knobel) are not made accessible to all. We therefore need to be mindful of the potential for what Henry Jenkins terms a “participation gap” (Challenges 15) and be critical of speculative and hyperbolic discourses not rooted in empirical evidence (Selwyn). Discriminatory practices are harmful to young people, 216

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and as Katie Salen-​Tekinbas observes, there is a need for initiatives that foster pro-​social interactions in digital environments (Salen-​Tekinbas). At the macro level, broader social and cultural factors, including governmental and institutional policies and practices as well as commercial concerns and market forces, all shape playful reading in a digital world. A focus on places involves considering spatial as well as contextual factors associated with locations. Playful reading takes place within physical as well as virtual settings, and digital technology connects these spaces, creating both local and global digital playgrounds. Samuel Kingsley has argued that we need to reconceptualize “virtual geographies” in order to attend to the “material conditions of contemporary digitally inflected spatial formations” (365). A micro perspective focuses on the immediate vicinity such as the layout of space and the accessibility of materials. For example, a well-​stocked and comfortable library may provide access to a range of physical books, but digital texts may be less readily accessible. A meso perspective brings local environments and contextual factors into view. For example, a home or school setting may provide different opportunities to engage in playful reading. Finally, a macro perspective involves developing an understanding of the ways global contexts shape children’s digital experiences with such reading. This task requires the consideration of social and cultural factors beyond those related to economic and commercial structures. A focus on products includes attention to materiality, networks, and connectivity. Children’s playful reading is shaped by the material-​functional affordances of the world around them, and therefore the materiality of literacy practices needs to be understood in relation to the ways opportunities for play are taken up (Burnett and Merchant, Digital). At a micro level, the artifacts (texts) that children engage with present opportunities for, or can hinder, playful reading practices and position and frame children’s engagements. The materiality of these texts makes a difference to the types of interactions, as do the semiotic and multimodal representations that they offer (via images, sounds, movements, and so on). At a meso level, texts are distributed and networked: transmedia, networked systems enable children to connect with others and offer multiple entry points or portals to engage with imagined worlds. At the broad macro level, technological, political, and commercial rule structures shape access to products. For example, playful reading can be influenced by companies’ algorithms and data collection policies.3 The digital environment can expand or limit opportunities for playful reading according to its configurations. Although the kaleidoscope framework could be viewed as ecological in design, it does not aim to impose a fixed structure that can be navigated. Cathy Burnett and Merchant suggest that we need an approach to understanding literacy practices that “celebrates complexity, embraces ambiguity, and, in doing so, challenges orderly perspectives” (“Boxes” 262). This kaleidoscope model is aligned with this requirement. Researchers in the social sciences have drawn on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1987 use of the term “assemblage” to convey the need to accommodate such instability. Victoria Carrington explains: While an ecological framing looks to find a contributory role for all components, an assemblage has room for tension, mismatch and ongoing reconfiguration. There is not a sense of creating and then maintaining a balanced symbiosis of parts. As a result of this heterogeneity and independence, assemblages dismantle and reassemble in different combinations as context and requirements shift. (209) In the center of the kaleidoscope model are the “playful possibilities,” which differ moment to moment as people, products, and places intersect with one another: “Viewing free play through the kaleidoscope framework, many patterns emerge, with different combinations and permutations of play. The components of the kaleidoscope are not fixed but shift and overlap, and can therefore be seen to align with the multi-​layered and changing nature of play” (Colvert 21). In the next section, 217

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I use this model to re-​examine the core qualities of child-​led playful reading in relation to volition and intra-​action, affective engagements, and participatory social processes in three empirical studies.

Shaping Storyworlds: Immersion and Embodiment Children’s engagements with fictional narratives require reconceptualizing and reframing if we are to consider the immersive and embodied ways that children undertake playful reading practices. Marie-​ Laure Ryan and Jan-​Noël Thon suggest that “storyworlds hold a greater fascination for the imagination than the plots that take place in them, because plots are self-​enclosed, linear arrangements of events that come to an end while storyworlds can always sprout branches to their core plots that further immerse people, thereby providing new pleasures” (19). Elsewhere, Ryan adds that these storyworlds are not dependent on particular modes of communication, remaining “inscribed in our mind long after the signifiers have vanished from memory,” and can therefore proliferate in a range of ways (“Texts” 11). As imaginative discursive constructions, storyworlds might be considered cognitive constructs (Ryan, Anatomy), but if spaces and materials are co-​constructing these storyworlds then these elements need to be considered too. Barad suggests that there is an “intra-​action” between matter, both human and nonhuman: The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (152) Similarly, Nigel Calder and Kathrin Otrel-​Cass find that “the digital medium and the user are mutually influential, and influenced through the interaction with each other. The participants’ worldviews might therefore be considered part of the social fabric of this coalition of material and social entities” (445).

Playing PAW Patrol: Volition and Intra-​Action One of the defining characteristics of reading for pleasure is that it is freely chosen and self-​led. However, as children’s playful reading practices are affected by the materiality of digital texts, nonhuman, agentic factors such as technology, materials, and spaces also influence and shape the worldbuilding that takes place. Drawing on posthumanist philosophies and sociomaterialist approaches, Jackie Marsh analyzes the reading engagement of one three-​year-​old child, Amy, as she plays with an app based on the Canadian animated television series PAW Patrol (2013–​) on her living-​room floor. In doing so, Marsh examines the intra-​actions that occur during a moment of play and explores how “the actions of the inorganically organized objects and the modes embedded within them were orchestrated with Amy’s embodied moves in complex ways” (“Internet” 27). One episode Marsh describes centers on a moment in which Amy moves away from playing with the app to reach for her PAW Patrol toy figures: Amy is prompted by the app to engage in the game, but she chooses to develop a parallel (and at times interlocking) narrative by playing with the PAW Patrol toys. [...] Throughout this time, the music continues to play on the app. Occasionally, the narrator says “To jump, just tap the screen.” She ignores the tablet for much of the time, but occasionally looks at the tablet as the narrator repeats the command, and at one point, she dances around it as she reaches for Ryder, another PAW Patrol toy. Eventually, the screen of the app goes blank, and Amy drives 218

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the truck containing the characters to the tablet. She slides the On switch to reactivate the app, then returns to her imaginative play with the figures, the trucks, and the Paw Patrol HQ as the app plays music. (“Internet” 25) At a micro level, Amy engages with the tablet and toys as artifacts that can support her imaginative engagement with the storyworlds of PAW Patrol. She is led by, and follows, her interests during this episode of play, and Marsh suggests that in this moment “the plastic PAW Patrol toys carried more potency for Amy than the pixel PAW Patrol characters on the screen” (“Internet” 25). The device, a tablet, is light and small and can be easily moved around the space. It is placed on the floor close to Amy, enabling her to move around it as she plays. The multimodal representations of PAW Patrol on the app provide visual and auditory stimuli and prompt instructions such as “tap the screen,” and the material affordances of the toys mean they can be grasped and manipulated and moved about the room in a toy truck. When viewed from a meso perspective, the storyworlds being woven together in this moment are distributed across media –​ including apps and toys. From a macro perspective, Marsh highlights the connections between “Amy as a consumer in a local context and PAW Patrol as a globalized consumptive space” (“Internet” 23). Although this dimension is less visible than the observable play, the app is also collating and responding to data about Amy’s engagement. In this episode, agency can be seen “as belonging neither to the tablet computer nor the child but as performed in the relationship between the two” (Pettersen, Arnseth, and Silseth 5). Spaces and materials available to Amy make some actions possible and others not. Describing Marsh’s study, Pettersen, Arnseth, and Silseth find that it suggests that in order to understand the nature of volition in these moments, we need to “unsettle binary notions of the active child and the passive plaything, thus allowing for a more sociomaterial and performative stance on agency –​i.e., the relationship between the girl and the toy, rather than either one alone, makes things happen” (5). Although the sounds and images from the app prompt Amy to take action, she resists these suggestions and “chooses not to follow the narrator’s instructions, but instead creates a parallel storyworld that occasionally interacts with the app” (Marsh, “Internet” 25). Her agency is expressed and exerted in an embodied response –​ reaching for her toys to extend the storyworld. Rather than obeying the app’s instructions, she instead appropriates and integrates music from the app to enhance her play. This episode was part of a larger British study, “Exploring Play and Creativity in Young Children’s Use of Apps,” that Marsh conducted with Lydia Plowman and Dylan Yamada-​Rice (2015). Methods included a large-​scale, nationally representative survey of 2000 parents of children aged zero to five who had access to tablets in the home, and ethnographic case studies of six children. The innovative use of Go-​Pro cameras (which are small and are worn around the child’s head) afforded a “first person” view of play. This “embodied perspective” captured the direction of the gaze and the children’s emotional engagement: the cameras “caught their squeals of delight as they played with various apps, and conveyed their sense of excitement as they rushed to the next stage of the gameplay” (Marsh, “Play” 166). But this data collection method had some limitations, in that the cameras were not always able to capture events on the screen, and there were other factors not “in view.”

Building Banterbury: Affective Engagements The affective quality of playful reading, related to the feelings it evokes, is likewise only partially captured in the phrase “reading for pleasure.” It is perhaps more helpful to adopt the term “emotionally resonant.” Exploring this term in relation to the quality of free play, Kate Cowan explains that it is “often associated with pleasure and joy. However, it can feature a wide range of emotions and can deal with serious themes. It can be emotionally ‘affective’ or satisfying to children in multiple ways, resonating with their inner lives and helping them to make sense of the world” (32). Chris 219

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Bailey investigates the lived experiences of a group of ten-​and eleven-​year-​old children as they built a community (offline and online) with the sandbox computer game Minecraft. The storyworld they co-​created is called “Banterbury,” and the following episode of play took place during the first three weeks of a Minecraft after-​school club: One child had built “The Sheep Hotel” as part of a large collaboratively constructed zoo. This towering structure more closely resembled a tree than a hotel, with a network of branches, each ending with a fenced platform holding a single green sheep. When other children noticed this construction, there were light-​hearted conversations around whether it was cruel to keep sheep trapped in such conditions. [...] The sheep song began with one boy singing “Free the sheep” to the chorus melody of “Do they know it’s Christmas?” in place of the words “Feed the world.” His initial improvisation was quickly taken up, without discussion, by another boy, seated next to him. The song evolved, with new words being added and removed as their play progressed. The song’s development was punctuated by conversations between the children. (“Sheep” 67–​68, emphasis in original) At a micro level, the immediate vicinity of the children in the after-​school club is significant in how it shapes the children’s engagement across virtual and physical domains. The children are physically present in the room in which the club meets, and their movement around the space is constrained by the layout of tables and chairs and the placement of the screens and keyboards they use to manipulate the online representations of Banterbury. In his analysis Bailey draws our attention to how the children’s physical proximity gives rise to “impromptu singing” and a “complex [...] ‘layered presence’ ” that they experience across spaces (“Sheep” 62, 63). Within the virtual world they shape and design their own environment –​building new structures and spaces for play. At a meso level, the local community spaces are also significant here, and the storyworld that emerges is shaped by the children’s shared experiences of living in the same locality. Collaboration occurred in both physical and virtual spaces, but Bailey notes that “although there was an on-​screen text-​chat function, more often it was the face-​ to-​face interactions that prompted action in the game, as the children discussed their plans for their play” (“Sheep” 63). At a macro level, their engagement with Minecraft Edu meant that the game was played in a closed school-​based community rather than connecting to global communities of players, and their engagement was framed by the company’s data-​collection and privacy policies. The affective engagements on display are central to Bailey’s analysis. He notes that the “children’s play often had a mischievous and exuberant quality” (“Experience” ii) and that [t]‌hey often sang, danced, did impressions, told jokes, laughed and acted out roles. They frequently described their behaviour during the club as “banter,” a word which also partially formed the name they chose to give their virtual world: “Banterbury.” The room was rarely quiet; conversation often digressed from Minecraft, even to the extent that Minecraft itself sometimes seemed a digression. Play was messy, inconsistent, exuberant, problematic and, sometimes, mundane. (“Experience” 3) There was pleasure in the act of singing together, in part because “there was a mischievous incongruence in the appropriation of a song originally about world famine for the relatively frivolous purpose of highlighting the imaginary plight of a pixelated sheep” (“Sheep” 68). However, it was not wholly pleasurable for every member of the group, as one suggested that the song was “annoying because they were freeing my green sheep” (“Sheep” 68, emphasis in original), and another made a “frustrated request to ‘Stop it!’ [which] helps to illustrate the affective impact of the song’s influence” (“Sheep” 69). While this episode was light-​hearted, it is worth noting that in global playgrounds children may 220

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need to be supported in navigating or avoiding potentially harmful situations, linked to antisocial behavior and bullying, which product design should actively mitigate against. This episode of play was taken from Bailey’s broader doctoral study, “Investigating the Lived Experience of an After-​School Minecraft Club,” which offers an innovative methodological approach to exploring the complexity of the social world and engagements across virtual and physical spaces: “rhizomic ethnography” (“Experience” 139). This study draws from a range of data including child-​produced video, audio, screencasts, photography, fieldnotes, and virtual model-​making discussion sessions. When representing the findings and exploring the significance of these data, Bailey creates a “hybrid text” that “includes comic strips, illustration and audio, as a means of transcribing and representing the complexity that is the children’s lived experience” (“Experience” ii). The concept of “emergent playfulness” that Bailey develops through his research (“Experience” ii) requires that we be receptive to, and find ways of reflecting on, the affective, embodied elements as children shape storyworlds with virtual worlds. He highlights the “ongoing, reciprocal relationship between gameplay and performance[… and] the importance of ensuring that such details are not written out of accounts of children’s interactions around technology, if we are to understand the potential of such environments” (“Sheep” 70). Playful interactions are shaped by people, places, and semiotic modes and materials. Pettersen, Arnseth, and Silseth suggest that “sociomaterial and performative perspectives afford researchers to reposition their gaze to explore how specific taken-​for-​granted units or entities contingently emerge –​ and can thus always materialize differently” (5).

Hunting Hunger Games: Participatory Social Networks Reading for pleasure is a social process, one sustained by the development and cultivation of “reciprocal reading communities” (Cremin et al. 67). Technologies can support children to share their reading experiences, and this is particularly evident as children gather to discuss and shape fanfiction and role-​playing games. James Paul Gee’s aforementioned term “affinity spaces” is often cited in relation to the ways that online spaces can support intergenerational collaboration through shared interests and motivations. Rooted in a sociocultural approach, this concept has been used as a frame to focus on the interpersonal relationships and practices that emerge in these spaces. However, Calder and Otrel-​Cass suggest that we attend to “the ongoing ebbs and flows of engagement by various participants [...] with differing intensities of involvement and participation demonstrated by different members” (445). Extending this conceptualization further, they propose that these spaces can be viewed as a “coalition of material and social entities” and can be usefully thought of as what Bente Meyer terms a “socio-​material bricolage” (Calder and Otrel-​Cass 445). People, products, and places all “participate” in playful reading. Jen Scott Curwood’s ethnographic study of online affinity spaces focuses on children’s engagement with young adult literature. The episode of playful reading presented here spans a year and centers on the experiences of a thirteen-​year-​old Australian boy named Jack as he engages with the storyworld of the Hunger Games. His first point of contact with this storyworld was Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games (2008), which he read when he was ten; at twelve, before Collins had completed her trilogy, he became involved with the online fansite Mockingjay.net. Curwood suggests that “applying a sociocultural framework to this study sheds light on the multiple dimensions of adolescent literacy practices, social identities, and relationships within The Hunger Games affinity space” (“ ‘Games’ ” 422). However, her commentary also hints at nonhuman influences, which will be drawn out in my discussion: Jack quickly became an active participant on the discussion boards. Soon, he was asked to join the staff and serve as a global moderator. In this capacity, he created and judged the monthly fan 221

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fiction and fan art awards, and he moderated forum discussions. Jack was active on Mockingjay. net from June 2010 to January 2011; during this time, he posted over 1800 times to the discussion boards. Launched in 2011, Panem October was an alternate reality game4 and social network. [...] From the beginning, Jack was an avid participant in the game. However, he quickly realized that other players were struggling to understand the concept of an alternate reality game and how to participate in the first phase, which involved working as part of a team to scan Quick Response (QR) codes. In response, Jack founded Panemonium. After a Skype conference with the Panem October founder, Panemonium soon became the official support site for Panem October. (“ ‘Games’ ” 420) Viewing Jack’s playful reading practices at a micro level, it is clear that they are deeply connected to his personal interests and passions. Curwood notes that Jack describes himself as a “mega-​fan” of the Hunger Games trilogy (“ ‘Games’ ” 419). His engagements with online spaces, while rooted in his love of the Hunger Games storyworld, were additionally “motivated by opportunities to be a game designer, programmer, and leader” (“ ‘Games’ ” 425). At meso level, Jack is engaged in a networked storyworld in which information is distributed across multiple sites or “portals” into the world (420), including Mockingjay (a fansite), Panem October (an Alternate Reality Game/​ARG), and Panemonium (a support site for players of the ARG). At a macro level Jack became engaged in global communities of practice, and as Panem October Gamemaker, he “assisted with the creation and implementation of an alternate reality game with thousands of players around the world” (“ ‘Games’ ” 424). Jack engages with playful reading, and in doing so enters into a range of sophisticated participatory practices. He joins what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger would term a “community of practice” (1) and learns and shapes the conventions of fansites relating to the Hunger Games. “On any given day” during his time as a Gamemaker with Panem October, Curwood explains, Jack might have been managing his international staff of four, computer programming, marketing, writing, researching, and interacting with others in The Hunger Games fandom. [...] In this capacity, he had to be intimately familiar with the themes, settings, and characters from The Hunger Games trilogy. More than that, Jack had to consider how to engage fans in a compelling narrative-​based game. Rather than just participating in portals, Jack was now designing them. Instead of encountering media paratexts, he was making them. (“ ‘Games’ ” 424) It is important to note that Jack’s engagement is not broadly “typical” and that many of those engaged in the ARG would have been involved in more peripheral ways. It is also significant that in pursuing his interests, Jack was supported by his family, who helped him to finance the costs of website hosting and server space. Other children may experience barriers to participation in such spaces relating to cultural, socioeconomic factors or disabilities. Present, but less visible in Curwood’s analysis, are the immaterial nonhuman factors that guide Jack’s participation, such as algorithms linked to his Google search that enable him to “stumbl[e]‌on” (Curwood, “ ‘Games’ ” 420) the Mockingjay portal. The affordances of the technology were another important factor: Curwood notes that “portals such as these are dynamic, malleable, and at times, unstable. They can evolve at a rapid rate, which gives rise to multiple pathways for participation and content creation” (“ ‘Games’ ” 420). This transitoriness affects the ways in which children can contribute. Jayne C. Lammers, Curwood, and Alecia Marie Magnifico argue that it “is often true that neither participants in affinity space portals nor ethnographers of these spaces have much control over the broader administration, or even existence, of a particular portal and the comments and postings that appear there” (53). 222

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Jack’s story was part of a broader ethnographic study in which Curwood, Magnifico, and Lammers collected a range of data including systematic online observations and interviews with twenty focal participants, aged eleven to seventeen, from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia (Curwood et al.). Textual interactions were collected and analyzed, but the researchers recognized that it was insufficient to rely on textual analysis alone and therefore focused on engaging with informants involved in fan-​based literacy practices. The online technology enabled the researchers to engage with participants outside of their geographic location and provided a valuable record of affinity space practices: Informants talk with us about their interests, they share their motivations, and they reflect on their practices. Not only do informants allow us to follow their online trail, they may share their private messages or drafts of their fan-​based fiction, art and multimedia. They also may alert us to upcoming changes in the affinity space, such as the emergence of new portals. [...] Our relationships with key informants are critical to providing us with access to rich data and allowing us to understand how young people actively navigate and construct culture in online spaces. (Lammers et al. 53) However, these interactions presented ethical challenges: “because of the nature of online data and the potentially long-​term presence of postings made on message boards and websites [...] the original files could threaten the anonymity of our participants as long as they remain online” (53). In addition, the “instability and impermanence of web-​based environments and artefacts” and the “porous boundaries of field sites” required that the researchers “follow participants’ moving, travelling practices [...] between and among the portals” (53, 54). Because of these complexities, they suggest that “new constitutions of space, time and field made possible by the Internet call for a new mode of ethnography” (56).

Rights of the Reader: Roles and Responsibilities This chapter demonstrates that in order to understand children’s playful reading practices, we need to attend more closely to the ways resources, spaces, and children’s lived experiences converge and inflect one another. Through play, storyworlds are shaped moment by moment as people, products, and places combine in dynamic, emergent, transient, and ephemeral ways. Sonia Livingstone and Kruakae Pothong explain that “Children want and need to be active participants in the digital world[, and] the digital world can and should be designed to support children’s agency and free play” (Design 7). Ensuring that children can engage in playful reading practices, then, in ways that are beneficial rather than harmful, will require a concerted and collaborative effort from researchers, educators, designers, and policymakers to protect the rights of the reader in a digital world. At present large-​scale international studies “frame reading more as a measurable result than a lived experience and a process” (Cremin et al. 7). As a result, Kucirkova and Cremin observe, “many of the factors which interact to develop young people who self-​identify as readers remain undocumented. Furthermore, and significantly, the complex social, affective and relational nature of reading and being a reader is ignored in such work” (13). Researchers urgently need to undertake further ethnographic studies and develop new innovative methodological practices to document and understand “playful reading” –​ not in order to design tests and measure impact on academic achievement but as part of supporting children’s right to play. Burnett and Merchant explain that such reading ranges “from immersive to lightweight, sustained to ephemeral, individual to collective, serious to flippant and from momentary hilarity to deep engagement” (“Encounters” 62) and that practices are changing rapidly and continually. The empirical studies presented in this chapter highlight the need to tackle 223

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the challenges in capturing data from unstable digital environments and take into account the performative dimensions of such practices across physical and virtual spaces. Additionally, we need to continue developing novel and innovative ways to include children in documenting their lived experiences, akin to those detailed by Marsh and Bailey. The United Nations has referenced consultations on “Child Protection and Children’s Rights in the Digital World” highlighting that “[c]‌hildren of all ages reported that they experienced pleasure, interest and relaxation through engaging with a wide range of digital products and services of their choice, but that they were concerned that adults might not understand the importance of digital play and how it could be shared with friends” (UN Committee, “General Comment No. 25” 18). To address this problem, researchers need to investigate intersections involving “the asymmetrical powers of bodies for sensing, feeling and doing[, which are] hybridised in postdigital situations” (Jayemanne, Apperley, and Nansen 164), and examine these intersections at all levels: micro, meso, and macro. Although the episodes of playful reading in this chapter are all drawn from out-​of-​school activities and settings, educators can play an important role in supporting and facilitating such experiences. Doing so requires teachers to develop their understanding of digital textual practices and “acquire new orientations to time, space, performance, creativity, and design” (Curwood, “Shifts” 233). In reshaping and reinventing the reading curriculum with and for children, educators can uphold the child’s rights by ensuring that “children have the opportunity to use their free time to experiment with information and communications technologies, express themselves and participate in cultural life online” (UN Committee, “General Comment No. 25” 18). It is also important that educators focus not only on the child but also on the assemblages that shape possibilities for playful reading. Marsh cites some pertinent examples of innovative practice in this area, including that of Lenz Taguchi, who “develop[ed] an ‘intra-​active pedagogy’ that enables early years practitioners to focus on how young children intra-​ act with the material environment they inhabit and consider what the adult’s role could be in facilitating these entanglements” (Marsh, “Internet” 6). Marsh also highlights the work of Candace Kuby, Tara Gutshall Rucker, and Jessica Kirchhofer, who “examined the multimodal meaning making of young children as they draw on a range of materials and argued that expanded definitions of literacy that include a focus on intra-​actions with matter deepen educators’ understanding of the writing process” (“Internet” 6). However, more needs to be done to support educators to tune into and understand the relevance of these sociomaterial influences on children’s reading practices. Companies that create digital content for children, or software and services that children are likely to use, must also play a vital role in protecting the rights of the reader. The Digital Futures Commission in the United Kingdom brought together academics, policymakers, innovators, educators, and children to understand how to improve opportunities for free play in a digital world, and to identify the steps needed to ensure that children’s rights are embedded into the design of digital environments (Livingstone and Pothong, “Play”). Livingstone and Pothong conclude that we need to strive towards an environment that is “Playful by Design,” proposing seven recommendations: be welcoming, enhance imagination, enable open-​ended play, avoid commercial exploitation, ensure safety, allow for experimentation, and be age appropriate (Design 8). Through concerted and collaborative effort, we can all contribute to improving the playful possibilities for reading in the twenty-​first century, building frameworks and developing rights-​respecting products and approaches that help us understand, and improve, children’s lived experiences as they engage in playful reading.

Notes 1 See also the UN General Comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. 2 With thanks to the DFC for funding this work. 3 Using this model as a tool in a recent literature review (see Colvert) revealed that the macro aspects of product design are less in focus in research relating to digital play, but this area of inquiry nevertheless remains important.

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Playful Possibilities 4 Elizabeth Bonsignore, Derek Hansen, Kari Kraus, and Marc Ruppel explain that “[a]‌lternate reality games (ARGs) are a new genre of transmedia practice in which players collaboratively hunt for clues, make sense of disparate information, and solve puzzles to advance an ever-​changing narrative that is woven into the fabric of the real world” (25).

Works Cited Abrams, Sandra Schamroth, Jennifer Roswell, and Guy Merchant. “Virtual Convergence: Exploring Culture and Meaning in Playscapes.” Teachers College Record, vol. 119, 2017, pp. 1–​16. Bailey, Chris. “Free the Sheep: Improvised Song and Performance In and Around a Minecraft Community.” Literacy, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016, pp. 62–​71. —​—​—​. Investigating the Lived Experience of an After-​School Minecraft Club. Sheffield Hallam University, PhD dissertation, 2017. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Bonsignore, Elizabeth, Derek Hansen, Kari Kraus, and Marc Ruppel. “Alternate Reality Games as Platforms for Practicing 21st-​Century Literacies.” International Journal of Learning and Media, vol. 4, no. 1, 2013, pp. 25–​54. Boyd, Danah. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What.” Knowledge Tree, vol. 13, no. l, 2007, pp. 1–​7. Burnett, Cathy, and Guy Merchant. “Affective Encounters: Enchantment and the Possibility of Reading for Pleasure.” Literacy, vol. 51, no. 2, May 2018, pp. 62–​69. —​—​—​. “Boxes of Poison: Baroque Technique as Antidote to Simple Views of Literacy.” Journal of Literacy Research, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 258–​79, 2016. —​—​—​. Undoing the Digital: Sociomaterialism and Literacy Education. Routledge, 2020. Calder, Nigel, and Kathrin Otrel-​Cass. “Space Exploration: Approaches to Inhabiting Digital Spaces and Their Influence on Education.” Postdigital Science and Education, vol. 3, no. 2, 2021, pp. 444–​63. Carrington, Victoria. “An Argument for Assemblage Theory: Integrated Spaces, Mobility and Polycentricity.” Children’s Virtual Play Worlds: Culture, Learning and Participation, edited by Anne Burke and Jackie Marsh, Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 200–​16. Chaudron, Stéphane, Rosanna Di Gioia, Monica Gemo, Donell Holloway, Jackie Marsh, Giovanna Mascheroni, Peter Jochen, and Dylan Yamada-​Rice. Kaleidoscope on the Internet of Toys: Safety, Security, Privacy and Societal Insights. Publications Office of the European Union, 2017. Colvert, Angela. The Kaleidoscope of Play in a Digital World: A Literature Review. Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights Foundation, 2021, https://​digit​alfu​ture​scom​miss​ion.org.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2021/​06/​The-​ kalei​dosc​ope-​of-​play-​in-​a-​digi​tal-​world.pdf. Cowan, Kate. A Panorama of Play: A Literature Review. Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights Foundation, 2020, https://​digit​alfu​ture​scom​miss​ion.org.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2022/​02/​A-​Panor​ama-​of-​Play-​A-​Lit​erat​ ure-​Rev​iew.pdf. Cremin, Teresa, Marilyn Mottram, Fiona M. Collins, Sacha Powell, and Kimberly Safford. Building Communities of Engaged Readers: Reading for Pleasure. Routledge, 2014. Curwood, Jen Scott. “Cultural Shifts, Multimodal Representations, and Assessment Practices: A Case Study.” E-​Learning and Digital Media, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 232–​44. —​—​—​. “‘The Hunger Games’: Literature, Literacy, and Online Affinity Spaces.” Language Arts, vol. 90, no. 6, 2013, pp. 417–​27. —​—​—​, Alecia Marie Magnifico, and Jayne C. Lammers. “Writing in the Wild: Writers’ Motivation in Fan-​Based Affinity Spaces.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, vol. 56, no. 8, 2013, pp. 677–​85. Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. Routledge, 2004. Jayemanne, Darshana, Thomas Apperley, and Bjorn Nansen. “Postdigital Interfaces and the Aesthetics of Recruitment.” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, vol. 2, no. 3, 2016, pp. 145–​72. Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. The MIT Press, 2009. —​—​—​. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006. Jerrim, John, and Gemma Moss. “The Link Between Fiction and Teenagers’ Reading Skills: International Evidence from the OECD PISA Study.” British Educational Research Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 181–​200. Kingsley, Samuel. “The Matter of ‘Virtual’ Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 38, no. 3, 2014, pp. 364–​84. Kucirkova, Natalia, and Teresa Cremin. Children Reading for Pleasure in the Digital Age. Sage, 2020.

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Angela Colvert Lammers, Jayne C., Jen Scott Curwood, and Alecia Marie Magnifico. “Toward an Affinity Space Methodology: Considerations for Literacy Research.” English Teaching: Practice and Critique, vol. 11, no. 2, July 2012, pp. 44–​58. Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel. “Researching New Literacies: Web 2.0 Practices and Insider Perspectives.” E-​Learning and Digital Media, vol. 4, no. 3, 2007, pp. 224–​40. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Law, John. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge, 2004. Livingstone, Sonia, and Kruakae Pothong. Playful by Design: A Vision of Free Play in a Digital World. Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights Foundation, 2021, https://​digit​alfu​ture​scom​miss​ion.org.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​ uplo​ads/​2021/​11/​A-​Vis​ion-​of-​Free-​Play-​in-​a-​Digi​tal-​World.pdf. —​—​—​. “Imaginative Play in Digital Environments: Designing Social and Creative Opportunities for Identity Formation.” Information, Communication and Society, vol. 25, no. 4, 2022, pp. 485–​501, doi:10.1080/​ 1369118X.2022.2046128. Marsh, Jackie. “The Internet of Toys: A Posthuman and Multimodal Analysis of Connected Play.” Teachers College Record, vol. 119, no. 12, 2017, pp. 1–​32. —​—​—​. “Researching Young Children’s Play in the Post-​Digital Age: Questions of Method.” The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood, edited by Natalia Kucirkova, Jennifer Rowsell, and Garry Falloon, Routledge, 2019, pp. 157–​69. Opie, Iona. The People in the Playground. Oxford University Press, 1994. Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development. “Do Students Today Read for Pleasure?” Pisa in Focus, no. 8, September 2011, pp. 1–​4, www.oecd.org/​pisa/​pisap​rodu​cts/​pisa​info​cus/​48624​701.pdf. Pennac, Daniel. Better Than Life. Translated by David Homel, Coach House Press, 1994. —​—​—​. The Rights of the Reader. Translated by Sarah Ardizzone, Walker Books, 2006. Pettersen, Kenneth, Hans Christian Arnseth, and Kenneth Silseth. “Playing Minecraft: Young Children’s Postdigital Play.” Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 2022, pp. 1–​25, doi:10.1177/​14687984221118977. Potter, John, and Kate Cowan. “Playground as Meaning-​Making Space: Multimodal Making and Re-​Making of Meaning in the (Virtual) Playground.” Global Studies of Childhood, vol. 10, no. 3, 2020, pp. 248–​63. Ryan, Marie-​Laure. A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If. Ohio State University Press, 2022. —​—​—​. “Texts, Worlds, Stories: Narrative Worlds as Cognitive and Ontological Concept.” Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds, edited by Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä, Routledge, 2016, pp. 11–​28. —​—​—​, and Jan-​Noël Thon. “Storyworlds Across Media: Introduction.” Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-​Conscious Narratology, edited by Marie-​Laure Ryan and Jan-​Noël Thon, University of Nebraska Press, 2014, pp. 1–​21. Salen-​Tekinbas, Katie. Raising Good Gamers: Envisioning an Agenda for Diversity, Inclusion, and Fair Play. Connected Learning Alliance, 2020. Selwyn, Neil. “Challenging Educational Expectations of the Social Web: A Web 2.0 Far?” Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, vol. 10, October 2015, pp. 72–​84. UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. “General Comment No. 17 (2013) on the Right of the Child to Rest, Leisure, Play, Recreational Activities, Cultural Life and the Arts (art. 31).” United Nations Digital Library, 17 April 2013, https://​dig​ital​libr​ary.un.org/​rec​ord/​778​539. —​—​—​. “General Comment No. 25 (2021) on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment.” United Nations Digital Library, 2 March 2021, https://​dig​ital​libr​ary.un.org/​rec​ord/​3906​061.

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PART III

Identities

Children’s literature has always spoken to and about particular identities and sought to intervene in identity formation. Consider, for instance, James Janeway’s effort to inculcate Christian beliefs in A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children (1671), or Agniya Barto’s The First of May (Первое мая, 1926), one of many works designed to teach young readers about the glories of the Soviet state. Producers and critics of children’s literature have also long understood the importance of seeing figures like oneself represented on the page, an understanding reflected in titles such as the pioneering African American children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book (1920–​21) and Heather Has Two Mommies (1989), a landmark celebration of lesbian parenting written by Lesléa Newman with illustrations by Diana Souza. That said, we live in an era when identities are increasingly perceived as multiple, distinctive, and inflected by past trauma, a circumstance that has done much to shape the current landscape of children’s literature in the West. Childhood is itself an identity stage. Thus, this section starts with Vanessa Joosen’s discussion of age, which addresses such issues as the development of age studies as a research field and concepts of age norms before embarking on a case study of Malorie Blackman’s Grandma Gertie’s Haunted Handbag (1996) and its 2018 reappearance as Grandpa Bert and the Ghost Snatchers. As Joosen points out, age intersects with any number of other categories. One of them is gender, and in their chapter on this topic, Mia Österlund and Åsa Warnqvist map the intersection of gender studies with visual and word-​based texts. They argue not only that feminist and gender theory have offered productive approaches to researchers into children’s literature, but also that the converse is true as well. In their chapters on nation and citizenship, religion, and social class respectively, Sara Van den Bossche, Gabriele von Glasenapp, and Kimberley Reynolds and Jane Rosen investigate identity categories reflecting membership in particular social groups. Focusing on Western and Northern Europe as the site of the emergence of influential concepts of the meaning of nation and citizenship for the young, Van den Bossche examines types of citizenship available to children and uses them to read an exemplary text, Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything (2004). Glasenapp similarly considers the emergence and development of religious texts for children, attending particularly to the German-​language tradition and to the history of Jewish children’s literature in German-​speaking countries as a separate and contrasting thread. For their part, Reynolds and Rosen detail the evolution of British children’s texts about the working classes from the nineteenth century (when such texts

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-22

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Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu

were overwhelmingly produced by middle-​class authors) to the end of the twentieth, by which time important working-​class voices had emerged. Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera likewise contemplate a single country, the United States. Their discussion of race and ethnicity in American children’s literature embraces a range of decades and ethnic identities but pays special attention to the contemporary scene, celebrating the explosion of works by racially diverse authors addressing a rainbow of child readers. Focusing on Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, Mateusz Świetlicki looks at LBGTQ+​ discourses in and around children’s texts, detailing ways in which these discourses differ from one another and showing how they both resemble and diverge from the longer tradition of LGBTQ+​ children’s books and their reception in the United States. The section ends with Toshio Kimura and Junko Yoshida’s survey of representative children’s texts featuring characters with disabilities, which emphasizes the history of such representation in the Anglo-​American tradition but concludes by examining work by an autistic Japanese writer, Naoki Higashida, in order to “locate points of commonality” with the works discussed earlier in the chapter. Reading through this section, one may locate additional points of commonality extending from chapter to ­chapter –​not least the tension between the anxieties associated with membership in a given group and the comforts to be derived from that same membership. While it is rarely pleasant to have others define one’s identity for one, as happens to children every day, it is good to know who one is. Children’s literature helps to provide its readers that assurance.

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19 AGE Vanessa Joosen

Age is central to the concept of children’s literature, which relies on a distinction between children and adults. After all, if children were not considered different from adults in terms of their abilities and interests, there would be no need for children’s books (Nodelman 248; Benner and Ullmann 145), even if such books are also read by adults. Peter Hunt defines children’s literature as “a blanket term, covering both educational and purely entertaining material designed for children and ‘young adults’ ” (42), as opposed to literature that excludes young readers. Since most published children’s books are authored, published, and sometimes illustrated by adults, this discourse is an intergenerational dialogue in its communicative setup. In addition, age is often a central concern in children’s literature, as many narratives feature characters of different ages and revolve around intergenerational relationships and conflicts. In the study of children’s literature, the construction of childhood has been a central concern from the start. In addition, scholars have recently started paying more attention to age more broadly, including adulthood and old age, and have found inspiration for this focus in age studies. This interdisciplinary field emerged in the late twentieth century and theorizes and analyzes age’s role in social matters including law, economy, medicine, education, and culture and the arts. While age studies developed from gerontology and is still often focused on middle and old age, various scholars in this field also work on the study of the life course and involve childhood and adolescence in their exploration of age’s meanings (Green; Pickard; Hockey and James). Some age scholars find children’s books a relevant source because of the role that stories play in age socialization, while conversely, children’s literature scholars find inspiration in age scholarship to frame their analyses in broader theories and concepts (Waller and Falcus; Benner and Ullmann; Abate). In addition to age studies, theories from childhood studies also inspire and support children’s literature scholars in their work. Although childhood and age studies are considered distinct disciplines with different foci and scholarly networks, their mutual interest in age makes a dialogue between them relevant and productive. Children’s literature provides occasions where such a dialogue can be started.

Concepts of Age The Oxford English Dictionary defines age as “a period of existence” and specifies that it indicates “the length of time (sometimes given as a specified number of years) that a living thing, as a person, animal, plant, etc., has lived.” Age scholars distinguish between expressing age in numbers (numerical DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-23

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or chronological age) and using other standards to measure it: how old you feel (subjective age), the age that other people attribute to you (other-​perceived age), your life expectancy (biological age), and your health and abilities compared to others (functional age), to name the most common concepts of age (Green 29). Numerical ages are referenced in some social contexts (for instance, the legal age to buy alcohol, the age when children start school). Virginia Morrow notes that “[i]‌n many ways, numbers are the only way that governments can manage people bureaucratically, by categorizing them according to age, starting with date of birth” (151). She points out that children in the West are often asked about their numerical age and usually know it well, but that this phenomenon is bound to time and culture. The practice of celebrating birthdays only took hold in the West in the nineteenth century. In some other countries, birthdays hardly matter to this day. Morrow’s research with children in Ethiopia and India shows that in these locations, greater emphasis is put on functional age and intergenerational relationships for deciding, for example, when children go to school or what tasks they are assigned (152). When discussing age, people often refer not so much to precise years as to age ranges (teenage years, one’s late sixties) and life stages. Age critic Lorraine Green (5–​9) distinguishes between the following phases: infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and old age. The boundaries, further refinement, and characteristics of these categories are subject to cultural differences, change, and debate. Childhood and adolescence have often been approached from a biological or developmentalist viewpoint, which identifies patterns and sets norms for the physical and psychological features of young people as they grow up. Morrow ascribes a big influence to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget for the “fixation with numerical age” that “leads to very powerful normative ideas about the ‘right’ and the ‘wrong’ age to do certain things” (151–​52). In later life too, many age-​related features are ascribed to biology, a tendency that age sociologists such as Green and Susan Pickard criticize. Alternatively, a sociocultural or constructivist approach will highlight the social aspects and individual differences that determine how a certain age is lived and perceived (López-​Ropero; Green; Pickard). Drawing inspiration from queer studies, Julia Benner and Anika Ullmann stress the performative aspect of age: “chronological age must, like sex in [Judith] Butler’s theory, be understood as a discursive category,” they argue. “Chronological age makes natural phenomena readable, translates them into sequences and time periods, that can be loaded with meaning” (149, my translation).1 However, Benner and Ullmann point out that biological realities do set some limits to the analogy between gender and age: “Many biological and psychological age acts cannot be actively performed” by people of all ages (151).2 Even regardless of biological limitations, Karen Coats observes that the distinction between nature and nurture is hard to draw when it comes to age. Widely popularized developmentalist theories, such as Piaget’s and Erik Erikson’s, have influenced the way adults treat children in certain age categories and may thus fulfill their own models despite being flawed. “If we believe, as did psychologist G. Stanley Hall, that the teenage years will be full of turbulence and dangerous behaviors, we might respond preemptively with overbearing restrictions that lead to self-​fulfilling prophecies of rebellion and challenge,” Coats argues (52), in agreement with Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, who have made a similar point about childhood. Similarly, if we assume that older people can no longer voice valid opinions on complex matters, it is likely that they will be deprived of opportunities to share their views, practice their debating skills, and correct this limiting perspective. This phenomenon could be witnessed in the COVID-​19 pandemic, where older people in care homes were often the subject of debate but rarely invited to participate in discussions about their wellbeing. In reflections on age’s social construction and performance, it is important to keep in mind that age is an identity marker that intersects with other social categories, such as gender, race, sexuality, social class, and ability. These factors affect how age is given meaning and what kind of behavior is encouraged and tolerated on the part of a certain age group. For example, Robin Bernstein has shown that the concept of childhood innocence has been racialized in American history and that 230

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Black children were not granted the same protection as their white peers.3 Using early episodes from The Simpsons as case studies, Mariano Narodowski and Verónica Gottau address the impact of class on the construction of older men: whereas Grandpa Simpson is cast as a burden to the family and “dumped” in a retirement home (173), the more affluent Mr. Burns still holds authority and is sexually desirable to his assistant (174). Developmentalist thinkers such as Piaget and Erikson have been criticized for casting the process of growing up in a linear and goal-​oriented way (Smith 2). In childhood studies, Kathryn Bond Stockton introduced the concept of “growing sideways” as an alternative to this linear pattern: it acknowledges the existence of queer childhood and the idea that “the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age, bringing ‘adults’ and ‘children’ into lateral contact of surprising sorts” (11). This idea informs recent studies on adults who enjoy products typically associated with childhood, such as wearing onesies or going to summer camps (Malewski), and on children’s books that primarily address adults (Abate). Marah Gubar’s “kinship model,” which has become widely adopted in children’s literature studies, likewise stresses that childhood and adulthood are not completely opposed but have a common ground of joint experiences and emotions. In this model, growth is not a linear trajectory but “actually a messy continuum, an ongoing process that involves losses as well as gains” (294). Alternative models from age studies also cast the aging process as cyclical rather than linear, capable of “backtracking” (Henneberg, “Crones” 118) and always incomplete. Moreover, because age is also a relational concept and life stages co-​construct each other, it is important when discussing notions of childhood to understand how they relate to ideas of adulthood. On a more individual level, people’s own age may determine how they view a certain life stage. To a child, a forty-​year-​old may appear quite old, whereas that same person may be considered young by an eighty-​year-​old. In After Childhood (2020), Peter Kraftl, inspired by posthumanism and new materialism, shows that human-​centered concepts of age and generations are relative when compared to objects: “objects’ biographies may be far faster than, or slower than, human generations but nevertheless inflect critically upon them” (Chapter 2). Especially in the light of climate change, conceptions of age that go beyond the human life course are gaining critica