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 critical currency, both in terms of the generations that preceded and will come after us, and in terms of the objects and nature that are entangled with the human in the environmental crisis.

Age Norms in Children’s Literature For scholars who take a constructivist view on age, children’s literature appears a particularly relevant source to be studied, as the narratives contribute to children’s acquisition of “age norms,” standards and expectations associated with a given age or life stage that function as part of an “age ideology.” The concept of age norms was originally developed to assess children’s physical development, such as a baby’s growth and weight compared to its peers, but the term is now used more widely to express expectations about social behavior, from the idea (cited above) that teenagers are rebellious to the assumption that people in their eighties no longer work. Age norms do not have to be a bad thing. Like other social norms, they help to regulate human relationships and can serve to protect people; for this reason, some age norms are anchored in laws and policies. However, age norms may also appear random and unnecessarily limiting, for example when they set rules for clothing (lists of what women should stop wearing after a certain age)4 or reading (adults who read children’s books are immature). Age norms can be experienced as unachievable and lead to unhappiness, or they may be felt to be outdated and undesirable. To take adulthood as an example: whereas the traditional postwar benchmarks for reaching full adulthood were “family, work and independent living” (Blatterer 3.5), which people were expected to reach by their early twenties, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett found that they no longer applied in the late twentieth-​century United States; 231

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some were unattainable because of the social and economic climate (e.g., buying one’s own house in high-​priced urban markets), while others were no longer desirable (e.g., pinning oneself down to a fixed job). Age norms are thus subject to socioeconomic circumstances, change, and debate. As children are socialized, they acquire age norms, and children’s books can be part of this process. Like all forms of ideological discourse, age norms can be overtly expressed or more covertly present in a book. They can be part of an author’s conscious writing process, but they can also be part of what Peter Hollindale calls a book’s “passive ideology”: worldviews and assumptions that are so ingrained in society that people accept them as truthful and do not necessarily think about them when they reproduce them. If the age norms align with readers’ own views, they may simply absorb or glance over them while reading, but readers can also challenge what books convey about age. In an empirical study in which Leander Duthoy talked with readers of different ages about Joke van Leeuwen’s Iep! (1996), he found that one character produced considerable debate: an adult man who still lives with his parents. An eleven-​year-​old boy was puzzled by a scene where that character’s mother fills his lunchbox: “older people can make their own food right? I’d think so. I hope” (116). Although in reality, Blatterer’s benchmarks for proper adulthood no longer hold, Duthoy found that they still steered some readers’ appreciation of adult fictional characters. Moreover, gender norms may be at play here as well: an adult man living with his mother is considered odd, not just by the eleven-​year-​old whom Duthoy interviewed, but also by Guus Kuijer’s fictional character Polleke, who is surprised to find out that her teacher still lives with his mother. An adult daughter living with her father, by contrast, may be more likely to be understood as caring rather than dependent. In illustrated children’s books, age is constructed in both text and images. People rely on biological features such as skin and hair, but also on activities and clothing styles, to assign an age to humans in pictures (Rexbye and Povlsen 79–​80). This observation is endorsed by Duthoy’s research with children and adults. For example, a fourteen-​year-​old girl tried to assess the age of characters in an image from Iep! in which a mother and her son, who is taller and carrying a backpack, are hugging. The girl compared their physical traits and vigor and drew on her real-​life knowledge to establish an age range: “I guess they are about 75, 78, 79. I just look at my grandma, who has also shrunk and is that age. With the son you see he is tall and stable and he can carry a lot. So I guess he is in his thirties” (unpublished, my translation). The children also mentioned wrinkles, and the adults commented on clothes and the size of the ears. When it comes to the construction of age, illustrations can be symmetrical, complementing and enhancing the text, to use Maria Nikolajeva’s terminology (Approaches 226), but they can also provide a counterpoint or contradict the text. For example, in the brothers Grimm’s “Snow White” (1857), the protagonist is only seven years old when her stepmother’s jealousy forces her to leave the palace to avoid being killed and to seek refuge with the seven dwarfs (269). In many visuals to this scene, Snow White is depicted as an adolescent rather than a seven-​year-​old, either because the text was adapted or because the illustrator departs from the age in the text (e.g., Cramer 9). Catherine Siemann points out that the age of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who is “seven years and six months” old in Through the Looking-​Glass (“Humpty Dumpty”), has evoked debate among scholars and that “[i]‌n its most recent evolutions, the older Alice is a common characteristic” (176). By contrast, in several critics’ opinion Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations of Alice make her look considerably younger than John Tenniel’s original drawings, and this text helped market the book to a younger audience (e.g., Carey; Linning). Indeed, age norms do not just relate to books’ content but also inform how books are written, published, and promoted. Stylometric analyses on smaller (Hurkmans) and larger scales (Haverals, Geybels, and Joosen) have identified differences in writing styles in books by the same authors that were published for different ages. In some countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands, it has been common practice to put a minimum age or age range on a book. The criteria for assigning these indications are expectations about the technical reading competencies of a given age group, its 232

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interests, and its cognitive and psychological abilities to deal with complex or potentially disturbing content. Many publishers now refrain from putting an age on the cover to avoid limiting a book’s potential audience. In library catalogs, on reading promotion websites, and in reviews, however, titles are still often given an age range,5 although many professionals acknowledge the problem of using age as the only criterion to judge a book’s suitability for young readers (Simeon). The case of Harry Potter shows that these age ranges may differ in various countries (Haverals and Geybels). Research on crossover literature has laid bare several books that are classified as adult literature in one country and as children’s or adolescent literature in another (Beckett). Moreover, as Michelle Abate has shown, there is an increased market of “juvenile-​styled texts intended for an adult readership” (3). These titles adopt forms traditionally associated with children’s literature, such as coloring books, ABC books, and bedtime stories, combined with content that is primarily aimed at adults and sometimes not deemed suitable for children. For example, Adam Mansbach’s bestseller Go the F**k to Sleep (2011) parodies the bedtime story to address parental struggles. Abate discusses Barbara Park’s MA! There’s Nothing to Do Here! (2008) as an example of “fetus fiction” that addresses expectant parents. Such books get political weight in the debate about fetal personhood and the right to abortion in the United States (110–​14).

The Pleasures and Need of Defying Age Norms Age norms can act as powerful social regulators. People who deviate from age norms can face disapproval and be told to “act your age,” but they may equally be met with fascination, and they have provided interesting material for various children’s books. In Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom (1981), the narrative mentions that the growth of Will, the child protagonist, lags behind that of most children of his age. Will’s failure to meet age norms causes the adults in the book to judge his mother for maltreating the boy, and prompts them to feed and protect him (Joosen, “Age”). The deviation from age norms is used as a way to steer readers towards sympathy for Will. In Precocious Children and Childish Adults (2012), Claudia Nelson discusses various Victorian narratives about child-​women, child-​men, and old-​fashioned children that exemplify “age inversion” without magical interference, but rather as a form of precocity or arrested development (3). As Nelson notes, “the dismantling of chronological age is frequently a way of tracking power or its loss, as child-​men and child-​women escape or are expelled from their assigned social categories” (4). Precocious children, who in the nineteenth century were often called “old-​fashioned,” could produce an uncanny effect, as in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (16), or evoke resentment in other characters, as is the case for Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (33). More recently, sexual precocity compromises the ideal of childhood innocence and is still frowned upon (Gubar 105–​106), but intellectual precocity has led to fascination and attraction. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of intelligence testing in children (Beauvais, “Effect”). In the twentieth century, Clémentine Beauvais has shown, the child that was uniquely gifted for its age became the fantasy of the middle class. This ideal led not only to what she calls “intelligence-​enhancing methods,” such as exposing children to classical music (“Effect”), but also to literature that celebrated such gifted children. In Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988), for example, the eponymous heroine fulfills “the myth of child precocity, which celebrates both the early signs of adulthood in the child and the fact that these signs remain firmly contained within a childish body” (Beauvais, “Giftedness” 289). The reverse happens in Frank Cottrell-​Boyce’s Cosmic (2008), where there is a strong mismatch between the protagonist’s numerical age and his other-​perceived age: although Liam is only twelve, he is so tall and looks so masculine (facial hair included) that people who don’t know him think he is an adult. This misjudgment leads not only to comical situations, as when Liam is allowed to test-​ drive a car and passes for a substitute teacher, but also to reflections on what it means to be an adult (Joosen, Adulthood 66–​71). Some of the age norms that the other characters use in this novel are 233

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ridiculed. One man, for example, calls it “extraordinary [...] that one could reach adulthood without knowing how golf is played” (Cottrell-​Boyce 119). But Liam also questions more commonly held beliefs about age, such as the idea that adults possess more self-​restraint than children and that they are less interested in play: “Honestly, grown-​ups talk about teenagers spending too much time online and taking games too seriously. A game of golf seems to take about three years, and they talk about it like the next stroke is going to save the world” (121). Liam’s passing in the adult world gives him an ironic insider’s view that makes him question various myths about adulthood, even though the novel also features adult characters (his father in particular) who comply with the adult norm of acting responsibly and with care for his son. In fairy tales and fantasy stories, magical age shifts and reversals are a popular trope, as are characters who grow far older than is deemed possible for humans. These narrative techniques can also serve to thematize age norms. According to Sanna Lehtonen, “age-​shifting often functions as a reward or punishment motif in tales: regained youth is a reward, premature old age is a curse” (43). They thus reinforce the so-​called “decline narrative” that I will further discuss below. Some children’s books provide an alternative perspective. When Sophie, the protagonist of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), is suddenly transformed into a crone, this change is first perceived as punishment, and Sophie indeed suffers from all sorts of ailments in her aged body; for example, “Sophie discovered another disadvantage to being old: you felt queer in hot weather” (112). But as the story progresses, Sophie finds that she feels more like her true self in her old body than in her young one (Swinnen 35), and the age shift is also liberating because she is rid of controlling age norms for young women. Conversely, some children’s books point out that a magical transformation to a youthful body may hold disadvantages. In Cornelia Funke’s Herr der Diebe (2000, The Thief Lord), a magical carousel functions as an age-​shifting device. While the older adults in the book want to use it to rejuvenate themselves, an orphaned boy challenges their desire to be young. Pointing out the disempowerment and risks that he faces, he wants to ride the carousel in the other direction, to escape childhood and prematurely grow up into adult independence. When he achieves this wish, the narrative endorses his decision by calling him “the fortunate one” (Joosen, “City”). In van Leeuwen’s Maar ik ben Frederik, zei Frederik (2013, But I’m Frederik, Said Frederik), a man is suddenly transformed into a boy when he reads a newspaper article. The change is marked by an immediate rediscovery of play in daily life, as he experiences joy from letting his office chair go up and down time and again. This scene relies on the age norm that children are more playful than adults. Frederik also realizes that his adult life at the office is unbearably boring. That idea confirms the trend that Susan Neiman has identified in In Why Grow Up? (2014): “Being grown-​up is widely considered to be a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits to a life that will be less adventurous, worthwhile and significant than you supposed when you begot it” (1). But the narrative also reflects on age norms for childhood and stresses that this phase has its own limits. The child Frederik is soon deprived of his autonomy and house: “Children do not have their own house,” he is told, “their parents own that” (16).6 When Frederik is restored to his adult self at the end of the book, he retrieves his independence but is keen on keeping the connection with childhood that he briefly re-​experienced. Accordingly, he seeks the company of other adults who have kept what Hollindale calls “childness,” childlike qualities that are not restricted to childhood. What these books have in common is that they acknowledge age norms but also challenge them. As such, they fit into a larger social trend that criticizes the importance that contemporary Western society attributes to chronological age, especially for children. Joanna Haynes and Karin Murris, for example, write: “Across the entire lifespan, linearity and ageism give rise to stereotypical and prejudicial ideas about age-​related needs, interests and achievements, and lead to over-​segregated provision, and increasingly to competition for resources to be allocated to particular generational causes” (971). One space where this “over-​segregrated provision” has taken shape is children’s education, 234

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where age is still the main standard used to divide children into classes. Instead Haynes and Murris plead for an “age-​transgressive” or “post-​age” approach, for which they are inspired by philosophy sessions with children and children’s books. For example, Colin Thompson’s How to Live Forever (1995), a picturebook about immortality, gives them ways to reflect on the concept of “agelessness” and the practice of “forgetting and re-​membering age” to understand better when and how age should and should not matter (975–​76). A post-​age approach makes children’s abilities and interests more central than age and facilitates learning across age groups. In this setting adults are not just teachers but also become learners in their own right. We can witness similar efforts to efface age-​informed hierarchies in other contexts as well, as in “participatory research” (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak) that does not treat children as research objects, but involves them in designing and carrying out research related to their interests. An important reason for questioning limiting age norms is that they may lead to “ageism,” prejudice and discrimination on the basis of age. While ageism can apply to any age group, in its most common use the term refers to negative discourses about old age. Sylvia Henneberg uses “reverse ageism” for “discrimination against the young” (“Crones” 121) and points out that “positive ageism” also exists. This term refers to stereotypes that carry a positive connotation at first sight but that are limiting nevertheless, such as “the stereotyping of elderly individuals as wise mentors who have no needs of their own” (121). The ageist stereotype that has been addressed most widely in age studies is the so-​called “decline narrative” (Gullette), the idea that life goes downhill as we grow older. Henneberg has identified ageist and positive ageist discourses in fairy tales and classic children’s books and fears that these narratives will have a negative impact on children’s views of older women in particular. As she notes, ageism and sexism reinforce each other in figures such as the evil witch or the weak grandmother (“Moms”). Elizabeth Caldwell, Sarah Falcus, and Katsura Sako also locate recurrent ageist stereotypes in ten picturebooks on dementia, while they acknowledge that the full picture that these stories provide is complex: the books “employ often ageist tropes of decline,” in part through the metaphors they use, and “yet at the same time support a narrative of ongoing personhood” and empowering intergenerational relationships (125). Indeed, it would be limiting to view children’s literature only as an ageist discourse. Some books contribute to readers’ age awareness by addressing age norms and exposing ageism (Haverals and Joosen; Joosen, Adulthood 39–​74), and many titles have promoted intergenerational dialogues and solidarity (Deszcz-​Tryhubczak and Jaques). Haynes and Murris note that “attitudes to age are changing as a result of research on aging, culturally diverse counter-​narratives of older age [… and] critiques of developmentalism” (980). Various children’s books are trying to create such counternarratives, including Howl’s Moving Castle and Cosmic, which I discussed above.

The Complexities of Fighting Ageism: A Case Study Ageism and intergenerational solidarity can sometimes be intertwined in the same story, as I will illustrate with a short case study. Malorie Blackman’s Grandma Gertie’s Haunted Handbag was published in 1996 for “newly fluent readers” (endpapers) and reissued in 2018 as Grandpa Bert and the Ghost Snatchers. The first scenes follow the gaze of two children who “other” their grandmother when she comes from Barbados to Britain for a visit. The older woman is introduced as “without a doubt the weirdest person Anna and her brother Keith had ever seen” (Grandma 1). Her strangeness lies in her big glasses, a hat with a parrot on top, her mysterious eyes, and the way she pats her handbag. The grandmother is associated with what Julia Kristeva calls “the abject”–​a feature that aligns with the ageist idea that older people have less bodily control than younger adults and cannot contain their bodily fluids (Pickard 123). As a result, the grandmother is abjected herself. In the children, her lack of bodily control evokes disgust: as the grandmother describes being sick four times during her flight, Anna “shifted along the back seat to put a few more centimeters between her and 235

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her strange grandmother” (3). At least this is the case in the original story, because in the 2018 edition, the reference to the grandmother’s airsickness is deleted. This omission may testify to an increased awareness of ageism. As a comparison between the editions makes clear, age norms and ageism are communicated not only through text but also through images, and these also show a shift between 1996 and 2018. The original book, illustrated by David Price, opens with a closeup of the grandmother that highlights her wrinkles, double chin, and somewhat naïve smile. The images are expressive when it comes to the characters’ feelings: as the children are listening to the grandmother, their eyes and mouths are wide open. By contrast, Melanie Demmer’s digital illustrations to the new edition make the facial signs of old age less pronounced and depict the grandmother as more reserved when she first meets the children. Only in a later scene of particular distress is her old age more visually pronounced: not only is she depicted with big tears, the picture also highlights her sagging cheeks, her big ears, and the wrinkles on her forehead, eyelids, chin, and neck (54). In either edition, the grandmother at first confirms the stereotype of the “ineffectual crone” that Henneberg (“Moms”) has identified in children’s classics. The older woman offers useless advice when the car gets a flat tire: “Don’t worry, son. It’s only flat at the bottom” (5). The fact that she is “peering over [dad’s] shoulder” aligns with the image of the nosy older woman (Joosen, Adulthood 186–​87). For the children engaged in othering the grandmother, her old age intersects with her exoticism; she comes from Barbados, while they have grown up in Britain. This double othering becomes clear when she asks Anna and Keith whether they believe in “duppies”: “A ghost, dear. That’s what we call them in Barbados” (6). Her strangeness is attributed to her age as well as to the “foreign” traditions that she respects. As it turns out, the grandmother is carrying her late husband’s ghost in her purse and hiding from two criminals who want to steal him. When she first mentions this situation to the children, they think that she is “as nutty as a lorry-​load of peanut brittle” (8), but they get sucked into the adventure when the ghost of their grandfather appears. He immediately expresses an age norm: “I wanted to meet both of you before you got much older. Most grown-​ups and even some children can’t see us ghosts these days” (9). The passage endorses a pattern that many children’s books display: the young and older characters share imagination and a sense of adventure, while the adults are left out. As children grow up, they lose touch with the supernatural, but this connection can be regained in senescence. Anna and Keith’s parents never witness the ghost; the two adults who are chasing the grandmother do see him, but they want to steal and exploit him. As the children and their grandparents are united in escaping these criminals, a connection is established between young and old. Whereas Anna first tries to maintain distance, she now “[runs] up to grandma” to whisper into her ear (16). Moreover, various ageist prejudices are silently disproven: the grandmother is quick (12, 28), creative, and inventive, and the grandfather loves “all this excitement” (40). When the older woman jumps on a bike to chase the criminals, Keith mutters, “But Grandma, you can’t… .” (28) and is proven wrong before he can finish his sentence. The children and grandparents enter into an intergenerational partnership that helps them to outsmart the younger adult criminals. As Nikolajeva argues in Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers (2010), children’s books are marked by a carnivalesque spirit, as they temporarily reverse the power hierarchies in child-​adult relationships. In real life, these structures are informed by the empowerment of adults through what Nikolajeva calls “aetonormativity” or “adult normativity” (Power 8). Age scholars might note that this normativity excludes older adults, or as Pickard explains, some adults “are more ‘adult’ than others” (3). Perhaps as a consequence of their mutual disempowerment in real life, older characters can join child figures in the carnivalesque reversal of age-​related power structures and mutually empower each other. Grandma Gertie’s Haunted Handbag illustrates this point; as the grandparents side with the children, they leave their marginalized position and turn into

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heroes who beat the adult villains. During this adventure, the children also get a sense of what it feels like to be othered. When Anna is talking to the ghost, her father suddenly perceives her as odd because he thinks she is talking to herself. There seems a sense of vengeance in the grandmother’s remark, “First sign of madness you know” (18). But this jab does not prevent the children and their grandparents from creating an intergenerational alliance. If we consider the construction of the generation in between, a see-​saw effect can be observed: as the children and older adults’ power goes up, the generation in between is brought down, as they are depicted as particularly unsympathetic (the adult criminals) or simply left out of the game (the parents). Once again, bodily features are invoked to contribute to characterization: the male criminal “had a very hairy nose which even looked extraordinary from across the street” (Blackman, Grandma 14). This is another passage that is deleted in the new edition, replaced with a kind of facial hairiness that is perhaps easier to render in the less detailed digital images: “the man had very wild bushy eyebrows. They looked like a big bush growing on his face” (Blackman, Grandpa 28).7 As I have argued in Adulthood in Children’s Literature, expressing disgust about adult bodily hair, in particular hair growing out of noses and ears, offers a way for child characters to empower themselves: “Their own bodies may be small and perhaps even weak, but at least they are not hairy” (100). At the end of the book, after they have beaten the hairy criminal, the children and older adults return home in a final moment of double entanglement: not only has “Grandpa Bert wrapped himself around Keith’s neck like a woolly scarf” (40), but he also joins the children in expressing his appetite for a good dinner. As many adventure stories end with the children having a good meal, this is a delight that the grandfather would like to enjoy as well. It seems that his plan to acquaint himself with the children has worked and will lead to a longer lasting relationship –​unless they stop believing in ghosts when they grow into adults.

Conclusion According to Nikolajeva (“Afterword”), there is a limit to the potential for intergenerational solidarity in children’s books, since narratives rely on tensions and conflicts between characters and too much unity and understanding can kill a good story. Although not all ageism in children’s literature is observed or corrected, many children’s books begin with intergenerational conflict but end in solidarity. While being strongly governed by age, children’s literature is also a discourse where a post-​ age approach is taking hold. The popularity of Gubar’s kinship model in analyses of children’s books shows that many stories highlight not only what divides age groups, but also what unites them. This is a crucial move in a time when issues such as global warming, the COVID-​19 pandemic, inflation, and war make a strong appeal for cooperation between generations. Children’s literature has potential to contribute to this dialogue, but in order to be successful, a critical examination of the age ideology it conveys through its form and content is needed. Such an examination can advance through resisting readers, who challenge the ideologies that texts offer, as well as through scholarship that can theorize and contextualize age in these narratives. The last decade has witnessed collaborations across the fields of childhood studies, children’s literature studies, and age studies that have yielded inspiring research, but more work needs to be done. I am thinking in particular of age in works on climate change, in the history of children’s literature, and in other media for children, as well as research on the intersection of age with race and empirical research (such as Duthoy’s) to assess how readers make sense of age in literature. Ideally, this research would be itself an intergenerational endeavor, taking into account how age influences the positionality of scholars in the topics they highlight, the approaches they favor, and the observations they make. As children’s books such as Grandma Gertie’s Haunted Handbag show us, intergenerational alliances make for better adventures and more successful teams.

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Acknowledgments This chapter was written as part of the research project Constructing Age for Young Readers (CAFYR). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 804920).

Notes 1 Original text: “muss auch chronological age, wie sex bei Butler, als diskursive Größe verstanden werden. Chronological age macht natürliche Phänomene lesbar, übersetzt diese in Sequenzen und Abläufe, die mit Bedeutung aufgeladen werden können.” 2 Original text: “Viele biologische und psychologische Altershandlungen können jedoch nicht aktiv ausgeführt werden.” 3 As Kimberley Reynolds and Jane Rosen show in this volume, working-​class children also fell out of the middle-​class ideal of childhood innocence. 4 Such lists are now being parodied in fashion magazines (see Chakraborty; Bird). 5 Examples are Bookfinder by the British Booktrust (www.booktr​ust.org.uk/​books-​and-​read​ing/​boo​kfin​der/​) and its Flemish equivalent Boekenzoeker (www.boeke​nzoe​ker.be). 6 My translation. Original text: “ ‘Kinderen hebben nog geen eigen huis,’ zei de portier. ‘Dat is van hun ouders.’ ” 7 This edition also renders the criminals as white, so that their conflict is not only between age groups but also between races, with colonial implications.

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Gender studies, which emerged in the 1990s, is an interdisciplinary field of study with its roots in women’s studies and feminist methodologies of the 1960s and 1970s, devoted to analyzing gendered power structures and theorizing how gender is shaped by historical, societal, and cultural aspects. Gender studies is among the most influential fields to provide theoretical and methodological perspectives to children’s literature research. Not only does it reveal the extensive and nuanced treatment of gender-​related themes in children’s literature over time, it also renders children’s literature research an important site for the development of gender theory overall.1 Gender has become a term by which researchers can stress the (re)production of gender as socially constructed, in distinction from the biological category sex. There is no single definition of gender, as gender changes radically over time and place, but a commonality among definitions of the term is that they question assumptions about inherent differences between the sexes (see, e.g., Humm 106). Feminist and gender scholars challenge gendered power structures and problematize the gender binary, lately with the help of queer theory. For example, in her entry on gender in the revised edition of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2021), Elizabeth Marshall avoids binaries by defining gender as “an analytic concept that names and sorts a constellation of bodies” (81). Marshall stresses that gender analysis observes how fictional children are complex sites for examining which bodies have power, and she asserts: “Representations of gender in children’s literature reflect and produce a politics about bodies, power, and socialization that extends beyond its pages. Theorizing bodies as sites of cultural inscription challenges the claim that gender denotes an objective difference between male and female” (81). As John Stephens reminds us, gender is not simply “an attribute of content or reflection of a cultural formation to be identified within texts. Rather, it exists in more complex ways” (“Gender” 17). Reshaping gender stereotypes has proven tricky. There is, Stephens concludes, “a tendency for major genres in children’s literature to be endemically gendered in their character functions, events and outcomes” (17). In her overview of how gender has been used as a category in children’s literature research, Victoria Flanagan states that much remains to be done when it comes to understanding how genres are gendered, how “narrative discourse can be used to privilege particular models of gender‌ and how texts endorse or interrogate dominant cultural constructions of gender” (“Gender” 37). While the field has evolved since Flanagan wrote these words in 2010, her conclusion that much remains to be explored is still valid. In this chapter, we discuss the development of gender studies within children’s literature. We anchor the discussion in the premise that gender studies is an umbrella field from which various

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-24

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different directions derive: masculinity studies, girlhood and boyhood studies, queer studies, and intersectional approaches. Gender studies has proven continuously relevant and constantly transforming, demanding an approach in which gender is explored both in a historical context and from new theoretical perspectives that define the area today, such as posthumanism, ecofeminism, digital feminism, and material feminism. Throughout our discussion, we use examples from children’s books in relation to international research. As scholars from a Nordic context with a strong tradition of feminist literary studies within children’s literature research, we also include and introduce research by Nordic scholars, providing our field with more voices and perspectives. Our view on gender studies within children’s literature research is informed by Boel Westin’s observation that every field needs to acknowledge its roots (see “Barnlitteraturforskningens”). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analysis of power structures, Westin stresses the need to know the archaeology of one’s research field as well as of one’s own research biases. This approach is self-​reflective in relation to earlier research and to each researcher’s motives, drives, and passions. In gender studies it is called situating. In this process, Westin calls for a revisiting of earlier paradigms –​the archaeology or genealogy –​of children’s literature research. Contextualizing literature within history, criticism, and contemporary debates may result in new perspectives also when it comes to gender studies within children’s literature research. Therefore, it is key to acknowledge how developments in women’s, feminist, and, later, gender studies have been especially influential in children’s literature research. Following Westin’s imperative, we sketch a selection of influential lines of development. In this approach, we also differ from a tendency in recent Companions to consider gender a perspective that permeates all theoretical approaches within children’s literature research. Under the influence of postfeminism, the impact and development of women’s studies and feminist criticism are sometimes taken for granted or simply neglected in these overviews. For example, in The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature (2017), Maria Nikolajeva and Clémentine Beauvais state that they “have deliberately excluded a number of self-​evident topics, both in terms of theoretical approaches [...] and genres and kinds” (5). One of the approaches excluded is gender. In contrast to such approaches, we find it important to discuss gender in a separate entry focusing on the theoretical developments within our field, an approach complementing Marshall’s previously mentioned entry in Keywords for Children’s Literature, which focuses on the concept’s linguistic aspects. Such an approach of necessity includes considering, for example, queer and LGBT+​ perspectives, but in this Companion these fields of research have an entry of their own and are therefore excluded from our overview. We aim to reclaim the profound importance of gender studies. Although merely hinted at here, our view of the field is informed by how profoundly queer studies have transformed how gender is examined.

Echoes of Earlier Paradigms How we conduct gender studies within children’s literature research today is dependent on decades of developing concepts and approaches, some still in use, some challenged or changed. Both as a societal movement and as an academic field, feminism has made an immense impact on gender studies. Feminist literary criticism, also known as feminist criticism, is literary analysis that arises from feminist theory and/​or feminist politics. The reading of children’s books through a feminist lens entered children’s literature studies in the 1960s and 1970s, as the second-​wave feminist movement led to profound changes and a new gender sensitivity within academia.2 Since then, feminism has influenced both children’s literature and criticism substantially, and there is an array of parallel approaches. Today we cannot speak of one single feminism. Instead, feminism comes in plural.

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The earliest feminist critics of children’s literature were influenced by feminist scholars such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. For example, Shirley Foster and Judy Simons reread classic American and British girls’ stories in the feminist reclaiming tradition, discussing their influence and importance in providing role models for girl readers. Among other works, they highlight Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) as an iconic work on gender politics, as Jo March and her sisters confront the essentialist gender expectations of their time (85–​106). Foster and Simons acknowledge how Alcott and other writers for girls address the complexities that underpin gender structures and what it is like to become a female writer. Similarly, the early Swedish girls’ book was, as Maria Andersson has shown, a mouthpiece for the women’s suffrage movement and for an overall emancipation of girls and women. Early approaches such as Foster and Simons’s paved the way for the examining of girls’ books within gender studies, a genre that encompasses a broad age span as it depicts the protagonists’ progress from girls to young women. While early feminist literary studies were often devoted to reclaiming forgotten female authors, this has not been a central task for children’s literature scholars focused on critical approaches to gender, since children’s literature was already a haven for female authors. At a time when women had limited outlets for their writing, children’s literature was an arena where they could work and express their opinions, often of a feminist kind, opinions that have not been silenced by children’s literature criticism but recognized. Consequently, gender approaches within the field of children’s literature are more often concerned with the literary works and theoretical approaches to, for example, agency and voicing, performative strategies, power, space, adjustment, and protest. The dialogue between feminist criticism and children’s literature research is strong and overlapping. For example, in rereading fairy tales, Jack Zipes and Vanessa Joosen both draw on, among others, Gilbert and Gubar’s classic reading of “Snow White,” which introduces a new palimpsestic reading of fairy tales by uncovering female rebellion behind the story’s surface. Zipes, in his historical re-​examinations of fairy tales, also acknowledges such subversive sides of the fairy tale tradition. Joosen addresses the intertextual dialogue between classic fairy tales and postmodern retellings, using gender as one of her key perspectives. For Gilbert and Gubar, “Snow White” interrogates female agency and power. These issues were central to second-​wave feminism, which fought patriarchal structures, promoted sexual liberation, and underlined sexual violence while also advocating for welfare, childcare, and contraception to liberate both women and men from structural inequalities. Women’s liberation became a theme also in children’s literature, as in Mamman och pappan som gjorde arbetsbyte (1970, The Mom and Dad Who Switched Jobs), written by the iconic feminist poet Sonja Åkesson and illustrated by her fellow Swede Monica Schultz. In this picturebook, a mother liberates herself as a bus driver, while her husband takes care of the household. British author and illustrator Anthony Browne’s satiric picturebook Piggybook (1986) raises similar questions about gender norms through its depiction of the Piggott family, where Mrs. Piggott does all the housework on top of her own daily job. One day she decides to leave, accusing the three males of being pigs. From this point on, they are depicted visually as pigs and shown trying ineptly to fend for themselves, turning the house into “a pigsty.” When Mrs. Piggott returns after a few days, a new division of household chores is implemented. As a satire, Browne’s take on feminism can also be read in the context of an emerging backlash of the 1990s, when feminist progress was questioned and pushed back against. In contrast, in the 1980s and 1990s the third wave of feminism stressed diversity and intersectional approaches. In addition, punk-​inspired discourses arose via, for example, fanzines and the Riot grrrl movement. As a new type of girly feminism became visible, the field of girlhood studies that had appeared in the 1980s was further consolidated. When feminist studies shape-​shifted into gender studies in the 1990s, it also came to include LGBT+​, intersectional, and queer studies, as well as girlhood and boyhood studies, which since have developed into autonomous fields.

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Many groundbreaking children’s literature scholars at this time drew on feminist criticism in combination with gender studies and developed the field into a gender-​sensitive one. Lissa Paul wrote one of the influential texts, “Enigma Variations” (1987), shifting the focus from gender entrapment to transcending gender. In children’s novels this was, for example, done via crossdressing, as in British author Gene Kemp’s The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (1977), where a girl is mistaken for a boy. In Waking Sleeping Beauty (1997), Roberta Seelinger Trites discussed how feminism has shaped children’s literature via three key concepts: voice, choice, and community. In hindsight, critics of the time relied heavily on linguistic and discursive aspects, as did feminist theory of the 1990s overall.3 Finally, one of the most influential studies of the third wave in general and children’s literature criticism in particular is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Drawing on earlier arguments on gender as socially constructed, Butler stresses the notion of performativity and theorizes gender from a queer-​theoretical perspective.

Gender Studies: An Array of Parallel Approaches The move towards more fluid conceptualizations of gender, and the development of queer studies, have led to a profound questioning of methods and readings. How competing gender discourses and figurations interact is no simple matter, which can be demonstrated by the development of the concept of postfeminism.4 This term has been seen as an antifeminist tool used to undermine feminist criticism and to declare feminism dead, in children’s literature criticism for example by Paul, who concludes that “feminism as a critical movement is over” (“Feminism” 114). Paul sees feminism as linked to a historical period and places its end in the 1990s. A broader view of postfeminism is to consider it as referring to a poststate analogous to posttheory, poststructuralism, postmodernity, and postcolonialism. Regarded in this way, this concept can also be seen as an accelerator, pushing feminism as a heterogeneous field of study towards a blossoming of perspectives in the twenty-​first century. The field has shape-​shifted and developed further under the umbrella term gender studies, in no small part because of and as a reaction to postfeminist discourses. As Trites (Feminisms) and Kerry Mallan have pointed out, the progress has also come about by connections to fields such as queer studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, materialism, and disability studies. The productive approaches of material feminism –​a perspective where linguistics, discourse, and embodiment work together –​ are only starting to find their way into children’s literature research. Feminist new materialism examines material conditions and considers capitalism and gender hierarchies central to understanding gender oppression. It builds on the premise that previous feminist studies have overemphasized discursive approaches to avoid essentialist attitudes to the female body. Feminist materialism wants to remedy this problem by emphasizing matter and the lived experiences of bodies. How bodies are written into the story materially thus becomes a focal point. In South Korean picturebook artist Baek Heena’s Changsu t’ang sŏnnyŏnim (2012, The Bath Fairy) the naked bodies of an elderly woman and a child manifest such a materiality. Within children’s literature research, Macarena García-​González and Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak provide tools for looking at children’s literature through a material lens. They suggest a broader focus on nonhumanity to study how children –​and humans generally –​are constituted by nonhuman activities. They also discuss the field’s tendency to rely on developmental psychology and socialization theories rather than acknowledging the relationalities between real and fictional children and adults (47–​48). Such a view would lend itself to feminist material readings. Neither material feminism nor posthumanism has yet been explored in relation to gender in children’s literature to any large extent. These perspectives tend to concern young adult fiction, as Flanagan shows in her study, drawing on feminist theory, of how science and technology can influence the human condition (Technology). Feminism and posthumanism intersect, Flanagan argues, in that both seek to deconstruct the essential, unified humanist subject in favor of a more fluid 244

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conceptualization of subjectivity (106). Posthumanism, like feminism, seeks to destabilize binaries, and can thus be seen as a continuation of feminism (36). Surely, this perspective will emerge also in children’s literature research. A development within gender studies in the 2000s is the expansion of perspectives dealing with different kinds of oppression and marginalization. These perspectives include ecofeminism, which uses a feminist perspective to study the relationship between humans and the natural world. Ecofeminist theory draws on and examines the correlative oppression of women and nature by patriarchal society, promoting equality and respect for both. In children’s literature research, Clare Bradford, Mallan, Stephens, and Robyn McCallum have declared feminism and ecofeminism part of the “utopian transformation” that they identify in children’s literature in the twenty-​first century. Scholars of the fourth-​wave feminism of the 2010s, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, approach another kind of oppression. They stress the need to build feminist alliances over geographical, cultural, social, and other borders to fight racist and antifeminist forces linked to nationalism and the urge to divide humanity. For example, Black feminism drew attention to the blind spots of white middle-​class feminism in the 1970s, leading to a more sensitive approach. Black feminists such as bell hooks promoted intersectionality (see, e.g., Ain’t I a Woman), gradually becoming visible also in children’s literature research, as in studies by Michelle H. Martin and by Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair on the politics of afro-​textured hair in picturebooks. Fourth-​wave feminism often uses the Internet and social media as platforms for fighting marginalization, for example when it comes to people of color or transgender people, or for sharing lived experiences of traumas such as sexual abuse. This digital feminism has been criticized for fostering a call-​out culture instead of developing new ways of addressing gendered power structures. As we have shown, following Westin’s imperative to map the genealogy of the research field, the chronological waves and turns in feminist theory and politics have provided children’s literature studies with tools for gender analysis. These approaches coexist; some have developed into subfields, some concepts have been tied to certain genres and periods, some re-​enter the field. When conducting a gender analysis, an awareness of such conceptualizations is key.

Girlhood Studies Gender in children’s literature often concerns girlhood and boyhood, since most books are about characters defined or identifying as girls or boys. For this reason, girlhood studies and boyhood studies are particularly relevant to this overview. Much feminist criticism within children’s literature studies has revolved around girlhood, from early studies of girls’ books onwards. Girls, Texts, Cultures (2015), edited by Bradford and Mavis Reimer, places the girl at the core of feminist theory, in contrast to mainstream feminist theory where the girl has tended to be a blind spot, revisited as a stepping stone but not thoroughly theorized –​ hence the emergence of girlhood studies. The collection, like many other works within girlhood studies, is mainly occupied with teenage girls, rendering younger girls in picturebooks and children’s novels less analyzed. As a separate field of study theorizing girlhood, girlhood studies emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. One important catalyst for the field’s emergence was Angela McRobbie’s research on female youth culture, later collected in Feminism and Youth Culture (1991). Of particular importance was her 1975 study of subcultures among girls, conducted with Jenny Garber, where youth research was criticized for marginalizing girls in the study of subcultures. To explain why girls’ subcultures worked differently and why girls were not involved in crime to the same extent as boys, they coined the concept “bedroom culture” to emphasize how girls were socialized into dwelling in a domestic sphere, particularly their own closed bedrooms. This critical stance gave birth to a vivid interdisciplinary field where the phrase “What about the girls?” has been a guideline. Girlhood studies brings together concepts and methods from sociology, 245

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psychology, childhood/​youth research, and cultural studies.5 Early girlhood studies were mainly concerned with white, heterosexual middle-​class teens in Western society, but since then researchers within the field have come to problematize the terms “girl” and “girlhood” from an intersectional perspective and to relate the categories gender and age to ethnicity, class, body norms, and more. In addition, they study girlhood in relation to place and politics, drawing attention to less researched contexts, for example Black girls or non-​Western girls (see, e.g., Mitchell and Reid-​Walsh; Mitchell and Rentschler; Wright; Smith). As such works show, an interdisciplinary methodology for the study of girlhood has emerged, emphasizing girlhood more as being than as becoming. Girlhood is seen both as an age-​specific lived experience and as a figure of thought that transcends age. Girlhood is also stressed as relational: it is done in relation to others, often to other girls. Doing girlhood, a constructivist way of theorizing girlhood drawing on Butler, has emerged as a way of studying girlhood in different times, places, and ages (Formark et al.; Mitchell and Rentschler). Like gender studies, girlhood studies offers no unequivocal definition of what girlhood is. As Jacqueline Reid-​Walsh points out, girlhood encompasses at least three aspects: the phase of being a girl, the time during which one is a girl, and collective girlhood (88). The state, the period, and relational aspects thus constitute girlhood. What girlhood studies focus on expresses –​ with a concept inspired by Foucault’s studies of power hierarchies –​ girlhood genealogies. This concept also addresses discontinuity and the breaking of norms within girlhood. Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking (1945) is one such girlhood revolution, echoing through the decades. Lindgren’s omnipotent girl, remarkable and groundbreaking as she was, was written in relation to earlier depictions of girls in classic girls’ books, for example Canadian author L. M. Montgomery’s 1908 Anne of Green Gables (see, e.g., Warnqvist). Lindgren and other writers are innovative precisely in that they acknowledge the long line of earlier depictions of girlhood. Pippi is also a good example of how girlhood is told and retold visually. In a Nordic context, Pippi is firmly fixed in Danish illustrator Ingrid Vang Nyman’s modernistic visual narration, but in translations she has been re-​illustrated in very different ways, changing the image of strong girlhood profoundly. Photographer Sally Mann’s much debated photograph “The Three Graces” from the series Immediate Family (1984–​92) can be used to illustrate what girlhood studies can be. The photograph expresses girlhood in a conscious commentary on earlier depictions of girls in art and explores conceptualizations of girlhood. First, the photograph depicts a non-​normative activity: all three individuals are depicted standing naked on a rock urinating. Second, the photograph creates a continuum between two girls and an adult woman –​ the photographer and her two daughters –​ depicted in an arranged pose holding hands, thus constituting a human chain. The positioning connects the motif to gaze theories on objectification and sexualization drawing on Laura Mulvey’s pioneering but contested study of the male gaze, as well as the concept of the reclaiming girl gaze. No direct girl gazes or objectifying gazes occur in the photograph. On the contrary, the girls are looking at their urine, while Mann’s eyes are closed. The emphasis on the girls’ gazes on their own bodies can be seen as a reclaiming girl gaze, also emphasizing the materiality of the girl body. The way the photograph refers to girlhood is evoked when analyzed via girlhood studies. What is gained is an explanation of how girlhood is done in art, and how it alludes to lived experiences of embodied girlhood. Many works of children’s literature comment on girlhood in a related way. For example, Anna Riwkin-​ Brick and Märta de Laval’s Swedish photographic picturebook Trulsa hos mormor (1955, Trulsa at Grandmother’s Place) contains an equivalent to Mann’s photograph. In the book, naked three-​year-​ old Trulsa pees standing up while looking at her urine (Österlund). Here, too, the girl herself is the one looking at her body. Mann’s photographs echo earlier pictures of girls, including Riwkin-​Brick’s, illustrating how the gaze on the naked girl body has undergone immense changes over time and place. As Anna Sparrman has noted, an increased focus on pedophilia, for example, has caused contemporary spectators of 246

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naked children –​ irrespective of age or sex –​ to adopt a pedophilic gaze, meaning looking at a naked child in the same way that one would imagine a pedophile looking at it (“Looking-​Glass” 19; “Hångel” 140–​41). This also results in a reinterpretation of earlier photographs of girls, such as those by British author Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), who took many pictures of Alice Liddell, for whom he wrote his classic children’s book and girlhood story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). For example, in “The Beggar Maid” (1858) she poses as a beggar girl, exposing her shoulders and a nipple. In the last decades Dodgson’s photographs have raised questions about the girl’s body and the male gaze, possibly a pedophilic gaze, but “The Beggar Maid” also records the gaze of a girl who looks at the spectator with a firm fist on her hip, taking back the interpretive precedence. The photograph evokes fragility and vulnerability in its shift between innocence and eroticism. The previously presumed innocence of such photographs has been discussed by Anne Higonnet, who shows how visual representations of girls have shaped our views of girlhood. She identifies a range of tensions within girlhood and considers girlhood an intersection. Visual representations of girls and these kinds of historical shifts have strong implications for girlhood studies, which seeks to theorize how and why shifts occur by noticing parallel discourses on girlhood. Thus, both the Trulsa picturebook and the Liddell photograph help us ask questions about girlhood. How are girls’ bodies told and girls’ voices heard, both visually and verbally? What figurations of girlhood are there? How girlhood is shaped is what occupies girlhood studies. The question of who is included in girlhood based on, for example, geography, culture, ethnicity, size, and ability is a prominent track in children’s literature research. Reid-​Walsh begins her entry on girlhood in the second edition of Keynotes for Children’s Literature (2021) with an iconic quotation, worth repeating, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It illustrates how children’s literature offers recurring debates on what it means to be a girl: “Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you’re trying to invent something!” “I –​I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day. “A likely story indeed!” said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt. “I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it.” (Carroll 72–​73) The passage underlines what it is to do girlhood: to be in flux and to reshape something. This example testifies to how girlhood has long been an arena for elaboration, a state reproduced in the many reinterpretations of Carroll’s girl figure, for instance by Finland-Swedish author and artist Tove Jansson, who illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1966. Depicting girls is in fact central to Jansson’s poetics. For example, her picturebook Den farliga resan (1977, The Dangerous Journey) emphasizes the girl’s gaze. The protagonist, Susanna, finds a magic pair of glasses and suddenly sees the world in a new way, a literal expression of the feminist metaphor of seeing with a new lens. Several images of girlhood are in dialogue with each other in this picturebook. With her long blonde hair and white dress, Susanna both evokes the image of the innocent maiden and embodies girl power: her wild adventure emanates from her wishes to experience something dangerous and for the world to turn upside down. Like Alice, Susanna creates a new world. Westin stresses the sisterhood between Alice and Susanna as well as the picturebook’s metafictional nature. Westin perceives Susanna as Jansson’s alter ego and the world she creates as a journey through the pictures and stories of Jansson’s childhood, which in turn influenced her aesthetic choices when creating the Moomin valley (Tove 478). This interpretation thus emphasizes the genealogy and legacy of girl reading, another important aspect of the study of girlhood within children’s literature research. 247

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Girly practices and knowledge production or new girlhood epistemologies characterize the methodologies arising within children’s literature girlhood studies. For example, gurlesque elements queering literary femininity stand for a girly aesthetics that comes in many shapes and age spans. Combining excess and performativity with the grotesque and the burlesque, the gurlesque destabilizes categories of girlhood (Glenum and Greenberg). In this mode, the color pink is a central place for renegotiations. Finland-​Swedish Malin Kivelä’s and Linda Bondestam’s Den ofantliga Rosabel (2017, The Immense Rosabel) is an example. In this picturebook, pink practices combined with darker undertones are part of a gurlesque aesthetic carrying the story of the rebellious liberation of a pony who disrupts bodily expectations (Warnqvist and Österlund).6 These and other picturebooks are examples of artworks that highlight the question of what girlhood can mean both verbally and visually, a crucial double perspective when dealing with multimodal mediums such as picturebooks. Girlhood studies within children’s literature research consists of subfields that examine girlhood in different genres and mediums. Genre conventions have been challenged in the ways in which girlhood can be depicted, as societal contexts also determine how girlhood is written into texts, as adjusted or as subversive. Girlhood tends to swing between realism and emancipatory visions. It is not always easy to determine what a girl is in literature: she is often seen as a hybrid, with porous borders. During the last decade, girlhood has also been redefined through, for example, the formation of transgender studies. To study girls in children’s literature is to discover not only that the ways of being a girl are constantly changing, but also that many patterns stay the same over time.

Figure 20.1 “It is her, Rosabel, the others follow,” from Den ofantliga Rosabel (2017) by Malin Kivelä and Linda Bondestam. ©Linda Bondestam.

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Boyhood Studies In the same way that feminist studies inspired girlhood studies, boyhood studies sprang out of feminist and masculinity studies.7 In his critical overview of boyhood studies, Diederik F. Janssen defines the field as “the open-​ended, wide-​angled inquiry into the idea, trope, lore, and imago of the boy precisely as it was hotly contested across the centuries and sciences, at times celebrated and aestheticized, at others submitted into an accountancy of cultural capital and representational fairness, ultimately precariously lived across cultures” (4). Boyhood studies and girlhood studies are separate yet parallel fields, mostly due to their different scholarly heritage and divergent relation to feminist theory (Coulter). Studies of gender mobility such as “phallic girls” (Renold and Ringrose 48), girls with traditional masculine traits, or “alpha girls” (Kindlon 6), girls who take the lead and use their power to reign, may blur this division into separate fields, as girlhood and boyhood also are entangled. Accordingly, both girlhood and boyhood can be described as encompassing “neither an age nor a stage, but[…] an ironic and iconic performance infused with youthful energy, style, fun, and capriciousness” (Pomerantz 154). Boyhood studies emerged in an American context, in part because boyhood often is linked to nationality. The term boyology, the study of young masculinity, introduced by Kenneth Kidd, has been influential.8 American boyology consists of historical studies that examine responses to shifts in masculinity during the nineteenth century. Within literary criticism, boyhood studies has repeatedly examined American boyhood in semiautobiographical “bad boy” books, for example by Mark Twain. However, Ellen Butler Donovan criticizes the obsession with this tradition, arguing that other models of development for boys were common and that too much primacy has been given to the image of the bad boy. When revisiting similar material, Donovan finds a much more open arena for negotiating boyhood. Ideas of boyhood were never hegemonic, she suggests, but in certain times and places, particular models dominated. In her study of 1880s novels set in the circus, she finds several competing boyhoods: the sentimental boy, who is emotional (for instance known from Anglo-​American author Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy [1886]); the upwardly mobile boy, who attains a middle-​class lifestyle by being smart and decent; and the knowing boy, who outsmarts adults. Post-​boyology is a gradual analytic shift in representations of boys to include non-​normative representations. It covers a range of views, including intertextuality, poetic conventions, exclusions, and dissonance. Boyhood studies reads boyhood also as consisting of performances, irony, and parody, over time and place. In a Nordic boyhood studies context, Magnus Öhrn has examined how later depictions of boyhood, for example in Swedish author Ulf Stark’s semi-​autobiographical novels about a group of boys set in the 1950s, contain intertextual renderings and specific literary geographies, as literary domains become palimpsests written onto real places, in Stark’s case the Stockholm suburb Stureby. Öhrn revisits Stark’s literary domain and shows how the environment one enters via Stark’s authorship is an imaginary universe with correspondence to the real suburb. Öhrn draws on the idea of a boys’ “nation,” a distinct cultural world with its own rituals, symbols, values: a social space where boys play outside the rules of the adult world. The study shows that specific places can be used to exemplify how boyhood is conceptualized. Methodological stances within the field often draw on R. Connell’s concept hegemonic masculinity, “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (77). Explorations of masculinity were undertaken in children’s literature research earlier, but Ways of Being Male (2002), edited by Stephens, introduced a more systematic study of how patriarchal culture regulates male bodies and behavior. The collection recognizes how children’s literature over the years has depicted new masculinities in opposition to hegemonic masculinities. These new masculinities sometimes occur in places where previous scholarship has tended not to recognize them. In her analysis of “witchy masculinities” in 249

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British author J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (1997–​2007), for example, Annette Wannamaker discovers a range of masculinities performed by boys and men in negotiation with hegemonic masculinity: “Rowling’s novels open up more possibilities for boys, portray broader definitions of what it means to be masculine, acknowledge a readership able to grapple with contradictions, and give readers characters and situations that test and contest the constructed borders of gender” (144–​45). Picturebook studies on masculinity include Bradford’s readings of Browne’s picturebooks as satires of fatherhood and masculinity. American Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962) is key in the depiction of young Black masculinity. In the book Peter, who lives in New York, experiences snow. While the other boys’ snowball fight is too rough for him, he makes angels in the snow and tries to capture a snowball by taking it into his home. Peter being Black is not commented on in the book. Instead, a boy’s exploration of his everyday surroundings is highlighted. Baek’s tender visual renderings of boys are other examples of nonhegemonic masculinities. In Al-​ sa-​taang (2012, Magic Candies) her handcrafted clay figures of the boy DongDong evoke a plethora of emotions. DongDong is portrayed as a sensitive, lonely, and possibly bullied boy whose spirits are changed when he buys a bag of magic candies that allow him to hear what people, animals, and things around him think. Gifted with a new understanding of his dog and his father, and realizing that he is appreciated and loved, DongDong musters the courage to approach and play with a boy he meets in the park. Masculinity here equals emotional work and sensitivity.

Figure 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.

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Lately, queer studies have influenced boyhood studies, as when Lance Weldy sheds new light on masculinity in Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof trilogy (1955–​68), about a man with a propeller on his back living on the roof of an apartment house in Stockholm. The age-​blurred man-​child character Weldy identifies in Karlson functions as a subversive agent exposing traditional ideologies, particularly through his queerness, which the trilogy illuminates by contrasting Karlson with the normative reality of mid-​twentieth-​century Stockholm through his narcissism, primal desires, and illogical or fallacious rhetoric. Through the lens of J. Halberstam’s queer subcultures, Weldy notices a legitimated queer visibility, cultivated by Karlson’s non-​normative belief system. Furthermore, Karlson’s queerness as a man-​child character disrupts traditional boundaries and delineations of the child/​adult binary and allows readers to witness the vulnerabilities of normative institutions while also appreciating diversity in non-​normative family structures. This new take on masculinity displays how masculinity studies and boyhood studies can inform new readings, for example with the help of queer theory. Masculinity studies within children’s literature studies have contributed the central perspective that gender is equally important to analyze when it comes to boys. Although boyhood studies as a research field is not yet as large and developed as girlhood studies, this turn is pivotal, given the hard-​ to-​escape tendency to view only girls as bearers of gender. Masculinity, in its multiple variations, has become increasingly visible, not least through the profound influence of queer and intersectional theory.

New Possibilities for Gender Studies Within Children’s Literature Research According to Trites, the 2000s have been highly productive when it comes to feminist literary studies within children’s literature. In Twenty-​First-​Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature, she does what Westin called for by mapping recent feminist turns within children’s literature research: new materialism, intersectionalities, ecofeminism, speculative fiction in the light of neoliberalism, queering, caring, and disability studies. Her broad approach to how children’s literature studies has developed alongside gender studies and its branches (such as queer theory and intersectionality studies) testifies to a lively field. Just as feminism comes in plural, so does gender studies within children’s literature research, as we have pointed out by discussing a selection of groundbreaking approaches to gender in children’s literature. Entries on gender may have disappeared from some overviews of the field, but the discussion of how gender influences children’s literature has hardly concluded. On the contrary, backlash tendencies –​ especially strong during the 1990s, but also today –​are fought by developing the concept of gender further. As we have shown, this is often done in combination with different subfields, where intersectional perspectives such as class, ethnicity, functionality, and normativity are brought together to provide more sensitive tools for analyzing gender. The tendency of gender studies is towards inclusion. As the outline above stresses, the development of gender studies has shown that gender alone is not enough as a concept; it needs to be combined with other tools for analyzing intersections and power relations. Where gender studies within children’s literature are now, and where the future will take us, are open for negotiation. New literary formats and new theoretical fields will continue to inform how children’s literature is discussed in terms of gender. The twenty-​first century has already witnessed a remarkable number of gender-​inflected perspectives within children’s literature research, which are developing nuanced and multilayered ways to study gender in its many forms. Still, the societal gains that the feminist movement has brought about are not to be taken for granted. They are far from universal, and they can be revoked. Gender analysis addresses possible gaps within social policy, legislation, education, politics, and everyday practices that limit people’s lives. Counterdiscourses arise in children’s literature, this societal laboratory where gender dilemmas, to use Mallan’s term, are continually confronted. 251

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It is clear that gender perspectives can reveal global hierarchies of unequal gendered privilege with toxic effects. The field of gender studies challenges the competing gender discourses at play at certain times and in certain places by introducing new and more gender-​sensitive discourses as ways of speaking, writing, and behaving. Gender studies within children’s literature research explores this complexity from a variety of angles. As long as there are genders, we are not done with feminist and/​ or gender studies within our field. As Mallan phrased it in 2009: “Have we really reached a point of saying ‘been there, done that’ with respect to debates about feminism and gender in children’s narratives?” (4). The answer then, and the answer now, is no. We must develop sensitive methodological approaches to meet the demands of new literary formats and new examples of narrating gender as well as to explore novel ways of reading earlier texts.

Notes 1 See, e.g., Mallan; Flanagan, “Gender”; Trites, Feminisms for previous overviews of gender studies within children’s literature. 2 The history of feminism is divided into waves: the first (1800–​1950s), the second (1960s–​1970s), the third (1980s–​), and the fourth (2010–​). There is no consensus around these later waves, neither on what is included nor on whether we are currently experiencing a fifth wave. As children’s literature scholars we also need to be attentive to whether these waves are the same in our field as elsewhere or whether different developments have occurred. 3 Trites revisits her discursive approach in Twenty-​First-​Century Feminisms (2018), where she rethinks her earlier approach from a material feminist perspective. 4 Postfeminism as a concept was coined by Toril Moi in Sexual/​Textual Politics (1985) to advocate a criticism that deconstructs binaries between liberal and radical feminism. 5 During the twenty-​first century, the research field has developed to the point of generating networks and an academic journal. The Finnish network Tyttötutkimusverkosto [Network for Girlhood Studies], the Swedish FlickForsk! [Girl Research!], and the transnational International Girls Studies Association were all founded comparatively recently, as was Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. The networks also instigated several collections (e.g., Ojanen, Mulari, and Aaltonen; Söderberg, Österlund, and Formark; Formark, Mulari, and Voipio). 6 The protagonist’s name is of particular importance. Rosabel is a telescope word that includes the Swedish word “rosa” (both a girl’s name and the word for the color pink) and refers to the word “rebel” as well as the French “belle,” meaning beautiful. 7 With influential names such as sociologist R. Connell and in children’s literature Kenneth Kidd, Stephens, and Annette Wannamaker. 8 Kidd borrowed the term from YMCA leader Henry William Gibson’s 1916 tract and a 1914 lecture series by E. P. Conlon.

Works Cited Åkesson, Sonja, and Monica Schultz. Mamman och pappan som gjorde arbetsbyte. Rabén and Sjögren, 1970. Andersson, Maria. Framtidens kvinnor: Mognad och medborgarskap i svenska flickböcker 1832–​1921. Makadam, 2020. Baek, Heena. Al-​sa-​taang. Bear Books, 2012. —​—​—​. Changsu t’ang sŏnnyŏnim. Bear Books, 2012. Bradford, Clare. “Playing with Father: Anthony Browne’s Picture Books and the Masculine.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 29, 1998, pp. 79–​96. —​—​—​, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens, and Robyn McCallum. New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature and Film: Utopian Transformations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. —​—​—​, and Mavis Reimer, eds. Girls, Texts, Cultures. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. Brooks, Wanda M., and Jonda C. McNair. “ ‘Combing’ Through Representations of Black Girls’ Hair in African American Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 46, 2015, doi:10.1007/​ s10583-​014-​9235-​x. Browne, Anthony. Piggybook. Julia Macrae Books, 1986. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.

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Gender Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan, 1865. Connell, R. Masculinities. University of California Press, 1995. Coulter, Natalie. “Separate Playgrounds: Surveying the Fields of Girls’ Media Studies and Boyhood Studies.” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 37, 2012, pp. 353–​62. Donovan, Ellen Butler. “Kaler’s Boys: The Popular Print Market and Models of Boyhood.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 4–​23, doi:10.1353/​chq.2021.0006. Flanagan, Victoria. “Gender Studies in Children’s Literature.” The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd, Routledge, 2010, pp. 26–​38. —​—​—​. Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Formark, Bodil, Heta Mulari, and Myry Voipio, eds. Nordic Girlhoods: New Perspectives and Outlooks. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-​ readings of Classic Stories for Girls. Macmillan, 1995. García-​González, Macarena, and Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak. “New Materialist Openings to Children’s Literature Studies.” International Research in Children’s Literature, July 2020, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 45–​60. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​ Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979. Glenum, Lara, and Arielle Greenberg. Gurlesque: The Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics. Saturnalia Books, 2010. Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. Thames and Hudson, 1998. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. Humm, Maggie. The Dictionary of Feminist Theory. 2nd ed., Ohio State University Press, 1995. Janssen, Diederik F. “After Boyology, Or, Whence and Whither Boyhood Studies?” Boyhood Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–14. Jansson, Tove. Den farliga resan. Bonniers, 1977. Joosen, Vanessa. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-​ Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Wayne State University Press, 2011. Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Kindlon, Dan. Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World. Rodale, 2006. Kivelä, Malin, and Linda Bondestam. Den ofantliga Rosabel. Förlaget, 2017. Lindgren, Astrid. Pippi Långstrump. Rabén and Sjögren, 1945. Mallan, Kerry. Gender Dilemmas in Children’s Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Marshall, Elizabeth. “Gender.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, New York University Press, 2021, pp. 81–​84. Martin, Michelle H. “Never Too Nappy.” The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 74, 1999, pp. 283–​88. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen. Macmillan, 1991. —​—​—​, and Jenny Garber. “Girls and Subcultures.” Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-​War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Hutchinson and Co, 1975, pp. 209–​223. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-​Walsh, eds. Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood. Peter Lang, 2005. Mitchell, Claudia, and Carrie Rentschler, eds. Girlhood and the Politics of Place. Berghahn Press, 2016. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 967–​91. Moi, Toril. Sexual/​Textual Politics. Methuen, 1985. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–​18, doi:10.1093/​ screen/​16.3.6. Nikolajeva, Maria, and Clémentine Beauvais, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Öhrn, Magnus. “Ulf Starks pojkland: En litterär exkursion i Stureby.” Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research, vol. 45, 2022, doi:10.14811/​clr.v45.679. Ojanen, Karoliina, Mulari, Heta, and Sanna Aaltonen, eds. Entäs tytöt: Johdatus tyttötutkimukseen. Vastapaino, 2011, pp. 9–​44. Österlund, Mia. “Vidare, vidare, vidare: Astrid Lindgren och Anna Riwkin-​Bricks fotografiska flickskildring.” Astrid Lindgrens bildvärldar, edited by Helene Ehriander and Annette Almgren White, Makadam, 2019, pp. 65–​84. Paul, Lissa. “Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows about Children’s Literature.” Signal, vol. 54, 1987, pp. 186–​201.

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Mia Österlund and Åsa Warnqvist —​—​—​. “Feminism Revisited.” Understanding Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2005, pp. 114–​27. Pomerantz, Shauna. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Un/​Defining the ‘Girl.’ ” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 1, no. 2, 2009, pp. 147–​58. Reid-​Walsh, Jacqueline. “Girlhood.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, New York University Press, 2021, pp. 88–​90. Renold, Emma, and Jessica Ringrose. “Phallic Girls? Girls’ Negotiation of Phallogocentric Power.” Queer Masculinities, edited by John C. Landreau and Nelson M. Rodriguez, Springer, 2012, pp. 47–​67. Riwkin-​Brick, Anna, and Märta de Laval. Trulsa hos mormor. Rabén and Sjögren, 1955. Smith, Ann, ed. The Girl in the Text: Transnational Girlhoods. Berghahn, 2019. Söderberg, Eva, Mia Österlund, and Bodil Formark, eds. Flicktion: Perspektiv på flickan i fiktione. Lund Universus Academic Press, 2013. Sparrman, Anna. “Through the Looking-​Glass: Alice and Child Studies Multiple.” Childhood, vol. 27, no. 1, 2020, pp. 8–​24, doi:10.1177/​0907568219885382. —​—​—​. “Hångel, sex och nakenhet: Bilder, blickar och barn.” Barnnorm och kroppsform: Om ideal och sexualitet i barnkulturen, edited by Malena Jansson, Centrum för barnkulturforskning, Stockholms universitet, 2019, pp. 139–​60. Stephens, John, “Gender, Genre, and Children’s Literature.” Signal, vol. 79, 1996, pp. 17–​30. —​—​—​, editor. Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature and Film. Routledge, 2002. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Twenty-​First-​Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature. University of Mississippi Press, 2018. —​—​—​. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. University of Iowa Press, 1997. Wannamaker, Annette. Boys in Children’s Literature and Pupular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child, Routledge, 2008. Warnqvist, Åsa. “Loving, Larking, and Lying: Free-​Spirited Children and Disciplinary Adults in the Works of L. M. Montgomery and Astrid Lindgren.” Children and Childhoods in L. M. Montgomery: Continuing Conversations, edited by Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, E. Holly Pike, and Margaret Steffler, McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2022. —​—​—​, and Mia Österlund. “Depicting Fatness in Picturebooks: Fat Temporality in Malin Kivelä’s and Linda Bondestam’s Den ofantliga Rosabel and Anete Melece’s Kiosks.” Analize: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 30, 2021, pp. 7–​28, www.anal​ize-​jour​nal.ro/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​A.-​Warnqv​ist-​M.-​Oste​ rlun​d_​De​pict​ing-​Fatn​ess-​in-​Pictu​rebo​oks.pdf. Weldy, Lance. “The Queerness of the Man-​Child: Narcissism and Silencing in Astrid Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof Series.” Silence and Silencing in Childrens Literature, edited by Elina Druker, Björn Sundmark, Åsa Warnqvist, and Mia Österlund, Makadam, 2021, pp. 169–​87. Westin, Boel. “Barnlitteraturforskningens arkeologi.” Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, doi:10.14811/​clr.v34i1.24. —​—​—​. Tove Jansson: Ord, bild, liv. Albert Bonniers förlag, 2007. Wright, Nazera Sadiq. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. University of Illinois Press, 2016. Zipes, Jack. Don’t Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Methuen, 1986.

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21 NATION AND CITIZENSHIP Sara Van den Bossche

During the COVID-​19 pandemic, societies around the world saw citizens questioning and protesting regulations governments were imposing (“Covid”). The way governing bodies addressed the pandemic, often attempting to curb it by curtailing freedom of movement, sparked heated debates that revealed tensions between what citizens saw as their prerogatives and what governments and policymakers perceived as citizens’ responsibilities towards society at large. Children’s privileges and obligations, in particular, came under great pressure, as young people repeatedly found themselves at the epicenter of the pandemic, alternately considered the largest risk factors or its biggest victims (Anthes; “Coronavirus”). With schools going into lockdown and education interrupted and/​or customized, young people have suffered considerable learning losses (Engzell, Frey, and Verhagen). Children were rarely consulted in these matters, and in contrast to their behavior in the “Fridays for Future” movement (described below), they seldom spoke out against the measures that affected them.1 The COVID-​19 pandemic made abundantly clear that in matters concerning citizenship, children occupy an ambivalent status. While they are denied prerogatives such as the vote, governing bodies nevertheless impose civic duties on them. This chapter explores the main dimensions of this dualistic relationship. More precisely, it demonstrates that the notion of citizenship and the closely related concept of the nation have always been entwined with children’s literature. In fact, one could even argue that, in Europe, they came into existence in tandem and in concert. As Kit Kelen and Björn Sundmark aptly explain, “The emergence of modern nation-​states towards the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of children’s literature in the same period is not coincidental. Children’s literature makes and educates future citizens” (“Things” 1, emphasis added). As a result, in children’s literature studies, explorations of nationality and citizenship abound. One reason for this close relationship is that both citizenship and nation on the one hand and children’s literature on the other are instrumental in the lives of children, specifically in their socialization, “the process whereby an individual learns to adjust to a group (or society) and behave in a manner approved by the group (or society)” (“Socialization”). In effect, children’s literature has been and is often used as a tool in nation building and citizenship education.

Defining the Concepts A seminal study that has informed many an investigation into nation and children’s literature is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). In it, Anderson comments, “Nation, nationality, nationalism –​ all have proved notoriously DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-25

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difficult to define, let alone to analyse” (3). Yet that is what this chapter attempts to do. The Cambridge Dictionary Online (CDO) identifies nation as “a country, especially when thought of as a large group of people living in one area with their own government, language, traditions, etc.,” and goes on to specify that the noun also can demarcate “a large group of people of the same race who share the same language, traditions, and history, but who might not all live in one area.”2 These definitions demonstrate that the notion of nation centers on a sense of belonging and commonality. So, too, does the concept of citizenship. As Jacqueline Bhabha has it, “Citizenship is [...] distinguished as a marker of belonging [...] based on ‘the social fact of attachment,’ most significantly indefinite or permanent lawful residency” (94). The CDO defines it narrowly as “the state of being a member of a particular country and having rights because of it.” Citizenship, then, can be understood as a subcategory of nation, as it is the set of rights and duties that accrues to membership in a nation. More broadly, the CDO demarcates citizenship as “the state of living in a particular area or town and behaving in a way that other people who live there expect of you” (emphasis added). The latter definition is more helpful still, as it makes clear that with citizenship, or membership in a nation, come anticipations of prescribed and socially policed conduct, prescriptions affecting people’s everyday lives. As this chapter elucidates, these behavioral expectations are often transmitted to young people, the citizens of tomorrow, through children’s literature. Moreover, the latter description of citizenship aligns closely with perhaps the most frequently quoted explanation of nation, that of Anderson: “[I]‌t is an imagined political community. [...] It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-​members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (5–​6, emphasis in original). The individual’s imaginary association with the other affiliates of a nation is what makes the concept so powerful; in Anderson’s words, “societies are sociological entities of such firm and stable reality that their members [...] can even be described as passing each other on the street, without ever becoming acquainted, and still be connected” (25). Quoting Hugh Seton-​Watson’s Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (1977), Anderson adds that “a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one” (6, emphasis added). The proximity of the definitions of the two concepts under scrutiny aptly reflects their interrelationship. Importantly, what these definitions also make clear is that both citizenship and the nation are constructs. The same goes for childhood. None of them is a natural phenomenon that exists in and of itself. Rather, they are cognitive categories that humans have constructed in order to make sense of their existence and structure the world they live in (Vloeberghs; Anderson). The constructed nature of childhood entails that individual children are conceived of as empty vessels that can be filled with knowledge and molded to adults’ wishes. The central idea governing this construct, to use James Kincaid’s phrasing, is that “[u]‌nencumbered by any necessary traits, the emptiness called a child can be constructed any way we like” (qtd in Vloeberghs 10). This conception of children is crucial in nation building, as Yael Darr points out: “Because children have no previous cultural habits, they are generally viewed as being able to adopt new national practices and acquire new cultural assets far more rapidly than adults” (1). Children are thus the essential building blocks of any (new) nation. In the development of all three constructs, citizen, nation, and child, the cognitive process of categorization and the ensuing separation between certain groups have been instrumental (Kokkola and Van den Bossche); this segregation has encompassed the implementation of barriers between children and adults, who up until the Enlightenment participated in society in a more or less integrated way (Vloeberghs). To further explain these developments, by way of conceptual framework, this chapter draws upon the different facets of citizenship that Elisabeth Wesseling outlines. She distinguishes among eight dimensions: 256

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[L]‌egal (membership in a state/​s), political (the right to vote and to be elected), cultural (access to shared symbolic expressions, values, traditions), economic (freedom from want and access to shelter), cognitive (knowledge of rights, duties, and political institutions), behavioral (active engagement with one’s surroundings), imaginative (the household, nation, and Europe as imagined communities), and emotional (feeling at home in and identifying with a specific place). (68, italics in original) This chapter concentrates on the types of citizenship that children’s literature is involved in, namely cultural, cognitive, behavioral, imaginative, and emotional. Tracing the origins of the notions of nation and citizenship as well as children’s literature, my focus is on Western and Northern Europe, as this is where these concepts emerged most clearly in the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era. While I recognize that this vantage point is Eurocentric, the European context does provide models for much of the world, due to the exportation of European concepts of nation and citizenship as part of imperialist and colonial campaigns.

Origins and Indicators of the Concepts The intertwined evolutions of children’s literature, nation, and citizenship are rooted in seventeenth-​ and eighteenth-​century Europe, when Enlightenment thinkers throughout the continent advocated for the use of education and literature to enlist children as engaged participants in their societies. Intellectuals envisaged children as future citizens inspired by the concept of universalism. In theory considering all humans equal and part of the same global family (Christensen 119), they socialized young people accordingly. Romanticism emerged as a complementary school of thought, accompanying the establishment of individual nation states. It was also hugely important for the emergence of children’s literature as a separate category. Universalism found a counterpart in more or less readily identifiable national identities, constructed on the grounds of the so-​called “Volksgeist” or national spirit (“Volksgeist”). The Enlightenment and Romanticism both gave rise to constructions of childhood that remain evident in many different aspects of European societies today. Yet Enlightenment and Romantic visions of childhood seemingly have entirely different, even diametrically opposed repercussions for children’s socialization and attendant citizenship. The first construct is very much attuned to children’s prospective participation in and contribution to society. The foundation of this future-​ oriented school of thought is a strong belief in the malleability of society, the potential for improvement, and the idea of progress (Vloeberghs). Individual subjects are perceived as small cogs in the great societal mechanism. Seeing young people as unfinished products, as blueprints of adult subjects governed by rational self-​interest, the Enlightenment promotes an active, albeit future citizenship for children. The responsibility of the adults in children’s lives is to prepare them for that societal role by injecting them with the right –​that is, empirical –​kind of knowledge (Vloeberghs). Children are not valued in and of themselves but rather as miniature adults and hence burgeoning citizens. Within Romantic views of childhood, the focus on projected participatory citizenship is substituted for protective seclusion. Balancing out the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality, Romantic thinkers attach more weight to emotions and subjectivity. They perceive children as representatives of an innocent past, untainted by the corruption of contemporary, increasingly industrialized society (Vloeberghs). Subsequently, Romanticism urges a segregation of childhood from adulthood, to protect the unspoiled child soul (Vloeberghs). Consequently, children are actively denied citizenship. It is in this spirit that the construct of childhood became entangled with the newly emerging concept of the nation. The correspondence between child and nation is that both are perceived as pure and undisputable entities (Kelen and Sundmark, “Things” 4). 257

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What unites Enlightenment and Romantic constructions of childhood, then, is that both consider children the aforementioned “empty vessel,” a tabula rasa, not yet corrupted. Significantly, this concept implies that neither perceives young people as capable of claiming and enacting citizenship during their childhood. In Bhabha’s words, both treat children as “citizens in the making, ‘future’ rather than actual citizens” (99). Citizenship is an identity to be attained over time, not one a person is born into, as the future citizen must “understand what the nation is about and how s/​he is a part of it and the kinds of role s/​he might one day play in the cause of the nation” (Kelen and Sundmark, “Things” 3). Becoming aware of nation and citizenship is thus an essential component of children’s socialization. Hence the central irony concerning children’s relationship to citizenship is that the latter both involves them, as the prevalent societal perspective on citizenship determines their current and future treatment, and simultaneously excludes them. Children’s citizenship seems to rest on a paradox, as Bhabha points out: Little consideration has been given to what it means for a child to be a citizen. This is surprising given that many of the cardinal attributes of citizenship –​including the right to vote, to serve on a jury, and to stand for public office –​are denied children. No other group of citizens has such partial access to the benefits of membership. (93) Victoria Flanagan observes that where citizenship is concerned, children make up a peripheral and challenging social category (251). They embody a duality, being students of citizenship who lack relevant knowledge but also have the potential to function as model citizens who can lead by example. Children are the recipients of nation-​building efforts, write Kelen and Sundmark, because “[i]‌t is for the benefit of the child that the adult work of nation-​making (cultural, political, martial) is undertaken” (“Things” 3). In some cases, however, they are held responsible for rescuing the nation and safeguarding its legacy for future purposes (Panaou and Tsilimeni 205). The core issue is, as Bhabha inquires, “Are children citizens?” (91). The prevalent answer seems to be, “Not fully, yet society prepares them to become citizens.” Children’s deficient ability to act on citizenship can be understood as a defining feature of the childhood construct originating in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This lack of access could be interpreted as a manifestation of what Maria Nikolajeva has termed “aetonormativity” (Power 8), a worldview that takes the adult viewpoint as the standard and sees young people’s vantage point as a deviation from that norm. This ideology confers power only to the normative –​ adult –​ group and deems children powerless. An alternative approach that does recognize children’s agency and is productive in revisiting citizenship is Clémentine Beauvais’s theory concerning might and authority. Instead of considering children’s and adults’ power as binary and mutually exclusive entities, she approaches the two forms of power as communicating vessels, with time as the crucial factor. Beauvais admits that children may not have access to authority, which is considered legitimate in society at large. One acquires this type of power by aging. What children do possess, however, is might, “a form of power intrinsically linked to the ‘possession’ of a future” (81, italics in original). As one grows older and one’s future becomes ever shorter, one loses might and attains more authority instead. This theory captures the general oversight of children’s power in society, while simultaneously honoring their potential to act in ways not widely recognized as valid. An excellent case in point is the campaign of school strikes for the climate known as “Fridays for Future,” instigated by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. These walkouts have seen young people across the globe expressing concern for their future, which they see as jeopardized by adults’ inconsiderate, short-​term exercising of their authority (“School Climate Strikes”). The potency of these protests lies in the fact that they 258

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undercut that authority precisely in one of the domains where it is imposed on children most visibly, compulsory education.

Cognitive, Behavioral, and Emotional Mechanisms Involved in Nation Building and Citizenship Both nation building and citizenship build on certain cognitive, behavioral, and affective mechanisms that can motivate individual members of a society to feel and behave in a certain way. At the core of both notions is a sense of belonging and having roots in a group of people, a community. This feeling of “allegiance,” as Margaret Meek terms it (viii), is in turn based on commonality, which people may find in values they can share with others. Nation building relies on individual subjects’ willingness to engage in participatory identification (Wesseling). In explaining why the nation is constructed as a community, Anderson notes that “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7). Wesseling observes a belief spread widely across Europe, that “equipping the newer generations (including migrants) with a clear sense of national identity […] is thought to be conducive to the development of their civic virtues” (67). We can take this comment to mean that the more strongly people identify with the nation they belong to, the more they are willing to participate in it in a constructive way. Kelen and Sundmark point out that the etymology of the term “nation” itself, connected as it is through the Latin root “nasci” to the notion of birth (www.merr​iam-​webs​ter.com/​dic​tion​ary/​ nation#word-​hist​ory), ties people to the nation they are born into, which thus is perceived as their home, and makes them “stakeholders” in it (Kelen and Sundmark, “Things” 1). Following this close liaison, “nation” and “home” are often used interchangeably, and, in the words of Petros Panaou and Tasoula Tsilimeni, “national/​‘home’ culture is associated with familiarity and security” (203). In the sense of membership in a nation, then, “citizenship signals ‘belonging’ and ‘insider-​status’ in a privileged way” (Bhabha 94). The idea of the delineation of nations giving rise to the category of “insiders,” barring “outsiders” from its imaginary realm, is a crucial side effect of nation building. Anderson describes this mechanism as follows: “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them […] has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind [sic]” (7, emphasis in original). In other words, nations do not perceive their borders as shared with the entire human race, but rather with smaller, discrete entities, subcategories of humankind, otherwise known as nations. In fact, an imagined national community cannot exist without other nations. It needs the other entities to demarcate its own boundaries. The underlying idea is, “This is how far ‘us’ reaches, and that is where ‘them’ starts.” The nation is, therefore, in essence a relational concept, defined by its relationship with the entities surrounding it.

Cultural Mechanisms Involved in Nation Building and Citizenship Nation building furthermore builds on symbols and activities that are used as shorthand for national identity (Geraghty; Christensen and Appel). The cultural dimension of citizenship (and, thereby, nation) is vastly important. Wesseling points out that art can be a means to disseminate these tokens. Helpfully, she explains that because nations are not “ready-​mades,” they need to be manifested and subsequently transmitted between generations (70). Imaginable means to create them are a repertoire of habits and a collective shorthand to stand in for the nation, which may include “a common currency, a flag, or a (trans-​)national anthem, [and] artistic achievements” (70). Darr offers similar insights when she recognizes that in Israel, “complex cultural activities served to enhance sociocultural cohesion between the citizens of the new nation-​state” (6). Specifically, she identifies as essential components in the invention of the Israeli nation “[d]‌aily practices, a national past with its 259

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significant spaces and places, national symbols, traditions, festive rituals, folklore, a standard national language, and literary canons” (1). The particular strength of stories in this context of creation, according to Wesseling, is that they offer young readers the unfamiliar perspectives of fictitious and/​or historical characters, which in turn potentially enlarge their worldview. One could even argue that due to its constructed nature, all human knowledge –​including social constructs such as nation and citizenship –​is made up of fictions. Tony Watkins observes that as humans attempt to make sense of the world around them by means of narratives, with creation myths being the most evident example, stories strongly govern individual and collective identities (183). Therefore, the narrative form is highly conducive for instilling in future citizens social values associated with nation and citizenship. Watkins suggests that “narratives […] shape the way children find a ‘home’ in the world” (183). Stories, plotlines, characters, motifs can all be deployed as instruments within what Svein Slettan, drawing on work by Timothy Brennan, calls the “ ‘apparatus of cultural fictions,’ texts that contribute to the forming of the nation” (23–​24). The increasing dissemination of print media, in particular, played a crucial part in strengthening national feelings. Anderson foregrounds as crucial “the novel and the newspaper. For these forms provided the technical means for ‘re-​presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (25). Other common print types used in nation building were magazines (particularly for poems), posters, and fairy tale collections (Christensen and Appel; Rutschmann), although in this chapter, my focus remains on realistic fiction. The novel’s particular strength, in Anderson’s view, is its ability to capture the “national imagination,” as “a sociological landscape” through which characters move (30). Significantly, the outlines of the setting that the novel creates render it readily recognizable as a particular nation, not just any one; it is deliberately not universal, as opposed to the “Once upon a time” generic chronotope characteristic of the fairy tale, for example. This setting’s second most instrumental feature is that it establishes an intimate connection between the readers and the fictional universe (30). The gist is the quality of “simultaneity” (37), which makes fiction bleed into reality and evokes “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36). Anderson concludes that “print-​capitalism […] made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways” (36).

Children’s Literature as a Key Instrument of Nation Building and Citizenship Adopting the intrinsic link between the establishment of a nation and the incitement of citizenship on the one hand and fictional narratives on the other, several scholars have highlighted the key role that children’s literature, in particular, has played in nation-​building dynamics and citizenship education. For example, concerning Israel, Darr notes, “The institutions, elites, and prominent cultural figures involved in forming and disseminating the new national culture ascribe particular importance to the traditions and ethos they wish to pass on to children, who will be the first generation to grow up within the new culture and take it for granted” (1). In Darr’s view, children’s books have been deemed a suitable medium for naturalizing particular nationalist images and understandings of the nation. Wesseling similarly notes the rise of “nationalist canons for school curricula” in several European states in recent years (67). Kelen and Sundmark underscore the link between children’s literature and the nation in more general terms and foreground children’s literature as the missing link between young people and the state (“Things” 4–​5). As all these critics agree, the way a literature specifically aimed at children envisages children and childhood has an impact on how the nation perceives itself. In turn, that nation’s desired self-​image informs and potentially limits the options for depicting children and childhood in children’s literature. The prevailing concept of the nation thus heavily shapes children’s socialization through what they read. Gillian Lathey therefore proposes that scholars analyze children’s books to understand what prerogatives and responsibilities children have in the producing context, as literature aimed at them tends to disclose these assumptions (6). 260

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Although children’s books are capable of instigating social change, where nation and citizenship are concerned they are just as likely to transmit clichéd and reactionary beliefs to secure the stable transmission of values between different generations (Kelen and Sundmark, “Things” 4). Furthermore, the tight association between nation, citizenship, and childhood tends to translate into a preference in children’s literature for topics that remain close to home, “securely rooted in a national context and in culturally specific perceptions of childhood” (4). Emer O’Sullivan observes that it is unusual for books in which culture is made explicit to acquire international acclaim (“Narratology” 154). Elena Paruolo has found that “[i]‌n the main, children’s books do not travel well: while considered classics in their own country, many remain almost unknown to a wider public” (21). Nikolajeva concurs, noting that “the obvious milestones on one horizon are in other countries and cultures eclipsed by more significant texts” (Children’s Literature 14). These observations do not hold true, however, for a core collection of international classics, sometimes indicated with German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s term “Weltliteratur” or world literature (O’Sullivan, Kinderliterarische). The construction of childhood governing these books is deemed less culturally specific and more “universal.” O’Sullivan claims of these classics, “Their value is based [mainly…] on inscribed moral and social values, inherent images or even myths of childhood and […] they reveal a basic narrative moment, situation or constellation of characters which lend themselves to being retold and reinterpreted in different forms” (“Pinocchio” 147). But however “universal” these classic books may be, they retain certain elements characteristic of their nation of origin (Kelen and Sundmark, “Things” 7), as becomes evident in cases where classics are adjusted when translated. As Panaou and Tsilimeni comment, the “multiple transformations” of works that move across national borders “often serve national ideologies within the cultures that receive them; authors tend to invest national and cultural capital in these characters’ classic status” (193). Accumulating ever more cultural layers with each translation, these classic stories typically become palimpsests (194–​95), a phenomenon also noted in the present volume by O’Sullivan and by Virginie Douglas.

Case Study A novel that neatly illustrates how contemporary authors treat the topics under scrutiny is Het boek van alle dingen (2004, The Book of Everything) by the 2012 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award laureate, Guus Kuijer. Kuijer is known for empathizing with young people in both his fiction and his literary criticism. He can be seen to take their side by, among other means, ridiculing certain –​often incompetent and/​or ignorant –​ adult characters and highlighting his young protagonists’ intellect, inventiveness, and agency. In a collection of essays tellingly entitled Het geminachte kind (The Disdained Child, 1980), Kuijer criticizes the way adults generally treat young people when writing for them. He comments, Authors of children’s books explain life to children. […] They act as people in the know, like Robinson vis-​à-​vis Friday. […] They purport to know what children want and that is a premature conclusion. […] Why are children’s writers exposed as soon as they attempt to write for adults? Because they make fools of themselves by behaving as knowing vis-​à-​vis their peers. That which among peers comes across as ridiculous pedantry, evokes praise when intended for children.3 (129, my translation) In his own works, he depicts most of the child characters as more “knowing” than adults. That generalization holds true for the main focalizer in The Book of Everything, nine-​year-​old Thomas, a pensive and somewhat naïve boy who writes about his life in a diary that he titles “The Book of Everything” (1). He is growing up in a household that is terrorized –​mentally and physically –​by its head, Mr. Klopper. The latter’s surname is telling, as it references the verb “to beat” and thus alludes 261

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to his proclivity to molest his wife and children. The narrative events center on the Klopper family, but significantly play out against the backdrop of early 1950s Amsterdam, the capital of a nation still recovering from the Second World War and its aftermath. The novel engages with citizenship on different levels –​ political, religious, and family –​ and shows how all of these are intertwined. It proposes an active role for both children and women and grants them agency in a time when the male head of the household generally still had the final say in all family matters. The Book of Everything engages with the imaginative type of citizenship, as it depicts the Klopper household as a miniature replica of the nation, with its head exercising authority over the other family members, imposing rules and regulations on them just as a government does on its citizens. In the first half of the plot, leading up to the narrative climax, Mr. Klopper clearly positions himself as “knowing” and authoritative towards both his son and his wife. For instance, he scolds his wife for not having kept her expenditures within her weekly housekeeping budget and reprimands Thomas for having gotten the words to a hymn wrong. In church, Thomas sings, “Musical Lord, forgive us our miserable singing” instead of “[m]‌erciful Lord, […] [f]orgive us miserable sinners” (8, 11). This mistake earns him a severe hiding. Mrs. Klopper tries to prevent the beating, arguing, “He is only nine. He doesn’t do it deliberately” (8), at which her husband slaps her face and shoves her aside. It is no coincidence that the first example of abuse in the novel is framed in a religious context: Thomas’s father claims authority based on the position of the man in society and the family the Bible prescribes. In his role as family sovereign, he acts on authority (recall Beauvais’s distinction between authority and might), which Thomas and his mother lack. Mr. Klopper enacts this authority through physical violence against his wife and children. In a fashion reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he attempts to subject their bodies in order to subject their wills. Neither Thomas nor his mother has authority. Society casts them as subordinate to the patriarch. As the community they belong to denies them authority, they can only rely on might (Beauvais). In creating this particular character constellation, the novel demonstrates how a cultural kind of citizenship can show up in people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, it illustrates how women and children have often been lumped together in the same, powerless category. It is no coincidence, then, that the locus of authority the young and female characters eventually revolt against is the sole adult man in the book. Echoing the increasing secularization in postwar Dutch society at large, they attempt to undermine Mr. Klopper’s authority in order to liberate themselves from the yoke of his terror. In their efforts, Thomas and his mother get support from several strong female characters. One of them is Thomas’s Aunt Pie, an extroverted feminist. Against her husband’s will, she wears trousers and speaks up about the domestic violence he inflicts on her. The following exchange between Pie and Mr. Klopper neatly lays bare how the gender-​based power dynamics in society were shifting at the time: “You have to tell him that he just cannot do this. […] Has he gone totally bonkers?” […] “Listen, Pie, […i]t is the man’s task to lead and instruct his wife and children. And if they refuse to listen to him, he has no choice but to…” “Beat?” screamed Aunt Pie. “…but to take severe measures. That is how God has ordained things. […]” Aunt Pie grinned maliciously. “Ludicrous!” she shouted. Father raised his voice. “And if you obstinately resist God’s commandments, your husband has the right, no, the duty, to compel you to obey, with a hard hand if need be.” (62–​63) The above quotation represents a microrendition of societal developments on the macro level. Moreover, it demonstrates that Mr. Klopper’s reliance on religious prescribed behaviors makes him vulnerable, as

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any disobedience that he does not know how to handle exposes just how brittle a foundation dogmas make. Significantly, Thomas looks up to Aunt Pie, who proves an ally in the ultimate revolt. The Kloppers’ neighbor Mrs. Van Amersfoort also inspires rebellion in Thomas. She is a social outcast as well, as her husband was executed during the war for participating in the Resistance. Now a widow, she is shunned by the neighborhood children, who believe she is a “witch.” The text introduces her as follows: Next door to Thomas lived an old lady. All the children in the neighborhood knew she was a witch. She lived by herself, and all her dresses were black. She […] had two black cats. […S]he stayed at home to brew her magic potions. Because she was a witch, children pestered her. (13) For his part, Thomas focalizes her as “old Mrs. van Amersfoort [sic], who, as everyone knew, was a witch” (14). The text thus exemplifies mechanisms of us/​them thinking put in place through language. These dynamics show the power of language in categorizing and subsequently ostracizing people, in effect creating nations within nations. Upon getting to know the person behind the “witch,” though, Thomas discovers the rumors are false. He takes a fancy to her, and she in turn empowers him to tap into his might. The first means she proffers to escape the abuse is a letter she writes to Mr. Klopper, signaling that she is aware of his reign of terror. The letter contains only a single, accusatory sentence: “A man who hits his wife dishonors himself” (31, italics in original). Thomas intercepts the letter and hides it, as he is terrified of what will happen if his father finds it. Her second stratagem is to make Thomas familiar with canonical texts for children: poems by Dutch author Annie M.G. Schmidt, prose by French writer Hector Malot and German writer Erich Kästner. In these works, Thomas finds inspiration and the means to revolt. For example, he borrows from Kästner’s Emil und die Detektive (1929, Emil and the Detectives) the clever idea of using a safety pin to carry Mrs. Van Amersfoort’s incriminating letter near his heart, only to deploy it later, as a token of his and the women’s might. He does so in a strategic way, at a strategic time, to unsettle his father when he finally feels ready to challenge him. In effect, the plot resolution relies almost entirely on elements from these canonized books and simultaneously foregrounds them as books worth reading. As they embody important messages about agentic behavior that are relevant for citizenship education, these international classics are appropriated and brought to bear their lessons upon the protagonist’s life, which in turn is firmly rooted in the Amsterdam of the 1950s. The way Thomas and the women around him succeed in frustrating Mr. Klopper’s abuse of power, then, is multifaceted. It deals with citizenship in an emotional sense, “feeling at home in and identifying with a specific place” (Wesseling 68). In a way, Thomas was not feeling at home in his own family home. Experiencing a sense of being out of place, he retreated into his fantasy to escape but also find inventiveness and courage to deploy his might. Here, the book models a cultural kind of citizenship, related to “access to shared symbolic expressions, values, traditions” (Wesseling 68). Also relevant here is the use of tales from the Bible to structure the plot, to enable Thomas to find comfort (he has occasional conversations with Jesus as an imaginary friend of sorts), and to provide ways to upset his father’s authority. In one of his prayers, Thomas confides in Jesus that his father hitting his mother makes him very sad: Jesus said nothing, but you could see in His face how shocked He was. And sad and angry too. “Well, I’ll be. […] Has he gone completely off his head?” That last expression was Aunt Pie’s! (Kuijer, Book 27)

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Small snippets of resistance coming both from the people surrounding him and from within himself are interwoven in Thomas’s prayers. He shows that he loathes his father’s abuse by reenacting the plagues of Egypt, most pertinently when he borrows some red lemonade from his trusted accomplice, Mrs. Van Amersfoort, to pour into the fish tank. This type of resistance, leaning on biblical stories, is particularly powerful, as it uses his father’s own weapon, the source from which he derives his authority, against him. Mr. Klopper is utterly destabilized when he finds out that the set of rules he turned to for stability and organizing the societal unit he reigned over –​his family –​is less stable than he had believed it to be. The acts of resistance also tap into citizenship from the behavioral and cognitive perspectives (respectively, “active engagement with one’s surroundings” and “knowledge of rights, duties, and political institutions” [Wesseling 68]), as they intervene in the way Thomas and his family members and neighbors engage with one another. Together with his female allies (his mother, his sister, Mrs. Van Amersfoort, Aunt Pie), Thomas breaks the rules governing socially acceptable behavior for women and children. The narrative climax illustrates this mechanism very aptly. Thomas and his allies organize a social event, a literary salon of sorts, that shakes the family head to his core, as becomes evident from Mr. Klopper’s remarks after he finds out that Thomas, his mother, and his sister have invited people over, unbeknownst to him. He mutters, “What people? […] It isn’t anybody’s birthday, is it? […] Why haven’t I heard about this before? […] Why doesn’t anybody tell me anything?” (87). His frustration grows, and eventually he retreats into his office, defeated, while yelling, “And what about ME? […] Where am I supposed to go tonight?” (88). The insurgence, disrupting as it does his hitherto clearly demarcated fatherly position, leaves him disoriented. The novel’s ending does not reveal whether things change in the Klopper household after this uprising, but Mr. Klopper’s revealing response may well lead us to believe that his reign of terror is now over. As such, The Book of Everything socializes readers into a kind of citizenship that approaches the authoritative forces in their lives critically, and entails standing up for oneself and deploying one’s might if need be.

Conclusion Scrutinizing the closely related concepts of citizenship and nation, and delineating citizenship as the set of rights and obligations that membership in a nation brings about, the current chapter has teased out children’s ambivalent status in these arenas. As the COVID-​19 pandemic has underscored, children tend to be simultaneously denied some of the prerogatives associated with citizenship and expected to observe part of the duties that it entails. Acknowledging the constructed nature of the concepts at hand, this chapter has traced to the Enlightenment and Romanticism the origins of nation and citizenship as we know them today, unpacking how both rely on an imagined glue that holds the individual members of a society together. Probing the repercussions for children’s socialization and attendant citizenship of the Enlightenment and Romanticism constructions of childhood, it has established that both movements conceive of children as “not yet” citizens who, through socialization, are stimulated to acquire an awareness of nation and citizenship. These circumstances could be seen as implying an aetonormative tendency (Nikolajeva, Power). By way of alternative, this chapter draws upon Beauvais’s theory advancing authority and might as complementary forms of power, governed by age. An important tool for socialization is children’s literature, which has played a key role in contemporary and historical nation-​building efforts and citizenship education. Specifically, children’s books relate to cultural, cognitive, behavioral, imaginative, and emotional types of citizenship, a recurring thread throughout the chapter. Serving as a case in point, the analysis of The Book of Everything illustrates contemporary novels’ multilevel engagement with citizenship. In a plot concentrated on one particular nuclear family against the backdrop of growing secularization and budding feminism in the postwar Netherlands, the book foregrounds individuals’ options for challenging authority and 264

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as such serves as an exemplary plea for young people’s use of agency and might in matters concerning nation and citizenship.

Notes 1 See Giuffrida for a rare example. 2 Even though the CDO lists racial uniformity as a defining criterion, the multiracial makeup of most contemporary nations shows that this is not in fact a necessary requirement. 3 “Kinderboekenschrijvers verklaren het leven voor kinderen. […] Ze gedragen zich als wetenden, als Robinson tegenover Vrijdag. […] Ze menen te weten wat kinderen willen en dat is een voorbarige conclusie die niet lollig uitpakt. […] Waarom vallen kinderboekenschrijvers door de mand zodra ze voor volwassenen proberen te schrijven? Omdat ze zich tegenover leeftijdgenoten onsterfelijk belachelijk maken als ze zich als wetenden gedragen. Wat voor leeftijdgenoten een lachwekkende pedanterie is, levert loftuitingen op als het voor kinderen is bedoeld.”

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006 (ebook, revised edition). Anthes, Emily. “Babies and Toddlers Spread Virus in Homes More Easily Than Teens, Study Finds.” New York Times, 16 August 2021, www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​08/​16/​hea​lth/​covid-​kids-​toddl​ers-​trans​miss​ion.html. Beauvais, Clémentine. “The Problem of ‘Power’: Metacritical Implications of Aetonormativity for Children’s Literature Research.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 44, no. 1, 2013, pp. 74–​86. Bhabha, Jacqueline. “The ‘Mere Fortuity’ of Birth: Are Children Citizens?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2004, pp. 91–​117. Christensen, Nina. “Imagining Equality: The Emergence of Ideas of Tolerance, Universalism, and Human Rights in Danish Magazines for Children, 1750–​1800.” O’Sullivan and Immel, pp. 111–​27. —​—​—​, and Charlotte Appel. Children’s Literature in the Nordic World. University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. “Coronavirus Outbreak and Kids.” Harvard Health Publishing, 16 September 2022, www.hea​lth.harv​ard.edu/​ disea​ses-​and-​con​diti​ons/​coro​navi​rus-​outbr​eak-​and-​kids. “Covid: Huge Protests across Europe over New Restrictions.” BBC News, 21 November 2021, www.bbc.com/​ news/​world-​eur​ope-​59363​256. Darr, Yael. The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1930–​1970. John Benjamins, 2018. Engzell, Per, Arun Frey, and Mark D. Verhagen. “Learning Loss Due to School Closures During the COVID-​ 19 Pandemic.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, no. 17, 2021, doi:10.1073/​ pnas.2022376118. Flanagan, Victoria. “ ‘I Thought I Lived in a Country Where I Had Rights’: Conceptualising Child Citizenship in the Posthuman Era.” Kelen and Sundmark, pp. 247–​61. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin Books, 1991. Geraghty, Lincoln. “Captain Euro and Citizenship Education: Creating a Comic Book Hero for European Children.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 73–​81. Giuffrida, Angela. “Italian Children Take Lessons Outside School in Protest at Covid Closures.” The Guardian, 21 November 2020, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2020/​nov/​21/​ital​ian-​prote​sts-​covid-​sch​ool-​closu​res-​anita-​ iacove​lli-​turin. Kelen, Kit, and Björn Sundmark. “First Things: Introduction.” Kelen and Sundmark, pp. 1–​8. —​—​—​, eds. The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations of Childhood. Routledge, 2012. Kokkola, Lydia, and Sara Van den Bossche. “Diversifying Understandings of Diversity: Possible Routes for Nordic Children’s Literature.” Barnboken: Tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning, vol. 43, December 2020, doi:10.14811/​clr.v43.521. Kuijer, Guus. Het geminachte kind. Synopsis, 1980. —​—​—​. The Book of Everything. Edited and translated by John Nieuwenhuizen, Arthur A. Levine Books, 2006. Lathey, Gillian. “Introduction.” Lathey, pp. 98–​109. —​—​—​, ed. The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader. Multilingual Matters, 2006.

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Sara Van den Bossche Meek, Margaret. “Preface.” Children’s Literature and National Identity, edited by Margaret Meek, Trentham Books, 2001, pp. vii–​xvii. Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. Garland, 1996. —​—​—​. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. Routledge, 2010. O’Sullivan, Emer. “Does Pinocchio Have an International Passport?” Lathey, pp. 146–​62. —​—​—​. Kinderliterarische Komparatistik. Winter, 2000. —​—​—​. “Narratology Meets Translation Studies, or The Voice of the Translator in Children’s Literature.” Lathey, pp. 98–​109. —​—​—​, and Andrea Immel, eds. Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Panaou, Petros, and Tasoula Tsilimeni. “International Classic Characters and National Ideologies: Alice and Pinocchio in Greece.” Kelen and Sundmark, pp. 193–​206. Paruolo, Elena. “Introduction.” Brave New Worlds: Old and New Classics of Children’s Literature, edited by Elena Paruolo, Peter Lang, 2011, pp. 9–​28. Rutschmann, Verena. “Russian Picturebooks from 1922 to 1934: Modernization, Sense of Nationhood, Internationalism.” O’Sullivan and Immel, pp. 187–​214. “School Climate Strikes.” The Guardian, 6 November 2018–​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​envi​ronm​ent/​sch​ool-​climate-​ stri​kes Slettan, Svein. “Ski Tracks in the Wilderness: Nature and Nation in Norwegian Young Adult Books from the 1930s.” Kelen and Sundmark, pp. 23–​37. “Socialization.” Britannica, www.bri​tann​ica.com/​scie​nce/​social​izat​ion, accessed 16 February 2023. Vloeberghs, Katrien. “Kindbeelden in de westerse moderniteit.” Literatuur zonder leeftijd, vol. 20, no. 70, 2006, pp. 10–​23. “Volksgeist.” Britannica, January 2023, www.bri​tann​ica.com/​topic/​Vol​ksge​ist. Watkins, Tony. “Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Children’s Literature.” Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism, edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 1992, pp. 173–​95. Wesseling, Elisabeth. “Introduction: Roundtable: Citizenship Education Through Childhood Heritage in Twenty-​ First Century Europe: Challenges, Trials, and Errors.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 67–​73.

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22 RELIGION AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Gabriele von Glasenapp

Religion has played a prominent part in the history of children’s literature. To this day, religious subjects and questions are dealt with in both fiction and nonfiction, on the textual as well as on the pictorial level. The great importance attributed to religion in the broadest sense within children’s literature in the past and the present is reflected not least in the fact that religious genres are an integral part of the genre spectrum of children’s literature, for example in the form of children’s catechisms, children’s Bibles, or biblical tales. Yet regardless of religion’s importance in children’s literature, a scientifically sustainable definition of what can be understood by the terms “religious children’s literature” or “religion in/​and children’s literature” proves difficult: So far, neither a uniform terminology nor a delimitation of the subject matter has been established within children’s literature research. This point is also evident in the numerous lexicons, handbooks, reference works, and encyclopedias of children’s literature, in which, with a few exceptions (see, e.g., Ghesquière), there is often no entry on the term “religion,” with reference instead being made to terms related to the literary representation of religion, such as Bible stories. From a religious perspective, religious children’s literature is understood to include all texts not explicitly and exclusively devoted to secular subjects. However, there is a danger that such a strict division would exclude too many works from the text corpus. Therefore, it is desirable to employ open, pragmatic definitions (Born 399), according to which works are counted as religious children’s literature if they 1. identify themselves as such qua genre designation; 2. deal with subjects or questions explicitly designated as religious on the content level; and/​or 3. “have religious aspects in the broader sense, in that they deal with existential problems, questions of meaning,” as Reinmar Tschirch puts it (“Religion” 2). These broad definitions make it possible to consider the entire range of children’s literature, even if the boundaries to nonreligious children’s literature must then be described as fluid. At the same time, in this way presentations of religious children’s literature can avoid the narrowness of focusing only on the comparatively small corpus of denominational literature for children, which would no longer be in harmony with current understandings of modern children’s literature. Last but not least, the definitions of religious children’s literature I use here are based on the premise that the term “religious” should not be understood one-​dimensionally as a synonym for “Christian,” but rather as a term that can, but does not have to, include specifically Christian aspects. This chapter focuses on religious Christian as well as Jewish works, since these –​in contrast to Muslim-​oriented children’s literature –​were and are formative for both the European and the North American continent.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-26

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Religious Children’s Literature from a Historical Perspective: The Middle Ages and Early Modern Times The often used equation of religious and Christian children’s literature is due to an unreflective use of both adjectives (from a Christian perspective), but above all to the fact that children’s literature was produced, distributed, and received in an explicitly Christian context from the very beginning in the German and Anglo-​American language areas as well as in the majority of other European countries. The fact that Jewish children’s literature (in Hebrew or Yiddish) dealing with religious material, themes, and content also existed in European countries from at least the Middle Ages forward (Völpel and Shavit) long went unnoticed both by the Christian majority and by the relevant research. To this day, knowledge about early Christian children’s literature, which came into existence around the eighth century, initially handwritten and mostly in Latin, is limited. Like the children’s literatures of later epochs, the early works were influenced by the conceptions of childhood prevailing at that time, even if, as Otto Brunken observes, this period of life was not firmly delineated in terms of age, but was rather conceived as adulthood’s opposite (2) –​ not an independent period of life, but a preparatory phase. Thus, early children’s literature almost exclusively offers models for future behavior in family and society. This fact manifests itself in the explicitly religious and indeed doctrinal orientation of many works: readers are to be educated to piety and strengthened in their faith. Another decisive factor in the explicitly Christian character of these texts is that they were initially used primarily as teaching aids in a religious context, namely in cathedral and monastery schools. This view changed little in the centuries after 1200: humankind was seen above all as part of the Church, as the property of Christ, which is why education, as well as the works used in its furtherance, continued to be placed entirely at the service of the child’s progress toward salvation. Changes only appeared in the age of the humanists, that is, at the end of the fifteenth century: Latin’s predominance was gradually broken in favor of vernacular textbooks, and the invention of printing made possible an enlargement and differentiation of the text corpus for children. Religious textbooks were increasingly supplemented by secular texts. An important caesura in the significance of religious children’s and youth literature in the German-​speaking world is formed by the educational writings of Martin Luther, which emerged in the sixteenth century (Glasenapp, “Gott”). Unlike the humanists, Luther again argued for an exclusively religious education, a view that also informs Protestant children’s literature based on his writings: literacy should enable every child to read the Holy Scriptures independently. This Protestant children’s literature, which is limited to the religious, is not designed for independent reading, as the texts are conveyed by adults; the act of reception concentrates on repeating and memorizing the texts in order to internalize the elementary teachings of the (Protestant) faith. Like Protestant literature, Catholic children’s literature was devoted entirely to religious subjects in the first decades after the Reformation. Over the course of the seventeenth century, both Protestant and Catholic children’s writings increasingly included natural history, history, and technology as subjects of instruction. The strong religious-​didactic character of the texts as a whole, however, remains unaffected. The basic function of religious children’s literature also does not change over the centuries: it is supposed to introduce young readers to the Holy Scriptures, and the majority of genres (including Bible excerpts, history Bibles, catechism sermons) are dedicated to this goal. Alongside these religiously instructive writings are religiously edifying writings such as songs, prayers, examples, rules of life and morals, and legends of saints. In both cases, these genres are nonfiction in the broadest sense, although in the case of legends and biblical stories, the border with narrative literature is crossed. Another central genre of religious children’s literature is school drama, which has appeared in large quantities since the fifteenth century. Such dramas were considered an effective instrument not only of religious instruction and entertainment, but above all of confessional propaganda. 268

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An important role in the production of religious children’s literature was also played by the producers of the texts, the majority of whom were pastors and educators. Their sharp criticism of the novel prevented the development of this form as a separate genre of children’s literature until the end of the eighteenth century. Only short literary forms such as legends or fables were tolerated, since they could be used for religious instruction, as could narratives if they were interspersed with religious references, biblical examples, or similar instructional elements. Jewish children’s literature, defined as all texts addressed by Jewish educators to Jewish children, was also exclusively religiously oriented in its early days, namely from the twelfth century onward, and serves religious instruction (Glasenapp, “Selbstverortungsprozesse”). However, reading practices within Jewish culture are fundamentally different from those of the Christian majority society. This difference exists because regardless of his social background, every boy is obligated to publicly demonstrate his knowledge of Hebrew upon reaching the age of thirteen, the time of his bar mitzvah: he is called to the Torah, from which he reads a passage. To learn Hebrew, attendance at a cheder (traditional Jewish religious school) was essential. There children first learn the Hebrew alphabet and the Hebrew language, with the help of which they then begin to study the Torah and later the Talmud. The reading socialization they underwent in this way in the Middle Ages and early modern period was thus entirely devoted to the acquisition of knowledge that was both religious and identity-​forming. The first compendia with excerpts from the Talmud explicitly addressed to young people appeared in the fourteenth century. They were intended to help students internalize the extensive subject matter in a short time, and as such, these summaries were mostly abridgments that took into account the young recipients’ limited comprehension. This process of adapting and modifying religious canonical writings considered important for children to suit their capacity finds its best-​known expression in the Passover haggadot, collections of biblical texts, religious poetry, songs, and ritual observances of Passover, published since the thirteenth century. The Haggadah (narrative) is read to this day in the family circle on the eve of Passover, in a form that is likely to attract the attention of children. For this reason, as early as the Middle Ages, the haggadot are expanded with songs and furnished with pictures (Goldin 20–​22). In the history of Jewish children’s literature, the sixteenth century represents a break with tradition in that Yiddish works for children now also appear. They, too, are often illustrated, and their contents continue to serve religious instruction. However, they are no longer read in the cheder but, like the Passover haggadot, in the family context, and the content, unlike that of the Torah and Talmud, no longer consists of canonized texts.

The Enlightenment In the history of European children’s literature, the epoch of the Enlightenment, which in the children’s literary context began in the last third of the eighteenth century, marks an important caesura, which also had a decisive impact on religion’s previous dominance over content and forms. The epoch was shaped by the rise of the bourgeoisie, which began to emancipate itself culturally from the nobility, leading to an increasing permeability of class boundaries. This greater social fluidity, in turn, brought about a fundamental change in the concept of childhood –​ not least through the influence of the writings of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (Schikorsky 28–​30). Childhood was no longer seen as a phase of preparation for adulthood, but as an independent life stage, and accordingly children were granted a special position within the bourgeois family model. They were now considered people with special needs, and in order to educate them to be enlightened human beings, they also required special literature tailored to their abilities and interests. To this view, vehemently advocated by enlightened educators, is owed the emergence of a modern, enlightened children’s literature, a literature created specifically for children and supposed to be completely attuned to their nature. 269

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This break with the children’s literature of the pre-​Enlightenment period was accompanied by a reorientation in terms of content: the new literature was supposed to be reason-​oriented and practical, while at the same time entertaining its audience. Overtly religious content was not banned from these texts, but it was relegated to a subordinate place. For example, the religiously motivated afterlife orientation of earlier moral teachings shifted completely to this world. The task of the texts now consists primarily of imparting to children not so much a religious as a moral elementary education that appeals equally to heart and mind. Above all, the specifically confessional is left out in favor of general categories such as God, piety, and virtue. At the same time, spiritual songs and children’s Bibles (for school) are among the most popular and strongly represented genres of the late eighteenth century, and narrative children’s literature is also interspersed with religious (nondenominational) teachings. As Theodor Brüggemann and Hans-​Heino Ewers write, “A large part of this sector [of entertaining children’s and youth literature] can be characterized as religiously and morally entertaining literature for children” (43).1 This observation also applies to the most famous German-​language children’s literary novel of the Enlightenment, Robinson der Jüngere (1779, Robinson the Younger) by Joachim Heinrich Campe. In addition to Robinson’s story and explanations of geography and other “realities,” there are many passages devoted to religious themes, such as theodicy, vindications of God’s goodness despite the existence of evil; the story of how Robinson converts the indigenous Friday to Christianity; the Christian songs with which the protagonist expresses his trust in God; and Robinson’s final purification, in which the motif of the Prodigal Son is unmistakably echoed. In his preface, Campe explicitly names this orientation of his novel, since he is concerned with “sowing the seeds of virtue, piety, and contentment with the ways of divine providence in young hearts.”2 It is also significant that Campe’s novel is not an isolated case as far as its religious underpinnings are concerned; religious themes and teachings can also be found again and again in children’s poetry and ABC books of this era. For the Jewish minority in the German states, too, the last third of the eighteenth century marked a threshold period in which they were given the opportunity for the first time to participate to a significant extent in the culture of the non-​Jewish majority. This paradigm shift, which has gone down in cultural and literary history under the name Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment), was triggered by the strong economic boom of Prussian Jewry, by the European Enlightenment, but also by a loss of rabbinic authorities (Shavit and HaCohen; Glasenapp, “Selbstverortungsprozesse”). The movement was driven by Jewish publicists, philosophers, and educators in Berlin, which is considered the first center of the Haskala. The goal of these Maskilim (followers of the Haskala) was legal equality for the Jewish minority, which was to go hand in hand with a cultural rapprochement with the Christian majority. In turn, it was hoped that the latter would be willing to integrate the Jewish minority, which had hitherto been socially, culturally, and religiously excluded, permanently into mainstream culture. Analogous to the representatives of the Enlightenment, with some of whom they had close contact, the Maskilim also developed a lively publication activity in journals they founded specifically to promote the efficient dissemination of their ideas. In these publications, the education of Jewish youth was emphasized as a central concern. Adolescents should now be taught not only Torah and Talmud, but also secular subjects, and this no longer only in Hebrew, but also in German, the language of the Christian majority. These goals must be seen as a central prerequisite for the formation of a modern Jewish youth literature oriented to the principles of the Haskalah. In this new Jewish children’s corpus, religion was expected to continue to play a central role, but in a different way than in earlier centuries. Significantly, a book from the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) addressed to adolescents is considered the children’s literary “founding document” of the Haskalah: in 1770, the Hebrew work Ssefer megilat Kohelet im be’ur kazar u-​masspik la-​hawanat ha-​katuv al pi pschuto le-​to’elet ha-​ talmidim (The Book of Kohelet [Ecclesiastes], with a brief and sufficient commentary for the literal understanding of Scripture for the benefit of students) appeared in Berlin. Of crucial importance here are, on the one hand, the canonical text (the Book of Ecclesiastes), but on the other, the “short and 270

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sufficient commentary,” the so-​called Be’ur; it is by Moses Mendelssohn and, although printed in Hebrew letters, is written in German (Salzer, “Kinderbibeln”). In this work, the position that the Maskilim envisioned for religion within the new Jewish children’s literature can be seen as through a burning glass. A canonical text (the Book of Ecclesiastes) is annotated in German, but Hebrew rather than Latin letters are used for this commentary. This hybrid form indicates that the work was addressed exclusively to Jewish readers, as only they were likely to be able to read the Hebrew letters. These readers, in turn, had to be so open to the ideas of the Haskalah that they had a command of the German language and were willing to tolerate the addition of a commentary in German to the canonical text of the Tanakh. As in his translation of the Pentateuch from Hebrew into German (1780–​83), Mendelssohn’s intention was to introduce young people to the sacred writings and simultaneously to disseminate the ideas of the Haskalah through his own commentaries and translations. The principles of content and language Mendelssohn advocated in his translation projects can already be found in the 1770s in textbooks used in the newly founded schools for Jewish children. In these schools, adolescents were now also taught secular subjects, and accordingly textbooks were needed whose content conformed to the ideas of the Haskalah and at the same time offered possibilities for connection to the subjects taught in non-​Jewish schools. A proliferation of Jewish textbooks and reading books resulted, such as David Friedländer’s Lesebuch für jüdische Kinder (Reading Book for Jewish Children, 1779), all of which strive to accommodate the new educational concepts based on the ideas of the Haskalah. Despite their differences, these anthological reading books manifest an important similarity in that they contain religious and secular texts by both Jewish and non-​Jewish authors. That is, the representatives of the Haskalah conceded a central position to religious texts within the new children’s literature, which is only relativized by the fact that the spectrum of texts to be read was considerably expanded by secular works.

Excursus: Bible Stories/​Children’s Bibles Tschirch observes that during the Enlightenment, the genre of biblical stories experienced a great upswing (“Kinderbibel”) via anthologies that explicitly address young readers but deviate linguistically and formally from the biblical pre-​text. The genre owes its origin to the desire to convey biblical content to children when the Bible itself was not considered a suitable work for teaching; it was too extensive, too demanding in terms of content and language, and too expensive to purchase. In their design, the Bible stories, which as a genre cannot always be sharply separated from the children’s Bible, exhibit a wide range, from stories that are close to the Bible to a rather free text design to literary adaptations of biblical material. Sometimes the biblical texts are supplemented by commentaries, songs, or legends about saints and martyrs. In their intention, biblical stories pursue quite different goals: to introduce the Bible, explain events considered central through narratives, bring Christian doctrine to life, serve moral education. Another characteristic of the Bible stories is that they are not printed in Latin like the bibles of the day, but mostly in the various national languages. Rudimentary forms of Bible stories have existed since the twelfth century, but the genre experienced its first heyday in Protestant European countries during the Reformation; along with hymnals and catechisms, Bible stories soon became part of the fixed religious reading canon in Protestant schools. The attractiveness of Bible stories was also increased by the fact that they were provided with illustrations at an early stage. During the Enlightenment, with its preference for the vividness even of Bible stories, a large number of biblical histories were produced, the best known being a work by the Protestant teacher Johann Hübner (1868–​1732), Zweymahl zwey und fuenfzig auserlesene biblische Historien aus dem alten und neuen Testamente (1714, Two Times Fifty-​Two Selected Bible Stories from the Old and New Testaments). The work, with numerous copperplate engravings, made its author the most successful textbook author of the eighteenth century; it was 271

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translated into numerous languages, including French, Italian, Hebrew, and English (Reents). Biblical histories and children’s Bibles are still widely used today, both in the classroom and as recreational reading. The focus of these texts continues to be oriented toward religious education; that is, the central criteria are the claim to tell stories in a way that is appropriate for children and relevant, an adequate aesthetic design, factual explanations, and fictional additions in the form of actualizing frame stories (Langenhorst, “Schriften” 158–​59). Since the Enlightenment, biblical histories with a specifically Jewish orientation have also been published in European countries (HaCohen), intended for use as textbooks in Jewish schools. Among the first of these works was the 1790 reading book Awtalion, we-​hu mewo ha-​limud le-​na’are bne Jissra’el we-​le-​kol ha-​chafezim bi-​leschon ewer (Awtalion, or Introduction to the Study for the [Young] Students of Israel and for All Who Desire [to Learn] the Hebrew Language), written in Hebrew by Aron Wolfsohn. Using Bible stories, Jewish students were to both read and learn the Hebrew language (HaCohen 75–​79). The concept was so successful that a second edition appeared in 1800, but with a different emphasis: the focus is no longer on learning Hebrew through Bible stories, but on teaching the biblical story itself. Thus, the number of biblical histories significantly increased at the expense of language education, and the context of the individual stories changed. The inclusion of additional biblical histories creates a historical continuum that begins with Creation and ends with the Babylonian Exile, so that almost the entire Old Testament story is now told continuously and coherently. Wolfsohn’s successful project marked the beginning of the rise of a new genre within Jewish children’s literature. It was oriented toward non-​Jewish pre-texts, but set its own emphasis with regard to the selection of Bible texts as well as on the linguistic level. The spectrum ranges from extensive works such as Isaak Markus Jost’s Neue Jugendbibel (1823, New Children’s Bible), which retells the five books of Moses (Salzer, “Bible”), to Jewish adaptations of Christian works such as Hübner’s Zweymahl zwey und fuenfzig auserlesene biblische Historien aus dem alten und neuen Testamente in David Samosc’s work Ssefer nahar me-​Eden (A Book of the River from Eden), published in 1837 (HaCohen 80–​84; Salzer, “Kinderbibeln” 82–​86). Biblical histories and Jewish children’s Bibles were among the most important religious (book) genres of Jewish children’s literature throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike in English-​speaking countries, however, after the Second World War a Jewish children’s Bible did not appear again in Germany until the 2010s: Hanna Liss and Bruno Landthaler’s five-​volume children’s Torah, Erzähl es deinen Kindern (2016, Tell it to your children, see Langenhorst, “Schriften” 170–​72).

From the Nineteenth Century Through the Second World War Religion plays a much larger role in children’s literary texts of the Romantic and Biedermeier periods (in Germany, roughly 1797–​1815 and 1815–​48, respectively) than it does in Enlightenment texts. In the course of the critique of Enlightenment “utilitarianism,” the idealized image of the child who embodies a paradisiacal primordial state of nature emerges in Romanticism; that is, the recourse to religious pre-​texts already appears in the conception of childhood of the time. The collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1808, The Boy’s Wonderhorn), edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, is one of the first texts to be attributed to Romantic children’s literature. The appendix to the third volume contains a compilation of songs, poems, and prayers –​explicitly addressed to children –​not for instruction, but for practical use. From this emphasis on the religious in a popular song collection, it was only a step to further anthologies, song collections, and family books appearing in the course of the early nineteenth century, in whose texts sensual-​bodily, emotional, and situational experiences are brought together to form an individually shaped unity of God, man, and nature, a tendency that intensified in the following decades. In addition, in European fairy tales and legends, whose collection and popularization are inseparably connected with Romanticism, there is a large reservoir of biblical-​religious and Christian images 272

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and motifs. Many of these tales also examine religious-​existential questions, such as the meaning of life in the face of everyday suffering or its genuine limitedness. Like the religious-​biblical stories, fairy tales deal with basic questions of human existence, and the references to religiously based questions appear almost omnipresent (Tschirch, “Religion” 6). The renewed upswing of Christian confessional children’s literature since the 1830s should also be seen in this context. One of the best known representatives of these moral-​religious narratives is the Catholic poet Christoph von Schmid (1768–​1854), whose works are among the most popular children’s literary narratives of the nineteenth century. Schmid wanted to remedy the lack of Catholic children’s literature by means of narrative writings that did not conceal their religious character in subtext, but openly emphasized it. Thus, in his works, one finds situations again and again that point to the goodness of God and unwavering trust in God. Schmid’s characters are thereby reduced to cutouts whose sole purpose is to convey religious doctrines, even if these admissions are often to the detriment of plot coherence. The great success of Schmid’s stories, as both school and leisure reading, can be seen in their numerous translations (into English, French, and Arabic, among other languages) and adaptations, some of them for Jewish children. Their vigorous circulation shows the extent to which he met the interests of his readers; that is, the works were by no means received only by Catholic readers, but were also read by members of other denominations. The great popularity of religious narratives, which can also be attributed to the emergence of Christian conservative scriptural movements in the course of the nineteenth century, also extended to Protestant children’s literature. Hardly less successful than Schmid’s writings were the stories of the Protestant pastor Christian Gottlob Barth (1799–​1862), who was also one of the most prolific authors of children’s and youth literature of his time. Characteristic for children’s literature of the nineteenth century, however, and not only in German-​ speaking countries, is an increase in the number of publishing houses and, associated with this, a constantly growing corpus of texts: as Emily Bruce discusses elsewhere in this volume, children’s literature became a mass medium. This growth is associated with an increasing differentiation in genres, functions, and themes. Despite the initial popularity of religious stories, the last third of the nineteenth century saw the rise of secular literature designed primarily for entertainment. Such texts’ influence on children’s literature was soon so great that one can discern successive processes of convergence between religious and secular children’s literature. Thus, in the tradition of the works of Schmid and Barth, religious-​confessional children’s literature attempted to make use of new popular genres such as adventure, historical, or colonial narratives. As a consequence, the overtly confessional-​religious teaching receded in favor of representations of generally human, sometimes also sociocritical questions, into which religious implications are then brought as a trustworthy guideline. It is significant that this convergence or merging of religious and secular entertainment literature is by no means exclusive to religious children’s literature, but can also be observed on the part of authors of secular works; both sides obviously try to profit from the popularity of the other literature. Prominent examples of this form of penetration are Johanna Spyri’s children’s novels Heidis Lehr-​ und Wanderjahre (1880, Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning) and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat (1881, Heidi: How She Used What She Learned), which have been translated into all major world languages. The focus is on the experiences of the orphan Heidi with her grandfather in Switzerland, her paralyzed Frankfurt friend Klara, and Klara’s recovery in the Alps, where she miraculously learns to walk again. Already these few remarks implicitly refer to the religious grounding of the novel. These elements are even more clearly evident in Heidi’s prayers and her trust in God, to which she clings almost unshakably, and in the embittered grandfather’s “conversion,” patterned after the parable of the Prodigal Son, which Heidi reads to him (Tschirch, “Religion” 9). However, making reference to religious elements and maxims was also suitable for legitimizing existing ideologies, as can be seen in numerous colonial narratives from a variety of linguistic traditions. With religious argumentation, nationalist-​imperialist views towards Black peoples could 273

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be justified as well as, in rare cases, questioned. Such a connection, in which religious elements are explicitly used to legitimize one’s own worldview and are thus functionalized, can also be found in some early narratives forming part of National Socialist (Nazi) children’s literature. Modern Jewish children’s literature owes its emergence at the end of the eighteenth century primarily to efforts to acculturate while at the same time preserving a genuinely Jewish identity. Both desires were reflected in the literature, shaping the works with naturally very different emphases until the early 1940s. In turn, within Jewish children’s literature the proportion of religious or religiously based works was consistently significantly higher than it was within non-​Jewish children’s literature during the same period. This can already be seen in the nineteenth century in the large number of folkloristic works, mostly from sagas and legends from the Talmud and Midrash, as well as in the large number of religious instructional writings, including religious instructional writings and prayer and devotional books (Völpel and Shavit). Only in the early twentieth century did the spectrum of religious works expand to include narrative works and picturebooks. Very popular in this context were the so-​called festival narratives, which offered reading material on the religious course of the year or on Jewish holidays.

The Present In the years and decades after the Second World War, the critical perception has been that religion –​ with the exception of religious literature for everyday use –​ plays only a marginal role in narrative, lyrical, and dramatic children’s literature (Tschirch, “Religion” 11). Yet it is often overlooked that this statement is based on a very narrow concept of religion, in which religious literature is often equated with Christian literature. A paradigm shift for the subject area of religion only took place in the course of the 1990s –​ both in German-​speaking countries and elsewhere in Europe and the Anglosphere. From this time on, a new openness toward religious and, for the first time, also interreligious matters, toward a new literary approach to God or transcendental questions, becomes apparent. Children’s literary works now thematize this long-​excluded area in a differentiated and open manner, without reducing the religious merely to general ethical categories. This new interest in religious topics has been accompanied by a more differentiated perception and categorization of this text corpus on the part of researchers. The texts considered relevant are sometimes grouped as follows: first, works of unintentionally religious literature in which, however, ethical-​existential issues are dealt with, so that the border between religious and philosophical children’s literature in these texts must be described as fluid; second, works in which explicitly religious topics are dealt with, but not from a specific denominational perspective; and third, works in which a Christian-​based message is recognizably at the center of the plot (Langenhorst, “Hinführung” 14). If we look at these three corpora in their entirety, their different sizes are striking. Thus, the third and smallest text corpus, that composed of specifically Christian-​oriented children’s literature, does indeed exhibit a wide range, but it is perceived and discussed almost exclusively within research on religious education. In contrast, the first two corpora, which are significantly larger and have an explicitly transnational orientation due to the large number of translations, are also the subject of interdisciplinary research discourses: children’s literature studies, cultural studies, theology, religious studies, and didactics, as well as philosophy. The characteristics of this type of children’s literature, which is religious in the broadest sense –​ for example, the successful and widely published novels Mister God, This Is Anna (1974), by “Fynn” (Sydney Hopkins), or Julemysteriet (1992, The Christmas Mystery) by the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder –​include not only its transnational orientation but also the great topicality of biblical themes and actors. Another characteristic of these works is their interreligious perspective, as in Catherine Clément’s worldwide success Le voyage de Théo (1997, Theo’s Journey). Clément’s work is unusual 274

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in putting religion at the center of the plot, something that happens in very few narrative works; more typically, religion provides one plot strand among many. The spectrum of genres in which religious themes are taken up is equally diverse: adolescent novels, historical novels, biographies, childhood stories, Holocaust narratives. In addition, there are socially critical novels that deal with the danger of religious sects for young people. So far, research has controversially discussed the question of whether and to what extent religious themes are also taken up in popular fantasy literature, or whether the often hermetic fantasy worlds can and must rather be seen as a metaphor of the human search for meaning or as an evocation of the religious antagonisms of good and evil. The situation is different with Jewish children’s literature, although here again a distinction must be made depending upon the country of first publication. While in the Anglosphere Jewish children’s literature has been published continuously since the nineteenth century, including a not insignificant number of works with religious themes, in Europe almost no Jewish children’s literature has appeared for several decades since the Shoah (Holocaust), apart from religious literature for everyday use. After the genocide of the Jewish minority, Jewish communities in Europe were too small to create their own children’s literature. This situation changed only in the late 1990s in the course of the enlargement of the communities through immigration from the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Now narrative works by Jewish authors about Jewish life in the present are appearing in many European countries. In contrast to non-​Jewish children’s literature, in these texts the characters’ Jewish identity is manifested exclusively in a religious context, meaning that the plot always has explicit religious references. This trait is also apparent in the texts published since 2010 by the Berlin-​based Ariella Verlag, the first Jewish children’s and youth book publisher in Germany since the Second World War (Glasenapp, “Nische”). Explicit references to Judaism can be traced in all of the publisher’s publications, even if not all of them are religious literature in the narrower sense. The only exceptions are stories and picturebooks about the Shoah, many of which have no or only a few religious references. Significantly, Jewish identity is manifested here not in reference to Jewish religion, but through the moment of persecution. Jewish children’s literature can be distinguished from works by Jewish and non-​Jewish authors about Jewish life and religion, which, however, are not explicitly addressed to young Jewish readers. The majority of narrative works are historical novels, more rarely present-​day narratives in the form of friendship stories. In many cases, the stories are told from the perspective of non-​Jewish youths who meet Jewish peers, become friends with them, and in this way receive information about Jewish culture and religion. Sometimes these treatises on Jewish rituals and festivals take up so much space within the plot that the boundaries between narrative work and nonfiction become blurred, as for example in Peter Sichrovsky’s novel Mein Freund David (1990, My Friend David; cf. Langenhorst, “Hinführung” 21).

Excursus: Nonfiction The upsurge of religious themes in children’s literature that began in the late 1990s also includes, for the first time, a wide range of nonfiction texts that treat religion not only on the textual but also on the pictorial level. A new emphasis becomes clear: while the earlier religious children’s literature wanted to convey almost exclusively the laws and teachings of the authors’ own religion, the other (world) religions now also come into focus. This text corpus is therefore only conditionally religious literature, more precisely described as works about religion whose character is less religious than encyclopedic. An important feature of this literature is its global orientation. The focus is no longer on one religion, but on world religions, as can often be seen from the titles: Religions by Philip Wilkinson (2008), World Religions by David Self (2001), A Faith Like Mine: A Celebration of the World’s 275

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Religions Through the Eyes of Children by Laura Buller (2005). A large part of these works are translated into many languages, in many of which a Christian-​Central European perspective dominates, which is committed to a concept of religion based on the concept of tolerance of the European Enlightenment: consider, for instance, Burkhard Weitz’s claim, “This book should therefore help you [...] to better understand people from other religions” (9).3 In appealing to the tolerance of their readers, such texts construct a clear difference between one’s own religious culture and that of others, for whose religious culture one has to find understanding, despite this otherness. In this context, Christianity (from which the majority of authors and readers come) is not accorded a privileged position, but it is repeatedly emphasized that Christianity has the most followers of any religion in the world. However, the extent to which a position of cultural-​religious superiority is already inherent in the idea of tolerance –​because it is for the stronger to tolerate the weaker –​is not reflected. On the pictorial level, mostly in the form of world maps, the superiority of Christianity manifests itself even more clearly. For the maps illustrate to what extent the individual religions are assigned to certain parts of the world, to regions or countries. Not only does the dominance of the Christian denominations appear unmistakable here, it also becomes clear that, with the exception of Christianity, all other religions may be understood as national, even regional phenomena. In this way, the works convey cultural concepts based on the idea that each religion represents a homogeneous, self-​contained entity closed off from other religions. At the same time, this approach insinuates that a distinction can always be made –​in the sense of a binary opposition –​between one’s own religion and the religion of others. The genuinely transnational, hybrid character of religions according to postcolonial and transcultural views, as developed in the 1990s by Homi Bhabha (among others), is concealed, even negated, in this way. Although these texts are current nonfiction books, they therefore create, analogously to fiction, a whole cosmos of religious-​cultural stereotypes, presented from a Christian-​European perspective. Religion does not appear here as a hybrid, transcultural phenomenon, but as a closed homogeneous entity. Tolerance toward other religions is postulated, but the fact that this demand results from a position of assumed religious-​cultural superiority is concealed.

Conclusion Religion has played a prominent part in the history of children’s literature –​however, to very different extents and in very different functions. Initially, its most important task was to form and strengthen child readers’ religious identities. In earlier centuries, children’s literature consisted almost exclusively of religious texts, but with the Enlightenment, children’s literature also turned to secular themes. Nevertheless, there were always periods, such as the Romantic era, in which religion played a dominant role in children’s literature. How strongly the depiction of religious themes was linked to one’s own identity is shown by the central role that religion plays not only within Christian but also within Jewish children’s literature to this day. What has changed over time is above all the variety of literary genres. In addition to fiction, there is now also a large corpus of nonfiction texts, and narrative and nonfiction picturebooks also play an important role. Biblical texts are also still present within children’s literature as reference texts. Although religious identity continues to trigger conflicts and wars today, children’s literature conveys a different picture: an international, transreligious perspective dominates; the focus is on the diversity of the world’s religions; and religious topics overlap with philosophical and ethical questions, and thus always with the question of one’s own identity.

Notes 1 “Ein gewichtiger Teil dieses Sektors [unterhaltender Kinder-​ und Jugendliteratur] kann als religiös und moralisch unterhaltende Literatur für Kinder gekennzeichnet werden.” All translations from the German are mine.

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Religion and Children’s Literature 2 “[D]‌en Samen der Tugend, der Frömmigkeit und der Zufriedenheit mit den Wegen der göttlichen Vorsehung in junge Herzen einzustreuen.” 3 “Dieses Buch soll dir also helfen [...] Menschen aus anderen Religionen besser zu verstehen.”

Works Cited Arnim, Achim von, and Clemens Brentano. Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Alte deutsche Lieder. 3 vols., Mohr und Zimmer, 1805–​1808. Born, Monika. “Religiöse Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur.” Taschenbuch der Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur, edited by Günter Lange, Schneider Hohengehren, 2000, pp. 399–​414. Brüggemann, Theodor, and Hans-​Heino Ewers. Handbuch zur Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur. Von 1750–​1800. Metzler, 1982. Brunken, Otto. “Mittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit.” Geschichte der deutschen Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur, 3rd ed., edited by Reiner Wild, Metzler, 2008, pp. 1–​42. Buller, Laura. A Faith Like Mine: A Celebration of the World’s Religions Through the Eyes of Children. DK Children, 2005. Campe, Joachim Heinrich. Robinson der Jüngere, zur angenehmen und nüzlichen Unterhaltung für Kinder. 2 vols., Carl Ernst Bohn, 1779/​80. Clément, Catherine. Le voyage de Théo. Ed. du Seuil, 1997. Friedländer, David. Lesebuch für Jüdische Kinder. Zum Besten der jüdischen Freyschule. Voß und Sohn, 1779. Fynn. Mister God, This Is Anna. Collins, 1974. Gaarder, Jostein. Julemysteriet. Aschehough, 1992. Ghesquière, Rita. “Contemporary Religious Writing.” International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2004, pp. 306–​17. Glasenapp, Gabriele von. “ ‘Für Gott und Vaterland’: Martin Luther als Erinnerungsfigur in der Kinder-​ und Jugendliteratur vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert.” Martin Luther und die Reformation in der Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur: Beiträge zur literarhistorischen und literaturästhetischen Praxis, edited by Gabriele von Glasenapp, Claudia Maria Pecher, and Martin Anker, Schneider Hohengehren, 2018, pp. 37–​60. —​—​—​. “Raus aus der Nische. Zur Darstellung jüdischen Lebens in der aktuellen Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur.” JuLit, vol. 47, no. 3, 2021, pp. 52–​58. —​—​—​. “Selbstverortungsprozesse: Jüdische Lesebücher des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts als interkultur elles Bezugssystem zwischen Aneignung und Abgrenzung.” Schnittstellen der Kinder-​und Jugendliteraturforschung: Aktuelle Positionen und Perspektiven, edited by Ute Dettmar, Caroline Roeder, and Ingrid Tomkowiak, Metzler, 2019, pp. 245–​66. Goldin, Simcha. “Juden und die Welt der Bücher in den Jahren 1100–​1700: ‘Schriften für Kinder’ und ‘Kinderbücher’ bei den Juden in Deutschland.” Völpel and Shavit, pp. 6–​23. HaCohen, Ran. “Biblische Geschichten für jüdische Kinder.” Völpel and Shavit, pp. 69–​84. Hübner, Johann. Zweymahl zwey und funffzig auserlesene biblische Historien aus dem alten und neuen Testamente. Joh. Friedrich Gleditsch und Sohn, 1714. Jost, Isaak Markus. Neue Jugend-​Bibel, enthaltend die die religiösen und geschichtlichen Urkunden der Hebräer, mit sorgfältiger Auswahl für die Jugend, übersetzt und erläutert. Trautwein, 1823. Langenhorst, Georg. “ ‘Heilige’ Schriften für Kinderhand? Kindertora, Kinderbibel und Kinderkoran aus Sicht der trialogischen Religionspädagogik.” Kinderbibel –​Kindertora –​Kinderkoran: Neue Chancen für (inter-​) religiöses Lernen, edited by Georg Langenhorst and Elisabeth Naurath, Herder, 2017, pp. 157–​79. —​—​—​. “Hinführung: Religion in der Kinder-​ und Jugendliteratur? Epochen und Ertrag der Forschung.” Gestatten: Gott! Religion in der Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart, edited by Georg Langenhorst, Sankt Michaelsbund, 2011, pp. 7–​24. Liss, Hanna, and Bruno Landthaler, eds. Erzähl es deinen Kindern. Die Torah in fünf Bänden. Ariella, 2014–​16. Mendelssohn, Moses. Ssefer megilat Kohelet im be’ur kazar u-​masspik la-​hawanat ha-​katuw al pi pschuto le-​ to’elet ha-​talmidim (Das Buch Kohelet mit einem kurzen und ausreichenden Kommentar für das wörtliche Verständnis der Schrift zum Nutzen der Schüler). Isaak Speier, 5530 [1770]. Reents, Christine. “Johann Hübner. Zweymahl zwey und funffzig Auserlesene Biblische Historien aus dem Alten und Neuen Testamente. Der Jugend zum Besten (1714).” Handbuch zur Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur. Von 1570–​1750, edited by Theodor Brüggemann and Otto Brunken, Metzler, 1991, pp. 231–​59. Salzer, Dorothea M. “Zweisprachige jüdische Kinderbibeln oder: Wie die Maskilim die Hebräische Bibel für jüdische Kinder übersetzten.” Trans-​ lation –​trans-​ nation –​trans-​ formation: Übersetzen und jüdische Kulturen, edited by Petra Ernst, Studien-​Verlag, 2012, pp. 65–​104.

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Gabriele von Glasenapp —​—​—​. “Re-​writing the Hebrew Bible for Jewish Children? Isaak Markus Jost’s New Children’s Bible in Its Context.” Wissenschaft des Judentums Beyond Tradition: Jewish Scholarship on the Sacred Texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, edited by Dorothea M. Salzer, Chanan Gafni, and Hanan Harif, de Gruyter, 2019, pp. 25−52. Samosc, David. Ssefer nahar me-​Eden. Kolel ssipur ha-​korot ascher karu libne Jissra’el mi-​jom ziwa H[a-​Schem] we-​niwre’u ad jeme Jehuda ha-​makabi [...] im sche’elot u-​mussar hassekel. Fluss von Eden. Enthaltend die Geschichte der Kinder Israels von ihrem Schöpfungstage bis zu den Tagen von Jehuda dem Makkabäer [...] mit Fragen und‚ nützlichen Lehren,’ sowie ein kurzes Gedicht am Schluss jeder Geschichte aus deren Inhalt, in hebräischer und deutscher Sprache. [Deutsch in hebräischen Lettern:] oder biblische Erzählungen nach Hübner, mit Fragen zum Nachdenken, nützlichen Lehrern und gottseligen Gedanken. Hirsch Sulzbach, 5595 [1837]. Schikorsky, Isa. DuMont Schnellkurs Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur. DuMont, 2003. Self, David. World Religions. Lion, 2001. Shavit, Zohar, and Ran HaCohen. “Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur der Haskala und der jüdischen Reformpädagogik seit den 1770er Jahren.” Völpel and Shavit, pp. 22–​84. Sichrovsky, Peter. Mein Freund David: Ein Kinderroman. Nagel and Kimche, 1990. Spyri, Johanna. Heidis Lehr-​und Wanderjahre. Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat. Andreas Friedrich Perthes, 1880/​81. Tschirch, Reinmar. “Kinderbibel.” Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur –​Ein Lexikon. Autoren, Illustratoren, Verlage, Begriffe. Teil 5: Literarische Begriffe/​ Werke/​ Medien, edited by Kurt Franz, Günter Lange, and Franz Payrhuber, Corian, 2000, pp. 1–​23. —​—​—​. “Religion/​Religiöses in der Kinder-​ und Jugendliteratur.” Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur –​Ein Lexikon. Autoren, Illustratoren, Verlage, Begriffe. Teil 6: Themen/​Motive/​Stoffe, edited by Kurt Franz, Günter Lange, and Franz Payrhuber, Corian, 2001, pp. 1–​27. Völpel, Annegret, and Zohar Shavit, eds. Deutsch-​ jüdische Kinder-​und Jugendliteratur: Ein literatur geschichtlicher Grundriß. In Zusammenarbeit mit Ran HaCohen. Metzler, 2002. Weitz, Burkhard. Nachgefragt: Weltreligionen. Basiswissen zum Mitreden. Loewe, 2007. Wilkinson, Philip. Religions. DK, 2008. Wolfssohn, Aron. Awtalion, we-​hu mewo ha-​limud le-​na’are bne Jissra’el we-​le-​kol ha-​chafezim bi-​leschon ewer). Awtalion, d.h. Einführung in das Studium für die [jungen] Schüler Israels und für alle, die die hebräische Sprache [zu lernen] begehren. Chewrat Chinuch Ne’arim [Jüdische Freischule], 1790.

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23 WHATEVER COMMON PEOPLE DO Social Class in Nineteenth-​and Twentieth-​Century British Children’s Fiction Kimberley Reynolds and Jane Rosen

It has often been observed that the British are “obsessed” with class (Cannadine xi), and so, while not all characteristics of the British class system are found elsewhere, there are enough commonalities in class relations around the world to make British children’s literature the most effective case study for a discussion of class. This is particularly true of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Britain, when issues around class dominated social relations, inevitably affecting how these were represented in writing directed at the young. Since for much of this time the production of arts and letters was almost entirely the preserve of the middle and upper classes, their preoccupations, concerns, ideologies, and lifestyles controlled children’s publishing. Ann Alston observes that “this is in many ways fitting in terms of the audience that nineteenth-​century children’s literature was designed to address” (27). As the examples below show, when material was directed at working-​class children, there was no shift in its ideological assumptions. This meant that across the nineteenth century, children and young people on the lower rungs of the social ladder only saw themselves in print as their self-​described social superiors saw or wanted to see them. During the twentieth century, new kinds of writers, some from working-​class backgrounds, began to influence how working-​class characters and families were depicted. Unsurprisingly, given how it was produced and distributed, change was slow; the vast majority of what was published continued to uphold the status quo, promulgating the norms, behaviors, and ways of thinking about the world favored by those who were comfortably off, educated, and in positions of authority. Since this segment of the population was managed by white males who, publicly at least, were assumed to be heterosexual, the interests and agendas of that group were also dominant. As a consequence, the working class, along with many other parts of society, was effectively silenced in mainstream British children’s publishing before the 1960s. The focus here is on class, but class has always intersected with other social forces including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and age (Attfield 47). Since we lack the space to explore all these topics, we concentrate on representations of the working class. As will be seen, these are rooted in a mixture of romanticism, paternalism, condescension, voyeurism, and othering of workers and the poor, giving rise in them to anger, shame, envy, fear, incredulity, and forced dependence. Nowhere is this mixture more nakedly shown than in texts produced specifically for working-​class children.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-27

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1800–​80: Cheap Print for and About the Poor The label “working class” has never designated a homogenous entity; especially in the nineteenth century, it encompassed a wide range of individuals and groups, many of which were the product of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of capitalism (Bullen 48). At this time, although those with full-​time work could often support themselves, “working-​class” was often used synonymously with “poor.” This practice came about because, while new forms of work could bring greater wealth and independence to the “productive” parts of society, they also gave rise to extreme forms of poverty and exigency. But in Britain, class has never been solely about a person’s economic situation. Cultural capital and family background are central to determining class. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fortunes could change overnight, but class was more resistant. The tension between money and social status became a prominent literary theme. Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855) is a well-​known example of a novel featuring the vicissitudes of family finances and the desperate assertion of gentility in poverty; the relationship between social standing and wealth also featured in writing for the young. For instance, The Lancashire Collier Girl: A True Story (1795 but in print through the 1840s), published in Hannah More’s (1745–​1833) series of Cheap Repository Tracts, begins by describing the rise of a working-​class family through their own industry: the mother and one daughter spin, while the father and two children, including his daughter Mary, work in the mines. Across the fourteen pages of this small, cheaply produced work, readers learn that through their labors underground, “Mary and her brother, so far from being a burden, were bringing a little fortune to their parents, even when they were eight and ten years old” (4). Tragedy strikes when a falling rock kills the father, the mother loses her sanity, and the youngest children are taken to the poorhouse. Mary redoubles her efforts, and one by one, over a period of years, she brings home family members, all of whom die. Broken by work and grief, she is finally hired as a servant to a wealthy family and there finds a more tolerable and secure life. But class distinctions mean that Mary is forever trapped in the working class, while Amy Dorrit, with her middle-​class background, becomes independently wealthy and marries a gentleman. Priced at one penny, More’s short work was more likely to find its way into working-​class homes than was any Dickens novel. It can be assumed that its message about the virtues of work and accepting one’s position in society were intended principally for that audience. Hard-​working, uncomplaining, socially compliant Mary and her family belong to the category known as the “respectable working class.” Other works of cheap fiction stressed the same values even more forcefully, often through the example of individuals who have failed to conform to what those in more powerful positions expected. For instance, Upwards and Downwards, or, the Sluggard and the Diligent (1857) by ALOE or A Lady of England (the pseudonym of Charlotte M. Tucker, 1821–​93) contrasts the behaviors and fates of recently orphaned “diligent” Willie and “sluggard” Sam. Both begin as crossing sweepers, but Willie is eager to learn and to be useful. He attends the local Ragged School (a charitable establishment for the education of impoverished children), where he learns to read, write, do sums, mend, and wash. He becomes “so respectable and clean, that it could scarcely have been believed that [he and Sam] had started from the same point of poverty” (14). Several critics have written about respectability as a form of social control and its centrality to the emergence and maintenance of class distinctions (see, e.g., Attfield; Skeggs). Compliance on the part of the poor, as manifested through industriousness, cleanliness, politeness, dress, and religious observance, distinguished between those who deserved sympathy and assistance and those who did not. Willie signals his compliance through both behavior and faith: he prays regularly and attributes his success to God, noting, “his piety gave new impulse to his industry” (15). He is rewarded with the opportunity to help in a shop, where he proves so capable and honest that he is made a partner. Sam, by contrast, represents the “undeserving poor”: he is last seen being arrested, not for the first time. At no point does this or any of the other examples of cheap print produced for working-​class readers 280

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consider what makes a child fail to conform to middle-​class expectations, or what might be missing from their lives –​education, opportunity, security, love, food, shelter –​that would make compliance possible and even desirable to the poor.1 ALOE’s work was primarily published under the auspices of religious publishing houses such as the Religious Tract Society (RTS) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Intersections between religion and class are evident in works similar to Upwards and Downwards produced for working-​class children across the nineteenth century. The persistence of their messaging is seen in the anonymously authored John in Search of a Place (187?). Published by the RTS, this chapbook tells the story of a boy whose widowed mother is too ill to work, meaning John must support them. The superintendent of his Sunday school observes John turn down work; when he asks why, the boy explains that “they kept open shop on a Sunday” (7). John is established as honest when he finds a gold coin on the pavement and is the means of restoring it to its owner, none other than the superintendent. Because of John’s godly and honest actions, the superintendent finds him a job. The story ends with mother and son praying to the God who has not forgotten them. John’s, Willie’s, and Mary’s behavior demonstrates that they have internalized middle-​class values around Christianity, honesty, family, and work. The book’s ten pages do not allow for much character development or philosophical debate, but it is striking that in what constitutes a happy ending, the household has to be sustained by prayer alone until John is paid his first wages. The desperation of their situation is made to seem tolerable through their faith, and mother and son appear to be well satisfied. No thought is given to helping John continue his education, thereby enabling him to earn more and to contribute at a higher level to society. The intended readership would have been only too aware of mother and son’s bodily needs, and for this reason might have resisted both the religious and the social messages in this and similar stories. However, a different approach was being explored by writers who, though also middle class, were deeply troubled by the living conditions and wasted lives of the urban poor (the rural poor received very little attention in print for children). The last three decades of the nineteenth century saw the heyday of what are variously referred to as “waif,” “street arab,” or “street urchin” novels. Of these labels, “street arab” best captures the extent to which their child figures were seen as other to the mainstream of society (see Reynolds, Oxford 257–​58). Like the cheap print discussed above, these books had middle-​class authors and were often published by religious firms, but at least some of their working-​class characters are represented more carefully, compassionately, and respectfully than in earlier works aimed at the poor. One reason for this shift is that their readership was principally comprised of middle-​class children who were being encouraged to understand that these waifs and urchins were only “other” because of their circumstances. To help change their lives, “street arab” fiction featured child characters who were pure in heart and mind if not in body and clothes. Its authors aimed to encourage readers to act kindly towards the grubby, hungry children they sometimes encountered on the street (for discussions of individual works, see Cutt; Bratton; Davin, “Waif”). Authors “Brenda” and “Hesba Stretton,” the pen names of Mrs. G(eorgina) Castle Smith (1845–​ 1933) and Sarah Smith (1832–​1911), respectively, were among a growing number of people concerned about both the moral and the physical condition of the nation’s working class. Theirs are protest novels that point to a crisis of poverty in Britain’s cities. Through vignettes of those pushed to the margins of society –​ starving orphans, drunken mothers, young women forced into prostitution, and others in similarly desperate situations –​ books such as Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) and Brenda’s Froggy’s Little Brother (1875) introduced the comfortably off to the plight of the poor. More than that, the novels identify both some causes of poverty and the responsibility of those in power to address them. Like the stories for working-​class readers, these longer works present admirable characters, but instead of rising through their own efforts, their young protagonists must be rescued by charitable interventions. Before they are saved, however, the children are often helped by those around them, 281

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although they too have barely enough to live on. “Froggy,” so named because as a baby his voice was croaky from the damp conditions of his home, tries to support himself and his little brother Benny, but they need more than he can earn. Benny eventually dies, but before this happens, their neighbor gives them food and fuel she cannot spare. The text calls these actions characteristic of “the generosity of her class” (158), and “Brenda” uses this example to show readers that they can do much more for the needy and at less cost to themselves. As this brief description shows, there is a strong family resemblance between “street arab” protagonists and figures such as Mary, Willie, and John. Froggy is one of the deserving poor, conforming to the ideal of the compliant working class. He tries to be clean, mends his clothes, has good manners, works hard, and is instinctively devout. A key difference is that “street arab” fiction seeks not to maintain the status quo but to bring about social reform. Its authors observed at first hand the wretched conditions of poor children and highlighted the consequences of failure to improve their lives. As well as expressing compassion and moral outrage, their writing asks whether children growing up in acute poverty, underfed, undereducated, riddled with diseases and vermin, and lacking knowledge of God could become a stable, reliable, governable workforce. The way individuals and groups are represented in fiction, or any other medium, particularly when the nature of the representation is largely unchanged over a sustained period, is socially significant. Stuart Hall explains how representation produces meanings that “organize and regulate social practices, influence our conduct and consequently have real, practical effects” (1). Nineteenth-​century representations of the working class in children’s literature were constructed by the middle class. They promoted compliance in working-​class readers and benevolence by those who were financially better off, firmly punishing (by death, prison, disgrace) those who failed to match the image created for them. What they did not include was any sense of how the working classes saw themselves, or any acknowledgment of a distinct working-​class culture of the kind documented by Stephen Humphries, Anna Davin (Growing Up Poor), and Jonathan Rose. Although even though in life, many members of the working class willingly adopted the behaviors associated with respectability, this conformity did not necessarily mean social and political deference. Indeed, respectability was often used to signal self-​respect and independence in ways that provided a sense of agency and social dignity (McCalman 90). By contrast, opportunities for resistance in relation to print, whether by writers or characters, were limited to rejecting or refashioning plots. However, through a combination of political, social, and educational change, challenges to middle-​class images of the working class were finding their way into print.

1880–​1945: The Working Class Writes Back These challenges came from the socialist movement that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. From the work of organizations and institutions such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), the organization around Robert Blatchford and his newspaper The Clarion, the Labour Church, and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) came an understanding that educating children was necessary for the development of a socialist society. This led to the creation of socialist publications for children that represented the working class from their own perspective (Gerrard; Reid; Reynolds, Rosen, and Rosen; J. Rosen). The first examples were sections for children in journals produced by the organizations mentioned above, notably including from 1888 the ILP’s The Labour Leader, first edited by Keir Hardie (1856–​1915), founder and leader of the Labour Party, and The Young Socialist, the journal of the Socialist Sunday Schools (SSS), launched in 1901. This period saw contributions by influential figures such as Katharine Bruce Glasier (1867–​1950), who produced fables and polemics; F. J. Gould (1855–​1938), known for humanist writings for children; and Margaret McMillan (1860–​1931), whose stories were based on her work in nursery education. 282

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Middle-​class empathy was not sufficient; these publications wanted to give working-​class children the education necessary to understand, question, and, they hoped, change their situation. The Young Socialist was produced to support SSS ideals. Significantly for changing class dynamics, its first editors were working class; Archie MacArthur (no dates) was a carpenter, and John Searson (no dates), his successor, was a textile worker. Regular contributors, in addition to those already mentioned, included the cabinetmaker and leading trade unionist Alex Gossip (1862–​1952) and the engineer Tom Anderson (1863–​1947). These are among the first working-​class writers for children. Perhaps surprisingly, much of the socialist material in these publications was moral and didactic in ways similar to works generated by the middle class, though the motivation was different: they show that overcoming the obstacles in the lives of working-​class children needed complete societal change (M. Rosen, Introduction). Nevertheless, socialist stories still required both working-​class children and adults to prove themselves worthy of the new society to come, not least by behaving better than their middle-​class counterparts. For example, in The Seed She Sowed (1891), a largely sympathetic account of the 1889 dockers’ strike by Emma Leslie (1837–​1909), much is made of the need for the dockers to behave well. Even the books of Fabian Socialist E(dith) Nesbit (1858–​1924) have this tendency, particularly apparent in Harding’s Luck (1909). Dickie Harding is a disabled orphan who, despite his surroundings, is gentlemanly and honest. Nesbit is critical of the poverty that exists in Britain, but the book belies her socialist beliefs: when Dickie is magically transported back to the seventeenth century, it is revealed that he is nobly born, evidently explaining his impeccable behavior. Many of the socialist works from this period also suffer from the issues identified in the examples discussed above. Even though the writers included members of the working class, there is still a sense of the outside looking in instead of a distinctive and genuine working-​class atmosphere and perspective. The reason for this distance is difficult to explain except as a product of education, which was largely set and overseen by the middle classes. Add to this training a background of Christian worship, and the resulting representation is at some remove from working-​class experience and attitudes. That said, the turn of the twentieth century is a significant time in the depiction of the working classes to young readers, not least for the role literature played in the alternative education that socialist organizations attempted to initiate. Their success was limited, however, as evidenced by the continuing publication of books with peripheral working-​class characters. This marginalization changed during the First World War, when working-​class characters often had central roles. Nevertheless, in the fiction that took place on all fronts of the war, including the home front, middle-​class protagonists trained, supported, and educated their working-​class compatriots, often as officers, and sometimes, as in Brenda Girvin’s Munition Mary (1884–​1970; 1918), as fellow workers. Girvin’s middle-​class Mary volunteers as a munitions worker. Not only does she outperform her fellow workers in the factory, she also manages to locate at least seven spies and inspire her working-​ class women comrades to understand the importance of their work. Girvin makes clear that Mary’s leadership qualities stem from her middle-​class morality and standing. These qualities are also apparent in the boys’ adventure stories of the time. For example, Fighting with French (1918), by Herbert Strang (the pseudonym of two English authors, George Herbert Ely, 1866–​1958, and Charles James L’Estrange, 1867–​1947), has as its heroes two middle-​class friends who inspire workers at the factory owned by the father of one of the young men by joining up and promising to remain ordinary soldiers. Their natural leadership abilities ensure that the majority of the men soon wish to release them from this vow. As one of the factory workers says: “We’ve got to look at things as they are, and be honest about it, and what I say is that you’ve had the training that makes officers and we haven’t; and besides, you were born one way and we were born another, and it’s no good trying to make out that chalk’s as good as cheese” (166). This attitude was then the norm, but there were alternatives. The Young Socialist continued, and although its articles were primarily concerned with peace, negotiations, and support for conscientious objectors, the reaction to 283

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the revolutions in Russia in 1917 meant that a new attitude to literature for working-​class children began to emerge. From 1918 and into the 1920s, as industrial relations worsened drastically, more class-​based publications for children were produced (see Reynolds, Rosen, and Rosen). Revolutionary educators such as Anderson, James Stewart (no dates), and Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–​1927) started issuing material reflecting the reality of working-​class children’s lives. More than this, working-​class ethics, society, and struggle were identified and validated, and much was made of the fact that workers produced but did not share in the world’s wealth. One effect of this newfound appreciation for workers was the publication of a large and eclectic group of left-​wing periodicals for their children, the central premise of which was that children had an active role to play in ensuring the liberation of their class (J. Rosen, “Spirit”). The 1930s saw the publication of one of the first mainstream children’s books with a working-​class family at its center. The Family from One End Street (1937) by Eve Garnett (1900–​91) introduced the Ruggles family, headed by Jo[siah], a dustman, and Rosie, who takes in washing. It was welcomed as a positive portrayal of a warm, loving, and supportive working-​class family who managed their poverty with dignity and humor. While this characterization of the novel might be true, it is still a work that looks from the outside; its author had no experience of working-​class life or values. Garnett also perpetuates many long-​standing tropes; for instance, the idea of the deserving poor is evident when the Ruggleses’ second daughter, Kate, wins a scholarship to the grammar school and is given her school uniform by one of her mother’s customers. This theme of charity rewarding hard work and honesty is continued when Jo’s moral stance on returning money found on one of his rounds leads to a gift that enables the family to go on a long-awaited excursion. This is a warm family story, but the underlying patronizing moralities and otherness of the working-​class experience are undeniable. Indeed, there is a sense of using working-​class life for middle-​class amusement. Happily, a radical publisher, Martin Lawrence, began producing children’s books in which working-​class children were central. Still largely written by middle-​class writers, they at least rendered working-​class protagonists as initiators of their own lives, and portrayed their culture and daily existence, although hard and relentless, as worthwhile. The first major children’s novels published by Martin Lawrence were by Geoffrey Trease (1909–​ 98), who became one of the best-​known writers of historical fiction for children. Bows Against the Barons was published in 1934, quickly followed by Comrades for the Charter (1934). Both books present the events covered –​the Robin Hood legend and the Chartist movement, respectively –​from a working-​class perspective. Moreover, Trease’s Robin Hood is no longer the nobleman of the legend, angry because his lands have been unfairly confiscated, but a peasant. This change transforms the struggle depicted into one about class. It is a peasant rebellion, and no nobleman or middle-​class savior comes to the rescue. Trease’s next novel, Missing from Home (1936), follows Anne and Dick, who have run away from their middle-​class home because of family circumstances. During their time on the run, they meet up with various working-​class characters and see the reality of their poverty. They participate in a factory strike, but at the end are encouraged to return home to complete their middle-​class education so they can use it “to help t’ peoples of t’ world” (207). The most successful of Martin Lawrence’s class-​aware novels was Alex Wedding’s 1931 Ede und Unku, translated as Eddie and the Gypsy (1935). Alex Wedding was the pen name of Grete Weiskopf (1905–​66), who worked as a typist, bookseller, and bank clerk in Berlin before turning to writing. Eddie and the Gypsy was her first novel for children. This outstanding work deals with working-​class culture, family, and characters in a realistic and unsentimental way. Wedding is clear on the actuality of working-​class Berlin; she describes the lives of her characters without comment, helped by John Heartfield’s (1891–​1968) powerful photographic illustrations. Reasons for poverty and unemployment are given, and it is understood that the solution must come from the members of the working

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class: the characters (both adults and children) are involved in their own liberation. Unsurprisingly, both Wedding and Heartfield were forced into exile after the rise of Nazism, and the book was chosen for the book burnings. Martin Lawrence continued publishing children’s books until the 1950s, but they were never so interesting again. Indeed, during the Second World War, the move towards a more authentic view of the working class was put on hold if not reversed. Much of the writing for children produced during the war deals with evacuees. Evacuee characters are generally working class and depicted as dependent on charity, ignorant, uncultured, and in need of middle-​class support. Typical examples include Elinor Brent-​Dyer’s (1894–​1969) The Chalet School Goes to It (1941) and the Tharrus trilogy by Catherine Macdonald Maclean (1941–​44). There were exceptions, however, notably Kitty Barnes’s Visitors from London (1941; see Reynolds, Left Out 144–​46). Evacuation meant that all sections of society mingled in a way that they had not done since the trenches of the First World War. Lessons had to be learned from that postwar experience, when returning soldiers discovered that they were not coming back to the promised homes fit for heroes but to poverty, unemployment, and deep industrial unrest. Those left to pick up the pieces after 1945 were determined to ensure that this scenario was not repeated. The 1942 Beveridge Report set out the foundations for a welfare state; with a Labour government elected in 1945, the report was acted upon. Sweeping changes were made to education and social insurance, leading to Britain’s National Health Service. Together, educational reforms and the new social contract contributed to a change in the middle-​class domination of publishing for children.

1945–​2000: The “Common People” Speak This chapter’s title and its final section refer to Pulp’s influential 1995 single “Common People,” a song that gives expression to the gulf that continues to exist between the classes in Britain, though arguably it is today less wide and simplistic than previously. The song plays with the word “common,” which, as well as connoting something widespread, familiar, and ordinary, is often used as a pejorative synonym for low social class/​uncultured. At the same time and in contrast to that view, the lyrics pay tribute to working-​class contributions to British life and culture. Significantly, the song is not about a working-​class art student but gives voice to his thoughts, insights, experiences, and desires. He is educated and able to critique the differences between “common people,” such as him, and the wealthy girl who imagines she wants to live that life. Although it continued to be dominated by stories about white, middle-​class, often male children, postwar British children’s literature did contribute to the movement to represent and validate working-​ class culture and values. Five figures stand out for their efforts to bring about this change: Leila Berg (1917–​2012), Aidan Chambers (1934–​), Alan Garner (1934–​), Robert Leeson (1928–​2013), and Robert Westall (1929–​93). In different ways each challenged the belief in the inferiority of working-​ class life and the value of middle-​class culture carried over in the children’s publishing industry from the nineteenth century (Reynolds and Tucker 11, 30–​31; Takiuchi 26–​30). They also fought against the assumption that working-​class children rarely became enthusiastic readers, and that if they did, they used reading to escape their situation because “that sort doesn’t read anyhow, and certainly doesn’t want stories about people like himself living as he does” (Chambers, qtd. in Takiuchi 28). While all produced some work for younger children, of the five only Berg concentrated on new and developing child readers. Chambers, Garner, Leeson, and Westall wrote for young people who were close to finishing their time at school. These readers would shortly be coming to terms with their class position, not least when faced with the decision about whether it was possible and desirable to continue their education. If they did not, most would become unskilled workers. The works discussed below attempted to help readers at this critical juncture interrogate and challenge long-​standing assumptions about the intellects, ambitions, behaviors, and lifestyles of Britain’s working class.

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Leila Berg’s Common Children As a teenager, Berg was influenced by the work of Susan Isaacs, an educational psychologist who taught that young children should be free to manage their own learning. To this philosophy Berg added her own political activism, some educational training, and her experience as a children’s book editor, arriving at the conclusion that children’s literature was failing to represent and speak to many of Britain’s children. Foremost among these were working-​class children, but she did not ignore the intersections between class and other factors leading to marginalization, including race, ethnicity, and disability. Berg summed up the disjunction between children’s book and working-​class children thus: The child from the bookless home comes stone cold to reading; and what do we give him in the classroom? We give him readers where father mows the lawn (what lawn is part of his life, for heaven’s sake?) [...] where the whole family sits down to have breakfast at a snowy damask-​ clothed table, all properly dressed and calm, and full of polite, grammatically correct, griefless, angerless, joyless, lifeless conversation. (n. pg.) In 1967 she launched Nippers, a series of early reading books reflecting and validating the everyday life and speech of Britain’s “common people.” This was followed in 1972 by Little Nippers. Both series were based on her observations of real children in working-​class homes, and many of the authors she subsequently commissioned came from working-​class backgrounds. Importantly, these homes were happy, functional, and entertaining –​ not places from which children needed to escape. Nippers show families in state-​subsidized housing, sometimes with leaks in the roof. They eat fish and chips or rice and peas and similar food associated with different ethnicities and cultures, and engage in ordinary activities such as going fishing and betting on football/​soccer matches. The language is based on the everyday speech of working families in different parts of the country. Nippers represent an early example of the inclusion of authentic working-​class voices and experiences. They were also designed to teach reading, so from their earliest years working-​class children could see themselves in books, not as others saw them, which was almost invariably in the roles of villains, not very bright sidekicks, and victims (see Dixon, Chapter 2), but as they saw themselves. Since Nippers were available to all children, the series also invited readers from the upper classes into working-​class homes and families.

Robert Westall and Class Nostalgia Like Berg and all the other writers discussed here except Chambers, Westall was identified as an intelligent child at primary school, and with the help of a scholarship, attended a selective school where pupils were prepared to go to university (Berg turned her back on higher education in order to pursue her interests in activism and journalism). The emotional effects on these writers of being educated out of their class are discussed by Haru Takiuchi, who also explores how they engage with class in their writing. Since in adulthood none was living a working-​class life, their positive and largely affectionate portraits of working-​class families are based on recollection and are often colored by nostalgia and left-​wing politics. Inevitably, given the time at which they were both writing, Westall and Berg fought many of the same battles, perhaps especially around the inclusion of authentically working-​class language. In Westall’s case, this speech went beyond nonstandard English. A largely unwritten but well understood code of practice made it taboo for children’s books to include references to sex (or anything private to do with bodies), violence, and bad language, referring to both swearing and grammatically incorrect usage (Reynolds and Tucker 31). Westall’s writing does all of these things. He also rejected 286

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the tropes of innocent childhood and working-​class victimhood: his novels present readers with a succession of relatively knowing children who frequently find themselves in challenging and compromising situations. Westall saw himself as part of a new wave of realist writers for children, and his young characters were based on first hand knowledge of his own and his son’s childhoods and the generations of children he taught. Many of Westall’s books use war to legitimize the controversial elements of his writing. Under cover of wartime disruptions to daily life, he shows children swearing, lying, fighting, and learning things adults think are “not for children” –​ though they happen to children. In Kingdom by the Sea (1990), for instance, Harry moves from a vague knowledge of what happens in the boys’ lavatories at schools to an explicit awareness of the sexually predatory nature of some adults. He also learns about territorial behavior, hunger, and the blind incompetence of authorities and institutions. Westall defended his use of swearing on the grounds that children –​ and at the time especially the kind of working-​class children in his books –​swear. Today the speech of children from all classes tends to be represented realistically, including the use of swearing, dialects, slang, colloquialisms, and references to a variety of sexual acts and activities. Westall was instrumental in bringing about this change. Arguably, it was only because his child characters were working class that the experiences they have and the language they use were acceptable to editors and educators. Of course, including challenging language and content per se was not Westall’s main interest. He wanted his books to appeal and be relevant to a wide spectrum of readers, not just the middle-​class children and young people who were the usual target audience for children’s books.

Aidan Chambers and Robert Leeson: Reading and “Righting” for Working-​Class Youth Westall’s belief that those who did not come from middle-​class backgrounds often struggled to find children’s books relevant was shared by Chambers and Leeson. Both set out to create books that would speak directly to and about working-​class youth. For Chambers, this effort began with books in the Topliner series he edited for Macmillan Education. Based on his own experience of growing up in a working-​class neighborhood and of teaching adolescent working-​class boys, Chambers devised a clear set of guidelines for Topliners. The books have simple plots about the kinds of things that then happened –​ or that they hoped would happen –​ to working-​class youths who have left or will soon leave school. The books often include sexual encounters, though they always enforce a message about being sexually responsible, including avoiding pregnancy as in John Crompton’s Up the Road and Back (1977). The Topliner style is straightforward, eschewing lengthy passages of description and literary pyrotechnics while encouraging reader identification. Although Chambers set out to represent working-​class adolescents, the series contains undeniable classist assumptions about what working-​class boys are like and want (see Reynolds, “Spot”). It is debatable whether Topliners did much to recognize working-​class culture even as they sought to cultivate working-​ class readers. Chambers’s own writing is in marked contrast to Topliners. Breaktime (1978) and Dance on My Grave (1982) both feature clever, ambitious working-​class boys whose success at school causes tensions at home. In Dance on My Grave, for instance, readers learn that Hal’s parents “couldn’t keep up with him because they couldn’t understand what he was talking about half the time” (64). When writing about rather than for working-​class readers, Chambers celebrates the wit and intellectual prowess of working-​class youth, allows them adventures and opportunities, and tells their stories in a sophisticated way. The novels undoubtedly recognize working-​class ability, but they are deeply ambivalent about working-​class life per se. They are driven by the need for the protagonists to move into a higher cultural sphere, from the safety of which they can look back and appreciate their parents and the teachers who shaped them. 287

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Leeson did not share Chambers’s ambivalence. His long career as a children’s writer and critic reflects his commitment to the political left and to inclusiveness. In Reading and Righting (1985) he argues that historically, literature was often a tool of repression but that it could also be used to bring about progressive social change. He too campaigned for greater diversity in children’s publishing, starting at the level of language. Leeson championed all those at the margins of culture, but particularly those from the working class. In The Third Class Genie (1975), for instance, schoolboy Alec lives in a crowded house in a run-​down neighborhood; he finds the genie of the title snoring in a beer can on the site of a derelict factory. The book also covers racism and regional prejudice: Alec lives in the post industrial north of England, then known principally for its local accents, dialects, and poverty. School is central to Leeson’s account of working-​class childhoods, and The Third Class Genie is essentially a modern school story. As he put it, the modern school story must “come to grips with the life of working-​class children and their home background [...] for the majority of day schools this is essentially the working class community” (Books 35). This idea underpinned the long-​running (1978–​2008) Grange Hill television series, which was set in a comprehensive school and for which Leeson wrote several tie-​in books. Leeson’s books also probe interactions of class, race, and gender, as in It’s My Life (1980) and Jan Alone (1990). These novels feature a working-​class teenage girl who is left to look after her father and brother when her mother leaves the family home. Her struggles for independence from the men in her life, both family and romantic, are chronicled with understanding and sympathy. The books unambiguously accept working-​class culture, ethics, and life; their characters do not hanker after a middle-​class existence.

Alan Garner: Articulating the Struggle Between Roots and Education Garner’s anger at the effects of being removed from his class background in order to receive a middle-​class education is well documented (Philips; Takiuchi). His concern with class difference is powerfully articulated in The Owl Service (1967) through a retelling of one of the ancient Welsh stories contained in the Mabinogion. The trio of characters forced to re-​enact the myth of betrayal and love do so not just in a highly sophisticated fantasy, but in a masterly dramatization of the clash between upper-​class entitlement and working-​class resentment. Breaking through is Garner’s realization of what his education has cost him, a topic he returns to in Red Shift (1973). The latter is a complex book involving different times, but Garner’s anger about how he has been alienated from his class and home is clearly expressed through the book’s main character, Tom. Like Garner, Tom was born into the working class, but his intelligence means he is receiving a middle-​class education. His interactions with his parents are fraught with miscommunications and misunderstandings. Tom’s contempt for them reflects the experience of many of what Takiuchi refers to as “scholarship boys.” Both books deal with an important aspect of British education for the working classes. Until selective examination at age eleven was generally abandoned, grammar school education for working-​class children almost always meant removal of pupils from their community. Not only did the education itself (not least its emphasis on proper speech –​a recurring theme in Garner’s work) isolate children from families and friends, but often schools were located far from working-​class homes, resulting in children traveling and studying outside their areas. The move in the 1960s to a more mixed education system and the employment of more teachers from working-​class backgrounds (including Chambers and Westall) introduced a greater degree of acceptance of working-​class values and culture in the educational system. The influence of former scholarship pupils in librarianship, education, literary criticism, and publishing, in tandem with this new generation of writers with working-​class origins, finally made it possible for books set in working-​class environments to become a significant part of 288

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mainstream children’s literature. This change is part of the context from which the acute observations of Pulp’s “Common People” emerged. Over the 200 years spanned by this chapter, then, children’s literature has proved important in the work of helping Britain deal with its obsession with class. The examples discussed show a movement from middle-​class writing that attempted to tell working-​class children what they should be like, to a philanthropic concern to rescue working-​class children from the perceived dangers and shortcomings of their family environments. This move meant acknowledging that working-​class children would be no different from those who were better off if they had the same access to education, food, comfortable housing, safety, health, and work. Spurred on by the early socialist movement, children’s books and periodicals continued to argue both for working-​class children’s right to these basic requirements and for the country’s need for a healthier, happier, and better educated workforce. Such works helped prepare the ground for the emergence in postwar Britain of a new kind of class-​aware writing for children that validated working-​class life and culture. The class ceiling has not been shattered, and as recent coverage of the British royal family has shown, class bias is still deeply ingrained, but young readers are no longer limited to writing that looks at working-​class life from the outside and judges it inadequate.

Note 1 For a large overview of cheap print for children, see Frances.

Works Cited ALOE. Upwards and Downwards, or, the Sluggard and the Diligent: A Book for Boys. Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1857. Alston, Ann. The Family in English Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2008. Anon. John in Search of a Place. Religious Tract Society, n.d. Attfield, Sarah. “Rejecting Respectability: On Being Unapologetically Working-​Class.” Journal of Working-​ Class Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, December 2016, pp. 45–​57. Berg, Leila. “The Five Year Gap.” The Manchester Guardian, 20 November 1967, www.leilab​erg.com/​artic​les/​ the-​5-​year-​gap-​man​ches​ter-​guard​ian-​201​167/.​ Bratton, J. S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. Croom Helm, 1981. Brenda. Froggy’s Little Brother. John F. Shaw, 1875. Bullen, Elizabeth. “Class.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, New York University Press, 2011, pp. 48–​52. Cannadine, David. The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. Columbia University Press, 1999. Chambers, Aidan. Dance on My Grave. Bodley Head, 1982. Cutt, Nancy M. Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth-​Century Evangelical Writing for Children. Five Owls Press, 1979. Davin, Anna. Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–​1914. Rivers Oram Press, 1996. —​—​—​. “Waif Stories in Late Nineteenth-​Century England.” History Workshop Journal, vol. 52, 2001, pp. 67–​98. Dixon, Bob. Catching Them Young: Sex, Race and Class in Children’s Fiction 1. Pluto Press, 1977. Frances, Rebecca Jane. Reading Children: Popular Print for Children, 1799–​1890. Newcastle University, UK, PhD thesis, 2022. Garner, Alan. The Owl Service. Collins, 1967. —​—​—​. Red Shift. Collins, 1973. Garnett, Eve. The Family from One End Street and Some of Their Adventures. Frederick Muller, 1937. Gerrard, Jessica. Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change. Manchester University Press, 2014. Girvin, Brenda. Munition Mary. Humphrey Milford, 1918. Hall, Stuart, editor. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage, 1997. Humphries, Stephen. Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-​Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–​1939. Oxford University Press, 1981. Leeson, Robert. Children’s Books and Class Society: Past and Present. Writers and Readers Publishing Co-​ operative, 1977.

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Kimberley Reynolds and Jane Rosen —​—​—​. It’s My Life. Collins, 1980. —​—​—​. Jan Alone. Collins, 1990. —​—​—​. Reading and Righting. Collins, 1985. —​—​—​. The Third Class Genie. William Collins, 1975. Leslie, Emma. The Seed She Sowed: A Tale of the Great Dock Strike. Blackie and Son, 1891. McCalman, Janet. “Class and Respectability in a Working-​Class Suburb: Richmond, Victoria, Before the Great War.” Australian Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 78, 1982, pp. 90–​103. More, Hannah. The Lancashire Collier Girl: A True Story. Evans and Son, 1795. Nesbit, Edith. Harding’s Luck. Hodder and Stoughton, 1909. Philips, Neil. A Fine Anger: Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner. HarperCollins, 1981. Pulp. Common People. Island Records, 1995. CD. Reid, F. “Socialist Sunday Schools in Britain, 1892–​1939.” International Review of Social History, vol. 11, no. 1, 1966, pp. 18–​47. Reynolds, Kimberley. “Froggy’s Little Brother: Nineteenth-​Century Evangelical Writing for Children and the Politics of Poverty.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 255–​74. —​—​—​. Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910–​1949. Oxford University Press, 2016. —​—​—​. “The Literary Sweet Spot: Sex in US and UK YA Fiction from the 1960s to the 1980s.” International Journal of Young Adult Literature vol. 2, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–​16. —​—​—​. Jane Rosen, and Michael Rosen. Reading and Rebellion: an Anthology of Radical Writing for Children 1900–​1960. Oxford University Press, 2018. —​—​—​. and Nicholas Tucker. Children’s Book Publishing in Britain since 1945. Scolar Press, 1998. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale University Press, 2001. Rosen, Jane. “ ‘Inspire the Communist Rebel Spirit in the Young People of Our Class’: An Overview of Communist Children’s Periodicals in Britain, 1917–​29.” The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals, edited by Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming. —​—​—​. “The Young Socialist: A Magazine of Justice and Love (1901–​1926).” Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature, edited by Angela E. Hubler, University Press of Mississippi, 2016, pp. 94–​115. Rosen, Michael, editor. Workers’ Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables and Allegories from Great Britain. Princeton University Press, 2018. Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. Sage, 1997. Strang, Herbert. Fighting with French: A Tale of the New Army. H. Frowde, 1915. Stretton, Hesba. Jessica’s First Prayer. Religious Tract Society, 1867. Takiuchi, Haru. British Working-​Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-​Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Trease, Geoffrey. Bows Against the Barons. Martin Lawrence, 1934. —​—​—​. Comrades for the Charter. Martin Lawrence, 1934. —​—​—​. Missing From Home. Lawrence and Wishart, 1936. Wedding, Alex. Eddie and the Gypsy: A Story for Boys and Girls. Martin Lawrence, 1935. Westall, Robert. Kingdom by the Sea. Methuen, 1990.

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24 RACE AND ETHNICITY IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

Introduction Despite being children’s literature scholars whose work is almost exclusively about race and ethnicity, it took us many years to come to the current robust literary corpus of writing by Black, Latinx,1 Indigenous, and Asian American authors. We both grew up as nerdy bookworms, but our bookshelves weren’t filled with books written by the likes of Derrick Barnes, Joseph Bruchac, Pablo Cartaya, Yuyi Morales, Nic Stone, and James Yang. Rather, as we started to devour books in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we immersed ourselves in the fictional worlds of Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and Francine Pascal. While we were too young to realize it then, our reading habits were white, reflecting the books that filled bookstore, library, and classroom shelves. Although there were notable successful writers of color at this time such as Mildred Taylor, Laurence Yep, and Walter Dean Myers, they were outside our purview. It’s easy to critique now, but if we wanted to read, these were the books most ready at hand. So we read Ralph S. Mouse (1982) and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972). We were inspired to write poetry by The Giving Tree (1964). We cried at Shiloh (1991). And we dreamed of becoming teenagers and attending Sweet Valley High (1983–​2003). Literature was transformative to our adolescence, and while we can easily recognize the benefits of developing healthy reading habits as children, as literature scholars today we are conscious that generations of readers grew up in a world in which children’s literature was white by default, and in which when characters of color did appear, they were often lazily written and imbued with harmful stereotypes. As a young Chicanita, Cristina never got to see her identity reflected in literature. As a white child, Trevor was never forced to consider identities that weren’t his own. Indeed, there are two sides of this coin –​ a lack of representation in children’s literature can fail to validate one child’s experiences while also limiting the worldview of another child. Our two journeys from adolescence to adulthood (and writing this chapter) are a testament to this situation. Now, as we reflect on race and ethnicity in children’s literature in the United States, we are faced with the legacy of a children’s literature canon that provided inadequate representation for diverse communities while we also revel in a publishing boom of new stories by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers that highlight the nuances of growing up as a child of color. Although our research focuses on American literature, we do recognize how conversations about race and ethnicity shape global children’s literature. We use the United States, therefore, as a case study that might shed light on the push for South Asian representation in British literature or North African voices in French writing for children. As Americanists, we turn our attention to the present moment DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-28

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in American children’s literature, in which the narrative around race and ethnicity is being updated. As the most powerful book publishing industry in the world, the United States, for better or worse, undoubtedly influences international publishing trends. In this chapter, we are not simply interested in children’s literature written by BIPOC writers. Rather, we engage in a discussion of how race and ethnicity have been major factors in children’s literature in the United States, especially in the twenty-​first century. Specifically, we unravel how children’s literature has been grounds for discussions of racism and white supremacy, among other pressing issues. Further, this chapter explores the ways scholars, teachers, and readers of children’s literature have championed social media campaigns such as #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #StopAsianHate to incite robust critical discussions. As we argue, children’s literature is a vital tool for influencing children’s views on race and ethnicity. Yet children’s literature by BIPOC authors does not exist only to serve a didactic or activist function. Rather, even as much work by BIPOC writers contains overt or covert politicized themes, literary craft and lyricism remain important.

Race and Ethnicity in the Children’s Literary Tradition Like literature written for adults, children’s literature is an ideal space in which to consider categories of race and ethnicity. In the mid-​twentieth century, social scientists famously discovered that children as young as three hold ideas about race and difference (Ishizuka and Stephens 6). BIPOC children may internalize damaging beliefs about themselves, given that not all children are racialized in the same way in the United States. For example, one of the longstanding myths within children’s literary studies equates young people with innocence, but this association has historically been applied to white children only (Thomas, Reese, and Horning 7). BIPOC scholars and writers have thus contended with the field by asking critical questions: Who is even imagined as a child? Whose children are worthy of protection? Given that it is typically an adult who purchases books for children or introduces them to the shelves of the local public library, parents, family members, and community leaders play a major role in shaping a child’s biases. As “a means of socialization,” children’s books teach youth about racial ideologies (MacCann xiv). Not surprisingly, the most significant space outside the home where children construct views of their surroundings, including of other human beings, is the classroom, where teachers have routinely assigned picturebooks to students (Ishizuka and Stephens 1). Problematic texts routinely win awards, grace the shelves of bookstores, and appear on K-​12 curricula.2 The celebration of these texts lends authority to troubling ideologies of race and ethnicity. Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens explain, “When children’s books center Whiteness, erase people of color and other oppressed groups, or present people of color in stereotypical, dehumanizing, or subordinate ways, they both ingrain and reinforce internalized racism and White supremacy” (6). Conversely, Rudine Sims Bishop’s famous essay “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” cautions against a limited understanding of diverse children’s literature. The common misconception is that multiethnic children’s literature is just for children of color. Instead, Bishop maintains that white children benefit from seeing diversity in literature as well, rather than whiteness as the universal storyline that maintains a perception of “colorblindness”: “They need the books as windows onto reality, not just on imaginary worlds.” Her groundbreaking work has been foundational to the fields of library science, teacher preparation, and literature because of its central tenet that diverse, complex children’s literature benefits all youth. Yet there remains in the American literary tradition a consistent pattern of racist and ethnocentric portrayals of BIPOC communities. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas reminds us that “Stereotyping, caricature, and marginalization of minoritized groups have been persistent problems in children’s literature throughout the field’s long history” (113). Unsurprisingly, the years before the American Civil War of 1861–​65 were a particularly fraught period for Black representation within children’s literary 292

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publications. Donnarae MacCann’s study of nineteenth-​century American children’s literature underscores the ambivalent undertones of works by well-​known abolitionist writers such as Lydia Maria Child, whose texts decried the sins of slavery while still subscribing to an ideology of white superiority (4).3 But the situation was not unrelievedly grim. As Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane note in Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature Before 1900, even though African Americans were rarely constructed as writers and/​or readers, there is evidence of a long tradition of Black literacies; Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–​84) and Jupiter Hammon (1711–​c. 1806) were two of the first African American figures who wrote for children (xi). Martha J. Cutter points out that we must also take into account white-​authored texts that were published for Black children. In her examination of the nineteenth-​century Quaker writer Abigail Field Mott’s edited version of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, Cutter demonstrates how Mott’s text “figures black children as capable of both claiming power in their own lives and becoming active in abolition debates” (118). Mott’s 1829 rewriting of Equiano’s antislavery narrative, according to Cutter, spoke to Black children as intellectually minded youth who would eventually grow into adult rationality, a far cry from the historical construction of Black adults as perpetually childlike (122). A text such as this is not without its limitations, but in its imagining of Black youth as rational thinkers, Mott’s work is significant for its subtle challenge to her time’s ideologies on race. Black children’s literature in the early decades of the twentieth century continued to promote African American intellectual capacity as a strategy to resist white supremacist ideologies that aligned Blackness with mental inferiority and childishness. Capshaw’s exhaustive work on Black children’s literature produced during the Harlem Renaissance offers important insight into how writers imagined childhood as a realm to promote racial uplift and community literacy despite the specter of past enslavement. While these writings were used as tools of empowerment, Capshaw notes the tensions and ambiguities of these texts in which “The emulation of white cultural models embedded in configurations of uplift frequently conflicted with the era’s ethos of cultural nationalism” or revolutionary messaging (xvii). The most famous of these publications was W.E.B. Du Bois’s periodical The Brownies’ Book (1920–​21), which appealed to Black children’s rationality while simultaneously addressing the reality of racial violence and lynchings (Capshaw 28). In addition to the periodical’s use of fairy tales and children’s poetry, Brigitte Fielder notes The Brownies’ Book’s strategic use of photography to present Black children as flesh and blood beings, in sharp contrast to widely circulated cartoons that proliferated during the time (161). In addition, some writings by white authors were celebrated by Black writers, reviewers, and librarians. For example, Wilhelmina M. Crosson’s 1940 review of Florence Crannell Means’s Shuttered Windows (1938) lauds the novel for its “sympathetic” depiction of Black life (324), even as later readers might take aim at its inaccuracies.4 Means’s extensive body of fiction for young readers depicts communities of color, including those of African Americans and Asian Americans, in a positive light, an impressive feat given the publication of these works in the racially and politically fraught pre-​/​post-​Second World War and Jim Crow era. Even well into the twenty-​first century, two picturebooks (among others) sparked a debate regarding race and representation: Emily Jenkins’s A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat (2015) and A Birthday Cake for George Washington, by Ramin Ganeshram (2016). In their essay on these works, Thomas, Debbie Reese, and Kathleen T. Horning discuss the fraught issue of portraying enslaved human beings in children’s literature in a manner that fails to critique the institution of chattel slavery. As these scholars remind us, A Fine Dessert does not depict any enslaved people beyond the mother and daughter who are preparing the blackberry fool dessert. This curious omission matters, as it fails to convey a complete picture of the backbreaking labor performed under enslavement (Thomas, Reese, and Horning 9). This example is one of many, but a crucial point to make is that even in texts that appear to be sympathetic in their renderings of enslaved people, there is nevertheless real harm in what is not stated, and this tension is visible even in the contemporary 293

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world. Moreover, as scholars and readers, we must be alive to the extent to which children’s texts continue to portray African Americans solely under enslavement instead of as contemporary human beings who live, work, move, love, and navigate their daily surroundings.5 These debates occur at a time when teachers, scholars, and parents must also confront beloved classics for their stereotyping of particular groups. Although penned in 1991, Naomi Caldwell-​Wood and Lisa A. Mitten’s essay “I Is Not for Indian: The Portrayal of Native Americans in Books for Young People” raises points that continue to resonate decades after its publication. One title they address is a work still sometimes taught in classrooms throughout the United States, The Indian in the Cupboard (1980), by the British author Lynne Reid Banks. In addition to portraying Native Americans as less than human (the title character is a toy), Banks’s story represents the Iroquois Little Bear as a denizen of the eighteenth century, implicitly promoting the myth of Native peoples as a group that “ceased to exist after 1890” (Caldwell-​Wood and Mitten). In their 2015 study of a year’s worth of Scholastic book publications including representations of Native Americans, Amina Chaudri and Nicole Schau find that this myth of Indigenous peoples “as extinct with stereotypical renditions of culture harkening nostalgically to a bygone era” continues to pervade children’s publications into the present (29). As Reese (Nambé Pueblo) asserts in her extensive research on representations of Native Americans in children’s literature, texts with such a focus “tend to be either well-​loved classics [...] that portray Native peoples as primitive savages who merely grunt or speak in broken English, or they are best sellers [...] that present Native peoples as romantic but tragic heroes who speak with elaborate, poetic prose about living in harmony with the earth” (245). Perhaps the best known of these examples is Laura Ingalls Wilder’s celebrated Little House on the Prairie (1935), part of a nine-​volume sequence that was adapted into a popular television series in the mid-​1970s. In both the original publication and the television adaptation, settler colonialism is romanticized through the white gaze, further visible in popular computer games of the following decade, such as The Oregon Trail, which allowed children to imagine themselves as settlers facing death and disease. This popular game has often been played alongside classroom readings of Little House on the Prairie, with a noticeably absent critique of genocide and the colonization of Native lands and peoples. As children’s literature scholars such as Marilisa Jiménez García and Clare Bradford have documented, literature for youth has often promoted ideologies of race and ethnicity that necessarily intersect with romanticized notions of colonialism. Bradford’s analysis of colonialism in children’s literature insists that race must be central to this study because of the “binary distinctions between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ on which colonialism and colonial relations were built” (7). Colonialism is hardly a vestige of the past, and ideologies of power and race continue to pervade publications well into the twenty-​first century. Yet for all the flaws apparent in many works available to contemporary American children, there nonetheless exists a robust body of multiethnic children’s literature, a fact that has not been lost on the academy. Scholars such as Thomas, Reese, Fielder, Jiménez García, Sarah Park Dahlen, and Phillip Serrato, among others, have centralized the experiences of BIPOC communities of readers, learners, creators, and artists that challenge the pervasive whiteness of the children’s literary tradition. These foundational scholars have examined the significance of children of color seeing themselves in literature and have articulated the need for the field of children’s literary studies to deconstruct whiteness as the norm.

In Comes the Corrective: BIPOC Children’s Writers Update the Narrative Thus far, we have outlined the fraught history of representing race and ethnicity in the children’s literary tradition. Adult authors, teachers, and librarians, most of them white, have often selected problematic texts for children to read, thereby passing down ideologies of difference that are replicated from one generation to the next. But it is important to note, as Thomas points out, that while 294

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problematic representation of BIPOC communities in children’s literature is a centuries-​old tradition, of equal significance for scholars is to uncover the persistent efforts of Black community members who wrote children’s publications to combat this denigrating history, stretching back to the nineteenth century (Thomas 114). In addition to Black children’s literary works, African American librarians in the early twentieth century were significant in promoting literacy to Black communities (Thomas, Reese, and Horning 7–​8). Working side by side as authors and educators, major Black literary figures such as Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes understood that challenging white supremacy while celebrating Black excellence should not be limited to the adult world but should be within reach of young people as well. Bontemps and Hughes were the first African American children’s writers to publish in major publishing houses and reach a wider, integrated readership (Capshaw Smith 230). In the twenty-​first century, important writers for youth, such as Jacqueline Woodson, have been inspired by this long history of Black literary activism. As Samira Abdur-​Rahman maintains in her article on Woodson, “The black child is [...] expected to establish a consciousness of past struggles, to articulate the politics of the present moment, and to gesture toward the future possibilities born from past and contemporary black struggle” (182). Abdur-​Rahman’s essay foregrounds the historical role of agency and resistance in the Black children’s literary tradition. Like African American children’s literature and other marginalized literary traditions in the United States, Asian American children’s literature has historically pushed back against reductive stereotypes of Asian American children that see them as dedicated, booksmart students who adhere to the “model minority myth” (Mathison 3). Although Asian American children are often rendered invisible or as “perpetual foreigner[s]‌,” youth literature by Asian American writers challenges simplistic, xenophobic societal constructions to present teen characters who grapple with their families’ and society’s constraints. Foundational Asian American texts began to be published widely in the first several decades of the twentieth century,6 followed by works such as John Okada’s No-​No Boy (1956) and Yep’s Dragonwings (1975), which shed light on the lived experiences of Japanese American and Chinese American youth, respectively. Dragonwings in particular draws on myth and magic, a technique now frequently employed as a means of celebrating cultural heritage. Similarly, in her work on food and dining in Asian American Bildungsromane, Jennifer Ann Ho contends that Gish Jen and Frank Chin, among others, critically examine how young protagonists combat centuries of Orientalist fetishism while developing a sense of themselves through a “hyphenated American identity that is informed by ancestral roots in Asia and complicated by American national and cultural loyalties” (3). Asian American children’s literature continues to grow in stature, with titles such as Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (2011) being widely taught in elementary classrooms throughout the United States and winning prestigious prizes such as the 2022 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. Moreover, even in popular white-​authored series such as Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-​ Sitters Club, which features a central character named Claudia Kishi, we see that Asian Americans have long been present, well-​rounded, and nuanced characters. This series inspired the Netflix series of the same name (2020–​21), where Claudia dons fashionable attire, creates inspiring artistic pieces, and learns of her grandmother’s internment in Manzanar. Significantly, in both its manifestations the series allows Claudia to explore “typical” themes of pre-​teen development while not erasing the specificity of her Japanese American identity. Moving on to the rich tradition of Latinx literature, it is important to recognize the cultural work of Afro-​Puerto Rican librarians Pura Belpré and Arturo Schomburg, whose work Jiménez García unearths in Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture.7 Framing youth literature and culture as a “fluid, multi-​textual, multiracial, multilingual space” (7), Jiménez García explores how Black Puerto Ricans, both on the island and in diaspora, have been the backbone of the youth literature of this culture since at least 1898. As librarians in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, Belpré and Schomburg fostered literacy and community education steeped in Afro-​Boricua thought. Their work reveals how Blackness and anti-​Blackness have 295

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been factors in mainland United States and Puerto Rican literary histories for a century and more. Belpré and Schomburg underscore how public libraries can become critical sites for feeding intellectual curiosity and fostering cultural practices. But their work as librarians is only part of their cultural and literary significance, as they also wrote children’s stories to empower Puerto Rican people as creators, readers, and learners. Early twentieth-​century, white-​authored children’s books about the island, such as Joseph Bartlett Seabury’s Porto Rico: The Land of the Rich Port (1903) or Greater America: Our Latest Insular Possessions (1900), which Jiménez García deftly explores in her book, promoted colonialism as “necessary” for the island’s salvation, relying on the “presupposition of a lack of history [and] the imagined subservience of the people” (36). In sharp contrast, works by Belpré and Schomburg constructed what Jiménez García defines as Afro-​Boricua pedagogies that not only resist erasure but centralize Blackness to Puerto Rican (and Latinx) youth culture, art, and history (71). Building on the literary tradition established by cultural figures such as Belpré and Schomburg –​ not to mention literary stalwarts including Pat Mora, Gary Soto, Eric Velásquez, and Meg Medina –​ Latinx children’s writers today have forged a prolific body of literature that speaks to the expansiveness of Latinidad and the Latinx community in the United States at large. Writers routinely tackle issues that Latinx children face every day, whether family relationships, as in Last Stop on Market Street (2015) by Matt De La Peña and Medina’s Merci Suárez Can’t Dance (2021), or identity struggles and assimilation, seen in The First Rule of Punk (2017) by Celia C. Pérez. And just as the field of Latinx literature marketed to adults has routinely engaged readers in complex yet realistic subject matter, Latinx writers frequently use children’s literature as a space to educate young readers about the hardships and strength of the Latinx community. Here one can encounter nuanced depictions of immigration, humanitarian crises at the border, and the lingering effects of colonialism. Although some adults may view these topics as too heavy or too controversial for children, to shy away from them would be to disregard lived experience and to deny the ability of young people to engage with challenging ideas, a point reflected in Ernesto Cisneros’s middle grade novel Efrén Divided (2019), in which a young boy must deal with the sudden deportation of his mother. But even as Latinx writers use literature to introduce young minds to the reality of living in a racialized, deeply unequal world, their texts highlight the right to experience joy, fun, and love. Like Asian American authors such as Yep and Lin, Latinx writers have taken the task of reimagining cultural figures, myths, and legends in such a manner as to push against the myriad ways that marginalization has historically tainted the narrative of Othered cultures in the United States by often painting BIPOC communities as not having cultures at all. In many cases, then, these myths take center stage, foregrounding centuries-​old tales and legends that have survived colonization. Not “simple” stories, myths and even dichos (expressions) are important to ethnic identity, as they are typically passed down from one generation to another and exist as powerful expressions of cultural survival. Cultural pillars such as La Llorona, La Malinche, El Chupacabra, El Cucuy, and La Lechuza8 are pervasive figures in Chicanx folk culture, often shaping childhood experiences as parents knowingly use these myths to assist –​for better or for worse –​their parenting. Want to keep your children from being mischievous? Tell them La Llorona is going to get them. Or, better yet, a chupacabra is hiding in the woods behind their house, waiting for them. Want to keep your children from disobeying you? Tell them about La Malinche, the f(r)amed “vendida,” or sell-​out, who served as Hernán Cortés’s translator during the conquest of the Aztec Empire.9 Yet for children’s literature authors, these myths are ripe for reevaluation and recasting, resulting in a body of work that provides young readers with fresh takes on what previous generations may have considered rigid archetypes. Perhaps most famous of these children’s books retellings is Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1995 picturebook Prietita and the Ghost Woman, which depicts La Llorona not as the infamous child murderer but as a kind, gentle soul who leads Prietita to the healing herbs that will cure her mother’s illness. In more recent texts, notably Guadalupe García McCall’s young adult novel Summer of the Mariposas 296

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(2012), La Llorona is similarly recast as a misunderstood, even feminist maternal figure who teaches the Chicana protagonist to challenge such reductionist, harmful ideologies about women, especially Latinas (Herrera, “Hermanitas” 97). In these Chicana recovery projects, writers convey to young minds the possibility of a better, more compassionate world than the one we presently inhabit. This is the world that prolific author Frederick Luis Aldama portrays in his children’s book The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (2020), with illustrations by Chris Escobar.10 In his author’s note, “Legend of El Chupacabra,” Aldama reminds us that “Latinxs have lots of tales with monsters, some real and some imagined.” Indeed, Charlie himself tells us on the first page of the story, “I’m a Chupacabra. One of those creatures from made-​up human stories. A monster.” But The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie is not solely a fantastical children’s story where ghosts, goblins, and strange, tentacled creatures roam the earth. Charlie is no monster, despite his self-​description, not the bloodsucking carnivore that mutilates farm animals in the countryside. In Aldama’s telling, the creatures we should fear are not the red-​eyed Chupacabras of Charlie’s species, but those two-​legged Homo sapiens whom Charlie and his friend Lupe call “The Big People in Green.” Like Aldama, Latinx writers have always been aware of how sociopolitical commentary is not –​ and should not be –​safely contained within the pages of adult novels, out of reach for young people in the midst of their growing up process. Julia Álvarez knew this when she wrote Before We Were Free (2002) and Return to Sender (2009), which deal, respectively, with coming of age under a cruel dictatorship in the Dominican Republic of the 1950s and with the intertwined lives of two children in precarious situations, one a boy whose family may lose their Vermont dairy farm, the other the daughter of migrant farm workers who come to perform the labor that the boy’s injured father can no longer do. Juan Felipe Herrera knew this when he wrote Calling the Doves/​El Canto de Las Palomas (1995), a bilingual picturebook memoir about his own early years as the son of migrant laborers. Yet this important body of work is seldom included as an example of rigorous critique designed to teach children and adults alike about issues of power, ideology, violence, and belonging. In these examples as in The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie, readers encounter the bravery of young people who force us to confront painful but necessary questions, queries that have long been posited in literature for youth. Whose history is remembered, and why? Whose voices are heard, and whose voices are erased and silenced by the gendered and racialized project of colonization, memorialized via official historical archives and documents? Indeed, children’s literature reminds us that children are more than capable of learning about the “real world,” especially since they are already living in it. Complex and accurate depictions of race and ethnicity in children’s literature can be a corrective that forges more inclusive communities. This conversation is precisely where Náhuatl/​Pipil/​ Chinese writer Oriel María Siu’s work intervenes.11 Siu’s children’s books offer culturally sensitive representations for BIPOC children in the United States. The second children’s book in her Rebeldita series, Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It’s Over (2021),12 privileges the voice of the young Black girl Rebeldita as in many ways a stand-​in for all Black and Indigenous children. Rebeldita’s task is to speak of the violence of colonialism, not as a far-​off chain of events centuries in the past, but as an ongoing project. Siu’s book turns the table on colonial ideologies that have characterized and constructed Native and Black peoples as less than human. The story begins by telling readers about the selfish king and queen ogres who lived in EuroLandia over 500 years ago. Fresh out of funds to sustain their lavish, greedy ways, they select the most “ruthless and heartless, and savagely capricious” of their lot, Christopher Cologre, to sail across the ocean to steal and pillage in the name of EuroLandia (n. pg.). While adult readers may be more likely to grasp the not-​so-​subtle correlation between Christopher Cologre and Christopher Columbus, even children will soon see that there’s nothing heroic about this ogre, a hideous creature who, upon landing on the shores of AbyaYala, declares, “I prohibit you telling the truth.” The illustrations by Víctor Zúñiga convey the grotesqueness of Cologre’s actions, confronting head-​on a history of theft, subjugation, and violence while offering in contrast Rebeldita’s radiant brown skin, luminous smile, and bountiful hair, 297

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communicating the book’s message that the lives of Black and Brown children should be –​but have not always been –​cherished and valued. Importantly, through depicting Columbus not as human but as a hideous ogre who stands in for the system of which he is the agent, Siu conveys the brutalities of colonialism, the ugly side to “discovery” that may be left out in history books. Yet children’s literature does not need to address hot topics to be relevant; every story has the potential to be a source of empowerment for BIPOC youth, just as white children have long enjoyed reading stories about the first day of school, making new friends, and learning to love themselves. Latinx writers, too, effectively update the narrative of growing up in the Latinx community by highlighting quotidian experiences. For example, My Papi Has a Motorcycle (2019), by Isabel Quintero; Medina’s Mango, Abuela, and Me (2015); and Last Stop on Market Street (2015), by Matt de la Peña, all reclaim the barrio, or Latinx neighborhood, even if they do so in less overtly political ways than the texts by Aldama and Siu discussed above. Dominican-​American writer Jasminne Mendez’s Josefina’s Habichuelas (2021) celebrates traditional Dominican foods far from the white gaze typically cast on “ethnic foods” in children’s literature.13 That the pages of these books are filled with normal stories of BIPOC children simply going about their business is a powerful act that corrects the narrative of children’s literature to be more inclusive and representative, a source of empowerment for children who deserve to see their stories reflected, normalized, and legitimized in published literature.

Conclusion: #WeNeedDiverseBooks As children’s literature written by BIPOC writers draws ever more attention from publishers, readers, scholars, and others, it is worth noting that digital initiatives have become critical sites to provide a more inclusive children’s literature community. Platforms such as Twitter (now X) and TikTok, social media campaigns using targeted hashtags, and special websites all push against the erasure and problematic depiction of youth of color in the publishing industry. The popular Disrupt Texts website (https://​disru​ptte​xts.org/​) is led by four women educators of color who use the space to disrupt extant conversations about literature taught in schools. Their goal, shared with many in the BIPOC literary community, is to bolster and disseminate anti-​racist and anti-​bias pedagogy through literature. In a similar vein, the Latinxs in Kid Lit website (https://​lati​nosi​nkid​lit.com/​) works to spread awareness about Latinx children’s literature, thus promoting literacy within the Latinx community and cultural competency about the fastest growing population in the United States. Social media platforms such as Twitter have often been ground zero in digital conversations in the United States surrounding the need to re-​evaluate children’s literature and to celebrate new texts by BIPOC writers. For example, the social media campaigns #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #StopAsianHate have been used to promote children’s books, drawing more attention to multifaceted depictions of BIPOC children written by BIPOC writers. The “we” in #WeNeedDiverseBooks signals a collective responsibility to address power imbalances at play in nations with colonial histories, which in practice has been manifested by social media campaigns such as the successful effort to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. While examples of such phenomena would merit their own chapter, we would like to highlight Park Dahlen’s work as a representative example. She has used the hashtags #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate to create a syllabus of Asian and Asian American children’s literature and critical pieces in conversation with this body of work.14 #StopAsianHate promotes reading books by and about Asian American children, thus creating a mirror into an often excluded community within the publishing industry and American popular culture at large. While Twitter has long been home to conversations about the need for a more equitable publishing ecosystem, in recent years TikTok has also emerged as a corrective. TikTok, a short-​form video app owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, has only been available in the United States since August 298

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2018 but is already thoroughly ingrained in popular culture, going from a fad dominated by teenagers to mainstream popular culture (Boffone, Renegades 27 and “Rise” 2–​4). As an integral part of digital culture in the United States, TikTok is affecting publishing and reading practices, leading readers of all ages to discover new literature by BIPOC writers via the hugely popular BookTok subcommunity (Jerasa and Boffone 221–​23; Boffone and Jerasa 11–​12). Although the focus on BookTok has largely been on young adult literature, children’s literature is its own robust subcommunity of BookTok. Of course, BookTok content runs the gamut, but writers of color frequently use the space to create “cover reveal” videos and other videos in which they engage in TikTok trends to talk about the world of their story. Indeed, well into the twenty-​first century, the full spectrum of digital spaces plays an increasingly important role in children’s literature. Digital initiatives are critical tools for shaping children’s understanding of race and ethnicity. Although children may be too young to fully engage in these spaces, the adults in their lives are accessing websites and platforms, which ultimately influences the publishing industry, K-​12 curricula, and general book purchasing. While children in the second half of the twentieth century may have eagerly awaited the annual Scholastic Book Fair at their schools, hoping to snag that year’s hottest books, the event was of limited duration and featured a limited number of texts, most of which targeted a white audience. Today, BIPOC children have a wealth of literature to engage with that represents a wealth of identities and experiences. As this chapter attests, writers of color in the United States offer a necessary corrective to the legacy left by classic children’s literature. Because of their efforts, future generations –​especially children of color –​can come of age in a literary world in which their identities matter.

Notes 1 In this chapter, we use the term Latinx to encompass peoples of Latin American descent in the United States. Although the term is at times contested, Latinx has been adopted in recent years as a gender-​inclusive variation of the more traditional Latina or Latino. The term “Latiné” has emerged, as well, as an alternative to Latinx. Some people prefer Latiné because of its adherence to Spanish grammar rules. 2 Among many other titles, such texts include The Indian in the Cupboard and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. 3 Robin Bernstein’s work on how children’s literature racializes Black children as antithetical to the idealized image of the white child is especially significant. Although Black adults were typically constructed as “childlike,” this trope did not mean that actual Black children were seen as young people equally deserving of the rights and protections afforded white children. 4 See, for example, Suzanne Rahn’s 1987 The Lion and the Unicorn article “Early Images of American Minorities: Rediscovering Florence Crannell Means.” Although Rahn’s response to the novel is generally admiring, she remarks that “It is easy to find flaws in Shuttered Windows from a present-​day perspective,” citing Means’s downplaying of the widespread racial injustice of the 1930s (106). 5 John H. Bickford III and Cynthia W. Rich explore the ways slavery continues to be (mis)represented in children’s books that are routinely taught in elementary and middle school classrooms. Meanwhile, in Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North, Crystal Lynn Webster reveals how African American children in the North during the antebellum period found ways to find agency despite the lack of freedoms associated with their societal status, something seldom reflected in children’s literature at the time. 6 Dhan Gopal Mukerji won the 1928 Newbery award for Gay-​Neck: The Story of a Pigeon. 7 Here, Jiménez García focuses on a host of cultural workers who have made youth literature and culture central to Puerto Rican history, both on the island and in diaspora. As she demonstrates, youth culture has been central in theorizing the sociopolitical relationship between the mainland and Puerto Rico even if the contributions by and for young people have been systemically disregarded. 8 La Llorona, also known as “the weeping woman,” is arguably the most infamous of Mexican-​American folkloric figures, described as a specter who roams riverbeds or creeks for the children she drowned. For more on her significance, see Domino Renee Pérez’s There Was a Woman. La Malinche is interchangeably known as Malintzin Tenepal, Marina, or even Malinalli, the Indigenous woman known as colonizer Hernán Cortés’s translator and mother to his mestizo child. See, for example, Alarcón. El Cucuy can be described as a boogeyman, while La Lechuza is a white owl thought to forebode death and tragedy.

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Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera 9 In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause, Alicia Gaspar de Alba tackles how figures such as La Malinche have been been “framed” by patriarchy as “bad women.” 10 For more on The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie, see Herrera, “Monster.” 11 Siu was born in Honduras and migrated to California in 1997. She currently divides her time between Los Angeles, California, and San Pedro Sula, Honduras. 12 For more on Christopher the Ogre Cologre, see Herrera, “Rebelditas.” 13 Josefina’s Habichuelas addresses how mainstream children’s literature –​ and culture at large –​ sometimes depicts traditional ethnic foods as “gross” or bad-​smelling. The result of these negative depictions is that children can feel ostracized by food; they must learn to love their culture through a reclaiming of traditional foodways. The titular Josefina celebrates the traditional food –​ “habichuelas,” or beans in English –​ from the beginning. There’s never a question of whether the food is strange or whether it is going to be enjoyed. Nor does it require explanation, although often children’s books tend to align with the white gaze and over-​ explain “different” cultures. Habichuelas are just a delicious dish that Josefina has always loved and that, throughout the book, she learns to celebrate even more. Unlike titles such as A Fine Dessert and A Birthday Cake for George Washington, Mendez’s book is a space where Black Latinx culinary traditions survive and thrive despite centuries of white dominance. 14 See also Mathison.

Works Cited Abdur-​Rahman, Samira. “Spaces of the Ancestor: Jacqueline Woodson and the Long Civil Rights Movement.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 42, no. 2, 2018, pp. 180–​97. Alarcón, Norma. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” Cultural Critique, no. 13, 1989, pp. 57–​87. Aldama, Frederick Luis. The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie. The Ohio State University Press, 2020. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood From Slavery to Civil Rights. New York University Press, 2011. Bickford III, John H., and Cynthia W. Rich. “Examining the Representation of Slavery within Children’s Literature.” Social Studies Research and Practice, vol. 9, no. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 66–​94. Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Reading Is Fundamental, vol. 3, 2015, scenicregional.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2017/​08/​Mirrors-​Windows-​and-​Sliding-​Glass-​Doors.pdf. Boffone, Trevor. Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok. Oxford University Press, 2021. —​—​—​. “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture.” In TikTok Cultures in the United States, edited by Trevor Boffone, Routledge, 2022, pp. 1–​13. —​—​—​, and Sarah Jerasa. “Toward a (Queer) Reading Community: BookTok, Teen Readers, and the Rise of TikTok Literacies.” Talking Points, vol. 33, no. 1, 2021, pp. 10–​16. Bradford, Clare. Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. Caldwell-​Wood, Naomi, and Lisa A. Mitten. “I Is Not for Indian: The Portrayal of Native Americans in Books for Young People.” American Indian Library Association, 29 June 1991, https://​aila​net.org/​about/​publi​cations/​ i-​is-​not-​for-​ind​ian/​. Capshaw, Katharine, and Anna Mae Duane, eds. Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children’s Literature Before 1900. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Capshaw Smith, Katharine. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana University Press, 2004. Chaudri, Amina, and Nicole Schau. “Imaginary Indians: Representations of Native Americans in Scholastic Reading Club.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 47, no. 1, 2015, pp. 18–​35. Crosson, Wilhelmina M. “Florence Crannell Means.” The Elementary English Review, vol. 17, no. 8, 1940, pp. 321–​26. Cutter, Martha J. “The Child’s Illustrated Antislavery Talking Book: Abigail Field Mott’s Abridgment of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative for African American Children.” Capshaw and Duane, pp. 117–​44. Fielder, Brigitte. “Before The Brownies’ Book.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 43, no. 2, 2019, pp. 159–​71. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause. University of Texas Press, 2014. Herrera, Cristina. “Celebrating Rebelditas Everywhere.” Latinx Spaces, 12 November 2021, www.latin​xspa​ces. com/​lat​inx-​lit​erat​ure/​cele​brat​ing-​reb​eldi​tas-​eve​rywh​ere. —​—​—​. “Cinco Hermanitas: Myth and Sisterhood in Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas.” Children’s Literature, 2016, pp. 96–​114.

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Race and Ethnicity in Children’s Literature —​—​—​. “Will the Real Monster Please Stand Up?” Latinx Spaces, 17 June 2020, www.latin​xspa​ces.com/​lat​inx-​ lit​erat​ure/​will-​the-​real-​mons​ter-​ple​ase-​stand-​up. Ho, Jennifer Ann. Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-​of-​Age Novels. Routledge, 2005. Ishizuka, Katie, and Ramón Stephens. “The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-​Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, vol. 1, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1–​49. Jerasa, Sarah, and Trevor Boffone. “BookTok 101: TikTok, Digital Literacies, and Out-​of-​School Reading Practices.” Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy, vol. 65, no. 3, 2021, pp. 219–​26. Jiménez García, Marilisa. Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2021. MacCann, Donnarae. White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–​ 1900. Routledge, 1997. Mathison, Ymitri. Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pérez, Domino Renee. There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. University of Texas Press, 2008. Rahn, Suzanne. “Early Images of American Minorities: Rediscovering Florence Crannell Means.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 11, no. 1, 1987, pp. 98–​115. Reese, Debbie. “Proceed with Caution: Using Native American Folktales in the Classroom.” Language Arts, vol. 84, no. 3, 2007, pp. 245–​56. Siu, Oriel María. Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It’s Over. Rebeldita the Fearless, 2021. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. “Stories Still Matter: Rethinking the Role of Diverse Children’s Literature Today.” Language Arts, vol. 94, no. 2, 2016, pp. 112–​19. —​—​—​, Debbie Reese, and Kathleen T. Horning. “Much Ado About A Fine Dessert: The Cultural Politics of Representing Slavery in Children’s Literature.” Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, pp. 6–​17. Webster, Crystal Lynn. Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

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25 LGBTQ+​ DISCOURSES IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Mateusz Świetlicki Children’s literature scholars have argued that most books for young readers, usually expected to be nonsexual, feature characters presumably not yet heterosexual (cf. Pugh; Kincaid; Bruhm and Hurley; Epstein). Picturebooks, board books, and novels challenging this heteronormativity have met with both acclaim and backlash. Although in many countries gender identity, (non-​hetero)sexualities, and same-​sex parenting have become prominent tropes in books for children, depending on the sociopolitical context, the same text can either go unnoticed, be accused of didacticism, called not progressive enough and homonormative –​that is, favoring norms and ideas traditionally associated with heterosexuality1 –​or provoke a national backlash indirectly or directly leading to the implementation of homophobic legislation. Hence, children’s books featuring same-​sex couples or queer2 characters function as powerful tools in the hands of adults: writers, scholars, parents, librarians, and politicians. In some countries the history of LGBTQ+​3 books is fairly long, and particular texts can be divided into subcategories depending on the trope they represent. For example, in The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+​Children’s Picture Books (2022), Jennifer Miller analyzes more than 150 picturebooks published in the United States between 1972 and 2018 and identifies several common concepts: from the early “sissy boy,” “queer exceptionalism,” and “boy-​meets-​skirt,” through “virtually normal gay parents,” “family diversity,” and “the gay uncle,” to celebratory books about drag queens and queer activism (Miller 6, 38). New topics continue to appear in the United States, although LGBTQ+​books remain among the most frequently challenged works for schoolchildren in states such as Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Ohio. Yet as the contributions to B. J. Epstein and Elizabeth Chapman’s edited volume International LGBTQ+​Literature for Children and Young Adults (2021) demonstrate, in many countries the representation of rainbow families and queer children in literature is limited or simply does not exist.4 As Kenneth Kidd has recently noted, “queer children’s literature studies has evolved from its early focus on signal boosting and queer affirmation to a more contemporary emphasis on the complexities of identity and community” (“Out” 77). At the same time, as Kidd points out, most of the scholarship available in English focuses solely on Anglophone literature and the Western context, where the legal situation of LGBTQ+​individuals and their visibility in the public discourses are relatively privileged. Such a narrow focus can lead to observations that do not reflect the global dimension(s) of LGBTQ+​children’s books. For example, in her examination of Anglophone children’s literature, Jasmine Z. Lester has argued that by embracing homonormativity, LGBTQ+​ individuals become “normative subjects who perform socially expected behaviors connected to heterosexuality that extend beyond sex, such as maintaining traditionally appropriate gender presentation, engaging in 302

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-29

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exclusively monogamous lifestyles, and raising children in nuclear families” (247). In other contexts, however, especially in openly homophobic countries, such representations of LGBTQ+​ individuals in children’s books may be read as progressive. I agree with Miller that even the most homonormative books “normalize” LGBTQ+​ individuals and same-​sex parenting and that their dismissal is counterproductive (Miller 6). Hence, the presence of queer children and rainbow families in children’s books can lead to “identification with queerness, even if readers don’t quite identify as queer” (Miller 15; emphasis in original). Although in her study Miller examines Anglophone picturebooks, in this chapter I argue that similar transformability can be attributed to various types of international children’s literature. In my considerations, I investigate books from four countries –​ Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia –​ where original and translated LGBTQ+​ children’s texts have been published but so far have received little attention in Western scholarship.5 Focusing on these four Central and Eastern European states will allow me to show the differences and similarities between the local book markets and the sociopolitical discourses, as well as to demonstrate the transformative potential of books that in the Western context can be seen as homonormative, but in a different cultural context become symbols of queer resistance. In the 2022 annual Rainbow Europe report prepared on the basis of the LGBTQ+​-​related laws and policies in fifty countries, Hungary came in thirtieth, Ukraine thirty-​ninth, Poland forty-​third, and Russia forty-​sixth. As I maintain in this chapter, the ranking does not reflect the place of LGBTQ+​ children’s literature on the local book markets. Since the introduction of anti-​gay laws in 2013,6 LGBTQ+​themes in Russian children’s literature have been prohibited, which has forced publishers to market books written for young readers as adult literature. In Ukraine, the mention of a same-​sex couple in a 2017 picturebook provoked a nationwide debate on LGBTQ+​parenting but resulted in no legal changes.7 Hungary, an EU member state, is significantly higher in the ranking than Ukraine and Poland, yet the publication of two children’s books featuring same-​sex parents and LGBTQ+​themes in 2020 and 2021 led to the introduction of homophobic laws similar to the ones in Russia. Finally, according to the Rainbow Europe ranking, the Polish law is the most homophobic in the European Union, yet the number of LGBTQ+​ books for children in the country has grown surprisingly in the last two decades, especially under the conservative rule of the current government,8 and presently the Polish book market has a variety of translated and local texts for all age groups.

The Political Dimensions of Children’s Literature Local controversies stemming from the inclusion of LGBTQ+​ themes in children’s books are connected to the political significance of what Lee Edelman calls “the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experience of any historical children,” which is often used “to regulate political discourse[s]‌” (11). As Kidd notes, the number of texts that fell victim to censorship increased in the last century mainly because “childhood was imagined more and more as a time of great innocence and vulnerability” (“Not Censorship”; cf. Heins). The figure of the child has been regularly used in the discourses of right-​wing politicians, activists, parents, and religious organizations, because “ ‘child innocence’ is a particularly effective frame, which can rally larger crowds than anti-​gender claims alone”9 (Paternotte and Kuhar 265; emphasis mine). Although the appearance of LGBTQ+​ books often leads to censorship, Kidd argues that like prizing, censorship may give books publicity and consequently help them reach even more child readers, not only those who are queer or brought up by same-​sex parents (“Censorship”). The defenders of the traditional nuclear family see LGBTQ+​ children’s books as a potential danger to children’s presumed heterosexuality. In his investigation of LGBTQ+​rights in Eastern and Central Europe, Fernando G. Nuñez-​Mietz observes that “state immunization against LGBT rights is undertaken through a process of securitization,” meaning that gay and queer identities “are discursively constructed as a (foreign) existential threat to the national identity” (544).10 Because imaginary 303

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children are considered “the nation’s future,” the existence of non-​heterosexuality and non-​cisgender identities is believed to be an attack on both children’s presumed heterosexuality and the nation’s survival (Nuñez-​Mietz 556). This anxiety explains the introduction of anti-​gay legislation in the region, understood as attempts “to protect the nation from LGBT rights before it is too late” (Nuñez-​Mietz 556). Writing about the emergence of homophobic movements in Eastern and Central Europe, Polish scholars Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk have accurately observed that “[c]‌alling on parents to defend their children from homosexuals is more than a mere rhetorical strategy[, and] [a]nti-​gender groups have recognized the political potential of deeply felt familial identities, roles and experiences and have managed to capture it” (115).11 Hence, children and children’s literature are at the center of this ideological playground, but they are not asked to play. On the contrary, real children are objectified, and children’s books become entangled in adults’ ideological wars.

LGBTQ+​Children’s Literature in Russia, Hungary, Ukraine, and Poland Studying the evolution of LGBTQ+​ themes in international children’s literature demonstrates the local and global changes in approaches to alternative sexualities and gender identities. Although frequently the publication of a single book results in the subsequent appearance of many others and the gradual normalization of LGBTQ+​themes, in this section I use the cases of Russia and Hungary to demonstrate that this trajectory does not always hold. On the one hand, as Miller observes, the appearance of LGBTQ+​ children’s literature can provoke the “creat[ion of] imagined queer collectives that can have real consequences on experiences of community belonging and building as well as social and psychic transformation” (4). On the other hand, however, the consequences of the publicity such books cause can also be negative for LGBTQ+​ individuals and their representation in literature. Currently LGBTQ+​ issues in Russia are seen as “a moral disease,” and this discourse “is built into a conservative campaign for the preservation of ‘traditional values’ ” as well as “an anti-​West campaign fueled by Russian nationalism,” holding that LGBTQ+​ expression is “a foreign threat to Russia’s societal security” (Nuñez-​Mietz 552; cf. Bluhm and Varga; Edenborg; Rivkin-​Fish and Hartblay; Essig and Kondakov). Still, in the first few years of the 2000s the Russian cultural landscape was different. After all, the country’s most successful cultural export at that time was t.A.T.u., a music duo consisting of two teenage girls who kissed in their music videos and sang about lesbian love. LGBTQ+​themes appeared on the Russian book market in 2006 with the translation of Marie-​ Aude Murail’s Oh, Boy! (2000). This French novel, promoted as a book for eleven-​ and twelve-​ year-​olds, features prominent gay characters, Bart and Leo, who are depicted in a stereotypically effeminate way and echo the “sissy boy” trope. Because of Russia’s so-​called anti-​gay propaganda law introduced in 2013, formally called “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values,” the subsequent editions of Murail’s Oh, Boy! had to be sold sealed with a new cover and a 18+​label. The first original Russian novel featuring LGBTQ+​themes was published before President Vladimir Putin signed this bill. Daria Wilke’s 2013 book for adolescents Shutovskoi kolpak (The Jester’s Cap; English title Playing a Part) crossed “another barrier in Russian culture: public discussions of queer identities in fiction for children and teens” (Lanoux, Herold, and Bukhina 167). The novel is focalized by Grisha, a teenager “questioning his sexual identity,” and its publication caused a scandal at a time when “the Russian government instituted new laws to protect children from purported ‘gay propaganda’ ” (Lanoux, Herold, Bukhina 167–​68).12 Despite the local backlash, the novel met with acclaim abroad and was translated into English, leading to an increase in its visibility. In the years following the implementation of the 2013 law, no Russian children’s books with queer tropes have been published. Moreover, the mentions of LGBTQ+​ themes in translations of popular books, such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (2017; Russian translation by Bombora 2018) and Welcome to 304

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Your Period (2019; Russian translation by Albus Corvus 2021), had to be censored. Although some LGBTQ+​books for teenagers are translated into Russian, all of them are marketed as 18+​.13 Following in the footsteps of Russia, in the early 2020s the Hungarian government introduced similar homophobic legislation, which it had been trying to ratify since 2013. The new Hungarian “anti-​gay propaganda” law is not precise and may potentially lead to censorship of mass media, with even rainbow flags not allowed to be displayed in public (“Hungary Approves”). As of 2022 same-​sex couples in Hungary do not have adoption rights, official change of sex on a birth certificate is not possible, and “promoting” LGBTQ+​ themes to children is illegal (“Hungary Approves”). As Viktória Radványi, a Hungarian LGBTQ+​ activist, pointed out in 2021, the wave of homophobic legislations in Central and Eastern Europe is “not accidental” and is connected to Russia’s attempts to “reach post-​Soviet countries in Europe to spread this anti-​liberal agenda. It’s not with tanks or armies. It’s a geopolitical playground, and LGBTQ rights are in the crossfire” (qtd. in Haynes; emphasis mine). Notably, after the publication of the first queer-​themed Hungarian children’s book, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán addressed the LGBTQ+​community saying: “Leave our children alone” (qtd. in Haynes; emphasis mine). By protecting their imaginary children from the imaginary enemies represented by books with LGBTQ+​themes, politicians such as Orbán deny the existence of real-​life rainbow families. In 2020 Dóra Dúró, a member of the right-​wing Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party, publicly tore up a copy of a children’s book, Meseország mindenkié (A Fairy Tale for Everyone), a collection edited by Boldizsár Nagy and illustrated by Lilla Bölecz. Hungarian publishers and human rights activists condemned the act and compared it to “Nazi book-​burners and Communist book shredders” (Haynes). Dúró later argued that her act was aimed at saving children from “foreign” propaganda: “Our Homeland Movement does not tolerate children being exposed to homosexual propaganda in the form of abnormal lifestyles smuggled into story books and thereby lying to children, as homosexual princes are not part of Hungarian culture” (qtd. in Bentley 157). Nagy, the book’s editor, argued that by publishing Meseország mindenkié –​the first Hungarian children’s book with any mention of LGBTQ+​people –​the contributors “wanted to give voice to the often voiceless,” normalizing them by introducing to the Hungarian cultural context (qtd. in Haynes). Despite the controversy it provoked, Meseország mindenkié is not a predominantly LGBTQ+​ book, as the volume aims to introduce several marginalized voices into Hungarian children’s literature. Meseország mindenkié features seventeen retellings of fairy tales, classic tales, and myths authored by both established and debut authors. The stories are of different lengths, styles, and literary quality, but they all contain “characters from various marginalized groups, including people of color, children living in non-​traditional families (e.g., with a single parent), as an adopted child, and also LGBTQ+​ people” (Bentley 157). Although most of the retellings are stereotypical and homonormative, the publication of Meseország mindenkié was seen as “a provocative act” and met with a strong reaction from the Hungarian government (Rankin). The publisher was ordered to put disclaimers on the book informing readers that it contains “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles” (Rankin). Notably, as Kidd observes more generally, this is a case in which “obscenity laws and other mechanisms for censorship ironically have helped enshrine certain materials as literature” (“Censorship”). The controversy led to the collection quickly selling out, thus reaching a wider audience. Meseország mindenkié was translated into Polish, German, Dutch, Slovak, and Swedish, a rare occurrence for a Hungarian children’s book, and in 2021 it was included in the prestigious catalog of White Ravens, the best international children’s books issued by the International Youth Library in Munich (Bentley). Moreover, Dorottya Rédai, the coordinator of the project, appeared on Time magazine’s 2021 list of the year’s 100 most influential people, and the book was called “a symbol of resistance in Hungary’s fight over LGBT rights” (Vaas; Haynes). In its focus on introducing a variety of different minorities, with the LGBTQ+​community being one of many, Meseország mindenkié is similar to Larysa Denysenko and Mariia (Masha) Foya’s 305

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Maya ta ii mamy (Maya and Her Moms; English translation Maya and Her Friends, 2022), the first Ukrainian children’s book featuring same-​sex parents, which “became a political tool in the confrontation between homophobic Ukrainian nationalists and progressive intellectuals” (Świetlicki 534). Despite its suggestive title, Maya is not centered on the theme of same-​sex parenting, but presents diverse family models. The picturebook is focalized by a presumably heterosexual girl who introduces the readers to her classmates: children who have been adopted, who are being raised by single parents or grandparents, who are refugees, or who are not ethnic Ukrainians but Crimean Tatars or Roma.14 Only on one of the last double-​page spreads does Maya mention her own two mothers, who are depicted as conventionally feminine. Both Maya and Meseország mindenkié caused heated debates, but in the Ukrainian case the debate was not followed by any changes in the law. In 2019 Maya was followed by the publication of another LGBTQ+​book, the Ukrainian translation of Kay O’Neill’s children’s comic Princess Princess Ever After, which was successfully presented at the Book Arsenal in Kyiv, a well-​known book fair. While Princess met with some controversy, Mariya Shahuri, the curator of the translation, notes that this response “was predictable and expected,” but “if the comic is discussed, it means that it touches on difficult topics that are very timely” and need to be discussed (qtd in “WoMo”; my translation). These discussions contributed to the growing visibility of the LGBTQ+​community in Ukraine. Although Meseország mindenkié caused backlash, it was also followed by the appearance of another, even more controversial, LGBTQ+​-​themed book. In 2021 the Hungarian bookshop chain Líra Könyv was fined for selling “content which deviates from the norm,” in this case Micsoda család!, a board book for toddlers depicting white, cisgender, and middle-​class children with same-​ sex parents (“Fining Bookstore”; Flood). While the book is short, homonormative, and seemingly innocent, Hungarian television aired a forty-​minute program openly condemning it. The following year the highest court of Hungary ruled that the fine was illegal (“Fining”). Representatives of the Hungarian Rainbow Family Association (Szivárványcsaládokért Alapítvány) commented on the verdict, stressing how important representation in literature is for children and their parents. However, with the implementation of the anti-​gay propaganda law, books featuring “deviation from gender identity, gender reassignment, and homosexuality” cannot be displayed, have to be sealed, and cannot be sold in bookstores close to schools or churches (“Fining”) –​even when they are homonormative board books aimed at toddlers. Written by American author Lawrence Schimel, illustrated by Elīna Brasliņa, and translated by Anna Szabó T., Micsoda család! (What a Family!) is a combined edition of Pronto por la mañana (2018; Early One Morning, 2021) and No es hora de jugar (2018; Bedtime, Not Playtime, 2021). Schimel argues that he and Brasliņa “set out to write books that were just FUN and featured queer families, but not about overcoming homophobia” (“Board”). Originally written in Spanish, the books have so far been issued in almost thirty languages. Notably, they had not aroused significant controversy until they were translated and published in Eastern and Central Europe. Before “the Hungarian government’s homophobic attack on the books, the most outcry over them had actually been because of the margarine,” notes Schimel, referring to the fact that in some editions margarine had to be changed to butter or hummus due to cultural differences (“Board”). The Hungarian controversy gave the books even further international recognition and turned them into political tools. A combined edition of Pronto por la mañana and No es hora de jugar, similar to the Hungarian one, was published in 2021 in Russia. Translated by poet Dmitry Kuzmin, it was issued in 500 copies by Russian LGBT Network and Sphere Foundation, because no Russian publisher wanted to work with them. In accordance with the Russian law censoring the content of children’s books, the book comes with a 18+​label and was distributed for free to local LGBTQ+​organizations (“Board”). Although in Hungary and Russia Schimel and Brasliņa’s board books caused controversy and legally had to be marketed as books for adults, a scholar only familiar with Western LGBTQ+​literature could easily dismiss them as simple, didactic, and homonormative: thus, anti-​queer. Pronto por 306

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la mañana and No es hora de jugar present what Lester has called “nonthreatening queers,” that is “people who conform to expected gender roles, who have a vested interest in parenting, and who are White and upper middle class” (245). Brasliņa’s illustrations are colorful and bright, and Schimel’s text is simple and rhymed. No es hora de jugar is focalized by a cisgender, dark-​haired, and conventionally feminine girl who plays with her dog and her two fathers before going to bed. The men are conventionally masculine, but they have different skin tones, with one of them positioned as the girl’s biological father. Pronto por la mañana is focalized by a red-​haired boy who wakes up in the morning and prepares breakfast for himself and the cat while his mothers and sister are asleep. The mothers are conventionally feminine, a typical feature of books about same-​sex parenting, and the illustrations also suggest that one of them is the boy’s biological mother and the other is his sister’s. The board books focus on the family unit; they do not mention any extended family or the LGBTQ+​ community (cf. Lester 250). Moreover, they highlight the assumed similarities between heteronormative and queer families and promote middle-​class values. In the Western context, the books are similar to some published in other countries almost fifty years ago (cf. Miller 40). Neverthless, in the context of Hungary and Russia, where the mere existence of LGBTQ+​ parents is seen as a threat to children and the nation, these seemingly homonormative books emerge as progressive and transformative. The transformative potential of LGBTQ+​ children’s books is always connected to the sociopolitical context. Micsoda család caused controversy in Hungary, but when Schimel and Brasliņa’s books were translated into Polish as Mamunie, tatunie, dzieciaki i zwierzaki (trans. Anna Błasiak; Moms, Dads, Kids and Pets), the book went unnoticed. The Polish edition was the initiative of German and Polish NGOs (100% Mensch and Fabryka Równości) and was printed in Germany using crowdfunding and then distributed for free in Poland (“Queer Children’s”). Notwithstanding the numerous political similarities between Poland and Hungary, this initiative may come as a surprise considering the much different state of the Polish children’s book market. Poland is only three places higher in the Rainbow Europe ranking than Russia and thirteen places lower than Hungary, but despite the country’s homophobic laws, the situation of LGBTQ+​ children’s literature significantly differs from that prevailing in Hungary, Russia, or Ukraine. In 2019 right-​wing politicians protested when a Polish drag queen called Lola read to children during the Poznań Pride Week. However, similar initiatives have also met with controversy in more gay-​friendly countries and further highlight the surprising differences between the state of LGBTQ+​ rights in Poland and the representation of queer themes on the local book market. The first local and translated books for children with mentions of queer individuals and rainbow families appeared as early as the 2000s, provoking heated discussions. Still, instead of resulting in homophobic changes to the law, as in Hungary and Russia, they contributed to the growing visibility of the LGBTQ+​community. In the last two decades books representing most of the typical tropes mentioned by Miller have appeared in Poland,15 including translated texts about same-​sex parenting, transgender children, or gay uncles (cf. Świetlicki and Świtała 1816). Some of the most interesting Polish books challenge gender binaries; for example, consider Maria Pawłowska and Jakub Szamałek’s Kim jest ślimak Sam? (2015, Who Is Sam the Snail?), a picturebook illustrated by Katarzyna Bogucka that has not been translated into English. The protagonist of Kim jest ślimak Sam? is a snail who is a hermaphrodite and struggles with the gender binaries they encounter on the first day of school. While at first Sam feels that they do not belong, over the course of the picturebook they realize that there are many other animals in the local woods who challenge gender binaries. Alongside Sam, Pawłowska and Szamałek introduce additional nonheteronormative and noncisgender characters. Although Kim jest ślimak Sam? centers on the animal world, the information it conveys is accurate. By showing that same-​sex parenting, same-​sex relations, and gender fluidity are common among various species, Pawłowska and Szamałek position similar issues in the human world as natural. 307

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In the early 2020s a myriad of new translations of books for all age groups has appeared in Poland, usually issued by major publishers and available in popular bookstores. The most notable examples include Alex Gino’s George/​Melissa (trans. Emilia Skowrońska, 2021) and the aforementioned Meseország mindenkié (Kraina baśni jest dla wszystkich, 2021). Despite the backlash the latter caused in Hungary, in Poland the collection caused no controversy. In addition to translations, original Polish books have also been published, including O sołtysie Salomonku i tęczy (About Little Solomon, the Village Head, and Rainbow) by the best-​selling and openly gay author Marcin Szczygielski, with illustrations by Adam Pękalski. The picturebook, which is the first Polish one representing the “sissy/​pink boy” trope, was named as one of the best children’s publications of 2021 by the Polish Section of IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People.17 “Sissy” books are those where “queerness, most often boyhood effeminacy, is represented as a problem to be solved” and “difference is celebrated, or at least tolerated, once the queer character proves themself worthy” (Miller 38; cf. Lester 248). As Lester argues, “it is problematic that these characters bear the burden of proving that they are acceptable, rather than an expectation that the communities must change their way of thinking” (250). However, in O sołtysie Salomonku i tęczy it is the heterosexual and cisgender father, the picturebook’s focalizer, who has to solve his problem, namely learning to understand and appreciate his effeminate thirteen-​year-​old son Joachimek. The teenager does not like playing with other boys and loves looking at the rainbow, a clear reference to the LGBTQ+​ community, especially in the context of Poland where the rainbow “has become a touchstone in the culture wars that have left Poland more deeply divided than perhaps any point since the end of Communist Party rule in 1989” (Santora). Unlike many other literary “sissy” boys, Joachimek does not have to prove himself, because there is nothing wrong with him. The one who has to change in O sołtysie Salomonku i tęczy is Salomonek, the father, who educates himself by talking with fellow villagers he considers smarter than himself. Salomonek meets various people, including a priest who denies even the existence of the rainbow. Notably, the mention of the priest seems to be a reference to the widespread homophobia in the Roman Catholic Church in Poland. After talking with an old woman named Agata, Salomonek finally realizes that he does not have to understand the source of his son’s otherness. The last double-​page spread depicts Joachimek looking at the rainbow together with his parents.

Conclusion Children’s books about gender and sexuality can be useful tools in providing queer children and those raised by same-​sex couples with representation and introducing other children to a variety of identities and family structures. The examples studied in this chapter show that examining LGBTQ+​ children’s literature should not be done without considering the sociopolitical situation in the relevant region. Comparing the cases of Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland demonstrates that the same book can incite various and sometimes contradictory responses. Although Lester has argued that homonormative books “do more to marginalize queer gender presentations than affirm them, and uphold rather than challenge heteronormative discourse on gender and sexual orientation” (248), the same texts –​for instance Schimel and Brasliņa’s board books –​may be interpreted as simple and homonormative or as transformative and revolutionary if read through a different cultural lens. Books featuring queer themes can help to introduce the experiences of LGBTQ+​ individuals to cultures where they are assumed to be foreign. Consequently, such literature may provide “collective identification and identity affirmation among those who may be quite isolated from others with similar experiences of gender and sexual identity” (Miller 4–​5). Hence, examining international LGBTQ+​ children’s books –​just like writing this type of literature –​is always a political act of beyond-​textual significance. 308

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Notes 1 For example, being in monogamous relationships, performing conventional masculinity and femininity, or having children (Duggan; cf. Halperin 441; Rubin 149). Homonormativity, a term popularized by Lisa Duggan, may be problematic when it is juxtaposed with allegedly more progressive expressions of gender and sexuality because it suggests that there are correct and incorrect ways of being LGBTQ+​. 2 In this chapter I use the word “queer” as an umbrella term referring to a variety of nonheteronormative sexualities and/​or non-​cisgender identities. As Kerry Mallan notes, “queer is a term that resists identity categorizations based on sexual orientation (including heterosexual). As a theoretical strategy, queer reveals the social and historical constructions of identity formation and dualistic concepts that govern normative notions of gender and sexuality” (161). 3 The acronym LGBTQ+​stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/​Questioning. 4 One of the contributors chose to write about LGBTQ+​ themes in the Arab world anonymously, which demonstrates that writing children’s books with same-​sex couples or queer individuals or writing about them is sometimes so controversial that it is risky to sign such a work with one’s real name. Many countries with no openly queer children’s books have texts that are queer-​coded and can be examined using queer theory (cf. Miller 12–​13). However, this topic exceeds the scope of this chapter. 5 Notably, literatures from these four countries are absent from Epstein and Chapman’s International LGBTQ+​ Literature for Children and Young Adults. 6 Local anti-​gay laws in some parts of Russia were introduced in the mid-​2000s. 7 The attempts to introduce an anti-​gay law in 2012 failed. It is worth noting that LGBTQ+​themes are present in young adult (YA) novels translated into Ukrainian. 8 PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; Eng. Law and Justice). For more about the anti-​LGBTQ+​actions of PiS, see Graff and Korolczuk; Świetlicki and Świtała. 9 The word “gender” –​sometimes referred to as “gender ideology” –​is not a neutral term in countries such as Poland, Hungary, or Russia, but an umbrella term for the alleged destruction of patriarchal traditions and Christian values. Moreover, in this understanding, “gender” is foreign to the region and comes from the West. Thus, the peculiar expression “anti-​gender claims” represents both homophobia and misogyny (Graff and Korolczuk 1–​8). Notably, as Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk argue, “the use of anti-​gender discourse by the populist right is largely opportunistic and strategic,” meaning that it is “a medium or tool for mobilizing collective emotions such as fear, nostalgia and resentment” (92). The attempts to defend “the traditional family and faith” are connected to “the radical-​right’s tendency to justify violence as self-​defense” (Graff and Korolczuk 92). Although homophobia was present in Central and Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism, in the last few years politicians in the region have openly used it in their campaigns by scapegoating the LGBTQ+​ community. For example, Polish president Andrzej Duda called the promotion of LGBTQ+​ rights an ideology worse than communism, and Przemysław Czarnek, the current Polish Minister of Education, compared “LGBT ideology” to Nazism. The political dimension of gender and LGBTQ+​ rights was also present in Vladimir Putin’s annexation speech delivered on 30 September 2022, when he once again mentioned the dangers of recognizing LGBTQ+​ rights and suggested that war in Ukraine helps Russia save children from Western degeneracy. 10 After Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the punishment for “gay propaganda” significantly increased. In the Russian media, the war in Ukraine is often explained as Russia’s attempts to protect Ukraine from the “LGBTQ+​ agenda” coming from the West (cf. Isajew). Hence, the local LGBTQ+​ community has become Putin’s scapegoat used to distract Russians from the genocide in Ukraine. 11 For more about the “anti-​gender” initiatives of parents in Eastern and Central Europe, see Graff and Korolczuk 125; Fábián and Korolczuk. 12 While LGBTQ+​ themes cannot appear in Russian children’s literature, numerous YA novels labeled 18+​ have been issued by Popcorn Books Publisher, including four books by Mikita Franko, which include references to transgender parents, same-​sex parenting, and a transgender boy (Fedorova). In 2021 Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova’s Leto v pionerskom galstukem (Summer in a Pioneer Scarf), another LGBTQ+​ novel about teenagers, was issued, initially as fanfiction on https://​ficb​ook.net. Notably, all of the books quickly sold out. In 2023 Leto v pionerskom galstukem was translated into Polish by Michał Kołakowski as Lato w pionierskiej chuście and was widely distributed. Interestingly, some Russian publishers of children’s books have started 18+​book series featuring LGBTQ+​themes. The 2020 Russian edition of Christelle Dabos’s YA series Les Fiancés de l’hiver censored nonbinary characters, provoking the author to “disassociate [herself] from this translation” (cf. Dabos). I thank Ekaterina Shatalova for providing me with this information.

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Mateusz Świetlicki 13 Rebel Girls contains an empty spread encouraging the readers to write their own story and draw their portrait. Welcome to Your Period contains a disclaimer: “the publisher is forced to withhold the text in order to avoid accusations of violating Russian law.” 14 The theme of the Roma also appears in Meseország mindenkié. 15 In the last two decades numerous popular LGBTQ+​-​themed young adult novels have been published in Poland, both local and translations from various languages. Unlike in Russia or Hungary, such books can be found in most bookstores and often become bestsellers. 16 LGBTQ+​ themes appeared in Polish YA literature even earlier (cf. Świetlicki and Świtała). More than a dozen new young adult books have been translated into Polish after the publication of Świetlicki and Świtała’s article. 17 The story was also issued in Wszystkie kolory świata (2020, All the Colors of the World), a collection of twenty mostly LGBTQ+​-​themed children’s illustrated texts created by forty-​three eminent authors and twenty illustrators who openly condemn the homophobia of the Polish government.

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26 DISABILITY AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Toshio Kimura and Junko Yoshida

Introduction A particularly significant milestone in the evolving social consciousness about people with disabilities was the 1972 decision of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in the United Kingdom to draw “a distinction between the physical ‘impairment’ and the social situation, called ‘disability,’ of people with such impairment” (UPIAS 15). The Union members defined “impairment” as the state of having a physically or mentally defective body and “disability” as the socially constructed barriers and discriminations against people with impairments. In their view, “it is society which disables physically impaired people” (15). This conception was later developed into the “social model of disability” by Michael Oliver and Bob Sapey in 1983 (23). The “social model of disability” has been widely accepted, and as a result the academic field of disability studies has developed globally, including the founding of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) in the United States in 1982. These movements have resulted in laws that prohibit discrimination against disabled people, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and its precursor the Rehabilitation Act (1973), the Disability Discrimination Act (1992) in Australia, and the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) in the United Kingdom. Against this background, in this chapter we discuss in historical perspective the changing representations of disabilities in children’s books written in English over the past one hundred years. First, before discussing books chronologically, we examine the relationship between “impairment” and the “social model of disability” in Kathy Hoopmann’s picturebook All Cats Are on the Autism Spectrum1 (2021). We begin the subsequent sections by exploring disability as metaphor in two classic early twentieth-​century tales. The middle part of the century was a transitional period, and novels of that era usually did not explicitly describe a character’s disability. We discuss a novel of the late 1960s that depicts a girl who has a psychological problem and a 1970 novel that portrays a disabled boy. We also look at a late twentieth-​century historical fiction that implicitly contrasts the attitudes toward disability operating in the 1850s with those of the 1990s. Finally, we discuss four contemporary narratives for young readers that highlight disabled characters’ voices and agency. While our sample size is necessarily small, our objective here is to sketch representative works illustrating key trends in this important topic.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-30

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Impairment and Disability In Hoopmann’s All Cats Are on the Autism Spectrum, all sixty-​six cat characters are depicted as having characteristics of autism: impairments of social interaction, obsessions, and repetitive behavior. Readers learn two things: what autism is like, including that there is a “spectrum” (following the American diagnostic manual DSM-​5 [2013]); and how the cats keep themselves safe and comfortable, overcoming barriers without their owners’ intervention. Let us examine some examples. First, explaining the cats’ approach to social interaction, Hoopmann writes, “They like to be near those they love, but might not want to be held, preferring squishy places to a hug. Instead of coming to people for comfort, they may prefer a toy or a pet” (3–​5). Second, she describes obsessions and repetitive behavior: “They are often fussy about what they eat and may want the same food presented in the same way, day after day. Daily rituals comfort them, and they get worried if their schedules or surroundings are changed” (12–​15). Significantly, Hoopmann’s autistic cats do not seem to encounter barriers because she intends to celebrate their community. Also significant, Hoopmann draws a parallel between her cats on the wide range of the autism spectrum and the young readers who might also be somewhere on the spectrum.

Stereotypical Metaphor While Hoopman’s book focuses on what it can be like to experience autism, some older classics of children’s literature employ disabled characters only as metaphors for something else. Patricia Dunn describes this move as an unfortunate way of “disabling characters”: This “disabling” may happen in several ways: the stereotypical way in which disabled characters are portrayed; a tired plot in which they die or get cured at the end, suggesting there’s no place for disability in mainstream society; and unchallenged discriminatory remarks reflecting assumptions of an ableist society, that is, a society that privileges so-​called “able-​ bodied” people. (2) More specifically, as David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder maintain, “disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). To provide examples of this phenomenon, we discuss L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz includes nonhuman characters with disabilities: the Scarecrow has an impairment of his brain, the Tin Woodman an impairment of his heart, and the Cowardly Lion an impairment of his mental strength or courage. Upon first meeting Dorothy, they complain about what they are lacking. However, Dorothy does not react compassionately. For example, she does not think that the Scarecrow has a real problem; instead, she treats him as a sensible person: “Do you think,” [the Scarecrow] asked, “if I go to the Emerald City with you, that Oz would give me any brains?” “I cannot tell,” [Dorothy] returned; “but you may come with me, if you like. If Oz will not give you any brains you will be no worse off than you are now.” (25) It might seem that Dorothy is not very sympathetic toward her companions, but it might also be said that she is willing to accept them as they are. However, Baum appears more interested in using these characters’ disabilities as an object lesson. As Junko Yoshida points out, Dorothy’s journey to the land 314

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of Oz primarily serves to help the male figures solve their problems (“Men” 160). To put it another way, the central characters are the males who undertake a quest in search of their masculine identity as empire builders. They hope that the Wizard will magically grant them what they lack, but they eventually discover that they were not deficient in the first place. Thus, the story focuses not on these characters’ experience of disability but on their gaining of self-​confidence and self-​understanding. On his way to the Emerald City, the Scarecrow conceives ideas one after another and solves various problems (52–​76). After the Wizard provides a placebo, “The Scarecrow told [his companions] there were wonderful thoughts in his head” (147). It is no wonder that the Wizard appoints him ruler of the Emerald City. Baum describes the Tin Woodman as follows: “When the Tin Woodman walked about he felt his heart rattling around in his breast; and he told Dorothy he had discovered it to be a kinder and more tender heart than the one he had owned when he was made of flesh” (147). Again, it is no wonder that “[the Winkies] had grown so fond of the Tin Woodman that they begged him to stay and rule over them and the Yellow Land of the West” (119). As for the Lion, he courageously confronts “a dozen of the fierce Kalidahs” and kills the great spider, the enemy of the forest animals (147, 175–​76), after which the beasts bow down to him as their king. In short, regaining confidence leads each of these three male characters to achieve the normative qualities of an empire builder: wisdom, kindness, and courage. In this story, disability is not presented for its own sake; rather, it is an abnormality that serves to construct normalcy, which Alice Hall concisely sums up2 (see also Davis 9, 14, 26). In other words, the male figures’ disabilities are utilized for the sake of the narrative, as Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of “narrative prosthesis”3 describes. In The Secret Garden, the two main characters have disabilities. Mary, a sickly ten-​year-​old orphan with a thin face, body, and hair, has grown up without adequate affection and has become a haughty “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary.” Ten-​year-​old Colin, the son of Mary’s guardian uncle Archibald Craven, is a hysterical and selfish “Rajah,” confined to his room, nearly bedridden, and convinced that he will die prematurely due to his back condition. As Jerry Griswold points out, these two characters’ essential problems are mental ones (233). Mr. Craven is described as a “hunchback” who has lost his beloved wife and resents his son for it. Mr. Craven avoids Colin because he fears Colin will grow up disabled. The mental disorder is much more severe than the physical disorder. In both cases, a cure can be effected by a change in environment, specifically including the social environment. When Martha, Dickon, and their mother, Susan Sowerby, who are all in good physical and mental health, spend time with Mary and Colin, the secret garden magically heals the two disabled children. Burnett convincingly portrays the process of overcoming disabilities and growing up by including passages that describe interactions with plants and animals, outdoor work and muscle exercises, sound thoughts, unfettered laughter, and healthy meals. The term “magic” is often used in The Secret Garden, but although Burnett’s Christian Science faith is never far from the surface and the Doxology is sung in one scene, there is no talk of divine grace. Instead, healing is rooted in the power of nature and fresh air, exemplified by the Yorkshire moor. Guided by the words of his late wife and a letter from Susan Sowerby, Mr. Craven regains his strength as he heads for the Manor. The joy of being in his homeland and the dramatic reunion with his son in the garden are the grand finale that liberates his heart. Given the general restoration to health that forms the denouement, it seems that Burnett intended her novel to describe a path toward overcoming disabilities. The novel revolves around Mary’s curiosity about both the secret garden and the mysterious screaming from inside the Manor, which turns out to emanate from Colin. Colin eventually denies his past as an invalid, and he compassionately tries to please his father. Both children are receptive to Martha, Dickon, Susan Sowerby, and Ben Weatherstaff, which enhances the effect of social inclusion. Mr. Craven’s paternal love is discovered to remain deep in his heart. All of this adds up to a happy ending, but as Griswold points out, the only person who can heal Mr. Craven is his son (246). The father-​son walk on the lawn is “a Recognition 315

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Ceremony, an acknowledgment of the true heir” (247), and a moment of freedom from the psychological and physical disabilities that have kept Mr. Craven away from his son and the social obstacles that have kept him from talking about his son. While the first half of the novel is about Mary, the second half turns into a story about men: Colin and Mr. Craven. In a sense, the first half is a prelude to the second half. Mary’s and Colin’s disabilities improve as the deserted garden is restored, after which the focus moves to Colin’s effort to please his father by suddenly demonstrating his restored health. Colin pretends to need a wheelchair to keep others from realizing that he can now walk. In other words, the wheelchair represents his disability. As Hall points out, “in everyday life, the image of the wheelchair remains the most frequently used symbol of disability in all of its diverse forms” (59), and the children employ it with an awareness of its symbolic meaning. However, Helen A. Aveling notes that The Secret Garden includes no specific description of the wheelchair, despite its important role (31–​32). This avoidance reflects the social attitude in a male-​dominated society that a wheelchair damages male dignity. Conversely, the muscle-​strengthening exercises that Dickon recommends to Colin represent a healthy masculinity. Colin’s vision of his future as the Athlete, the Lecturer, and the Scientific Discoverer reflects the values and ideals of the upper class in the male-​dominated society of the time. Therefore, as Alexandra Valint argues, it is not surprising that even Mary vanishes from the story, along with the wheelchair (263). Once the perfect male figures of Colin and Mr. Craven are established, the secret garden need no longer be a “secret.” In sum, the disabilities and illnesses in The Secret Garden work as metaphors that emphasize and reinforce the “normalcy” of masculinity. Furthermore, the norms in question are specifically those of affluence. A wheelchair is expensive, and someone needs to push it. Colin says to Mary at one point, “I shall like to go out with you if Dickon will come and push my chair” (204), so class issues are also expressed and symbolized through the wheelchair.4 Thus, the masculinity of the upper class, in particular, is pushed to the forefront with the authority of the able-​bodied.

Disability during the Transitional Period In contrast to Hoopmann’s positive depiction of autism as an alternative way of being in the world, Joan G. Robinson’s novel When Marnie Was There (1967) centers on a pre-​teen female protagonist, Anna, who is probably on the autism spectrum and who feels a barrier between herself and those around her, including her foster mother, Nancy Preston, and friends at school. Mrs. Preston worries that Anna’s apathetic “not-​even-​trying” may spoil her life (10). On the pretext that she needs a change of air to treat her asthma, Anna is sent to visit Susan Pegg, Mrs. Preston’s friend, who lives in the fictional town of Little Overton in Norfolk. At the Peggs’ Anna is told, “You do what you like. Just suit yourself and follow your fancy” (36). Accordingly, she enjoys exploring three different worlds: “The world of the Peggs’ cottage, small and cozy. The world of the staithe, where the boats swung at anchor in the creek and the Marsh House [was] watching for her out of many windows. And the world of the beach, where great gulls swooped overhead” (37). Gradually, she becomes preoccupied with the staithe and the Marsh House, and she obsessively visits the magical house every day. Even in Little Overton, however, Anna draws a line between herself and others and hates to talk to anyone, silencing herself and not caring about how others feel. Consider two episodes. First, Anna is unsociable with two guests at Mrs. Pegg’s, Sandra and her mother. Sandra’s mother says about Anna, “She’s a bit of an awkward one, ain’t she?” and Sandra says, “Never did I see such a stiff, plain thing —​” (45). Second, when Anna later comes across Sandra at a store, she fails to communicate sociably and instead says, “Fat pig.” Sandra retorts, “You look like –​like just what you are [sic]” (55). Her words painfully remind Anna that she is “ugly, silly, bad tempered, stupid, ungrateful, rude [...] and that was why nobody liked her” (55). Lorna Wing, the British psychiatrist who formulated the idea of an “autistic spectrum” (“Continuum” 92), describes a “triad of impairment” in autism: “social interaction, communication and imagination” (“History” 20), including obsession. Robinson’s book 316

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does not explicitly mention autism, but this triad can be found in Anna’s behavior, besides her obsession with the staithe and the Marsh House. When people criticize Anna for her apathy or “not-​even-​ trying” and regard her as an awkward, “stiff, plain thing,” she feels a barrier between herself and others; thinking of herself as an “outsider” and of others as “insiders,” she wears an “ordinary look” or a “wooden face” (8). Significantly, the worlds to which Anna is obsessively drawn have womb-​like and maternal elements: a small and cozy space, the creek with the boats, and the Marsh House that watches for her. Anna comes to voice her long-​suppressed feelings for the first time, borrowing the sandpipers’ cry, “Pity me! Oh, pity me!” (25). It is no coincidence that she meets a mysterious girl, Marnie, who lives in the Marsh House and later turns out to be the ghost of Anna’s maternal grandmother. Interestingly, Anna’s habilitation is achieved through her magical, dreamlike encounter with her grandmother, who herself suffered from maternal deprivation. At the end of the novel, Anna learns the real identities of her mother and grandmother and their tragedies of their lives. In Marnie’s case, her mother was busy entertaining guests in London with her husband, so Marnie had to stay with an abusive nurse and servants at the Marsh House all summer. In Anna’s case, her divorced mother and her new stepfather were killed in a car crash. Robinson seems to imply that Anna’s problems are deeply rooted in a generational inheritance of maternal deprivation –​an assumption often made by psychologists and psychiatrists when diagnosing emotionally disturbed children. The term maternal deprivation brings to mind the theory of the “refrigerator mother,” which derives largely from the work of Austrian-​American psychiatrist Leo Kanner on “early infantile autism.” Writing in 1949, he suggested that autism may be a disorder caused by a “maternal lack of genuine warmth” (422, 425). Stuart Murray maintains, “[I]‌t was Kanner who coined the phrase ‘refrigerator mother,’ the most notorious comment attached to the idea of parental causation of autism” (54). Later, the renowned American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim helped popularize the idea that unloving parents, particularly mothers, cause very young children to withdraw in autism. Nonetheless, Kanner himself rejected the “refrigerator mother” theory in his speech at the 1969 meeting of the National Society for Autistic Children. As Sean Cohmer writes, “[Kanner] acquitted the parents and insisted that the condition of autism was innate” (“Refrigerator”). In today’s medical community, autistic disorder is generally understood as a spectrum that includes Kanner’s syndrome (or classic autistic disorder) and “Asperger’s syndrome,” a term coined by Wing (“Syndrome” 115). Accordingly, rereading When Marnie Was There from a twenty-​first-​century medical perspective, as reflected in the diagnostic manual DSM-​5, Anna can be described as hovering at the edge of the autism spectrum. Consequently, we can place this novel in the transitional period in terms of changing concepts of autism. Returning to the topic of Anna’s habilitation, we should examine what happens to her when she revisits the Marsh House after a period of convalescence in the Peggs’ house. She encounters Priscilla Lindsay and her lively family. Anna, who has been unsociable and uncommunicative, now enjoys talking with Priscilla about Marnie. It seems that the “magic circle” that used to exclude Anna has evaporated, and “Anna’s two worlds would be joined into one” (10, 230). Thus, we can assume that Anna has emotionally grown through her experiences at Little Overton, and she now can go beyond the barriers erected by the “social model of disability.” Anna is a fictional character, but there are real-​life examples of young people on the autism spectrum who have recovered from the disorder. In Send in the Idiots, Kamran Nazeer reports on the later lives of his former classmates at a special elementary school for autistic children in New York. He writes, “André, Craig and I are obviously very fortunate. We are towards that end of the autism spectrum from which it is simpler to progress into education, attainment, and employment” (224). Emphasizing the importance of acceptance by others, Nazeer states that he and some classmates became “less idiotic than before [...] through exposure to the world that lay beyond the horizon of our own selves,” adding, “Our autism was erased, in each case, because of other people, our parents, and our teachers, of course” (228, 229). Nazeer’s description echoes Anna’s way of habilitation. 317

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Lastly, we should note that the female characters in Robinson’s novel take the gender role of mothering for granted, which is problematic from a feminist perspective. Jane asks her mother, Mrs. Lindsay, “You mean that because Marnie wasn’t loved [by her mother] when she was little, she wasn’t able to be a loving mother herself, when her turn came?” (264). In other words, the girl presumes that the “reproduction of mothering” has malfunctioned in Anna’s family. Nancy Chodorow’s question in The Reproduction of Mothering is worth asking in this situation: “Why are mothers women? Why is the person who routinely does all those activities that go into parenting not a man?” (11). In this respect, the novel appeared at a transitional, indeed watershed, moment for feminism. From the 1970s onward, the concept of mothering as an exclusively female occupation has not been uncritically accepted.

Disability for Its Own Sake Unlike The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or The Secret Garden, Betsy Byars’s 1970 Newbery Medal-​ winning novel, The Summer of the Swans, portrays disability for its own sake. Byars’s novel, which focuses on Charlie Godfrey, a ten-​year-​old boy with brain damage, was published at a time of sociocultural change following the civil rights movement. And in keeping with the movement’s emphasis on identity, Byars felt a strong commitment to verisimilitude, whereas Baum and Burnett tailored their depictions of disabilities, essentially metaphorical, to suit their messages. Regarding her portrayal of Charlie’s impairment, Byars writes: I did a lot of research on the character of Charlie in the Medical Library of W.V.U. [West Virginia University]. I found three case histories of kids who had had brain damage because of high-​fevered illness when they were babies, and that’s where Charlie came from. All the details of his life were from those three case histories. I made nothing up. (“Autobiography” 32) Byars’s portrayal of Charlie’s impairment based on the three case histories supported her use of an omniscient point of view. The critic Malcolm Usrey maintains that this viewpoint better enables the young reader “to enter the mind of Charlie” than would a stream-​of-​consciousness point of view (23). With Charlie at its center, the novel deals with his family’s difficulties: his mother’s death; his father’s absence due to having to work far from home; the fourteen-​year-​old protagonist Sara’s sudden loss of self-​confidence; and Sara’s feeling that Charlie is a “problem” that has damaged her relationship with a close friend. Thus, the novel starts with Sara’s sense of deprivation and depression. The novel then unfolds along the two narrative threads of “lost” and “found” (Usrey 21–​22). On the one hand, Sara loses her confidence in her own worth. On the other, Charlie, who is fascinated by the beauty of white swans in a mountain lake, gets lost in a ravine on his way to the lake at midnight. Toward the end of the novel, Sara finds Charlie, who is panicked and exhausted, his face streaked with tears and dirt. What Sara finds in Charlie is someone quite different from his ordinary self: “He opened his eyes and as he saw Sara a strange expression came over his face, an expression of wonder and joy and disbelief, and Sara knew that if she lived to be a hundred no one would ever look at her quite that way” (126). Charlie, who had never expressed any feelings, including joy, wonder, or disbelief, was previously a source of problems for Sara. But now he has turned into a dear brother who clings to her: His arms gripped her like steel. “Oh, Charlie.” She could feel his fingers digging into her back as he clutched her shirt. “It’s all right now, Charlie, I’m here and we’re going home.” His face was buried in her shirt and she patted his head, said again, “It’s all right now. Everything’s fine.” (126) 318

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Sara finds Charlie, but she also finds something else: her problems –​ her insecurity about her appearance, her issues with sibling rivalry, and her feeling that Charlie is a nuisance –​ are no longer important. What is important is the effort that her disabled brother makes to move ahead. This recognition gives Sara a vision of “blinding white steps” (140), with each family member positioned at a step of life. The Summer of the Swans may itself be seen as one step in a journey, as later novels, stimulated by the Society for Disability Studies and the enactments of additional laws prohibiting discrimination against disabled people, gradually came to express disabled characters’ own voices.

Institutionalization of Disabled People The books examined so far in this chapter have contemporary or fantastic settings. Looking at an example of a historical novel depicting disability can also be instructive, as authors can use events apparently safely located in the past to comment on the present. Katherine Paterson’s Jip, His Story (1996), a Scott O’Dell Award winner, is set in Vermont during the 1850s and portrays disabled male characters. The novel revolves around a twelve-​year-​old orphan named Jip and other residents at a poor farm where the mentally disabled characters, Putnam Nelson, Sheldon, and George, are institutionalized. The story develops suspense as Jip discovers that his mother was an escaped slave and that the slave owner, Jip’s father, has been hunting his son as his property. Besides Jip’s escape narrative, young readers are introduced to the historical institution of the poor farm, whose inmates include not only the orphan Jip, but also disabled men, elderly people, and a widowed mother with her children. Paterson describes the poor farm as follows: It was the overseer’s job to clear the town of tramps and transients and sweep the poor and mentally defective out of the village and onto the poor farm, where they would not offend the eyes and nostrils of God-​fearing citizens, nor strain their purse strings overmuch. (7) Though the comment is sardonic in its criticism of the reluctance of the “God-​fearing citizens” to exhibit Christian compassion, this is a historically accurate depiction. Sociologist David Wagner notes that poor farms contained a mix of inmates, with “the widowed, aged, infirm, children, and other ‘deserving poor’ all housed together in one place” (5). As is indicated in “the confusion between workhouse and poorhouse” (5), the poorhouse or poor farm originally had two totally different aims, hospitality and punishment (4). Despite this confusion, even poor farms could be seen as a step forward, since before they were established as homes for various people in need, a form of involuntary servitude was sometimes practiced. Paterson recounts, again with a sardonic undertone, how municipalities began to put out the poor to the lowest bidder –​ the householder who proposed to take on the responsibility for the pauper at least expense to the town. This practice, alas, fell into disfavor as the ever-​vigilant do-​gooders sniffed out cases of abuse and claimed near starvation. (28) In the opening chapter, the “lunatic” Putnam Nelson is brought to the poor farm instead of being sent to an asylum, and Jip and Sheldon are ordered to make a cage for him. Paterson writes that the fictional Put Nelson is based on the actual Put Wilson, who lived in a cage on the town poor farm in nineteenth-​century Hartford, Vermont. Like Put Wilson, fictional Put loves to sing the same song over and over at children’s requests (Paterson, “Acknowledgments”). 319

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Wagner finds that inmates have left few records or diaries that record their experiences in their own “voices” (11). Paterson may be seeking to comment on this past and present silencing by endowing her marginalized characters with a degree of power. Although the two disabled men in the novel are tragically killed, Paterson’s portrayal of them does not follow the usual script for disabled characters. “Lunatic” Put dares to run away with Jip, protecting him as his “father,” a contrast to Jip’s actual slave-​hunting father. Put is shot to death while shouting the song “All is well!” to distract the slave catchers’ attention from Jip (170). His voice roars when he is murdered by the slave catchers. Thus, Put assumes agency, his gift of singing, and determines his own fate. The other disabled character, Sheldon, has been forced to work as a “stone man” (55) in a quarry. The overseer Lyman thinks, “We need for someone around here to earn real cash money. Not just eat up all the profits” (52). Sheldon, who has never earned cash, is extremely proud to be a “workingman” (59) and later is killed by a blast of dynamite. Sheldon also uses his voice, wishing to be treated as a “full man” like nondisabled men (61). In insisting on Put and Sheldon’s dignity and even heroism, Paterson encourages young readers to reject negative stereotypes of the mentally ill or cognitively challenged.

Disabled Characters with Voice, Subjectivity, and Agency By the turn of the twenty-​first century, many children’s books that included disabled characters were strikingly different from the books of decades earlier. First, the characters have their own voices. Second, instead of being objectified by others, the characters possess subjectivity, which shapes their fate. Third, they assume latent agency to survive hardships and establish their identity. In this final section, we look at four texts out of many published over the last two decades: Lois Lowry’s dystopian Gathering Blue (2000); Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery (2007), a novel featuring autism spectrum disorder that is written in the voice of a boy with a “syndrome”; and a short story and nonfiction piece by autistic writer Higashida Naoki5 (2007, 2015). These works depict a world that reflects the “triad of impairment” described above, from an outsider perspective in the case of the nondisabled authors and from an insider perspective in the case of Higashida. In Gathering Blue, a standalone part of the Giver Quartet, Kira, a teenage girl with a physical disability, is thrown into a social-​Darwinian community after her mother dies. The novel depicts how Kira survives using her gift of embroidery skills, a kind of agency, in the devastated community where the strong prey upon the weak. Vandara, who brings a suit against Kira, insists on sending her to the Field to be killed by the beasts as worthless and unproductive, saying, “[Kira] drags that dead leg around like a useless burden,” and “There is no room for this useless girl. She can’t marry. No one wants a cripple” (30, 31). However, the Council of Guardians, the communal government, decides to house Kira in a sturdy building, the Council Edifice, instead of sending her to the Field. Kira is assigned to the prestigious job of repairing the Singer’s ritual robe, using her embroidery skills. She works as an obedient and diligent “inmate” in the house, doing what she is told. A turning point comes when Kira finds a faded blue thread among old embroidery designs on the Singer’s robe. She realizes that there is no real blue anymore, neither in her stock of thread nor anywhere in her village, because there are no woad plants that produce the color blue. When she learns from a dyer that some people on the far side of the wood have blue, Kira starts gathering blue. Kira is also at a turning point in that she is seeking a way to leave her institutionalized life, in which the Council of Guardians exploits her skills under their strict surveillance. She realizes she has not been free and has been isolated as well. Richard K. Scotch, a sociologist who discusses the changing institutions and associated legislation for disabled people in the United States, writes, “Institutions took on an essentially custodial nature” and often isolated the residents because nondisabled people made decisions about institutionalization (16, 28). This is the case with Kira. German philosopher Ernst Bloch suggests in The Principle of Hope that an imagination of the utopian helps deprived people pursue positive dreams in the process of achieving hope (144). He also 320

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asserts that people first need to recognize the lack of something important in their reality (5). Bloch’s analysis can be applied to Kira’s case. After losing her mother, Kira realizes that those around her lack concern for others, especially the old, weak, or disabled. Later, she understands that gathering blue is a metaphorical act of loving and caring for others, because only in the far-​off “village of healing” (228), where “broken people” are looked after and loved (227), is the woad grown. Kira centers her hope on embroidering “the untouched expanse across the back and shoulders of the robe” (91). By embroidering the blank place in blue thread, Kira resolves to construct what Rebecca Totaro calls “a place for hope” (135), which is closely related to “the village of healing” where her father has been rescued. Accordingly, Gathering Blue can be read as a story in which a disabled female protagonist assumes agency (her gift of embroidery skills), not only to survive hardships but also to change the world (see Yoshida, “Representation”). In The London Eye Mystery, Ted, the twelve-​year-​old protagonist with a “syndrome,” likewise demonstrates impressive agency by solving the mystery of the disappearance of his cousin Salim. Ted is the first-​person narrator of the novel.6 Although his syndrome is not explicitly named, it is clear that he is on the autism spectrum. When his mother describes the front garden as “the size of a postage stamp,” Ted takes her literally and calculates that the garden is the size of 22,500 postage stamps (20). He has unconscious hand-​waving, various obsessions, difficulty with interpersonal relationships, and difficulty expressing himself appropriately. He also has an excellent memory, and he is aware that his brain runs on an operating system different from other people’s. Difference here is not necessarily disadvantage. For instance, listening to weather forecasts is not merely one of Ted’s obsessions, as his knowledge of the weather becomes part of the solution to the mystery. Ted has no cognitive disability, but he has been bullied because he is different from normal people. Accordingly, the author seems to want readers to question how we categorize people as normal, as disabled, or as having a syndrome. Dunn observes that “The book [...] repeatedly challenges judgments of what is ‘normal’ and emphasizes the value of different perspectives” (123–​24). For example, Ted has never lied. However, after an extraordinary situation, he comes out of his shell and tactfully tells a lie. The change indicates that his social skills have expanded. But the author invites readers to reflect upon the fact that lying is the mark of a “normal” person. The indeterminability of “normal” shows that it cannot be defined by the conventional social model of disability. Hall offers a new view of disability: Focusing on issues of cognitive impairment, such as autism or Down Syndrome, challenges understandings of disability as simply a mismatch between the social environment and an individual’s physical impairments. In this context, “disability” might be re-​framed: seen not as a damaging social process but instead as an alternative way of being in the world. (27) Like the cats in Hoopmann’s picturebook, Ted can exemplify an alternative way of being in the world. Tobin Siebers’s views on disability identity are applicable to Ted’s case: Disability is not a physical or mental defect but a cultural and minority identity. To call disability an identity is to recognize that it is not a biological or natural property but an elastic social category both subject to social control and capable of effecting social change. (4) Siebers further states, “Many disability theorists –​ and I count myself among them –​ would argue that disability as an identity is never negative” (4). This point may be the crucial message conveyed through Ted. Ted is never particularly bizarre. Nor, as Dunn points out, does the novel stereotype the disabled protagonist as a “superhero” or “supercrip” (123–​28). The novel simply refers to Ted’s 321

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“syndrome,” without using the words autism or Asperger. This technique helps to avoid narrow stereotypes of autism, which in reality has a variety of symptoms.7 The issue of social disability is also woven into the story. It is the author’s important intention to make young readers aware of various real-​world problems, in addition to offering the fun of unraveling a mystery. First, Ted’s family is not harmonious; the fact that the father is a demolition expert is clearly an intentional literary device. Ted’s sister Kat is “AWOL” from school, and their parents do not listen to him. Despite these circumstances, Ted and Kat pursue several of Ted’s theories to find a solution to the mystery. The search by the pair reminds us of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and indeed Ted uses Holmes’s method of “elimination” in order to exclude unlikely theories. In addition to Ted’s being bullied, Salim and Marcus are subject to racial discrimination. At the time of Salim’s disappearance, the father is working at the “Barracks,” described as follows: It used to be where people who are socially excluded lived. Being socially excluded is a bit like being excluded from school. Instead of a head teacher telling you you have to leave, it’s more that everybody in the rest of society acts like you don’t exist. (10) Dunn, discussing the same passage, observes that “this novel also examines, in a positive, hopeful, but definitely critical way, the society in which Ted finds himself ridiculed, bullied, and excluded” (123). In addition, the author employs the reunion and regeneration of the family to figure the restructuring of society. Looking at a Japanese autistic writer, Higashida, enables us to locate points of commonality with the British and American writers discussed above. Higashida’s writings also provide an insider’s perspective on some of the issues raised earlier in this chapter. He was diagnosed with severe nonverbal autism at an early age and learned to read and write using letter boards and other tools. He is able to express himself through prose and poetry. The Reason I Jump (Japanese 2007, English 2013), an autobiographical book written when he was thirteen, reveals the inner world of a person with autism.8 The short story “I’m Right Here,” included in The Reason I Jump, is about a boy, Shun, who dies and then visits his family as an invisible spirit in order to convey his feelings to them. Later, Shun chooses to be reborn in the same family, this time as a girl, in order to console his mother, who is still overwhelmed by grief. Higashida states: I wrote this story in the hope that it will help you to understand how painful it is when you can’t express yourself to the people you love. If this story connects with your heart in some way, then I believe you’ll be able to connect back to the hearts of people with autism too. (Reason, “Foreword”) It is important to note that Higashida does not present Shun as disabled. The author himself suffers from the disability of autism, but he is mindful of the suffering of “normal” people. His description of jumping adds to our understanding of the story: “When I jump, I feel lighter, and I think the reason my body is drawn skywards is that the motion makes me want to change into a bird and fly off to some faraway place” (77). The world in which he jumps would be a free blue sky with no boundaries between normal and disabled. Higashida’s writings make us ask what is “normal” or “disabled.” Factors that supported his growth include self-​awareness of his disorder, reflection upon the nature of things, and finally, a positive acceptance of his disability –​a contrast to some earlier texts that locate the happy ending in disability’s eradication. In Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 (Japanese 2015, English 2017), Higashida remarks, “The neurotypical public need to know that the failure of people with autism to communicate doesn’t stem

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from inner self-​imprisonment: it stems from a failure of others to see that we are open and receptive” (165–​66). He feels his own loneliness, yet he transcends his disability to attend to the pain of the able-​ bodied. In a sense, Higashida overcomes the dichotomy between normality and disability, blurring the boundary between a “normal” and a “disabled” person.

Conclusion Along with following the changing social consciousness of disability, we have adopted an intersectional analysis of discrimination based on race, gender, social class, and economic disparity. That the material lends itself to such analysis illustrates that disability coexists in a complicated relationship with other forms of marginalization. In the books by Baum and Burnett discussed above, for example, an intersectional reading of masculinity explains why the active female protagonists are overshadowed by male characters. We expect that reading from multiple perspectives will deepen our understanding of disability represented in children’s literature.

Notes 1 The book was originally published as All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome in 2006. In 2013, the American diagnostic manual DSM-​5 replaced the term “Asperger Syndrome” with “Autism Spectrum Disorder” (see American Psychiatric Association 31–​32, 50–​59). Accordingly, the book title was revised to All Cats Are on the Autism Spectrum. 2 “Normalcy is understood as a culturally specific standard or set of characteristics through which ‘normal’ human beings are defined in a particular society and period. Norms are ‘enforced’ through a variety of normalising technologies and practices, including the representation of norms as positive traits in books, films, television shows and works of art” (Hall 167). 3 According to Hall, “A ‘prosthetic’ use of disability in narrative employs representations of disability as a shorthand or stand-​in to signify stereotypical notions of pity and moral or social disorder” (166). In other words, “disability is not represented for its own sake but instead is used to shore up and stabilise ideas of the normal, with a focus on the central, non-​disabled characters. This theory encourages scholars to draw attention to metaphors and stereotypical scripts that might otherwise be taken for granted” (166). 4 For further discussion of the wheelchair as a symbol of class and gender, see Valint. 5 In Japanese culture, the family name conventionally comes first, followed by the given name. 6 In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time (2003), protagonist Christopher is also the first-​person narrator. His mental disorder is not specifically identified. 7 This can be inferred from Murray’s multifaceted commentary on the complexity of the diagnosis of autism and the current ways of understanding and talking about autism. Sonya Freeman Loftis deconstructs cultural stereotypes of people on the autism spectrum, explores the surprisingly flexible alterity of autism as a signifier of social and cognitive differences, and discusses the role of autism in Haddon’s novel. 8 Toshio Kimura has attended several of Higashida’s lectures and has seen firsthand that Higashida is able to express himself without the help of others.

Works Cited American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-​5. American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013. Aveling, Helen A. “Modelling Illness in the Early 20th Century.” Unseen Childhoods: Disabled Characters in 20th-​Century Books for Girls, edited by Helen A. Aveling, Bettany, 2009. Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With Pictures by W. W. Denslow. 1900. SeaWolf, 2019. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. I, 1938–​1947, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, The MIT Press, 1986. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. 1911. Puffin, 2015. Byars, Betsy. “Autobiography Feature.” Something about the Author, vol. 108, Gale Research, 2000, pp. 23–​39. —​—​—​. The Summer of the Swans. 1970. Penguin, 1981.

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Toshio Kimura and Junko Yoshida Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. University of California Press, 1978. Cohmer, Sean. “Early Infantile Autism and the Refrigerator Mother Theory (1943–​1970).” Embryo Project Encyclopedia, 19 August 2014, http://​emb​ryo.asu.edu/​han​dle/​10776/​8149, accessed 18 August 2022. Davis, Lennard J. “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 1997, pp. 9–​28. Dowd, Siobhan. The London Eye Mystery. 2007. Puffin, 2016. Dunn, Patricia A. Disabling Characters: Representations of Disability in Young Adult Literature. Peter Lang, 2015. Griswold, Jerry. Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story. 1992. Revised ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time. 2003. Vintage, 2004. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. Routledge, 2016. Higashida, Naoki. Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. 2015. Translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell, Hodder and Stoughton, 2017. —​—​—​. The Reason I Jump: One Boy’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. 2007. Translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell, Hodder and Stoughton, 2013. Hoopmann, Kathy. All Cats Are on the Autism Spectrum. Jessica Kingsley, 2021. Kanner, Leo. “Problems of Nosology and Psychodynamics of Early Infantile Autism.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 19, 1949, pp. 416–​26. Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. Indiana University Press, 2015. Lowry, Lois. Gathering Blue. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. University of Michigan Press, 2000. Murray, Stuart. Autism. Routledge, 2012. Nazeer, Kamran. Send in the Idiots: Or How We Grew to Understand the World. Bloomsbury, 2006. Oliver, Michael, and Bob Sapey. Social Work with Disabled People. Macmillan, 1983. Paterson, Katherine. Jip, His Story. 1996. Puffin, 1998. Robinson, Joan G. When Marnie Was There. 1967. HarperCollins, 2002. Scotch, K. Richard. From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy. 2nd ed., 1984. Temple University Press, 2001. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. 2008. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Totaro, Rebecca Carol Noël. “Suffering in Utopia: Testing the Limits in Young Adult Novels.” Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry, Routledge, 2003, pp. 129–​38. UPIAS and DA (Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation). Fundamental Principles of Disability. UPIAS and DA, 1976. Usrey, Malcolm. Betsy Byars. Twayne, 1988. Valint, Alexandra. “ ‘Wheel Me Over There!’: Disability and Colin’s Wheelchair in The Secret Garden.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 263–​80. Wagner, David. The Poorhouse: America’s Forgotten Institution. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Wing, Lorna. “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account.” Psychological Medicine, vol. 11, 1981, pp. 115–​29. —​—​—​. “The Continuum of Autistic Characteristics.” Diagnosis and Assessment in Autism, edited by Eric Schopler and Gary B. Mesibov, Plenum, 1988, pp. 91–​110. —​—​—​. “The History of Ideas on Autism: Legends, Myths and Reality.” Autism: The International Journal of Research and Practice, vol. 1, no. 1, 1997, pp. 13–​23. Yoshida, Junko. “The Representation of Hope in Lois Lowry’s Gathering Blue: Why Does Kira Gather Blue?” Tinker Bell: Studies in Children’s Literature in English, vol. 66, 2021, pp. 51–​65. —​—​—​. “Uneasy Men in the Land of Oz.” Children’s Literature and the Fin de Siècle, edited by Roderick McGillis, Praeger, 2003, pp. 157–​68.

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PART IV

Border Crossings

Although (as Sara Van den Bossche observes in her contribution to Part III) childhood and nation are intimately connected, successful works don’t remain confined to their place of origin. They circulate with remarkable freedom –​ across national boundaries, across decades or centuries, across media –​ and they change as they do so, moving in and sometimes out of languages, meeting with different receptions, taking on different forms. Some reworkings of children’s texts have been highly successful within their new contexts, for instance Alexander Volkov’s rewriting of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for a Soviet audience; Volkov’s Magic Land series (1939–​75) remains beloved in and beyond Russia. Some have attracted derision, such as Victorian illustrator George Cruikshank’s Fairy Library (1853), excoriated by Charles Dickens for imposing temperance morals and exsanguinated content on canonical fairy tales, or British publisher Puffin’s 2023 adjustments of Roald Dahl novels by “sensitivity readers,” quickly followed (after a public outcry on the part of Dahl’s Dutch and French publishers as well as readers in the Anglosphere) by the announcement of Puffin’s decision to publish “Classic Dahl” alongside Sensitive Dahl. While the above examples are ideologically driven, this section focuses on border crossings of multiple kinds. Part IV begins with Emer O’Sullivan’s chapter on “Translation,” Virginie Douglas’s on “Retranslation,” and Anja Müller’s on “Adaptation.” All three consider ideological, cultural, and commercial factors influencing how texts are selected for translation or retranslation into different languages or media. Each new version of a text is necessarily an interpretation that highlights some elements of the original and suppresses others; even the most faithful film based on a novel, for instance, must make the changes that follow upon moving from a print medium into a visual medium. These three chapters rehearse influential theories developed to study the phenomena in question and suggest how particular examples illustrate these ideas. The next trio of chapters looks at different ways in which children’s texts may engage with national borders. Weronika Kostecka details how Polish authors have used one of the earliest international literary forms, the fairy tale, to create local versions of global stories. Clare Bradford, Kristine Moruzi, and Michelle J. Smith look at selected works by Indigenous authors, immigrant and refugee narratives, and stories focusing on transnational identities in order to illuminate the fluidity of boundaries of country and culture within contemporary Australian, American, and Canadian children’s literature. And in “Transcultural Comparison as Method: Korean and Hebrew Children’s Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century,” Dafna Zur and Rachel Feldman juxtapose works from two widely separated linguistic traditions, arguing that a transcultural approach may enable one to discern

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

important commonalities between texts that might initially seem to have no connection, thus gaining insight into “how children’s culture has taken form across the globe.” The final two chapters in this section, Naomi Hamer’s “Marketing and Franchising” and Sara K. Day and Carrie Sickmann’s “Children’s Literature Websites and Fandom,” examine postpublication phenomena ranging from spinoff books or other media to stuffed animals and china to the ever-​evolving websites designed to encourage and control children’s fan behavior. In an era in which a source text may be anything from a classic work of fiction to an amusement park ride, transmedia expression is the mark of textual (commercial) success; meanwhile, while author websites are viewed as essential to generating and maintaining readership, anxiety about children’s untrammeled use of the Internet helps to ensure that their crossing of the digital frontier will differ in some important particulars from that engaged in by adults or even adolescents. Many adaptation theorists hold that fidelity to the original text is no guarantee of quality –​indeed, the opposite may be true, since a slavish devotion to realizing someone else’s vision can inhibit one’s own creativity. At the same time, the seemingly endless replication of popular series in various money-​spinning forms, like the imposition of propagandist messaging after the fact, also draws the ire of culture critics, while critics concerned with upholding what they see as the integrity of a national sensibility may inveigh against the importation of texts espousing ideas antithetical to that sensibility. All varieties of border crossing relating to children’s entertainment are potential sources of anxiety as much as of enrichment, a fact that helps explain their interest for scholars.

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27 TRANSLATION Emer O’Sullivan

Children’s literature has always been a site of intense translational activity, and works from other languages have been central to its development since translations of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales introduced new models and the books and magazines of the German philanthropists Joachim Heinrich Campe and Christian Felix Weiße spread new ways of addressing children into the literatures of other countries.1 The fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, the classics from the British Golden Age of children’s literature, the avant la lettre anti-​authoritarianism of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump (1945) –​ these are just some of the works that have stimulated and inspired literary production in different languages. Global successes such as Pinocchio (in more than 300 languages [Paone 407]), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (in more than 170 [Lindseth and Tannenbaum]), and the Harry Potter series (in more than eighty) would not have been possible without those who translated them,2 and children’s literature is currently one of the most translated segments in literary markets from China (Tan) to the Netherlands (McMartin). An idealized view of translation of children’s literature holds that only the best gets translated, thereby enriching the target literatures (the literatures into which it is translated), and that, thanks to global exchange, children of the world get to read the literature of all countries, hence broadening their reading experience and exploring different cultures through books. However, when one looks closely at what exactly is translated and how it is translated, it becomes evident that the matter is significantly more complex. This chapter starts by noting features and specifics of children’s literature that are of central relevance to its translation. A consideration of the addressees of children’s literature will indicate how developmental, educational, and ideological factors are at the core of decisions made about how to translate for them. As this question is heavily informed by the image of childhood in a given culture at a given time, translating children’s literature “necessitates or allows forms of textual manipulation” (van Coillie and Verschueren v) to a much greater degree than translating for adults. A discussion of translation strategies, manipulations, and adaptations in translation and what motivates them follows before I turn to the wider field of publishing to consider geopolitical and commercial factors as well as dynamics of the literary field that determine what gets translated where, highlighting the unequal flows of texts between cultures and continents. I conclude by looking at some organizations and publishers who work to address the imbalance in the field of translating children’s literature.3

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Children’s Literature: Relevant Factors for Its Translation Children’s literature is a vast, heterogeneous body of texts from different sources (including folklore, books originally written for adults, and ones authored specifically for children), types of publications (such as multimodal picturebooks, anthologies, novels, magazines, and so on) and genres (adventure stories, horror, information books, plays, poetry, and more) for addressees who range in age from infants to young adults; its degree of linguistic complexity ranges from simple concept books to sophisticated adolescent novels. It fulfills a variety of functions such as teaching children how to read and promoting literacy, entertaining and informing them, and providing intellectual and aesthetic stimulation, with different types of texts fulfilling different functions. It is vital to bear this heterogeneity in mind when talking about children’s literature in translation; much scholarly work on the topic focuses on a single text type or genre, or on works for a limited age group, and fails to sufficiently reflect this diversity. A comprehensive account of the fascinating complexity of children’s literature in translation, not yet undertaken, can only be realized when its heterogeneity is taken fully into account. Children’s literature is written, translated, published, and disseminated by adults on behalf of children; its literary communication is on unequal terms, and this asymmetry is its constitutional characteristic. It is determined by adults’ notions of what children can understand and what they might need or like; in Katharine Jones’s words, it assumes “various conceptions of the child, childhood, and the childlike, with child readers being the target of the book” (305). The mediating role of adults who write, translate, publish, review, recommend, and buy children’s books is a vital one without which children would have no books at all. But what Cecilia Alvstad terms the “power difference between adult mediators and child readers” (159) means that a children’s book must gain adult approval in that particular target culture at that particular point in time if it is to be translated. As Zohar Shavit succinctly remarks: “The children’s writer is perhaps the only one who is asked to address one particular audience and at the same time appeal to another” (36–​37). Because adults are involved both as mediators and as (co-​)readers, children’s literature has a dual audience, which means that it must be regarded as suitable by adults, even when it is not primarily addressed to them. Children’s literature has to take into account the abilities, experience, and interests of its readers at any given stage of their development. It has to bridge the distances between adults and children that exist on the levels of command of language and knowledge of the world and of literature; language, subject matter, and thematic and formal features are therefore adapted accordingly. Assumptions about the receptive ability of child readers are at the heart of both writing and translating children’s literature. However, what children at any particular stage in their cognitive, emotional, linguistic, and literary development actually can understand, and the degree to which they may be able, for instance, to navigate foreignness in texts, is what Gillian Lathey has identified as the ultimate black box of translating for children, rightly pointing out that a greater emphasis on empirical research into reader response would be necessary to inform current speculation (“Introduction” 12). When translators –​ understood in the broader sense to include editors and publishers –​underestimate child readers, purportedly wanting to protect them from being over-​challenged, it may result in “nanny translations” (O’Sullivan, “Translating Pictures” 170) that “babysit the reader” (Desmet). Translators for children ask themselves: What do children want to read? What are their cognitive, emotional, and linguistic capabilities? How far can/​should they be stretched? What do they enjoy? Their answers to these questions effectively construct the implied reader of their translation. This agent is always a different one from the implied reader of the source text, as that text has been transported from its original language and context into a new one, and, with that relocation, the basic parameters of the literary communication have been changed. The implied reader of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880), for instance, is assumed to be able to read the novel in German, in contrast to the implied reader of its translation into French. Language is the most basic level; there are cases where 328

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the implied reader of the translation differs significantly from that of the source text, as when elements in a picturebook, only evident in the images in the source text, are made explicit or explained in the verbal target text (see O’Sullivan, “Narratology”). In addition to developmental issues that determine how the implied reader of a translation is constructed, there is the matter of appropriateness. As children’s literature introduces readers to the society into which they are growing, it belongs firmly within the “domain of cultural practises which exist for the purpose of socializing their target audience,” as John Stephens puts it (8). Guiding both what is selected for translation and how it is translated to make it appropriate or suitable for the children in that culture at that time are the social, educational, moral, and religious norms and values shared by or, in the case of institutionalized propaganda and censorship,4 proscribed by a society. An example is provided by the Syrian scholar Kanaan, who in 1999 explicitly named the values that literature in his country should propagate in order to politically socialize its children. These values include nationalist ones such as “love of the homeland, the sense of pride in belonging to the Arab nation, sacrifice and martyrdom, and combating enemies” and economic ones such as “love of work and workers [...], increasing and protecting national productivity” (Mdallel, “World” 164–​65).5 In the zone of conflicting aims that constitutes translation for children, editors’ and translators’ decisions are therefore determined by their assessment of child readers’ capabilities, by the target culture’s prevailing cultural and ideological norms, and by the economic factors that motivate publishers to produce translated texts that adult buyers and mediators will regard as both readable and acceptable. It is a challenge for translators to take these factors into account while at the same time doing justice to a source text’s formal and aesthetic dimension and preserving the difference that constitutes a translated text’s potential to enrich the target literature and to introduce children to different cultures.

Adaptation in Translation: Rationale and Strategies The tension between the ideal of preserving a source text’s artistic and cultural integrity and adapting it to the abilities of the young target audience is reflected in the debate over how children’s literature should be translated. Göte Klingberg, one of the first scholars to seriously address the issue of translating children’s literature, famously argued that the integrity of the original work should be violated as little as possible; he inventoried culture-​ and language-​specific references that occur in source texts, regarding them as one of the main sources for “deviations” in translation (Klingberg). Riitta Oittinen’s child-​centered theory, in contrast, concentrates exclusively on the child reader; she programmatically speaks of “translating for children” rather than “translating children’s literature” and disputes any authority for the text. Research on children’s literature translation continues to reflect these tensions, although most contemporary scholars adopt a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach. Nonetheless, the forms of “textual manipulation” necessitated by or allowed when translating children’s literature, and the moral, ideological, pedagogical, or commercial motivations behind them, remain central points of focus in the discussion. Synthesizing approaches identified by Klingberg, Shavit, and Emer O’Sullivan (Komparatistik), Mieke Desmet names the following as the five main strategies used by translators for children when modifying texts: omission and deletion, simplification, purification, substitution, and explication (81ff). Omission and deletion strategies can result in abridged versions of texts, affecting characterization, setting, and narration. The metafictional commentaries by Erich Kästner after each chapter in Pünktchen und Anton (1931), included in the first edition of the French translation Petit Point et ses Amis (1936), were omitted in the 1982 paperback edition, thus “significantly altering the whole effect of the novel which is in part based on the interaction between these two contrasting elements of chapter and reflection” (O’Sullivan, Literature 107). Omission and deletion may also be linked to 329

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ideological goals. Deletion in the service of prudery was evident when the final illustration in Pija Lindenbaum’s picturebook Else-​Marie och småpapporna (1990, Else-​Marie and Her Little Papas), showing the girl Else-​Marie, her normal-​sized mother, and her seven tiny fathers all sitting naked, playing in the bath together, was cut from the American translation (Surmatz, “Berättande” 73). Simplification strategies are especially to be found in interlingual translation, in simplified retellings of texts (often so-​called classics) within the same language. On a macro-​structural level it may affect genre affiliation, structure, and organization in chapters, while on the micro-​structural level it usually takes the form of using shorter sentences than the original (see Ippolito). Purification strategies bring translated texts in line with the values of the target culture by altering elements considered inappropriate or unsuitable for target readers. This process can range from mild adaptation to censorship. What Alvstad calls “sensitive content” (162), such as violence, religion, and sexuality, is often modified, as the degree to which it is taboo differs among cultures. What is considered bad manners and behavior in children, such as disrespect for parental and other authority, may be purified in translation. In Western children’s literature purification for these reasons has lessened with time; famous examples from the past include how the subversive behavior of the title figure in Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump, a novel that celebrates disrespect for adult authority and ridicules the contemporaneous rules and norms of child-​rearing, was toned down in early translations (O’Sullivan, Literature 82–​85; Surmatz, Pippi). Purification of nonstandard language and standardization of dialect follow the educational goal of transmitting purportedly correct and appropriate language. Playful misspellings, for instance, were cleansed in the first German translations of Winnie-​the-​Pooh (1928) and Paddington (1968; O’Sullivan, Literature 87–​88), but rectifications in retranslations in the 1980s and 1990s bear witness to the changeability of what is considered appropriate. Jeroen Vandaele has identified standardization of the irreverent, working-​class voice of eight-​year-​old Madrilenian Manolito in “bookish” translations of Elvira Lindo’s best-​selling comic fiction series Manolito Gafotas into English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, and Italian, and sees it as a reason for their lack of success. However, the decisive factor in the translation of nonstandard language, beyond the norms of the target culture, is the creativity of the individual translator (see Sarah Adams’s account of how she tackled translating French backslang into English). Not all purification should be seen in negative terms. Alvstad has observed that alterations may be necessary “for ethical reasons” when children may, for example, “have limited knowledge about their right not to be physically or sexually abused, and this will affect how they interpret violence and abuse directed at fictional children in books” (163). And purification might facilitate the transfer of an innovative book into a source culture that otherwise would have rejected it. Turgay Kurultay notes that because the Turkish translation of Christine Nöstlinger’s emancipatory novel Ilse Janda, 14 (1974) defused the erotic element of the girl’s “longing” for her boyfriend into the merely romantic “missing” him, it was able to reproduce a similar degree of provocation in the target context by merely hinting at a romantic relationship (cited in O’Sullivan, Literature 85). Substitution strategies provide children with easily intelligible texts by replacing foreign cultural elements with familiar ones; they involve what Klingberg calls “cultural context adaptation” and Laurence Venuti “domestication.” Domestication can eradicate the sense of the foreign origin of a text, resulting in translations indistinguishable from texts that originate in the target culture. This is the case in many translations of English children’s books into Greek, German, Korean, Spanish, and Arabic analyzed by Themis Kaniklidou and Juliane House, who identify “massive ‘cultural filtering’ ” through which source texts undergo “systematic rearrangements and major adaptations to target culture norms” (233, 234). Klingberg’s list of culture-​ and language-​specific references in source texts, which account for most adaptations in translation, includes literary and mythological references; historical, religious, and political background; food; customs; games; flora and fauna; personal names6; geographical names; and currency and weights and measures. Their translation has been the focus 330

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of much scholarly attention. For example, in books translated into Hebrew in the early twentieth century, as Shavit reports, “a Christmas tree became a Hanukkah –​ the nine-​branched menorah that symbolizes the Jewish holiday, nonkosher foods were replaced by kosher foods (veal replacing pork), and Jewish prayers replaced the Christian” (Lima 263). Religious adaptation or realignment on a deeper level can be seen in the attempts of Protestant missionaries in China to reconcile the contradictory images of the Christian evangelical child and the Chinese filial child in translated nineteenth-​ century British bestsellers and tracts. As Shih-​Wen Sue Chen has discovered, on the one hand these works “often utilized readers’ familiarity with filial piety to help illustrate foreign Christian concepts; on the other [hand], their message that obedience to God takes precedence over being filial toward one’s parents challenged the prevailing model of Chinese childhood” (38). An extreme form of substitution is localization, which converts all source culture elements into target culture ones. The setting of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) was transposed in an Arabic translation of 1990 from the English countryside to Damascus and other Syrian cities and villages. It introduces “an Arab Muslim war hero, Khalid ibn al-​Walid, who fought many wars that helped expand the Islamic Empire,” and depicts the horse Black Beauty as one of an Arab breed “known for its generosity, courage, nobility, hard work, and beauty” (Mdallel, “Archaeology” 326). Relocating the action to Syria aimed, according to Sabeur Mdallel, “to consolidate the theme of pride in belonging to the Arab nation” (326). Domestication on the level of literary norms may involve substitution of familiar genres and strategies in place of unfamiliar ones. A study of the forty-​plus unabridged translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) into German reveals how some early translators aligned the novel with the tradition most known to German children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fairy tale, while others chose to explain outright the inexplicable, to ensure that nothing remained unresolved in the text that might puzzle young German readers. In the process, the dreamlike quality of Carroll’s nonsense, its inverted logic and playful incomprehensibility, was lost (O’Sullivan, “Miss Zimmermann”). Explication strategies, in contrast to the others, may often serve to preserve foreignness. Rather than substituting recognizable references for strange ones, they aim to mediate between cultures and languages by providing supplementary information, not present in the source text, in footnotes, prefaces, and so on. While the more radical forms of foreignization propagated by Venuti, which deliberately break the conventions of the target language, may only be possible in literature for adults, metalinguistic explanations (and translations issued in bilingual editions) nonetheless can serve to foreignize translations of children’s literature as they make readers aware that the source text comes from a cultural and linguistic tradition different from their own. May Massee’s foreignized American translation of Emil and the Detectives in 1930 is furnished with a foreword in which she takes pains to emphasize the Germanness of the original, explaining that the author, “Mr. Kästner,” enjoyed finding names for his characters with a “good German sound,” so she kept these in her translation. She also gives pronunciation tips and generally makes the preservation of cultural distance a theme (O’Sullivan, Literature 98f). The tradition of negative criticism that designates adapted texts as “faulty, unfaithful or mutilated” (Bravo-​Villasante 46) or dismisses adaptation “as an abusive form of translation” (Bastin 10) does not take into account Georges L. Bastin’s points that “all translators engage in adaptation, consciously or otherwise” and that “translations always undergo what Venuti calls a process of domestication” (10). In the wake of Linda Hutcheon’s influential theory, adaptation studies has abandoned the concept of fidelity to an original as the prime yardstick, and adapted children’s books are now also examined in terms of how they modify the source and whether and how they work as individual, original artistic creations.7 A descriptive rather than a prescriptive investigation examines the manner and degree to which any specific text has been manipulated for what audience, and what motivated the changes. These motivations range from assumptions about what children can understand, through politically 331

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or ideologically driven adaptations and censorship, to commercial reasons. A differentiated account of adaptation in translation has to consider various elements such as historical change in translation practice –​ the ones described by Shavit in Hebrew children’s literature in the 1950s would be unacceptable there today; the degree of cultural and linguistic distance between source and target cultures, which necessitates different grades of “manipulation” –​ those in translations between French and German today will differ in dimension from those between Swedish and Chinese; or how approaches towards domestication in dominant languages, into which little is translated, may differ from those in languages that are more open to translation (see Lathey, “Books” 51). Temporal distance, too, may call for adaptation if some texts are to remain comprehensible to and enjoyable for young readers today. Oittinen claims that “even tales by H. C. Andersen should be adapted to keep them readable; they must be adapted or die” (Translating 80). Recent research has increasingly asked whether certain forms of domestication “may actually help keep young readers engaged in stories they would otherwise cast aside” due to unfamiliar style or uncontextualized norms and values (van Coillie, “Diversity” 152). And, while acknowledging that it is essential to encourage children’s natural eagerness to encounter difference, Lathey points out that “pragmatic compromises” in the form of subtle linguistic and cultural negotiations are sometimes necessary to ensure that translations are read at all (“Books” 46). Among other factors that may determine or necessitate a degree of adaptation are generic considerations and the status of a text in the literary system. Generic considerations pertain to performative texts such as picturebooks,8 which belong to the most translated as they are –​erroneously –​thought of as requiring less in the way of translation, or poetry, according to Susan Kreller the least translated, which may call for more creative license. This license was granted by the source text publisher to the Irish poet Catherine Ann Cullen for her English version of a collection of poems by Latvian poet Inese Zandere, and both names appear as coauthors of All Better! (2019; Parkinson, Interview). And translator Daniel Hahn talks about his work on Éric Veillé’s rhyming L’encyclopedie des mamies (2018) in performative terms: it “is so playful, and requires a lot of inventiveness –​or, to put it another way, it requires changing a great deal. I left *everything* out if you want to think of it like that, except for the spirit of the original” (“TRANSLATION”). Likewise, some information books not only allow but demand some degree of domestication. Valerie Wyatt’s prize-​winning humorous and interactive How to Build Your Own Country (2009) about forms of government, elections, constitutions, and so on had to be localized by translator Petra Buck to make it relevant for the German readers of Die Bademattenrepublik (2014). Finally, a text’s status in the literary system must be considered. In her study of English narrative fiction for girls translated into Dutch, Desmet reveals how the stratification of children’s literature according to status and function can determine the degree of manipulation in translation. She finds that translations of low-​status texts such as formula fiction series reveal a primary concern for the readers’ enjoyment and understanding of the text, and therefore adapt their content strongly to the target culture, while translations of award-​winning novels demonstrate a tendency to preserve as much as possible of the source text’s aesthetic quality. As a vast proportion of translated books worldwide today are best-​selling series, the undifferentiated notion that all translations are interculturally enriching cannot be sustained, especially when in 2006 the “ubiquitous Walt Disney” (Ghesquière 27) topped the list as the most translated “author” in the UNESCO database of translations, Index Translationum.9

The Geopolitics of Translation The notion of translated children’s literature as a window through which children can access foreign cultures has featured largely in discussions of the internationalism of children’s literature, which can be traced back to Paul Hazard’s utopian vision of the power of children’s books: 332

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each of them is a messenger that goes beyond mountains and rivers, beyond the seas, to the very ends of the world in search of new friendships. Every country gives and every country receives –​innumerable are the exchanges –​and so it comes about that in our first impressionable years the universal republic of childhood is born. (146) The discourse on international exchange in children’s literature often owes more to wishful thinking than to observation; closer examination quickly reveals an imbalance of exchange between countries and languages. Important factors that determine the direction of textual flows are the dynamics of the literary field, the status of the language and of children’s literature, political orientation,10 and traditions of cultural exchange. Emergent literatures and those in minority languages11 depend upon translations to enrich their language and literature, while those in dominant languages often deem themselves more self-​sufficient and therefore import less. The proportion of translation in the annual book production of children’s literatures ranges from one percent to eighty percent.12 Heading the league in Europe is Finland with around seventy percent (Oittinen, “On Translating”), followed by other Nordic countries at around fifty. Translated books make up between thirty and forty percent of children’s books published in Brazil, China, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain,13 and the Netherlands. The percentage in Germany has dropped from over thirty to around twenty percent in the past fifteen years. Japan has around fifteen percent (Jacobson), and the Arabic world some twelve percent (Mdallel, “Archaeology” 317). Britain and the United States are at the bottom of the league of importers of children’s books, with around one to two percent and three percent, respectively.14 These reluctant importers are also the greatest exporters of children’s literature, indicating how the dominance of a source language in translation may be in inverse proportion to the translational activity into that language: in emerging children’s literatures in Southeast Asia, anywhere between sixty and eighty percent of all translated books are from English (van Coillie and McMartin 29), while these literatures are rarely –​if ever –​to be found in Western countries.15 Research on the sociology of translation has thrown light on the uneven flow of translations in light of the power relations among languages. The center-​periphery model applied by Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro describes the world translation system, in which half the books translated worldwide are from English: English occupies the most central position, even hyper-​central. Well behind come German and French, which represent between 10 and 12% of the world market of translations. Eight languages have a semi-​peripheral position, with a share that varies from 1 to 3% of the international market (Spanish and Italian, for example). The other languages all have a share of less than one percent of the international market, and might thus be considered as peripheral, despite the fact that certain of them (Chinese, Arabic or Japanese) represent linguistic groups that are among the most important in terms of numbers of speakers. (95–​96) Heilbron and Sapiro identify an “inverse relation between the degree of centrality of a language in the international system of translations and the proportion of translations in the national production of books” (96), which is confirmed by Jack McMartin’s figures for the “peripheral” European literature Dutch: “Dutch supplies just under one percent of the world’s source titles for translated books, and imports upwards of a quarter of its domestic literary production through translation, most of that from English” (146). Mergers and acquisitions have become dominant commercial strategies affecting the production and consequently the translation of children’s literature. Since the end of the twentieth century, media conglomerates such as Pearson, Thomson Reuters, Penguin Random House, Bertelsmann, 333

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and Scholastic –​the biggest book publishers in the world in 2022 (Global Book Publishing Industry Factsheet) –​have been moving towards production across media outlets, creating what Henry Jenkins has called “convergence culture” (2). “Franchise storytelling,” defined by Clare Parody as the creation of narratives, characters, and settings “that can be used both to generate and give identity to vast quantities of interlinked media products and merchandise” (211), has produced some of the highest grossing and best known fictional texts, characters, plots, and worlds of the twentieth and twenty-​ first centuries, among them the Harry Potter franchise, whose estimated value in 2021 exceeded $43 billion. Geopolitics, differences in economic and cultural capital, and global conglomerates therefore all have a bearing on the extreme imbalance in the international circulation of children’s literature. Many literatures not only cannot participate as sellers in the international market, they are not even able to serve their own, local one. Michael Daniel Ambatchew writes about the situation in what he calls “the developing countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America,” pointing out that “weak publishing sectors, inadequate distribution mechanisms, and poor purchasing power all contribute to a severe shortage of quality indigenous reading materials” (431), making these countries overseas markets for large quantities of English-​language books sold by the global publishing industry and leading to fear of cultural erasure. Mdallel reports that a general suspicion of translations “epitomizes a general feeling among Arab educators, decision-​makers, and even translators,” some of whom warn that Arab children are threatened by a cultural invasion from the West and that “the waves of translated books that fill the markets of the Arab world are preventing the spread of local children’s literature” (“Archaeology” 316). And Rita Ghesquière, after a visit to the Philippines, where she found almost no Philippine books in school libraries and little awareness or appreciation of their own children’s literature on the part of teachers and librarians, posed the rhetorical question: “Do non-​Western countries need our children’s books or are these a hindrance for the development of their own children’s literature?” (31). A small but noteworthy antidote to global conglomerates are small to medium-​sized publishers committed to translating children’s literature. Among them are the Danish publisher Vagn Plenge, proprietor of Forlaget Hjulet (“The Wheel Press”), which has been purchasing translation rights and books from “the warm countries” in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania since 1976 (Jensen), and Klaus Flugge, founder (also in 1976) of Andersen Press in London and tireless advocate of translations. They have been followed in the past two decades by a new generation of founders of small-​scale independent presses such as Pushkin Press and Tiny Owl Publishing in Britain, or in New Zealand Gecko Press.16 Canada’s Groundwood Books and the Enchanted Lion in the United States operate along similar lines, and in Ireland, author turned translator and publisher Siobhán Parkinson set up Little Island Press in 2010, believing “passionately in the importance of making books available to children that bring them the message that not everyone interacts with the world through the medium of English” (“Birthday”).17 Charities and nonprofit organizations also foster translations; the oldest and largest of these, whose mission since 1953 has been to promote international understanding through children’s books, is the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).18 Its “cultural bridge building work” strives to increase the numbers of translations and foreign editions of excellent children’s books from all countries by awarding prizes and recommending titles. Similar mediation work is carried out by the International Youth Library in Munich (IYL), founded by Jella Lepman in 1949,19 whose annual White Ravens catalog recommends for translation a selection of 200 titles of children’s books in all languages. A more recent organization, the British “Outside in World,” has been dedicated, since 2007, “to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.”20 The independent Swiss charity Baobab Books deserves special mention as an organization that seeks to enable geopolitically disadvantaged literatures to find a place –​on however small a scale –​ in the Western world.21 Committed “to promoting cultural diversity in children and youth literature”

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for more than thirty years, Baobab has been publishing, in German translation, children’s books from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and the Middle East, with a special focus on Indigenous literature. Its translations –​ especially of picturebooks –​ are often issued in bilingual editions, with the target language set above the source one on the same page. As most German readers will not understand the Chinese, Persian, Arabic, or Korean source texts, this strategy, rather than being primarily aimed at bilingual readers, creates a form of foreignization in translation that visualizes the fact that the book originated in another language. This effect is especially evident in the bilingual German-​Georgian Schlaf gut (2017, Sleep well), a picturebook by Tatia Nadareišvili about a boy who can’t sleep and so tries out the various positions of sleeping animals on land, in the air, and in the sea. The ornately lettered Georgian text, integrated into the illustrations in the original, is retained in Baobab’s edition, with the German text set below. In addition, single words in both languages stand out in different colors, visualizing the concept of translation for children: even if they can’t decipher the Georgian word, they can see that it corresponds to the one highlighted in German. This strategy makes this beautifully executed and produced book a genuine embodiment of translated children’s books as cultural enrichment. Translation is and has always been a vital part of most children’s literatures, stimulating their development and enabling children to become aware of cultures far beyond the borders of their own. This chapter has shown that, while this statement is true, it is also an idealized view. In the translation process developmental, educational, and ideological factors influence decisions about how to translate for children, which in some cases means that the very elements that might offer young readers a window on another culture are eliminated. Translation for children is a zone of conflicting aims, which translators approach with different strategies. A closer look at the flow of texts between cultures and the geopolitics of children’s literature translation reveals that many languages rarely get translated, and English-​speaking countries, whose own language dominates the global publishing market, are in the main unreceptive towards works originally written in other languages. However, as the final example of Schlaf gut, the Georgian picturebook in German translation, illustrates, children’s literature in quality translation can indeed open up new worlds for young readers.

Notes 1 For instance, according to Li Li, “without the introduction of foreign children’s works there would have been no such Chinese children’s works” (101). 2 Translators are the invisible and largely unsung heroes of this development. See Lathey, Role for the first –​ and hitherto only –​ history of children’s literature translation into English that places translators firmly in the center. 3 For a survey of the field of children’s literature in translation and the actors involved, see O’Sullivan, “Translating.” 4 Gaby Thomson-​Wohlgemuth gives an account of how economic and ideological factors influenced translation and censorship in the former communist German Democratic Republic during the Cold War. State censorship of children’s literature in Franco’s Spain is examined in Craig, and censorship practices as an organized state policy in Turkey that “sustains and promotes the control and suppression of both home-​ grown and translated children’s books” in Kansu-​Yetkiner. 5 In addition to serving as the vehicle of a single state ideology, children’s literature can also be the site of wars between opposing ideologies. See Kansu-​Yetkiner for an account of how the political polarization between secular Republican Kemalists and conservative Islamists in Turkey is reflected in the peritexts of translations. 6 See van Coillie, “Names”; Mussche and Willems. 7 See Lefebvre; Geerts and Van den Bossche; Kérchy and Sundmark; Dybiec-​Gajer, Oittinen, and Kodura. 8 These multimodal texts that demand special consideration of the interplay between the visual and the verbal have been a special focus of interest in children’s literature translation studies. See O’Sullivan, “Translating Pictures”; Oittinen et al.

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Emer O’Sullivan 9 The Walt Disney Company was listed as the most translated “author” until 2006 or later. More recent statistics drop it from this category, even though these records document, in 2022, that over fifty percent more Disney titles have been translated than those of the most translated individual author, Agatha Christie. See www.une​sco.org/​xtr​ans/​bss​tatl​ist.aspx?lg=​0. 10 The Arab world, with its variety of cultures, provides good examples; Mdallel shows how translated children’s literature is influenced by political considerations, with books in one country “categorically rejected in another.” Syria is the only Arab country that regularly translates Russian children’s literature, while Disney comics, rejected in Syria, “have mostly been translated in Egypt and the Gulf countries, especially in Saudi Arabia” (“Archaeology” 327). 11 For translation into Galician, see Millán-​Varela; into Irish (Gaelic), O’Sullivan, “Languages”; and into Maori and Scots, Cheetham. 12 It is extremely difficult to get exact and reliable figures, as not all countries document translations into their languages. 13 The figures for Spain are for translations into Castilian Spanish. The figures for other official languages in Spain, which had been suppressed during the Franco regime from 1939 to 1975, are higher: some sixty percent of children’s books in Basque, Galician, and Catalan are translations. 14 The study by Literature across Frontiers establishes a three percent proportion of translation in Britain and Irish literature overall, but it does not provide separate figures for children’s literature (Büchler and Trentacosti). Lathey gives two percent as the current annual percentage of translations in British publications for children (“Books” 41). However, as Hahn reminds us, three percent of a market as huge as the British one represents many more titles than, say, thirty percent of a market in a country that produces significantly fewer ones. 15 Referencing the results of a report by the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books on the proportion of translations from different languages, Alvstad reports that seventy percent were from English, with Danish, German, French, and Norwegian together making up twenty-​five percent. “Books from other (or unspecified) language areas make up only 5 per cent,” and “translations from parts of the world outside of the West are almost entirely lacking” (173). And of the relatively few children’s books translated in the United States in 2018, seventy-​two percent came from just four languages –​French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Only six percent were translations from non-​European languages (Jacobson). 16 Lathey, “Serendipity” gives an account of these, based partly on interviews with the publishers. 17 See O’Sullivan, “Languages” for a more extensive account of Little Island. 18 www.ibby.org/​about/​what-​is-​ibby/​. See also Valerie Coghlan’s discussion of IBBY and the IYL in the present volume. 19 www.ijb.de/​en/​about-​us.html. 20 www.out​side​inwo​rld.org.uk/​. 21 www.baob​abbo​oks.ch/​en/​about​_​us/​.

Works Cited Adams, Sarah. “Translating Monsters.” Outside In: Children’s Books in Translation, edited by Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini, Milet, 2005, pp. 12–​13. Alvstad, Cecilia. “Children’s Literature.” Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, edited by R. Kelly Washbourne and Ben van Wyke, Routledge, 2019, pp. 159–​80. Ambatchew, Michael Daniel. “International Communities Building Places for Youth Reading.” Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Shelby A. Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine A. Jenkins, Routledge, 2011, pp. 430–​38. Bastin, Georges L. “Adaptation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 3rd ed., Routledge, 2020, pp. 10–​14. Bravo-​Villasante, Carmen. “Translation Problems in My Experience as a Translator.” Children’s Books in Translation: The Situation and the Problems, edited by Göte Klingberg, Mary Ørvig, and Stuart Amor, Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1978, pp. 46–​50. Büchler, Alexandra, and Giulia Trentacosti. Publishing Translated Literature in the United Kingdom and Ireland 1990–​2012: Statistical Report. 1 January 2015, www.lit-​acr​oss-​fronti​ers.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2013/​03/​ Tran​slat​ion-​Sta​tist​ics-​Study​_​Upd​ate_​May2​015.pdf. Cheetham, Dominic. “The Translation of Children’s Literature into Minority Languages.” Children’s Literature in Education, 2022, pp. 1–​17, doi:10.1007/​s10583-​022-​09478-​9. Chen, Shih-​Wen Sue. Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

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Translation Craig, Ian. Children’s Classics under Franco: Censorship of the “William” Books and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. Peter Lang, 2001. Desmet, Mieke K. T. Babysitting the Reader: Translating English Narrative Fiction for Girls into Dutch (1946–​ 1995). Peter Lang, 2007. Dybiec-​Gajer, Joanna, Riitta Oittinnen, and Małgorzata Kodura, editors. Negotiating Translation and Transcreation of Children’s Literature: From Alice to the Moomins. Springer Singapore, 2020. Geerts, Sylvie, and Sara Van den Bossche, editors. Never-​Ending Stories: Adaptation, Canonisation and Ideology in Children’s Literature. Academia Press, 2014. Ghesquière, Rita. “Why Does Children’s Literature Need Translations?” Jan van Coillie and Verschueren, pp. 19–​33. Global Book Publishing Industry Factsheet. “Top Book Publishing Companies in the World 2022, Biggest Book Publishers.” BizVibe, 1 January 2022, https://​blog.bizv​ibe.com/​blog/​top-​book-​pub​lish​ing-​ compan​ies. Hahn, Daniel. “Award-​Winning Translator Daniel Hahn Ponders the Importance –​ or Otherwise –​ of 3%.” Booktrust, 1 January 2007, https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​201​3032​3012​259/​www.booktr​ust.org.uk/​books-​and-​ read​ing/​tra​nsla​ted-​fict​ion/​artic​les/​dan​iel-​hahn/.​ Hazard, Paul. Books, Children and Men. Translated by Marguerite Mitchell, The Horn Book, 1944. Heilbron, Johan, and Gisèle Sapiro. “Outline for a Sociology of Translation: Current Issues and Future Prospects.” Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 93–​107. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006. Ippolito, Margherita. Simplification, Explicitation and Normalization: Corpus-​Based Research into English to Italian Translations of Children’s Classics. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Jacobson, David. “Guest Post –​Beyond 3 Percent: Translated Children’s Literature in the U.S.” School Library Journal, November 2019, https://​afuse​8pro​duct​ion.slj.com/​2019/​11/​12/​guest-​post-​bey​ond-​3-​perc​ent-​ translated-​childr​ens-​lit​erat​ure-​in-​the-​u-​s/.​ Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006. Jensen, Eline Morch. “Communicating the Strange: The Entire World into the Kids’ Room and the Classroom. …” KLODSHANS, July 2012, pp. 18–​22. Jones, Katharine. “Getting Rid of Children’s Literature.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 30, no. 3, 2006, pp. 287–​315, doi:10.1353/​uni.2006.0033. Kaniklidou, Themis, and Juliane House. “Discourse and Ideology in Translated Children’s Literature: A Comparative Study.” Perspectives, vol. 26, no. 2, 2018, pp. 232–​45, doi:10.1080/​0907676X.2017.1359324. Kansu-​Yetkiner, Neslihan. “Banned, Bagged, Bowdlerized: A Diachronic Analysis of Censorship Practices in Children’s Literature of Turkey.” History of Education and Children’s Literature, vol. 11, no. 2, 2016, pp. 101–​20. Kérchy, Anna, and Björn Sundmark, editors. Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Klingberg, Göte. Children’s Fiction in the Hands of the Translators. Gleerup, 1986. Kreller, Susan. Englischsprachige Kinderlyrik: Deutsche Übersetzungen Im 20. Jahrhundert. Peter Lang, 2007. Lathey, Gillian. “Introduction.” The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader, edited by Gillian Lathey, Multilingual Matters, 2006, pp. 1–​12. —​—​—​. “ ‘Only English Books’: The Mediation of Translated Children’s Literature in a Resistant Economy.” Van Coillie and McMartin, pp. 41–​54. —​—​—​. The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers. Routledge, 2010. —​—​—​. “Serendipity, Independent Publishing and Translation Flow: Recent Translations for Children in the UK.” The Edinburgh Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Clémentine Beauvais and Maria Nikolajeva, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 232–​44. Lefebvre, Benjamin, editor. Textual Transformations in Children’s Literature: Adaptations, Translations, Reconsiderations. Routledge, 2013. Li, Li. “Influences of Translated Children’s Texts upon Chinese Children’s Literature.” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, vol. 16, no. 2, 2006, pp. 101–​106. Lima, Lia Araujo Miranda de. “Interview with Zohar Shavit.” Belas Infiéis, vol. 8, no. 3, 2019, pp. 257–​76, doi:10.26512/​belasinfieis.v8.n3.2019.26342. Lindseth, Jon A., and Alan Tannenbaum, editors. Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece. 3 vols., Oak Knoll Press in cooperation with The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, 2015.

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Emer O’Sullivan McMartin, Jack. “Dutch Literature in Translation: A Global View.” Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2020, pp. 145–​64, doi:10.1080/​03096564.2020.1747006. Mdallel, Sabeur. “The Archaeology of Translating for Arab Children (1950–​1998).” The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation, edited by Sameh Hanna, Hanem El-​Farahaty, and Abdel-​Wahab Khalifa, Routledge, 2020, pp. 312–​30. —​—​—​. “Translating for Children in the Arab World: An Exercise in Child Political Socialization.” Translation Matters, vol. 2, no. 2, 2020, pp. 160–​71, doi:10.21747/​21844585/​tm2_​2a10. Millán-​Varela, Carmen. “(G)Alicia in Wonderland: Some Insights.” Fragmentos, January-​June 1999, pp. 97–​117. Mussche, Erika, and Klaas Willems. “Fred or Farīd, Bacon or Bayḍun (‘Egg’)? Proper Names and Cultural-​ Specific Items in the Arabic Translation of Harry Potter.” Meta: Translators’ Journal, vol. 55, no. 3, 2010, p. 474–98 Oittinen, Riitta. “On Translating for Children: A Finnish Point of View.” Early Child Development and Care, vol. 48, no. 1, 1989, pp. 27–​37. —​—​—​. Translating for Children. Garland, 2000. —​—​—​, Anne Ketola, Melissa Garavini, Chiara Galletti, Roberto Martínez Mateo, Hasnaa Chakir, Samir Diouny, Xi Chen, Camila Alvares Pasquetti, and Lincoln P. Fernandes. Translating Picturebooks: Revoicing the Verbal, the Visual and the Aural for a Child Audience. Taylor and Francis, 2017. O’Sullivan, Emer. Comparative Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2005. —​—​—​. Kinderliterarische Komparatistik. Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000. —​—​—​. “Narratology Meets Translation Studies, Or, the Voice of the Translator in Children’s Literature.” Meta: Translators’ Journal, vol. 48, no. 1–​2, 2003, pp. 197–​207, www.eru​dit.org/​revue/​meta/​2003/​v48/​n1-​2/​ 00696​7ar.html. —​—​—​. “Translating Children’s Literature: What, for Whom, How, and Why: A Basic Map of Actors, Factors and Contexts.” Belas Infiéis, vol. 8, no. 3, 2019, pp. 13–​35, doi:10.26512/​belasinfieis.v8.n3.2019.25176. —​—​—​. “Translating Pictures: The Interaction of Pictures and Words in the Translation of Picture Books.” Signal, no. 90, 1999, pp. 167–​75. —​—​—​. “Two Languages, Two Children’s Literatures: Translation in Ireland Today.” Van Coillie and McMartin, pp. 55–​71. Paone, Pina. “Collodi, Edizione Nazionale Delle Opere Di Carlo Lorenzini, Volume III.” Enthymema, vol. 8, 2013, pp. 405–​11. Parkinson, Siobhán. “Happy 5th Birthday, Little Island: Siobhán Parkinson Traces the History, Successes, Challenges and Ambitions of the Children’s Publisher She Helped Found in 2010 as It Launches Its 50th Book.” The Irish Times, 13 May 2015. —​—​—​. Interview by Emer O’Sullivan, 14 February 2019. Parody, Clare. “Franchising/​Adaptation.” Adaptation, vol. 4, no. 2, 2011, pp. 210–​18, doi:10.1093/​adaptation/​ apr008. Shavit, Zohar. The Poetics of Children’s Literature. University of Georgia Press, 1986. Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. Longman, 1992. Surmatz, Astrid. “Att Översätta Berättande.” Konsten att Berätta för Barn: Barnboken, edited by Anne Banér, Centrum för barnkulturforskning, 1996, pp. 59–​82. —​—​—​. Pippi Långstrump als Paradigma: Die deutsche Rezeption Astrid Lindgrens und ihr internationaler Kontext. Francke, 2005. Tan, Teri. “Children’s Books in China 2017: An Overview of the Children’s Book Market in China.” Publishers Weekly, 17 March 2017. Thomson-​Wohlgemuth, Gaby. Translation under State Control: Books for Young People in the German Democratic Republic. Routledge, 2009. “TRANSLATION. Daniel Hahn Advocates for Children’s Literature [Interview].” Words and Pictures: The SCBWI British Isles Online Magazine, 2019, www.words​andp​ics.org/​2019/​04/​tran​slat​ion-​danny-​hahn.html. van Coillie, Jan. “Character Names in Translation: A Functional Approach.” van Coillie and Verschueren, pp. 123–​40. —​—​—​.and Jack McMartin, eds. Children’s Literature in Translation: Texts and Contexts. Leuven University Press, 2020. —​—​—​. “Diversity Can Change the World: Children’s Literature, Translation and Images of Childhood.” van Coillie and McMartin, pp. 141–​56.

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Translation —​—​—​, and Jack McMartin. “Introduction: Studying Texts and Contexts in Translated Children’s Literature.” Van Coillie and McMartin, pp. 11–​37. —​—​—​, and Walter Verschueren eds. Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies, St. Jerome, 2006. —​—​—​,and Walter Verschueren. “Editors’ Preface.” Van Coillie and Verschueren, pp. v-ix. Vandaele, Jeroen. “Silenced in Translation: The Voice of Manolito Gafotas.” Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation, edited by Cecilia Alvstad, Annjo K. Greenall, Hanne Jansen, and Kristiina Taivalkoski-​Shilov, John Benjamins, 2017, pp. 159–​80. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Routledge, 1995.

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28 RETRANSLATION Virginie Douglas

In the Western world, children’s books have fed on translations, retranslations, and adaptations ever since they became an established genre in the mid-​eighteenth century: like translation, retranslation has played a foundational role in the circulation and evolution of children’s literature and has been instrumental in shaping a canon. To a certain extent, retranslating children’s literature was already under way in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands; through translations that were then largely adaptations, the metamorphoses of texts as they traveled between countries paved the way for various interpretations and retranslations of the same text. Isabelle Nières-​Chevrel’s definition of translations of children’s books as “providers of literary works and models to develop or renew a literary repertoire” (“Traduction” 936) also applies to retranslations. It is by dint of the variations that result from rewrites, (re)translations, and adaptations that many children’s texts have become classics. Why retranslate this literature? What children’s books are retranslated? And when they are, into what language are they retranslated? Retranslation has much to say about this genre. In the same way as it is appropriate to question the specificity of translation for young readers, it is pertinent to wonder to what extent retranslation differs when it concerns children’s –​ rather than adult –​ literature. This chapter draws both on general theories of literary retranslation and on academic work dedicated to the translation of children’s literature, substantiating its argument with a few significant case studies. After focusing on various definitions of retranslation and on the place of retranslation in children’s literature, I examine the reasons that motivate retranslation before looking into the conditions, constraints, and characteristics of retranslation of children’s books.

Defining Retranslation: Its Connection with Children’s Literature Although retranslation produces what used to be called “new translations,”1 retranslation itself is nothing new. Its definition is as shifting and constantly renewed as the very process of retranslating, particularly in relation to a literature that has been affected by free translation, adaptation, abridgements, and censorship more than any other. Yves Gambier has tried to give a straightforward definition of retranslation: Retranslations can be interpreted as new translations, in the same language, of a text that has already been translated, in whole or in part. It is linked to the notion of updating texts, determined

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by the evolution of the readership, their tastes, their needs, and their skill. Retranslation works on texts that have already been introduced in the target language-​culture. (413–​14) Sometimes “the same language” is not exactly the same, which makes it difficult to decide whether a given translated text is a retranslation or not. Are we to consider such intralingual adaptations as that of Harry Potter into American English actual translations (Nel)? Retranslating into the same language is not the same as retranslating for another target area using (roughly) the same language. As Catherine Delesse has shown in her analysis of one of the Astérix comics into British English (by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, 1976) and then into American English (by Robert Steven Cohen, 1984), the cultural as well as the linguistic discrepancy between the uses of English in the Old World and in the New proved a stumbling block. Despite the quality of the first translation, a retranslation was needed because of its failure with the American readership. In that case, the variations between the two translations go far beyond the mere intralingual adaptation of Harry Potter. Gambier’s definition of retranslation is largely based on French translation studies scholar Antoine Berman’s seminal work. In the 1990 issue of the French journal Palimpsestes, Berman, who is also a translator of German, English, and Spanish to French, especially of children’s books, elaborated a theory of retranslation. This “retranslation hypothesis” is based on the assumption that retranslations are generally more satisfactory insofar as they are closer to the source text than first translations, and as they insist on the foreignness of the text rather than on its accessibility for the target audience. Retranslations are therefore supposed to be source-​oriented (as opposed to target-​oriented). Unlike first translations, which tend to favor domestication, they are purportedly prone to stick to the original text to compensate for the shortcomings –​or “failure” –​of the initial translation(s): they are related to the inevitable loss linked to translation. If we apply this premise to the retranslation of children’s books, the process could be seen as an attempt to promote these books a posteriori, giving them new legitimacy. Berman’s theory has been much discussed and criticized, especially in case studies of retranslated children’s books, which sometimes confirm but often undermine 0” this hypothesis. In any case, this initial delving into the mechanisms of retranslation has been instrumental in furthering research in the field. The retranslation of children’s books started soaring dramatically in the last half-​century and especially in recent decades. This is a logical development of the globalization of culture, which has contributed to making children’s literature a prominent part of world literature. The retranslation phenomenon coincides with the growing academic interest in translation studies and in children’s literature studies, as well as in the correlation between the two. Indeed, it highlights the evolution of children’s literature in general, its unprecedented publishing success, and its new legitimacy: retranslation is connected with commercial and critical recognition of a genre whose position in the literary polysystem (Shavit) is no longer peripheral. Yet it should be pointed out that the recent growth in retranslations has barely affected the translating of children’s books into English, as most Anglophone countries have no need for retranslation from a quantitative point of view (the number of translated children’s books constitutes only slightly more than one percent of the market in the United States, about three percent in Britain), or into the languages of countries where children’s literature is emerging and has therefore only recently started importing foreign children’s books. Geopolitical factors are as present in retranslation as they are in translation and tend to emphasize contrasts between the Western world and younger literary cultures. Because retranslations of children’s books are mostly exported from Europe or North America to the other continents, retranslations chiefly concern European languages. The more a country resorts to translation to publish children’s books, the more it comes to retranslate this literature. The disparities between the proportions of translation in the children’s

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literature of various countries are also commensurate with the precocity and numerical importance of retranslations in particular linguistic areas. In Britain, however, there are a few exceptions to the dearth of retranslated children’s books. Pushkin Press promotes the world heritage of children’s literature by retranslating “classic books long out of print” (Freudenheim), such as Erich Kästner’s Das doppelte Lottchen (1949), first translated in the United States by Cyrus Brooks as Lottie and Lisa (1962) and retranslated by Anthea Bell as The Parent Trap2 (2014), or José Mauro de Vasconcelos’s O Meu Pé de Laranja Lima (1968, My Sweet Orange Tree, retransl. Alison Entrekin, 2018), which had been out of print for forty years in Britain after a first translation from Brazilian Portuguese to English in 1970. In some countries, in contrast, (re)translation is infrequent because it is a rather recent phenomenon, and its function is obviously the creation of a body of children’s literature where none exists. This was the case in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century: Émilie Audigier has shown that, through a process called “anthropophagism” by poet Mário de Andrade, late nineteenth-​century Brazilian authors such as Alberto Figueiredo Pimentel and Carlos Jansen translated and retranslated European fairy tales and novels in order to feed their own culture, in particular children’s literature (212). Appropriation through retranslation is also evident in such contexts as South Africa, at the beginning of the twentieth century and again in recent decades, when retranslating Roald Dahl’s novels, for example, was meant to reinforce the body of children’s literature in Afrikaans (Revington). Retranslation, even more than translation, adds value to a literature long considered subordinate, whether from a global or a local point of view.

Why Retranslate Children’s Books? The decision to retranslate a children’s book is often based on a combination of extratextual and/​ or intratextual factors. Reasons for retranslating certain books are numerous, but one thing is obvious: retranslating is closely linked to the notion of the canon. The number of languages into which a classic has been translated is often mentioned as one of the criteria that give it its high status, and top-​ranked children’s authors in the list of most translated authors of UNESCO’s Index Translationum (Jules Verne in second position after Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton fourth behind Shakespeare, Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm in eighth and tenth places) are those who are also most retranslated. Within a particular language, the number of retranslations of the same book is indicative of the degree of its appropriation in the target culture, and therefore of the place it holds among classics for young people. Either the status of a book as a national classic motivates a series of translations in major target languages, or it is the process of retranslation itself that gradually makes the book a classic across borders. In some cases (Carlo Collodi, Lewis Carroll, Selma Lagerlöf, Rudyard Kipling, A. A. Milne, Kästner, Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren), books have already become classics before being retranslated. In others, they are deemed future international masterpieces, and retranslations are meant to confirm this status, as in the case of the retranslation into French of Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972), a classic mainly in the English-​speaking world, by the small independent publishing company Monsieur Toussaint Louverture forty years after the first translation. Translating and retranslating are ways for a national classic to have a chance of becoming an international one, even if the work in the target culture is not entirely the same as the original. Retranslations are often motivated by anniversaries. For instance, Charlotte Berry explains Oxford University Press’s large-​scale project, on the centenary of Lindgren’s birth in 2007, of commissioning new translators to replace the “ageing” Hurup translation into English (361) of the Pippi Långstrump books (1945–​48, Pippi Longstocking) by a “sumptuous new gift edition” illustrated by Lauren Child (359). O Meu Pe de Laranja Lima’s retranslation into English occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in Brazil. The most striking example is Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince 342

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(1943). The book’s huge international success, with 200 million copies sold and translations made into 547 languages and dialects (with exceptionally numerous retranslations in Spanish and Italian, but also in Turkish, Arabic, Farsi/​Persian, Mandarin/​Chinese, and Japanese3), became even greater in 2018, the seventy-​fifth anniversary of its publication. This generated a new series of retranslations of the famous tale, which was already “the most translated secular book in the world,”4 most notably into English by British author Michael Morpurgo. Many reasons for retranslation can be accounted for by the time factor. As Yves Chevrel and Jean-​ Yves Masson put it, retranslation is a time-​bound process: “The succession of translations of the same work over time forms a history that deserves to be written: a new translation does not replace the old one, but adds to it” (11). With retranslations, several layers of linguistic or ideological content are added to, or respond to, one another. Retranslations –​insofar as they are “[e]‌xponents of the historical relativity of translation” (Desmidt 670) –​ thus interact not only with the original text but also with its previous translation(s). Judith Inggs shows that popular writer Kornei Chukovsky’s abridged and simplified translation of Robinson Crusoe for Soviet child readers has remained the preferred version of the text in Russian to this day (8). This trend is particularly noticeable in titles. In children’s literature, which is so often redolent with nostalgia, it has time and again proven impossible to modify the title of a well-​loved first translation, even when its deficiencies prompt revision. The title of the most famous French translation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), the very free adaptation by publisher Pierre-​Jules Hetzel (pseud. P.-​J. Stahl, 1880), Les Quatre filles du Docteur Marsch [sic], is revealing of his domestication of the original text. As Nières-​Chevrel (“Traduction et création”) and Claire Le Brun have demonstrated, Hetzel’s version (already a retranslation) amounts to a rewriting of the book, from which the religious dimension is erased (the father, a chaplain, becoming a doctor in French) and where the supposed necessity of a happy ending entails the marriage of Jo and Laurie. In a recent retranslation, novelist Malika Ferdjoukh managed to change the famous original title by only one syllable, with Les Quatre filles du Pasteur March (2010). This move restores the Protestant dimension of Alcott’s text (by reverting to the father’s true profession) but not its feminist dimension, as Jo and her sisters remain “daughters” (filles) under their father’s authority, whereas the American title emphasizes their independence as young women. A title is therefore often retained out of attachment to the first translation. Anna Derelkowska-​ Misiuna’s study of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), erroneously translated as “Anne of the Green Hills” (Ania z Zielonego Wzgórza) in the 1912 Polish translation by Rozalia Bersteinowa and in the other eleven Polish ones that followed between 1995 and 2012, explains that none of the translators dared to change the title: her translation had remained the only Polish version for eighty-​three years and therefore become canonical, not least because it came out a few years before Poland regained its independence in 1918 (198, 194). Since Derelkowska-Misiuna’s analysis, however, Anna Bańkowska has published a retranslation (in 2022), in which the first title is replaced by the correct one, without entirely convincing the readership (Pielorz). Among time-​related reasons for retranslation, the aging of translations is a leitmotif. Translations are often said to become outdated sooner than original texts, which triggers the need to retranslate the source text to preserve its youthfulness, especially when it is aimed at a young audience. Florence Cabaret underlines that “as the incarnation of a ‘new generation’ in an age where youth is one of the most profitable values, the child strengthens our awareness of the temporal and ephemeral dimension of a text’s interpretation” (17). That child readers, their language, and their education evolve very fast makes the aging of translations especially relevant in children’s literature. In his “Translator’s note” to the 2000 retranslation of Le Petit Prince into English, Richard Howard blames the aging of the original translation rather than its possible flaws. Dusting off children’s stories often involves more modern forms of text transformation, which interact with the process of retranslation. In some cases, the release of a movie or television series adapted from a children’s book can affect the publisher’s choice to commission a retranslation. An 343

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example of a French retranslation made as the result of a film adaptation is that of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which has been partially retranslated since 2005,5 when the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was first released (in French: Le Lion, la Sorcière blanche et l’Armoire magique). New editions feature cover photos from the film in addition to the retranslated content; in the title of the cycle, in particular, the original term of “Chroniques” is replaced by “le Monde [the World] de Narnia” (the publisher thus showcasing the worldbuilding associated with the thriving genre of high fantasy). Likewise, a transnational approach to (re)translation such as the “Global Huck” project has shown the impact that a TV series may have in revitalizing a classic and fostering retranslation: the Japanese animated version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn produced in the 1970s and broadcast in Iran in the 1980s and 1990s was watched by millions of young viewers, some of whom recently authored the many retranslations of the American classic into Persian (Fishkin et al. 10–​11). These multimodal incentives to retranslate works reveal that the “value” conferred on retranslations addressed to children is not only aesthetic or intellectual but also economic. This is often noticeable in one of the most effective selling points of retranslations of children’s classics: the book’s packaging and cover, whose modernity and attractiveness are supposed to reflect the textual revisions, confirming that “paratexts serve as a means of conferring and transferring symbolic capital” (Inggs 3). The impact of publishing and legal matters such as the cost of translation is part and parcel of the decision to retranslate. Economic motivations for retranslation are often linked to historical context. Marisa Fernández López has shown how the boom in children’s literature after the Spanish Civil War gave rise to numerous translations, but also, for classics already translated, to retranslations, often of poor quality or plagiarized from previous versions (“Años”). In this case, the end of Franco’s dictatorship, but also the economic context resulting from political liberalization, explain the abundance of new translations (Fernández López, “Literature”). Likewise, Gabriele Thomson-​Wohlgemuth reveals that in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), even if the choice of books eligible for (re) translation largely depended on ideological factors, economic factors were not negligible: since the GDR was sorely lacking in foreign currency after the war, retranslating copyright-​free classics was favored. A similar example is that of the former Soviet Union and satellite countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This wave of retranslations of classics for young people in the former communist bloc verged on mass production from the late 1980s onwards –​ in Romania with the proliferation of retranslations of classic fairy tales (Constantinescu) or of Jules Renard’s French classic Poil de carotte with its seven translations (Hăisan), or, in Poland, the aforementioned case of Anne of Green Gables. The reasons for retranslation depend on the country of production. Whether changes in the economic context are due to political factors or to the evolution towards a more globalized system of production, favorable economic elements inevitably lead to changes in modes of production and eventually in the way texts are translated. Retranslating thus consists of exploiting new publishing possibilities and adjusting to supply and demand, either to win back a readership or to increase profits by appropriating the original work to the extent that it should not only be retranslated but also prolonged. One emblematic example is that of Swiss-​German author Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880) and its sequel, which were first translated into French in 1882. They were then retranslated in 1933 and 1934, but also followed by four additional volumes (1936–​46) written by the Swiss-​ French translator, then the publisher, and finally another author (Lévêque 1000–​1001). As a rule, as a work ages, it becomes technically easier to publish a belated initial translation of it or a retranslation. In most European and many non-​European countries, a work now becomes copyright-​free seventy years (sometimes fifty) after the author’s death. Some retranslations are therefore prompted by the recent accession of authors to the public domain, which acts as “a catalyst,” according to Emer O’Sullivan: “When Saint-​Exupéry’s crossover novel The Little Prince entered the public domain in 1994, three new English translations came out immediately” (“Translating Children’s Literature” 21–​22). 344

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The distinction between “child people” and “book people” (Townsend 199) and the subsequent double point of view on children’s books is as visible in the field as it is in (re)translation. While child people give priority to the didacticism of children’s books, and consequently to accessibility, readability, and ideology in (re)translation, book people focus on the work’s status and literariness. For book people, reasons for retranslation are mainly intratextual and stress amending the deficiencies of first translations. The (re)translation of Lindgren’s Pippi Långstrump into several European languages is frequently seen as a case in point: the inadequacy of the first translations, which had often censored the Swedish masterpiece for its subversion of adult authoritarianism and the establishment in general and for its deviation from the standards prevailing in mid-​twentieth-​century children’s books, has triggered the wish to remedy their shortcomings. Indeed, Lindgren was well ahead of her time when she created her independent, unconventional heroine. The first translations of the Pippi trilogy into most European languages, French in particular and, to a lesser extent, German and English, tried to restore the heavily didactic dimension expected from children’s books, or at least to tone down Pippi’s misconduct and the most seditious aspects of her behavior. The first German version, for instance, re-​establishes the prohibition against children using firearms; in French, in addition to the many deletions, Pippi seems a bland, troubled child rather than a rebellious one.6 Adult interventionism and censorship in the initial translation were eventually “repaired” in several languages. In France, an article by academic Christina Heldner, thanks to its harsh criticism of the initial translation,7 was instrumental in convincing the publisher to commission a retranslation. The three Pippi books (instead of the two published by Hachette in 1951 and 1953) have now been restored in an entirely new translation by Alain Gnaedig and have retrieved all their strength and rebelliousness.8 Sometimes it is not the translator or publisher who is at fault but the text itself that seems untranslatable. In “major” languages, Carroll’s Alice books (1865–​72) have a vast, ever-​increasing number of retranslations. Among the languages and dialects into which these books are translated –​ 174 for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and sixty-​five for Through the Looking-​Glass –​ there have been over fifty translations in French, about fifty in Italian, almost forty in German, more than ten in Arabic, and over 500 in Japanese, the language of a country where the duology is a cultural and sociological phenomenon (Kennell). The presence of Carroll’s works among the most translated and retranslated books is due to the untranslatability of the wordplay they contain as much as that of the parodies, in which cultural references are embedded in linguistic games. The fact that the original text resists translation and that the first target texts have translated wordplay in a way deemed unsatisfactory prompts translators to try to retranslate the text using all their ingenuity and creativity. Adaptation is always present in (re)translation to varying degrees, but the content of Carroll’s books makes it impossible to translate them literally, at the risk of producing boring or sibylline translations. Only imaginative (re)translations can keep a pun from falling flat and preserve the humor, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian retranslation9 (Loison-​Charles). Nières-​Chevrel may call Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “An untranslatable story” (“Un récit intraduisible”), but she shows that the best French retranslation was probably Jacques Papy’s of 1961, in particular thanks to the attention paid to wordplay. Retranslations, even more than first translations, are therefore attempts at solving problems. However, reparation through retranslation does not necessarily involve purely linguistic or translational matters; it can be prompted by the perceived betrayal of an important sociocultural or political aspect of the original text. Grands Cœurs (1892), the first French translation of the Italian masterpiece Cuore (1886) by Edmondo De Amicis, was clearly a target-​oriented adaptation used as a reader by French schoolchildren until 1960: it had “de-​italicized” the original, as Mariella Colin’s analysis shows, and one of the particular aims of the 2001 source-​oriented retranslation was to restore the Italian historical dimension of the original. The changing perception of a book over time can lead to questioning its original address: does the book’s status still correspond to the initial child readership? The time-​related shift of status and address often motivates a revised translation. Hence, the reasons to retranslate a book will necessarily affect the way it is retranslated. 345

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How to Retranslate Children’s Books The question of the actual readership addressed by what is labeled “children’s literature” is elusive. But it underlies the whole process of retranslation through the choices that are made. In the case of classic authors for whom a clear sense of recognition has developed over the years, new legitimacy paradoxically results in a certain adultization through retranslation, by affecting its modalities. Loyalty to the source text involves such matters as how to deal with register or the treatment of culture-​bound elements. Retranslating a well-​known work can thus either induce higher standards out of respect or allow for lower standards insofar as heritage literature is felt to belong to everyone. The indecision over the intended audience of original fairy tales, for instance, has often been reflected in the variations in the address of their successive translations (Constantinescu). The shift of address is usually a direct consequence both of the uncertainty about the source text’s initial address and of the original text’s gradual canonization. But this process is not always linear, and it does not mean that two translations of the same children’s book published in the same language at about the same time are almost identical. Writing on nineteenth-​century Czech translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eva Kalivodová shows that two adapted versions, both released in 1853, one year after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic, convey very different messages. Only the depoliticized version was later republished and, when it was reprinted in a children’s series, “might have helped to establish the Czech tradition of childish Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (113). In her work on Carroll’s reception in France, Nières-​Chevrel shows that the two initial French translations commissioned from England did not target any particular readership; France only appropriated Carroll between the wars with proliferating retranslations. She identifies two periods of “adult appropriation” of the Alice books: in the 1930s, due to French Surrealists’ fascination for Carrollian nonsense, and in the 1960s and ’70s, with the development of linguistics (“Classique” 67). The retranslations of Alice therefore became more famous, adult-​oriented, and elitist after being translated by the Surrealists’ circle. A retranslation such as Henri Parisot’s, still among those most often used in new editions of the tale, is far from accessible to the child because of its complex syntax and poor sense of orality. Allegiance to the source text made Parisot change his choice of terms for the Caterpillar. He discarded his accessible first choice ‘Chenille’ for “Bombyx” or “Ver à soie” in the 1970 edition because he had read about the importance of preserving the hookah-​ smoking insect’s masculinity (“Chenille” being grammatically feminine). But few children know what a ver à soie is, let alone a bombyx. In contrast, some recent French retranslations show a shift back to a child audience (especially in picturebooks, such as the one illustrated by Belgian artist Anne Herbauts and retranslated into French by her sister Isabelle; see Nières-​Chevrel, “Classique”). It is therefore pointless to seek linearity in the history of the translations of a text. Björn Sundmark shows that the first Swedish translation of Alice (Emily Nonnen, 1870) is paradoxically not an “introductory,” domesticated translation, but a source-​oriented one. Unlike later Swedish versions, it is close to the original text, with an introduction to define nonsense and footnotes to explain the parodies. This shifting address from one translation to the next is showcased in an extreme example, the retranslation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into Portuguese for Brazilian children by the same translator who had made the adult translation: textual playfulness is emphasized, but linguistically or culturally problematic passages are deleted in the children’s version (do Amarante). The interpretation of a book’s address is arbitrary to a certain extent, and translation can turn a children’s text into an adult one and vice versa. Now that Brazilian literature has reached recognition, as Audigier argues, it is not unusual for a classic to be rejuvenated by a foreign publisher (rather than the translator), thanks to a deliberate change of address; the short story “Conto de Escola” (1884) by Machado de Assis was first translated into French for an adult readership –​the initial target audience –​before being retranslated for a child audience by Michelle Giudicelli. 346

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What the observation of retranslations reveals above all is the puzzling extent to which they can differ from one another. Translation scholars have looked closely at the varying norms that produce highly dissimilar translations. The textual modifications apparent in retranslations are the same as those in first translations (see O’Sullivan, “Translation”). Deletions and additions are among the most common devices in retranslations that are closer to adaptations, as well as the domestication of culture-​bound elements, especially proper names and references to food –​ an essential theme in children’s books. Translational norms have changed over time, and the better training of translators today is visible in retranslation. But it is linguistic, cultural, and ideological norms that fluctuate most. All retranslations of children’s books point to the evolution of ideological assumptions underlying the choices entailed by the necessity of ensuring readability: change in the perception of the child implies change in the perceived mission of children’s literature. This is why retranslation of books conveying strong values about the child as a social subject is more likely to deviate from the original text in the representation of the young protagonists, especially in the context of authoritarian regimes in which children’s education is based on censorship.10 Children’s literature is likely to convey ideological values, as its readership is young, pliable, and represents the future of society. The manipulations due to censorship in retranslation change as rapidly as the image of the child, yet are not limited to dictatorships, as Fernández López notes: “While the inclusion of sex, vulgar expressions, or liberal views no longer represents a problem in children’s literature, censorship is applied to texts that are considered racist or sociopolitically incorrect. The fundamental rationale for this new censorship is today, as it was in the eighteenth century, didactic in nature” (“Studies” 30). This is also what Isabelle Desmidt shows, drawing on fifty-​two German and eighteen Dutch versions of Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906–​7 Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey Through Sweden): although the motivation to improve on earlier translations occasionally exists, “a clash of norms” in the aims of more recent translations generally hinders the validity of Berman’s theory (676). Likewise, Miryam Du-​Nour has highlighted changing norms in her large-​ scale study of (re)translations of children’s books into Hebrew over seventy years. She demonstrates the general tendency amounts to gradual modernization and simplification of the language, giving priority to the text’s readability for the child as “customer.” Moreover, the same translation standards will not be applied to an author belonging to the literary or “adult” canon, or to a text belonging to mass culture and governed by the logic of series. This is exemplified in the case of Hachette’s launching, in 2006, a major French retranslation of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five for the hundredth anniversary of their iconic “Bibliothèque Rose.” This new version of Le Club des cinq, by Rosalind Elland-​Goldsmith, triggered controversy: it is a modernization rather than a “reparation” of the first translations’ numerous deficiencies,11 driven by the efficiency and oversimplification characteristic of mass publishing. Linguistically, the past historic has been replaced by the present tense; narratively, descriptions have been shortened; culturally, some modern items such as cellphones are introduced. This neglectful revision of a neglectful initial translation reveals the publisher’s concern to constantly update and modernize. Such evolution signifies the changing ideological norms in time or space. Retranslation is therefore regarded as a way not only to make the language suitable for children or adapt to young readers’ supposed cognitive skills, but also, more generally, to rectify the image of the child conveyed in books. Roberta Pederzoli’s exploration of the shifting vision of girlhood over the five Italian translations (published between 1871 and 2016) of Les Malheurs de Sophie (1859) by the Comtesse de Ségur reveals “the evolution of gender role models imposed on girls, which reflects the Italian cultural context in which each new version is published” (“Malheurs” §5). In illustrated children’s literature, especially picturebooks, the image of the child gets even more salient in retranslation, because the implied adult-​child relationship is conveyed not only in the narration but also in the dual address and its implicit assumption that parent and preschool child will 347

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be co-​readers of the same story thanks to the reading-​aloud process. Translating picturebooks implies taking into account the interaction between the two semiotic systems involved, text and image. As translators can only address the verbal dimension of the book, they tend either to give precedence to the verbal text or to make their interpretation of the text-​image relationship overexplicit. The importance of orality in fairy tales is now often showcased in picturebook retranslations, which are affected by the translator’s fantasized idea of the reading-​aloud relationship (van Coillie). Annalisa Sezzi’s comparative study of the first translation (1990) and retranslation (1999) of Anthony Browne’s Bear Hunt (1979) into Italian reveals “different images of the child and of the adult reading aloud compared to the source text” (227). Does greater consideration for the child reader imply greater consideration for the original text? The “new seriousness” of retranslation for children in recent French versions of Just-​So Stories, Little Women, and Pinocchio does not necessarily mean the child is excluded from the readership. Writing on the 1979 French retranslation of the first book in Spyri’s Heidi series, Nières-​Chevrel (“Heidi”) argues that the new seriousness and fidelity of the text include its commentary on Switzerland’s debut in the Industrial Revolution even if it was commissioned by a children’s publisher, L’École des loisirs. Which gets priority when one translates “children’s literature”: what concerns the child or what concerns literature? The idea that the child reader can grasp complicated notions or experience aesthetic pleasure like the adult is visible in a greater number of retranslations today, even if it is far from systematic. In the 1990s, the German-​to-​French translator François Mathieu called on his colleagues to “[r]‌etranslate our young classics” in order to counteract the strong tendency to adapt rather than translate children’s books. Pederzoli’s ideal of reaching “aesth-​ethics” in translation for children is representative of the seriousness with which certain translators nowadays aim at combining an aesthetic rendition of the text with an ethicalppp vision of their activity (Traduction 283). Quality retranslations increasingly accommodate the child’s specificity by enhancing sensoriality, but also the encounter with otherness in an age when picturebooks start being retranslated, emphasizing the pleasure of storytelling, the orality, or the possibility of performance (Sezzi) thanks to the play on rhythm or sound. Increasing importance is given to elements of the book either known to be especially significant for the child, such as images or the materiality of the book, or reflecting the status of the child as a “minor” being. Catherine Renaud, a translator from Danish and Swedish to French who retranslated Jansson’s classic Moomin picturebook Vem skal trösta knyttet? (1960, Who is to comfort the knyttet?) under the title of Qui va rassurer le tibou? (2009), showed great consideration both for the child and for Jansson’s original text. She returned to the characteristics of the source text, refusing to adapt it as Pierre and Kersti Chaplet had done in their 1993 translation. Keeping close to Finland-​Swedish culture implied translating proper names either by drawing on their connotations or by giving a French version phonetically identical to the Swedish names. She also took advantage of the obligation to use the original rhyming pattern, thus making the most of the musicality of language (Renaud). Loïc Boyer has shown about this picturebook and others that (re)translating means much more than turning the verbal text into another language: the typographical choices, layout, paper, size, and colors of the illustrations in retranslated picturebooks often reveal the publisher’s wish to return to the original and to the sensory pleasure sought by the author. Today’s emphasis on orality is particularly relevant in children’s literature, because the language of young people changes very quickly, especially slang and colloquial language. The problematic slang of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was one of the reasons a French retranslation was needed. In 2008, it was carried out by Bernard Hoepffner, who used great inventiveness based on lexical, phono-​graphological, or syntactic modifications to restore to Huck the singularity of his young voice. Retranslating a text to accommodate its new canonicity sometimes involves academics, who make up a significant proportion of retranslators, in more “serious” retranslations: Cuore or Stalky & Co. in French, Winnie-​the-​Pooh in Polish, the Alice books in Spanish and Chinese, and many others have

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been given scholarly retranslations.12 But although they confirm the legitimacy of the book, these are not always welcome. Even when they are not academics, many children’s translators reflect on their practice today and are more open to a return to the foreignness of the translated text, especially as children are more educated to diversity as a result both of the Western world’s postcolonial heritage and of globalization. There is less patronizing and less authority in their approach despite the persistence, under the surface, of a desire to educate the child reader by conveying content that is now concerned with openness to difference. This new vision of the child as a more autonomous individual explains the vast phenomenon of retranslation in children’s literature in recent decades and the way these retranslations are conducted: just as seriality and multimodality in children’s literature now allow for the “monetization” of characters and worlds through the expansion of narratives, so retranslation allows for a new popularity of children’s stories through modernization and updating. In many respects, retranslation has made children’s literature what it has become today, although the study of retranslation does not allow us to draw uniform conclusions with regard to reasons for retranslating this literature (or to a specific way of doing so). It is a never-​ending process, as it relies both on the static archetype of the puer aeternus that the adult seeks to perpetuate in many of these books and on the ever-​changing image of the child according to the period and society in which they are produced.

Notes 1 Yves Chevrel remarked in 2010 that “ ‘retranslation’ is a scholarly term, hardly ever used by those attempting a new translation” (11). Enrico Monti pointed out in 2012 that the preferred label of “new translation” is a common feature in the publishing world, as it lays the stress on novelty rather than repetition (12). All translations are mine. 2 A title taken from the popular 1961 Disney adaptation of the book. 3 See https://​petit-​pri​nce-​col​lect​ion.com/​lang/​trad​ucte​urs.php?lang=​en. 4 https://​wel​ovet​rans​lati​ons.com/​2021/​10/​15/​whats-​the-​best-​tran​slat​ion-​of-​the-​lit​tle-​pri​nce/​#tra​nsla​tor-​9. 5 On the retranslation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in French and Italian, see Artero. 6 For accounts of the French, English, German, Dutch, American, and South African translations of Pippi, see Heldner; Berry; O’Sullivan, Literature; Kümmerling-​Meibauer and Surmatz. 7 French Pippi is described as an “anarchist in a straitjacket” in the title, and the original text is said to be “disfigured” and “mutilated” (Heldner 67). 8 Jing Yu has shown how three Chinese translations of Huckleberry Finn have all toned down Huck’s rebelliousness in a way very similar to the French translation of Pippi. 9 There had already been several Russian translations of Alice when Nabokov’s was published in 1923. 10 One retranslation studied by Inggs is that of Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy published in 1992 after “the absence of Burnett’s works during the Soviet era” due to the inadequacy of “works [...] firmly rooted in nineteenth-​century bourgeois society” with regards to the values of Soviet socialist realism (6). 11 The initial target texts (1955–​67) describe French children with French names in a French setting; there is no revision of this overt domestication in the retranslation. 12 See respectively Colin; Douglas, “Intertextualité”; Woźniak; Luo.

Works Cited Amarante, Dirce Waltrick do. “Finnegans Wake, de James Joyce, pour enfants.” Atelier de traduction, no. 38, 2022, pp. 69–73. Artero, Paola. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: un roman et trois générations de lecteurs.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 227–​42. Audigier, Émilie. “Machado de Assis retraduit pour les enfants.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 211–​26. Berman, Antoine. “La retraduction comme espace de la traduction.” Palimpsestes, no. 4, 1990, pp. 1–​7. Berry, Charlotte. Publishing, Archives, Translation: Nordic Children’s Literature in the United Kingdom, 1950–​ 2000. University of Edinburgh, PhD dissertation, 2013.

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Virginie Douglas Boyer, Loïc. “Rétrographisme: les albums retraduits sont-​ils formellement réactionnaires?” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 291–​301. Cabaret, Florence. “Introduction.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 11–​19. Chevrel, Yves. “Introduction: la retraduction –​ und kein Ende.” La Retraduction, edited by Robert Kahn and Catriona Seth, Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2010, pp. 11–​20. —​—​—​, and Jean-​Yves Masson. “Avant-​propos.” Histoire des traductions en langue française, XIXe siècle, Verdier, 2012, pp. 7–​14. Colin, Mariella. La Littérature de jeunesse en France et en Italie au XIXe siècle: traductions et influences. Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1992. Constantinescu, Muguraş. “La retraduction des contes français en roumain et leur changement de statut.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 23–​37. Delesse, Catherine. “Astérix d’un bord à l’autre de l’Atlantique, ou La Grande traversée.” Palimpsestes, no. 11, 1998, pp. 173–​85. Derelkowska-​Misiuna, Anna. “Anne of Green Gables–​Towards the Ideal or Mass Production of Translations?” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 193–​207. Desmidt, Isabelle. “(Re)Translation Revisited.” Meta, vol. 54, no. 4, 2009, pp. 669–​83. Douglas, Virginie. “Traduire l’intertextualité en littérature pour la jeunesse: le cas de Stalky & Co. de Rudyard Kipling.” Palimpsestes, no. 18, 2006, pp. 103–​25. —​—​—​, and Florence Cabaret, eds. La Retraduction en littérature de jeunesse /​Retranslating Children’s Literature. Peter Lang, 2014. Du-​Nour, Miryam. “Retranslation of Children’s Books as Evidence of Changes of Norms.” Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1995, pp. 327–​46. Fernández López, Marisa. “Children’s Literature in Franco’s Spain: The Effects of Censorship on Translations.” Anuario de Investigación en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil, no. 3, 2005, pp. 39–​51. —​—​—​. “Cuarenta años de un clásico juvenil anglosajón en España: traducciones de The Wind in the Willows de Kenneth Grahame.” Amigos del Libro, vol. 12, no. 26/​27, 1994, pp. 33–​46. —​—​—​. “Translation Studies in Contemporary Children’s Literature: A Comparison of Intercultural Ideological Factors.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1, 2000, pp. 29–​37. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Ronald Jenn, Holger Kersten, and Selina Lai-​Henderson. “Global Huck: Mapping the Cultural Work of Translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2021, pp. 7–​25. Freudenheim, Adam. “Read Translated Children’s Books and Discover the World.” BookTrust, www.booktr​ust. org.uk/​news-​and-​featu​res/​featu​res/​2018/​febru​ary/​read-​tra​nsla​ted-​childr​ens-​books-​and-​disco​ver-​the-​world/​, 28 February 2018. Gambier, Yves. “La Retraduction, retour et détour.” Meta, vol. 39, no. 3, 1994, pp. 413–​17. Hăisan, Daniela. “La retraduction: miroir magique, boîte catoptrique ou kaléidoscope. Poil de Carotte et les sept versions roumaines.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 165–​78. Heldner, Christina. “Une anarchiste en camisole de force: Fifi Brindacier ou la métamorphose française de Pippi Långstrump.” La Revue des livres pour enfants, no. 145, 1992, pp. 65–​71. Inggs, Judith. “Translation and Transformation: English-​Language Children’s Literature in (Soviet) Russian Guise.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 8, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–​16. Kalivodová, Eva. “19th-​Century Czech Translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: What Has Been Left Unspoken.” Hermēneus: Revista de traducción e interpretación, no. 19, 2017, pp. 96–​120. Kennell, Amanda. Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation. University of Hawai’i Press, 2023. Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Bettina, and Astrid Surmatz, eds. Beyond Pippi Longstocking: Intermedial and International Approaches to Astrid Lindgren’s Work. Routledge, 2011. Le Brun, Claire. “De Little Women de Louisa May Alcott aux Quatre filles du docteur March: les traductions françaises d’un roman de formation au féminin.” Meta, vol. 48, no. 1–​2, 2003, pp. 47–​67. Lévêque, Mathilde. “Littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse.” Histoire des traductions en langue française, XXe siècle, edited by Bernard Banoun, Jean-​Yves Masson, and Isabelle Poulin, Verdier, 2019, pp. 981–​1052. Loison-​Charles, Julie. “Traduire en russe les calembours phoniques d’Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: quand la violence du langage de Lewis Carroll rencontre celle de Vladimir Nabokov.” Palimpsestes, no. 32, pp. 29–​40. Luo, Yifang. “Análisis de varias traducciones coetáneas de Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a las lenguas china y española.” Sendebar, no. 24, 2013, pp. 169–​94. Mathieu, François. “Retraduire nos jeunes classiques.” Traduire pour la jeunesse: TransLittérature, no. 13, 1997, pp. 42–​47.

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Retranslation Monti, Enrico. “La Retraduction: un état des lieux.” Autour de la retraduction: Perspectives littéraires européennes, edited by Enrico Monti and Peter Schnyder, Orizons, 2012, pp. 9–​25. Nel, Philip. “You say ‘Jelly,’ I say ‘Jell-​O’?” The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, edited by Lana A. Whited, University of Missouri Press, 2002, pp. 261–​84. Nières-​Chevrel, Isabelle. “Un récit intraduisible: Alice au Pays des merveilles.” Enseigner les œuvres littéraires en traduction (séance 2), edited by Yves Chevrel, CRDP, Académie de Versailles, 2008, pp. 49–​62. —​—​—​. “Relire Heidi aujourd’hui.” Strenæ, no. 2, 2011, http://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​stre​nae/​266. —​—​—​. “Retraduire un classique: Dépoussiérer Alice?” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 1, no. 2, 2009, pp. 66–​84. —​—​—​. “Traduction.” Dictionnaire du livre et de la littérature de jeunesse en France, edited by Isabelle Nières-​ Chevrel and Jean Perrot, Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie, 2013, pp. 935–​39. —​—​—​. “Traduction et création.” Mythe, traduction et création, edited by Christiane Abbadie-​Clerc, BPI, 1998, pp. 103–​23. O’Sullivan, Emer. Comparative Children’s Literature. Translated by Anthea Bell, Routledge, 2005. —​—​—​. “Translating Children’s Literature: What, for Whom, How, and Why. A Basic Map of Actors, Factors and Contexts.” Belas Infiéis, vol. 8, no. 3, 2019, pp. 13–​35. Pederzoli, Roberta. “Les Malheurs de Sophie en traduction italienne, entre plaisir de la lecture, expériences sensorielles et nouveaux modèles de genre.” Palimpsestes, vol. 32, no. 1, 2019, pp. 96–​110, https://​journ​als. open​edit​ion.org/​palim​pses​tes/​3261. —​—​—​. La traduction de la littérature d’enfance et de jeunesse et le dilemme du destinataire. Peter Lang, 2012. Pielorz, Dorota. “Przeprowadzka Ani? O najnowszym polskim tłumaczeniu ‘Anne of Green Gables’ L. M. Montgomery.” Nauka, www.nauka.uj.edu.pl, 2 July 2022. Renaud, Catherine. “Traduire pour la jeunesse: le cas particulier des albums ‘classiques’ scandinaves.” État des lieux de la traduction pour la jeunesse, edited by Virginie Douglas, Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015, pp. 17–​34. Revington, Marietjie. “Retranslation in Afrikaans Children’s Literature.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 243–​55. Sezzi, Annalisa. “Translating Crossover Picture Books: The Italian Translations of Bear Hunt by Anthony Browne.” Children’s Literature in Translation: Texts and Contexts, edited by Jan van Coillie and Jack McMartin, Leuven University Press, 2020, pp. 215–​30. Shavit, Zohar. Poetics of Children’s Literature. University of Georgia Press, 1986. Sundmark, Björn. “The Swedish Translations of Alice in Wonderland.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 121–​33. Thomson-​Wohlgemuth, Gabriele. “Children’s Literature and Translation Under the East German Regime.” Meta, vol. 48, no. 1–​2, September 2003, pp. 241–​49. Townsend, John Rowe. “Standards of Criticism for Children’s Literature.” 1971. The Signal Approach to Children’s Books, edited by Nancy Chambers, Kestrel Books, 1980, pp. 193–​207. van Coillie, Jan. “Nibble, Nibble Like a Mouse/​Who Is Nibbling at the Source Text’s House. Retranslating Fairy Tales: Untangling the Web of Causation.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 39–​52. Woźniak, Monika. “The Strange Case of Kubuś Puchatek and Fredzia Phi-​Phi: Polish Translations of Milne’s Winnie-​the-​Pooh.” Douglas and Cabaret, pp. 179–​92. Yu, Jing. “What Was Huck Running Away From? Rebellion, Canonicity, and the Chinese Translation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, 2022, pp. 53–​65.

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Adaptation is relevant for children’s literature studies in various respects. First, adaptations for children render material that was originally aimed at another age group suitable for consumption by a younger audience. A media shift is less pertinent in this context than questions of an age-​specific literature or child suitability. The second major dimension of adaptation in a children’s literature context occurs when adapting children’s literature itself into other media and inquiring into the strategies, functions, and effects of this process. The following chapter begins with some general reflections on adaptation before it scrutinizes these two dimensions of adaptation with regard to children’s literature. It will conclude with some observations on the cultural function of adaptations.

General Theoretical Considerations Adaptation belongs to a group of concepts highlighting the relational character of texts as opposed to singular “works.” Emerging in the late 1960s, the concept of intertextuality has since defined literary texts as essentially relational, referential, and derivative. According to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the term, all texts are interconnected by allusions and references, with individual texts forming mosaics of citations. Allusions enrich a text because they add further layers of meaning as texts are compared and related with each other. Whether or not an author knew these other texts and alluded to them intentionally is largely irrelevant. The concept of intertextuality acknowledges textual and readerly autonomy, challenging authorial control and the resulting power relations within literary communication. Another leveling of hierarchies occurs with regard to the status of individual texts. If all texts are nodes or hubs in a universal intertext where allusions and references to other texts coalesce, then all texts are dependent on their intertextual relations, all are derivative, and none is entirely original. The main difference between intertextuality and source criticism consists of their underlying conceptual metaphors. Whereas intertextuality uses spatial images, such as a mosaic, tapestry, or web of equally interrelated texts, source criticism endorses a linear concept of an original source containing the full amount of aesthetic potential, which is gradually watered down in its successors. The idea of a superior source whose derivative successors never achieve its original quality used to be applied when evaluating adaptations. Indeed, it still is, whenever one thinks that a movie can never reach the complexity, aesthetic accomplishment, or imaginative quality of the book it is based on. Within this logic, which one often finds in fan communities, adaptations must strive for fidelity to the original; the more they accomplish it, the better the adaptation. Contrary to this discourse, academic

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adaptation studies have made a point of rejecting the demand for fidelity and acknowledging instead the media-​specific demands of as well as the important cultural work performed by adaptations.1 Adaptation studies takes its cue from intertextuality insofar as it presupposes the network character of textual relationships and jettisons the privileged position of a source over its adaptation. Due to this network character, adaptations are connected not only with their “source,” but with other adaptations of that source as well.2 The materials that are most commonly adapted are myths, folk, and fairy tales –​that is, originally oral traditions without an identifiable source text. Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as “an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (170), characterized by repetition with variation. Adaptations do not have to include a media change, although the term “adaptation” is most frequently used with such implications. Adaptations tend to acknowledge overtly or covertly their reliance on a previously existing text for central narratological elements, such as plot structure, character constellation, setting, or theme. Such a structural reliance is not necessary for intertextuality, where the intertextual relation can remain merely allusive, with references only to single aspects of another text. One might say that intertextuality affects especially the semantics (that is, the meaning making process and the enrichment of meaning), whereas adaptations also affect a larger bundle of structural elements of texts. To Julie Sanders, adaptation is a specific form of intertextuality retaining a greater shaping power of the author/​producer, whereas intertextuality seeks to destabilize the authorial position. Compared to Sanders’s, Hutcheon’s perspective focuses more on reception than on production. She establishes a reception continuum of adaptation ranging from imitations over translations, condensations, and retellings/​revisions to highly creative and participative productions. Adaptations, thus, are “(re)interpretations and (re)creations” (Hutcheon 172) with a variety of functions, such as genre transposition, amplifications of scope or length, commentary, or mediations that try to increase the relevance or comprehensibility of selected aspects. Analyzing these functions is of greater interest than comparative endeavors (see Sanders 20). Paramount to adaptation is the pleasure of playing with an existing text. This play may pursue a critical agenda, yet it can also result from the sheer appreciative enjoyment of the adapted material. As Hutcheon observes, whether an adaptation is experienced as an adaptation depends on the audience (120). Audience members with knowledge of the adapted text will recognize the adaptation as such, whereas unknowing ones will experience the adaptation as a production of its own. Different degrees of such “knowingness” will also lead to different depths in interpretation, different modes of engagement, and, consequently, different modes of immersion. Independent from its recognition, however, any adaptation contributes to the circulation of a work in cultural memory (122–​23). As mentioned above, adaptations may vary in the degree of explicitness regarding their adaptational character as well as in the degrees of deviation and independence from the adapted material. Hence, Sanders distinguishes between adaptations, which are quite explicitly marked, and appropriations. The latter are less explicit about their indebtedness, deviate more decisively from the appropriated material, and present themselves more pointedly as a new, independent cultural product (Sanders 26). Lacking markers referring to the adapted material, such appropriations may raise concerns about plagiarism or “a complex ethics of indebtedness,” as Sanders puts it (40). For both Sanders and Hutcheon, adaptation is first and foremost an enrichment of inspirational texts. Hutcheon adds to this understanding a biological metaphor, comparing cultural adaptation to evolutionary processes. She sees adaptation as a sign of “popularity, persistence, or even the diversity and extent of dissemination” and asserts that “all cultural adaptations one day [may] be seen to have equal cultural validity” (xxv, xxviii). The cultural impact of adaptations should not be underestimated. Adaptations have an inherent critical potential, opening new perspectives on established narratives and their sets of values. They “circulate stories among media and the world, indigenizing them anew each time” (175), thus enabling diverse cultural groups to appropriate those stories in their own way.3

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With her emphasis on the creative and critical dynamics that are sparked by adaptation, Hutcheon counters positions that metaphorically associate adaptation with parasitism or vampirism, hence with infection, corruption, or degeneration. The evolutionary metaphor, with its progressive implications, emphasizes Hutcheon’s optimistic view of adaptation as an enlivening and preserving process.

Adaptations for Children’s Literature This preserving function also features prominently in adaptations for children’s literature. From a historical perspective, adaptations of texts originally written for either an adult or an age-​neutral audience formed a considerable bulk of early children’s literature. The adapted material included novels (famously Robinson Crusoe [1719] or Gulliver’s Travels [1726]), material from popular chapbooks, and fairy tales. Several prefaces to eighteenth-​century children’s books negotiated a functional and aesthetic distinction between literature for children and that for adults. Apart from quantitative difference (such as abridgments), the most prominent strategies were disambiguation, rationalization, and moralization. To begin with the last-​named device, novels were considered to be dangerous reading matter for children if their protagonists had to prove their superior morality by overcoming assaults or temptations, entailing explicit representations of vice. In the preface to The School (1766), Sarah Maese criticizes this strategy after passing a dismissive verdict on romance plots: To find books that will innocently amuse, is not the least difficult part of her [a teacher’s] task. The most decent of novels can not be ranked in this number; for the least evil that can be said of them is, that they soften the heart, probably of itself too tender; teach the readers to see most circumstances in life in false lights; and to think, that all the colour of their future days must spring from the good or bad success of a passion, which it is desirable few of them should feel. Besides, as the heroine’s virtue rises in proportion to the dangers to which it has been exposed, these sorts of productions familiarize the mind with scenes of vice, at an age when one would wish to have them totally ignorant of depravity. (n. pg.) The recipe for protecting children’s innocence was a literature for children that neither overstimulated their senses nor unduly incited their emotions. In addition, children’s books were to avoid ambiguities that could spark controversies, such as the one that had arisen around the sincerity of the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). As Richardson’s subtitle suggests, Pamela’s model virtue is eventually rewarded with marriage to her rich employer. Authors such as Henry Fielding had attacked Richardson, calling Pamela a hypocrite who only pretended to be virtuous in order to lure her employer into marriage, the position of wife, after all, being more lucrative than that of a mere mistress. The Renowned History of Primrose Prettyface (1782), an adaptation of Pamela for children, duly corrects the assumed defects of Richardson’s novel by providing its young readers with a disambiguated version of Pamela that leaves no doubt about the virtuous intentions of its heroine, who in this version cannot be thought to be engaging in calculating falsehood for the sake of her social advancement. An overt authorial narrator who comments on the incidents in the story was a common narratological device to ensure that readers received the correct message. Introspective I-​narration, as deployed in Richardson’s “writing to the moment” technique,4 would have left far too much room for young readers’ own interpretations, not to speak of its higher immersive appeal to the readers’ emotions. The remaining major adaptational strategy, rationalization, helped to adapt material with supernatural elements in a way that rendered it acceptable for a rational education. Whereas the gothic novel for adults flourished by the end of the eighteenth century, genres with unrealistic elements, 354

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such as fairy tales, chapbooks, or even fables, had become contested reading matter where children were concerned. Chapbooks were associated with “smut” or “profligate and shiftless conduct” (Jackson 67). Andrew O’Malley relates this distinction to middle-​class ideology, yet he also discovers a “residue of plebeian [chapbook] culture” in the children’s literature of the mid-​eighteenth century, especially in the publications of John Newbery (19). In fact, not only did Newbery’s books adapt chapbook stories, but many of his productions also adapted the generic features and the material form of the chapbook: most authors remained anonymous, title pages sometimes alluded to chapbook characters such as Jack the Giant Killer, and the standard editions were printed in a comparatively cheap duodecimo format, often with recycled woodcuts.5 These books thus adapted an existing form of popular literature while endeavoring to establish a new, age-​specific audience. For both chapbooks and fairy tales, rationalization and moralization were strategies to render their contents acceptable. This genre transformation in view of a young audience had already occurred in France, in the works of the Countess d’Aulnoy and Charles and Pierre Perrault (see Muir 36; Zipes 9). In originally English texts such as Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), which incorporates fantastic material into an otherwise realistic narrative, this transformation was achieved by adding a moral and/​or by apologizing in the preface for presenting an ostensibly “untrue” work of fiction. To be legitimized as children’s literature, fairy tales had to include moral messages or reflections on their own fictional character. Adaptations of canonical texts did not have to undergo such a legitimation process. One of the foremost functions of such adaptations consists of the socialization of young readers into a common cultural heritage. They ensure the continuity of this cultural knowledge, establishing and thus reproducing an existing “adult” canon by expanding the generational scope of its audience. The resulting cultural literacy may become transcultural if canonical texts from other cultural contexts are adapted. Such transcultural adaptation can provide common ground for intercultural communication within a globalized world.6 The function of enculturation in adaptations for children is balanced by strategies that seek to approach the adapted text to the child audience’s experiential world, for example through topicalization, that is, by transporting the adapted story into a contemporary cultural context. Ideological revisions, especially in the contested battlegrounds of gender and race, attempt to raise awareness of ideological underpinnings in canonical texts that are deemed problematic from a contemporary perspective. Such ideological adaptations may consist in linguistic expurgations of words and phrases that are today considered politically incorrect, while leaving the rest of the adapted text largely intact.7 Moreover, shifting the perspective to less privileged side characters or introducing new characters who belong to underrepresented or less privileged social groups has become an established strategy of “writing back” in both adult and children’s literature.8 As mentioned above, the caveat of such ideological adaptations consists of the risk that adaptation may yield to presentist fallacies to the extent that it allows itself to be harnessed for canon cancellation instead of fostering and unfolding its critical analytical potential. When it comes to adapting material originally aimed at adults for children, one inevitable question is whether this material is suitable for young readers. Hans-​Heino Ewers suggests avoiding the term “adaptation” for such cases entirely. He prefers the term “accommodation” because he believes that the idea that a text must be altered to meet the requirements of a particular audience is a special case (143–​45). True, there is still comparatively little systematic research on adaptations for particular audiences, least of all for age-​specific groups.9 However, reception-​oriented adaptation studies such as Hutcheon’s make it redundant to introduce a new term for reception-​driven adaptations. Reaching new audiences is a core motivation behind adaptations, and accommodation to the new audience’s interests and capabilities goes without saying. Nevertheless, what exactly establishes suitability needs clarification. In our particular case, child suitability rests entirely on the contested ideological ground of what children are and wherein their special needs lie. Fully aware of this caveat, Ewers 355

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avoids authoritative statements on child suitability. Instead, he presents a systematic overview of areas in which adaptational strategies may operate; among them are language, style, genre, contents, paratexts, and value judgment (147–​62). The respective alterations are all neutral to the aesthetic quality of the adaptation, because they are conscious choices to render the material most efficient and appealing to the cognitive capabilities, interests, and aesthetic preferences of the young target audience. If reductionism or “dumbing down” occurs programmatically, the driving force behind this adaptational strategy is neither inherent to adaptation nor due to the nature of the target audience. Rather, it reflects both an ideology of childhood and the economic or sociopolitical agenda behind the adaptation. Excellent examples of sophisticated adaptations for children are Marcia Williams’s picturebook adaptations of canonical texts. Williams’s adaptations, done in comic-​book style, are aimed at an audience that has been growing up with educational principles based on sensual experiences, developing creativity and self-​expression. Accordingly, her picturebooks try to offer such a sensual experience, encouraging the readers to explore the pages in many directions. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (2007) literally retains the original’s narrative frame, as it first frames each narrative with ornamental columns, displaying commentary on the tales by “Chaucer” (on the left page) and his horse (on the right page), while the pilgrims’ train is represented at the bottom of the pages. Short phrases in Middle English are cited in the frames and in the panels depicting the tales, whereas the stories’ contents are summarized in contemporary English in the captions under the panels. Williams’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays use a similar layout, image panels depicting key scenes from the plays while providing snippets of quotations in Early New English and commentaries in the frame. The commentary sections in these adaptations try to draw the readers in, as they express reactions, including critical responses, to the stories from a contemporary perspective. In “The Clerk’s Tale,” for example, the conclusion of the story in the caption is in line with the medieval original: “He kept his word to her, just as she had always kept her word to him, and every one rejoiced to see the family living in happiness and harmony once more” (Williams, Tales 31). In the marginal comments, however, both Chaucer and the horse refuse to read the story of patient Griselda as an exemplary model of womanhood and challenge the caption’s conclusion: “She is too patient. Be warned! He is a tyrant! She is too patient. This is not a winner! Ooh.… I don’t know” (30–​31). Whereas in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales comments in the frames also adapt the medieval technique of marginal glosses, in Williams’s Shakespeare adaptations the drawings in the frame try to capture the atmosphere of Elizabethan theatre performances with their mixed audience (including children) and the noise and lack of propriety among the spectators. In both cases, the frames have a mediating function, guiding the readers’ attention to details in the scenes, commenting on them, and including anachronistic remarks that help readers connect with the adapted material. Connecting readers and the adapted text is also a clear goal in Williams’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in Lizzy Bennett’s Diary (2013). Here, Jane Austen’s authorial narrator is replaced with I-​narration in epistolary and diary form. The shift in narrative perspective reduces readers’ distance from the text, emphasizing the romance (for which Austen’s novel has become popular) over the satirical elements. Simultaneously, however, the diary may also signal to readers that, although they are invited to share the position of the addressee (that is, the diary), they should handle this intimacy responsibly –​and remember that their position is distinct from that of the protagonist who is writing the diary entries. The composition of the diary aims at immediacy and at bringing the Regency story close to young readers of the twenty-​first century. Reproductions of prints, tickets, “handwritten” notes, and letters are pasted into the book, creating an impression of “authentic” material. Some of this material also invites interaction via unfolding notes or opening envelopes to take out letters, which often contain abridged quotations from Pride and Prejudice. Like Williams’s other adaptations, Lizzy Bennett’s Diary abridges the original text considerably, yet it still succeeds in highlighting key moments in the plot, fulfilling the goal of familiarizing children with elementary canon knowledge. 356

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By retaining citations from the originals in visually marked positions, Williams establishes continuity with the adapted texts, thus asserting their timelessness. Moreover, her adaptations raise awareness of the material form of the adapted texts. By so doing, they render their own status as adaptations of one medium into another explicit.

Adaptations of Children’s Literature Upon reading the still scarce studies on adaptations of children’s literature, one finds interesting positions concerning the status of fidelity. In general adaptation studies, fidelity is often rejected as a criterion of quality, on the ground that adaptations ought to be evaluated in their own right.10 Claiming that precedence and priority are merely temporal incidents without an impact on quality, Hutcheon even asserts, “In the working of the human imagination, adaptation is the norm, not the exception” (177). In view of such adamant positions, it is surprising to read in Deborah Cartmell’s essay “Adapting Children’s Literature” that fidelity in movie adaptations of literature is most pertinent when it comes to children’s literature because of “concerns over film’s moral influence and threat to literacy” (167). Adaptations of children’s literature are, hence, subject to “higher demands of fidelity” (168), because children’s literature is generally better known and there is closer intimacy between the reader and the original. In an earlier essay, I contested this position, arguing that it presupposes clichés and concepts of childhood and children’s literature that are at least problematic. The presupposed morality of children’s literature, for instance, neglects this literature’s entertaining and aesthetic qualities. The supposed closer intimacy of readers where children’s literature is concerned belabors an idea of childhood as a state of wholeness that should remain undisturbed, even by critical reflections or media competence (see Müller 3–​4). Nevertheless, there seems to be a tendency among critics to advocate fidelity for adaptations in a children’s literature context. In adaptations for children, the chief argument is that insufficient fidelity to the original may interfere with the enculturation function. It seems that child audiences are expected to be the recipients of established canonical knowledge. Voices in favor of fidelity in adaptations of children’s literature either imply Cartmell’s presuppositions or remain entirely vague about their reasons. Expanding on Christine Geraghty’s view that fidelity matters in adaptation when it matters for the audience, Casie Hermansson continues: “In the case of children’s screen-​adapted literature, fidelity often matters to viewers a great deal –​ arguably more so than for most adult literature” (344). She does not add further explanations or evidence for this assumption, though. It is interesting to find that, more recently, similar statements have been applied to fan audiences irrespective of their age group. These observations, however, can be grounded on some reliable qualitative research data and do not entirely rest on theoretical concepts of assumed “fans” (see Hutcheon xxvi). With regard to the Harry Potter series, for instance, the fan community uses fan edits to correct supposed flaws in adaptations by creating their own versions (see Bernard and Martinez). As long as we lack reliable data on the fidelity preferences of child audiences, all we can say is that there is a discourse on the status of fidelity in adaptations of children’s literature that aligns children’s literature with cultural products enjoying a broad fan base, arguing in both cases that fidelity is a quality criterion for these audiences. This discourse links children’s literature with “popular” fan culture, thus extending the “popular” label to children’s literature. Continuing this thought, one could suggest that such an alignment implies a distinction between “popular” audiences that rely on fidelity in adaptation and “adult” or “high culture” audiences that emphasize adaptation’s aesthetic autonomy. Such a tentative proposal can, however, be immediately countered with another parallel, namely that between fans’ active and creative processing of material, and a form of literary didactics that replaces analysis and interpretation with children’s creative appropriations of literary texts (including children’s literature). In both cases, the “popular” audiences tend to display considerable freedom 357

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from fidelity concerns. Such adaptational activities are rather governed by the principle of relatability, coupled with the goal of immersion into the world to which the adapted material belongs. It is accordingly difficult to sustain the thesis that adaptations of children’s literature rely more on fidelity because their audiences insist on this reliance. I therefore second Meghann Meeusen’s proposal that we jettison the comparative focus on fidelity when it comes to adaptations for and of children’s literature. Instead, one ought to draw attention to the critical potential of adaptation in a children’s literature context –​for example, by highlighting and assessing the strategies within the adaptive process, or by discussing their motivations/​reasons and functions. In this respect, Meeusen forwards an interesting thesis on movie adaptations of children’s literature: Movie adaptations, she argues, tend to increase binary polarizations implied in the adapted text. The reasons for this tendency are both ideological (Meeusen 17) and media specific. Among the media-​specific reasons are the reliance on visual presentation, the affective appeal of audiovisual elements (such as iconic pictures or sounds), and the limited time frame of movies. Since film depends on a representational economy favoring expediency over elaboration, it also favors the representation of clearly distinguished positions. Polarization in adaptations of children’s literature is caused and achieved by “thematic amplification” (22): that is, a conscious selection by the filmmakers of one particular theme (out of several themes addressed in the book), around which the film is then built. Meeusen prefers the term “amplification” in this context because she believes this strategy is media induced. Unlike “dumbing down,” thematic amplification does not diminish the meaning potential of the adapted source. It merely highlights individual elements –​ to such an extent that other elements may easily be overlooked, even if they are still there. Thematic amplification also helps to sustain the pattern of disruption and resolution Meeusen identifies in movies. Unless conceived in serial form, movies tend to support closure and seem less inclined to open endings. This preference is due to the material reception conditions that cinematic viewing shares with drama. Among the common viewing rituals of these two media are the use of framing devices such as lighting, curtains, and an ending marker (curtain and curtain calls in drama, opening and closing credits in film). Although individual works and performances may handle these rituals playfully, they are exceptions to the rule. An adaptation into a medium relying on closure will thus almost inevitably tend to deploy some closure-​producing strategies –​among them polarizations that turn open arguments into either-​or decisions. The 2016 movie adaptation of Patrick Ness’s novel A Monster Calls (2011) is a case in point. Ness’s novel capitalizes on ambiguities and explicitly rejects polarized mindframes and value judgments. In the novel, the eponymous monster tells four stories to the protagonist, Conor, who is racked with guilt because he simultaneously fears and hopes for the death of his terminally ill mother. Each of the stories highlights life’s ambiguities, as it tries to unsettle the protagonist’s (and readers’) prejudices about what or who is good or evil. The monster itself is ambiguous, too. Although the novel’s magical realist mode invites readers to perceive the monster as the mythical creature as which it introduces itself, it is also possible to read the monster as an imaginative projection of Conor’s wishes and fears. In its main plot, the novel does not entirely resolve the central conflicts, either. Once the boy’s interior conflict has been revealed, the conflicts he has had with his schoolmates and his grandmother merely fade into the background, without explicit resolutions. As the novel ends with Conor’s mother’s death, readers can only speculate on how the boy will cope with his grief in the time to come. The movie adds a scene at the end in which Conor has moved in with his grandmother and is given his mother’s old room as well as her sketchbook. The book contains drawings that partly resemble, partly match his own drawings of the monster and its tales; the final sketch depicts the monster carrying a girl –​presumably his mother –​on its shoulders. This scene integrates Conor’s encounters with the monster into a larger pattern of family history. The visual analogies imply that the boy and his mother share the experience of bereavement of a parent, for the sketchbook apparently was Conor’s mother’s grief-​work occasioned by her own father’s death. Since the tree is endowed with 358

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the voice and face of Liam Neeson, who appears as Conor’s grandfather in one of the family pictures, its status as a mythical creature is balanced with additional significance: The tree may also embody the grandfather, who becomes Conor’s mentor when the remaining (female) family members fail at helping the boy in his grief.11 Of course, it is still possible to view the tree as a mythical creature that comes to grieving children. Nevertheless, the movie adaptation of A Monster Calls has transformed the mythical context of the novel so as to focus on the central redemptive and healing power of the nuclear family. Further elements tighten the analogy between Conor and his mother in the movie version. The novel only implies the close bonds between the two while presenting their relationship in its final phase of dissolution, as her cancer is rendering Conor’s mother mostly incapable of caring for her son. The movie, in contrast, presents scenes of intimacy when Conor and his mother watch an old King Kong movie on super-​8 reels, combining a nostalgic scene of transient family bliss with a nostalgic look at the medium of film. By inheriting her artistic talent and unconsciously drawing the same motifs in the same style she used in her sketchbook, Conor is even established as an artistic successor to his mother. Whereas Conor’s situation and personality appear extraordinary in the novel, the analogies and the final scene of the movie insinuate that Conor’s mother went through basically the same experience and employed the same coping mechanisms as a child. These alterations in the movie adaptation may result from thematic amplification, foregrounding through character parallels the topic of parental death and children’s grieving strategies. However, they are also a sign of “aetonormativity” (the term, which refers to the tendency to see adults as the norm and children as the exception, is Maria Nikolajeva’s, quoted in Meeusen 88)12 because they chiefly highlight the mother’s role in the story. The reconciliation between Conor and his grandmother adds to the aetonormative character of the movie, for in accepting his grandmother as his new surrogate mother, Conor is finally assuming his mother’s role (he even moves into her old room), thus completing the movie’s amalgamation of the two characters. One may argue that this generational amalgamation and reconciliation targets the enhanced, dual audience of the movie adaptation. On a more critical note, the aetonormative character of the movie achieves this reconciliation at the cost of the uniqueness of the child’s experience. The novel ends at the precarious moment when Conor is in tune with his feelings about his mother’s death but the text remains open in its conjectures about his future. The movie, in contrast, provides the closure the novel refuses, as it literally closes a circle of life and death, in which Conor is one of several participants sharing a similar fate. This thematic amplification is hardly an impoverishment in comparison to the novel, though; it is rather a media-​ induced shift in emphasis.

Cultural Function of Adaptations of Children’s Literature As far as the cultural function of adaptations of children’s literature is concerned, they have the same effect as adaptations in general, inasmuch as they broaden the options for accessibility to children’s literature. By so doing, adaptations integrate children’s literature into general cultural and economic processes that enhance and deepen the modes of reception of individual works. A significant part of these cultural and economic processes consists of so-​called transmedia productions or transmedia franchises. Henry Jenkins has famously defined the latter as follows: A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best. [...] Each franchise entry needs to be self-​contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. [...] Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty. [...] Different media attract different 359

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market niches. Films and television probably have the most diverse audiences, comics and games the narrowest. A good transmedia franchise works to attract multiple constituencies by pitching the content somewhat differently in the different media. (21, 97–​98) As Jens Eder points out, most adaptations today appear within such transmedia contexts. Viewed as a transmedia practice, adaptation no longer applies to one single pretext but becomes “the process of transferring the defining elements of a text’s content or form into new texts that openly refer to their origin while fitting into other contexts” (70). Within a transmedia context, the relational character of adaptation fully takes over, and it does so no longer with regard to a single text but as part of a larger worldbuilding strategy. Adaptations become indexes to other texts, highlighting their relevance for the network. By repeating signature features of the transmedia franchise, adaptations focus “the minds of the audience on certain experiences and ideologies,” in David Hugh Weaver’s phrase (qtd in Eder 78), thus contributing to community building. Most importantly, Eder reminds us that transmedia productions are predominantly economic enterprises, with strategies and decisions aiming at an increase in consumption and profit. The subversive potential of adaptations praised by Hutcheon (174) is hardly to be expected in what Clare Parody calls mere “franchise adaptations” (qtd in Eder 79) that reproduce ideologies of large productions, perpetuating myths and imaginations out of commercial interests. Eder therefore believes Jenkins’s idea of a participatory culture to be an optimistic utopia because fan productions, too, are situated within an established market, and they reinforce this market irrespective of those productions’ alleged true merit. This latter consideration is intriguing because of the analogies mentioned above between immersion and interactivity in fan practices and how children’s interaction with texts is conceived of. One may wonder whether such an emphasis on immersion and interaction (instead of analysis and critical interpretation) helps to foster in young audiences an attitude that responds particularly well to transmedia franchises. Even if one may appreciate the empowerment and agency concomitant to those strategies, one can hardly overlook their underlying economic interests. Besides, if the response to a text is primarily a creative and affective immersion in a storyworld, little room remains for critical distance. Such room, however, is essential for evaluating and maybe resisting the powerful rhetoric implemented by transmedia franchises. Many transmedia franchises for children have evolved from TV formats or material products, such as toys or games (for example, My Little Pony or Pokémon). Conversely, toys can become entrance doors to franchises for initially adult audiences that reach out for younger fans. The toy merchandise and Lego animations of the Star Wars franchise, for instance, familiarize children with the lore of that world at an early age, offering access via toyshops or TV screenings, while access to the movies might still be restricted to older viewers. The most prominent transmedia franchise with a literary core, Harry Potter, exemplifies how a reiteration of adaptations of children’s literature into a plethora of media can develop into a transmedia world without having been planned as such from the start. Initially, the Harry Potter series consisted of seven novels with one story arch, written by J. K. Rowling between 1997 and 2007, and adapted for the cinema by Warner Brothers from 2001 to 2011. Three additional publications by Rowling –​ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001), Quidditch Through the Ages (2001), and The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2008) –​supplemented the story but did not yet endorse the full range of world-​ building strategies. Worldbuilding rather emerged in fan productions, imaginatively filling the untold gaps in the story, or in other unauthorized sites, until the official IP holders took it into their hands to expand the story of the seven novels into a veritable world, by adding sequels and prehistories in different media forms, and by supplying a lager frame of world lore through the Pottermore platform (2011–​19), which was then replaced by the website WizardingWorld.com. The strict control Rowling 360

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exercises over the content of that world gives ample proof of the economic interest behind the franchise that has long ceased to target children as its main audience, but apparently strives for retaining the loyalty of an audience that has aged together with the novels. Another major franchise, The Lord of the Rings, deliberately decided against using The Hobbit as an entrance door for a child audience, although Tolkien’s novel of 1937 was originally written for child readers. Instead, Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations (2012–​14) transformed the children’s book into an epic screen adventure for adults. The Hobbit can, hence, be regarded as an example of a children’s book whose cultural status has been strengthened through its adaptation. If adaptations acknowledge the cultural status of the adapted material, this point also applies to adaptations of children’s literature. Whether this acknowledgment also includes the aesthetic status may still be contested, given the previous considerations of the economic significance of adaptations. Without a doubt, however, adaptations testify to a text’s economic and cultural relevance. Continuing this line of thought, adaptations of children’s literature reveal that children’s literature has established itself in the literary sphere, employing general strategies of expansion and transformation that exemplify the vitality and status of those texts as literary works. Acknowledging this autonomy through adaptation is, I argue, more pertinent than searching for age-​specific features of adaptations in a children’s literature context. Such specificities only seek to underscore a distinct “nature” of childhood –​ with the implication that literary or cultural products for this age group are supposed to follow different rules than other cultural products. If one looks at Margaret Mackey’s chapter on “Media Adaptations” in the Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature of 2010, this conjecture appears doubtful, because all the features she identifies for the different media adaptations generally apply to any production in those media. Even Meeusen’s observations on movie adaptations for children essentially depend on the media transformations. That is, the polarizations and thematic amplifications do not result from the audience’s age but from the new medium and can equally be found in movie adaptations for adult audiences. Therefore, I want to close this chapter with a few thoughts occasioned by Anne Kérchy, who begins her investigation of transmedia adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books with two presuppositions: First, adaptations are encouraged and supported by textual ambiguities and metatextual elements (3–​4). Second, adaptations may transform a text into a cultural phenomenon to such an extent that cultural knowledge about this phenomenon can exist independently from knowledge about the source text; hence, a core identity will persist throughout all adaptational processes (4). Pondering the implications of Kérchy’s suggestions for adaptations in a children’s literature context, one can draw the following conclusions: If textual ambiguities or metatextual qualities support adaptation, adaptations of children’s literature illustrate the existence of such textual complexities in children’s literature. Calls for the necessity of disambiguating children’s literature, for straightforward messages or clear moral frames, or claims about the supposedly simple character of children’s literature are refuted by the very fact that children’s literature is, after all, complex enough to be interesting for adaptation. The complex, open character of children’s literature is, thus, testified to by these adaptations. If adaptations transform texts into cultural phenomena, adaptations of children’s literature highlight the cultural status of the adapted texts. Children’s literature no longer needs to accommodate adult texts to the requirements of child readers. It has become adaptable for its own cultural value. It has become part of our cultural knowledge, with its own right of existence, without the umbilical cord of firsthand knowledge of a source text. Like any adaptation, adaptation in a children’s literature context is not reliant on the crutch of fidelity, either. One may even share cultural knowledge about a specimen of children’s literature without having read the original –​just as one can do with Shakespeare’s plays. Adaptation has helped to turn children’s literature into cultural icons: Alice, Pinocchio, Pippi Longstocking, Peter Pan, and Harry Potter are only a handful of examples that come to mind. 361

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Adapted children’s literature retains a core identity that will continue through adaptive processes. And this core identity also implies that children’s literature has acquired a status of aesthetic and cultural autonomy –​an autonomy it lacks as long as it is harnessed to didactic purposes and/​or viewed primarily from a functional perspective, as a vehicle for moralizing, socializing, or ideologizing. If merely employed for economic purposes, adaptations for and of children’s literature can increase such ideologizing purposes –​just like adaptations of adult material. But if one allows the critical potential of adaptations to unfold, adaptations in a children’s literature context will enliven children’s literature –​as literature.

Notes 1 Seminal in this regard is Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; 2nd ed. 2013). Among the scholars who have further sharpened the terminology and conducted numerous case studies are Deborah Cartmell, Julie Sanders, Kamilla Elliott, Robert Stam, Thomas Leitch, and Eckart Voigts. The Society for Adaptation Studies publishes current research in its journal Adaptation (eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 2008ff). 2 Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare film adaptations, for instance, also refer to Laurence Olivier’s earlier ones. Another example is Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which adapts the aesthetics of the fantasy movie genre he had previously established in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. 3 Famous examples are Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s movies Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Ran (1985), adapting Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear respectively. Kurosawa’s own The Seven Samurai (1954), in turn, was famously adapted by John Sturges into the Western genre as The Magnificent Seven (1960). In the field of children’s literature, one may think of the numerous anime series produced by Nippon Animation in Japan. From the 1970s to the 1990s, their World Masterpiece Theatre project resulted in yearly adaptations of children’s classics from all over the world, among them Heidi, Pinocchio, and A Little Princess. 4 This term has been used to characterize Richardson’s narrative technique, which tries to create the illusion that Pamela, the I-​narrator, is writing down her experiences in her letters and diaries immediately after the events happen. 5 Although more expensive and carefully bound editions existed, the products for the broader market shared their modest material quality with the chapbooks. 6 One example of such adaptations is manga, which has not only become a popular genre to adapt canonical texts into, if one tries to attract a young readership. Translations of manga have also contributed to introducing Western children to Asian cultural traditions in general and Japanese ones in particular. 7 Well-​known examples are the omission of the n-​word in recent versions of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, or new translations of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking that transform Pippi’s father from a “King of the Negroes” (original version) into a “King of the South Sea” (modern German version). 8 In terms of shifting gender perspectives, one may think of the various Hamlet adaptations for female teenagers retelling the story from Ophelia’s perspective, for example Lisa Fiedler’s Dating Hamlet (2002) and Lisa Klein’s Ophelia (2006). 9 This diagnosis, which I originally made in 2013 in the introduction to my Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature, still largely applies. It is also shared by Meghann Meeusen, whose more recent monograph Children’s Books on the Big Screen (2020) is one of the exceptions confirming the rule. 10 For a thorough and nuanced assessment of fidelity in adaptation studies, which goes beyond a simple disparagement of fidelity, see Johnson. 11 Such an interpretation would also correspond to the critical representation of mother figures in Ness’s other novels, for instance Mikey’s career-​driven mother in The Rest of Us Just Live Here (2015) or Mistress Coyle in the Chaos Walking trilogy (2008–​10). Since father figures tend to be either equally dysfunctional or absent in Ness’s novels (cf. Mikey’s father in The Rest of Us Just Live Here, Adam’s father in Release [2017], and of course Mayor Prentiss in the Chaos Walking trilogy), the Yew Tree fits into an overall pattern of desire for male mentor figures on the part of the male protagonists. 12 Meeusen assesses aetonormativity as a typical feature of movie adaptations of picturebooks.

Works Cited Bernard, Brian P., and Kimberley D. Martinez. “Supplement or Supplant? How Fan Editors Contribute to Fictional Universes.” Transmedia Harry Potter: Essays on Storytelling Across Platforms, edited by Christopher Bell, McFarland, 2019, pp. 30–​47.

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Adaptation Cartmell, Deborah. “Adapting Children’s Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 167–​80. Eder, Jens. “Transmediality and the Politics of Adaptation: Concepts, Forms and Strategies.” The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology, edited by Dan Hassler-​Forest and Pascal Nicklas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 66–​81. Ewers, Hans-​Heino. Fundamentals of Children’s Literature Research: Literary and Sociological Approaches. Translated by William J. McCann, Routledge, 2009. Hermansson, Casie. “Where Does the ‘Meta’ Go in Adapting Children’s Metafiction to the Screen: The Case of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events.’ ” Where Is Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts, edited by Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick, John Benjamins, 2018, pp. 343–​64. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013. Jackson, Mary V. Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839. University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006. Johnson, David T. “Adaptation and Fidelity.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas M. Leitch, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 87–​100. Kérchy, Anna. Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. McFarland, 2016. Mackey, Margaret. “Media Adaptations.” The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd, Routledge, 2010, pp. 112–​24. Maese, Sarah. The School. London, 1766. Meeusen, Meghann. Children’s Books on the Big Screen. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. A Monster Calls. Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. Universal Studios, 2017. Muir, Percy. English Children’s Books, 1600–​1900. B. T. Batsford, 1954. Müller, Anja. “Introduction: Adapting Canonical Texts in and for Children’s Literature.” Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature, edited by Anja Müller, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 1–​8. Ness, Patrick. A Monster Calls. Walker Books, 2011. O’Malley, Andrew. The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century. Routledge, 2003. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. Routledge, 2006. Williams, Marcia. Mr. William Shakespeare’s Plays. Walker Books, 1998. —​—​—​. Bravo Mr. William Shakespeare. Walker Books, 2000. —​—​—​. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Walker Books, 2007. —​—​—​. Lizzy Bennett’s Diary. Walker Books, 2013. Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006.

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30 FAIRY TALES AND CIRCULATION A Case Study in Poland Weronika Kostecka

The Cultural Circulation of Fairy Tales as Their Essence Fairy-​tale topoi are in constant motion. They wander, conquer other lands, and sneak into new spaces. They enter into surprising marriages, create diverse cultural constellations, and dress up in miscellaneous costumes. Circulation, intertextuality, and crossing interregional borders are the very nature of fairy tales.1 Being incessantly retold in new variants and forms, they create a boundless universe of adaptations, references, and transformations that Cristina Bacchilega calls the “fairy-​tale web” (Fairy Tales 1–​30). As she has proved in her numerous publications, today’s directions of development “activate multiple intertextual and generic links that both expand and decenter the narrow conception of the genre fixed in Disneyfied pre-​1970s popular cultural memory” (“Cultures” 31). Nevertheless, phenomena of fairy tales’ metamorphoses and circulation have been explored from various perspectives for over two hundred years (Haase, “Global” 17). The results of this research have enriched and still enrich the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, literary studies (including children’s literature), comparative literature, and many others (Zipes, Fairy Tale xi). Among the countless research works in the area of fairy-​tale explorations, in the context of this chapter it is worth recalling monographs on intercultural transfers and transformations of single topoi, such as “Cinderella” (de la Rochère, Lathey, and Woźniak), “Little Red Riding Hood” (Zipes, Trials; Beckett), or “The Little Mermaid” (Fraser); particular collections, such as The Arabian Nights (Marzolph, Nights) and the brothers Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (Joosen and Lathey); and fairy-​tale narratives from different regions of the world, created, for example, in Persian and Urdu (Khan) or in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish (Marzolph, Tales). As a fascinating sociocultural phenomenon, the fairy tale is a “genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world,” as Jack Zipes remarks (Fairy Tale xi). Listened to and read in childhood, it becomes the first alphabet of culture, contributes to forming a specific worldview, and shapes a hierarchy of values. It also serves as a point of reference for further reading experiences. Later, it reappears in new, modified forms –​ in literary works, comic books, films, TV series, video games, visual arts, and more. We must remember that only privileged fairy tales can circulate; as Bacchilega explains, “Historically, the traffic of folk and fairy tales has been regulated by commerce, religion, and prejudice –​ which results in an unequal flow of tales and an unequal valorization of different tellers’ located knowledges” (“Cultures” 32). Nevertheless, while undergoing constant transformations, numerous fairy tales circulate on various levels: among different media, cultural circuits, groups of recipients (diverse in terms of age and broadly understood identity), and historical, social, and political discourses, as well as regions of the world.

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Many of the globally known fairy-​tale topoi manifest themselves locally in specific contexts. In this chapter, I focus on the circulation of fairy tales as narratives addressed to children. I will show how popular fairy tales –​ such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Snow White” –​ are realized in a country that belongs to Central and Eastern Europe: Poland. Through this case study, I want to explore: (1) In what sense can the fairy tale be understood as world literature? (2) How does the fairy tale connect its global dimension with the local one? For this purpose, I will refer to Zipes’s concept of fairy tales as memes and the assumptions about world literature presented by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, and Franco Moretti. I will also explain why Poland is a good example of a country where interesting phenomena accompanying the local transformations of global fairy-​tale topoi can be observed.

The Fairy Tale as World Literature2 According to Casanova, world literature consists of works presented globally as world literature; they circulate with this status because the cultural “center” has granted it. Clearly, this is the case with fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. Donald Haase (“Studies”), Bacchilega (“Canon”), Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi, and many others have rightly urged the decolonization and reorienting of fairy-​tale studies and highlighted that, as Bacchilega puts it, claiming the universality of the genre and holding European tales as constitutive of the genre are two sides of a coin that has us buying into an ahistorical and prescriptive idea of the fairy tale, one that ignores and thus naturalizes the colonial history of folk and fairy-​tale exchange and entanglements across cultures. (“Canon” 34) Yet Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen are still considered “the most impressive canonical names in the nineteenth-​century fairy-​tale tradition” (Zipes, Fairy Tale 95), and their fairy-​tale collections –​ of which Walt Disney productions have enormously popularized individual pieces –​ are the most influential ones. (Two stories from the Book of One Thousand and One Nights are also widespread in the Western world, especially the versions taken from the 1704 and 1717 adaptations by Antoine Galland: those about Aladdin and Ali Baba [Zipes, Why Fairy Tales 1]). This is why in this chapter, I see particular fairy-​tale topoi brought into general use by the four authors mentioned above as world literature. Consequently, I will explore local (Polish) realizations of these topoi. Following Zipes’s conception of fairy tales as memes that are cultural replicators (functioning similarly to genes, which are biological replicators), I assume that “The fairy tale often takes the form of a meme in our brains, as the input of a public representation, or replicator, and we process it in a module and transmit it in sociocultural contexts” (Why Fairy Tales xiii–​xiv). Zipes also asserts that “Children’s acculturation depends on memes” (18–​19), and I share his conviction that tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” co-​create –​ although mainly in the Western world –​ the child’s cultural alphabet as they circulate in their canonical but also (locally) transformed variants. As a meme, the fairy tale can be considered world literature as understood by Damrosch: “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (4). The main point in this conception is how the given works –​in this case, fairy tales –​function in other cultural and linguistic areas in the form of translations, adaptations, and reinterpretations. This is what Maria Tatar means when she points out that

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[w]‌hat the Brothers Grimm had begun as a project with distinctly nationalistic aspirations ironically turned into a cultural heritage that moved in the direction of creating an international repertoire, a shared body of stories that acquired a recognition factor beyond the Grimms’ wildest dreams of commercial success. (“Brothers” 86) A similar observation about becoming part of the “international repertoire” might be made referring to Perrault’s and Andersen’s tales. This “shared body” of fairy-​tale narratives is world literature understood, as Damrosch puts it (21), as a way of circulation and a way of reading. It is we, the readers from diverse regions of our globe, admirers of fairy tales, who have activated and still activate their circulation across cultures, turning them into world literature. Moreover, Maria Nikolajeva draws attention to reception as a factor constituting world literature: “Semiotically, it has to do first of all with the young readers in the new country and their ability to accept and utilize the book” (Age 27). Finally, according to Moretti, world literature is constituted by distant reading, “where distance [...] is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes –​or genres and systems” (57–​58). In this conception, studies of the world literature system require a conscious abandonment of close reading of a single text, as “the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be” (57). Although I am Polish, I will try to look at a large corpus of Polish fairy-​ tale narratives from a distance. I will combine the distant reading of fairy tales originally published in Poland with a context of works created in English-​speaking countries –​to capture the common trends in a global circulation of fairy tales and features presumably specific to Polish variants of fairy-​tale topoi.

Global Versus Local Exploring the difference between global and local dimensions of the fairy tale and considering the problem of to whom it belongs, Haase contrasts the pleasure felt by the potential reader unfamiliar with the original context of a story with the concept of cultural property of a given community. As he points out, “ ‘Enjoyment of a first reading’ –​ the reader’s pleasure in the text –​ seems to be independent of the contextualized understanding that the compilers [of fairy tales] cultivate in their paratexts” (“Global” 24). While Haase has researched interactions between globality and locality by focusing on how the global circulation affects the local fairy-​tale property, I will explore the opposite direction of influence: what the local context does with the global fairy-​tale property. Consequently, I will contrast the global occurrence of fairy-​tale topoi well known from Perrault’s, the Grimms’, and Andersen’s collections (motifs, plot schemas, characters, and so on) with their local realization in Polish narratives directed at children. This realization has two general models. The first one fits in the global trends in fairy-​tale narratives (such as intertextual plays with literary tradition or postmodern discourses); in this case, I will ask in what sense fairy tales re-​created locally draw from global culture. The second one grows out of cultural, social, historical, and political contexts characteristic of Poland; hence, I will ask how the local realities shape the globally known fairy-​tale topoi. In this chapter, I consider locality at the national level. However, it can also be understood on a larger scale (for example, a specific part of the continent) or a smaller one (such as an individual town or region of a country). According to Damrosch, “a literary work manifests differently abroad than it does at home” (6). Developing this idea, we can say that, depending on the country, not only the faithful translations of fairy tales but also their potential adaptations and retellings may be contextualized in various ways. As both a Pole and a researcher of fairy-​tale narratives, I find Poland an interesting place where the global and local dimensions of fairy tale circulation intertwine. It is a country with cultural, social, political, and other influences from Western and Eastern Europe. As Poles, we have absorbed many ideas and phenomena that have been popular behind our 366

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eastern and western borders (which have changed many times). Having been annexed by antagonistic neighbors between 1795 and 1918, Poland had disappeared from the map. The cruel realities of the two world wars and occupation in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as Soviet-​imposed communism lasting more than four decades starting in 1945, further shaped Polish identity. In 2004, Poland joined the European Union, consolidating and legitimizing –​after the political breakthrough in 1989 –​ Polish membership in an international community open to Western ideas and values. Yet the collective memory of the affiliation with the Eastern Bloc (a term for the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact –​the former Stalinist puppet countries in Central and Eastern Europe) is still fresh. This is why Polish identity (probably excluding the youngest generations) is split; it can be observed in social behaviors, political discourses, and cultural output. Since Polish children’s literature is created by adults who either experienced the situation of their homeland personally or share collective postmemory, this complicated split identity manifests itself in literary works directed at children.

References to Global Trends Fairy tales circulate in changing forms, reflecting new ideas, transforming axiological models, and reorienting conventional messages. Among the strategies of “refreshing” fairy-​tale topoi visible globally in the last few decades, intertextual and metafictional plays with fairy-​tale tradition and references to critical sociocultural discourses stand out. Nevertheless, intertextuality, recognized as a multifaceted and significant feature of children’s literature, including fairy tales (see Nikolajeva, Age; Joosen; Miele; Wilkie-​Stibbs), is the overriding issue in this section because it is the basis of the rest of the phenomena mentioned here. As Nikolajeva has noticed, “parody, irony, and intentional intertextual bands in children’s books increased during the last decades of the twentieth century” (“Children’s Literature” 193); accordingly, in this part of the chapter, I focus on fairy-​tale narratives published since the 1980s. Indeed, it was in the ’80s that Roald Dahl released his famous Revolting Rhymes (1982) and Jon Scieszka The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! (1989, followed in 1991 by The Frog Prince, Continued and in 1992 by The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales). At the same time, fairy-​tale retellings began to gain popularity in Poland. Apart from the notion of retelling, I believe that postmodern fairy tale would also be an adequate term here. As I have written elsewhere, The artistic attempts of creative play with fossilized patterns (narrative conventions, plot structures, genre features etc.) are exactly the value conceived by postmodernism. When seen in this light, it can be understood as a challenge: the impossibility of achieving originality or uniqueness of a literary work provokes a creative stimulus. (“Subjects” 212) The trend of postmodern, intertextual plays with a fairy-​tale tradition is very diverse, yet some generalized common features of this type of narrative can be distinguished. Namely, conventional fairy-​tale patterns are questioned and parodied, an absurd vision of the world replaces a deterministic one, and the lack of fairy-​tale determinants provokes creative transformations of pre-​texts. This transformation may be achieved in different, often intertwining, ways, such as a change of roles and functions of typical fairy-​tale figures; modification of a single detail of a fairy-​tale plot, with sometimes far-​reaching consequences; metafictional awareness manifested by fairy-​tale characters; and the complete deconstruction of fairy-​tale motifs, plot structures, and axiology to discuss various aspects of human existence and challenge sociocultural paradigms (Kostecka, “Subjects” 212–​13). Such narratives re-​canonize their classic pre-​texts (Joosen 17) while maintaining the endless circulation of fairy tales. 367

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Entertaining Intertextual Plays and Thought-​Provoking Metafiction Zbigniew Brzozowski’s tale O królewnie ze szklanej góry (The Princess on the Glass Mountain, 1988) presents the story of a princess living at the top of a mountain. Surprisingly, she is not a miserable prisoner: her father has sent her to this forgotten place out of concern for the girl’s safety during a cruel war. Her guardians are a protective witch and a playful dragon; these characters give the story both reflective and comic character. In Pyś, czyli wiadukt nad chaszczami (Pyś, or the Overpass above a Thicket, 1998) by Bohdan Butenko, a little boy and his friend travel through the Imaginary World where they encounter characters from fairy tales, such as the dwarfs from “Snow White.” The princess had already tasted a poisoned apple, so she fell asleep with the gnawed fruit in her mouth. The starving dwarfs try to take the apple, but the sleeping girl bites their fingers. Desperate with hunger, they wait for a brave prince who eventually gets the fruit. In turn, the construction principle of Bajki Pana Bałagana (Tales by Mr. Mess, 1989) by Jerzy Niemczuk consists of entirely new stories, where references to tradition are barely indicated. The author suggests that the literary culture is running out –​ it occurs too predictably, so it is time to creatively transform it. Thus, only individual elements should be taken from the canon. It can be just one significant word, a single idea, or an object that will then lead the creator of the fairy tale to entirely new areas. Mr. Mess’s fairy tales begin precisely in a mess –​ in an untidy children’s room. Chaos becomes an inspiration; Niemczuk abolishes the division into main and episodic events, significant and irrelevant phenomena, and positive and negative characters. All these comical strategies of transforming fairy-​tale topoi, applied by those mentioned above and many other Polish writers (for instance Beata Krupska, Marcin Pałasz, and Małgorzata Strzałkowska), serve to entertain the potential child reader who is already familiar with the fairy-​tale tradition. As such, they join the global trend of parodic metamorphoses of fairy tales co-​created by such authors as Dahl and Scieszka as well as Eugene Trivizas, Leah Wilcox, Emily Gravett, Jonathan Emmett, and Tara Lazar, among many others. Described as a significant phenomenon in children’s literature (Moss; Nikolajeva, Age; Silva-​ Díaz), metafiction reshapes and deconstructs canonical fairy-​tale narratives. As the Polish scholar and writer Joanna Papuzińska has indicated (224), metafiction in works addressed to young readers used to take the form of a secondary motif, so it hardly affected the plot’s integrity. More recently, however, ostentatious metafictional elements became very popular in late twentieth-​ and early twenty-​first-​century texts. One well known example of such a strategy applied in children’s literature is David Wiesner’s famous picturebook The Three Pigs (2001), in which the protagonists are “huffed and puffed” out of the story, right into the realm of diverse fairy-​tale illustration styles. Other examples are tales by Scieszka, Eric Braun (The Little Mermaid: An Interactive Fairy Tale Adventure [2020]), and Joan Holub (Little Red Writing [2018]). Polish writers also participate in this trend, transforming fairy-​tale topoi in the spirit of metafictional plays with literary tradition. As researchers of children’s literature –​especially picturebooks such as those created by Wiesner and Scieszka and countless fairy-​tale retellings directed at children –​ have proved many times (Sipe and Pantaleo; Allan, Picturebooks, Fairy Tales), the concept of postmodern works applies here as well. I follow Sylvia Pantaleo’s assumption that Metafiction is one of the most prominent features exhibited in postmodern literature. [...] Metafiction draws the attention of readers to how texts work and to how meaning is created [...] and in picturebooks, metafictive devices can be used with both the verbal and the visual text. [...] the synergy of several devices serves to enhance a text’s fictional status and self-​conscious nature. (325–​26)

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Like Scieszka’s or Wiesner’s tales, the Polish postmodern fairy-​tale narratives I will discuss further reveal their imaginary character since the narrators refer explicitly to the pre-​texts. However, unlike in The Frog Prince, Continued and The Three Pigs, metafiction here involves creating characters with metafictional self-​awareness, which means that they are aware of being fictional. Having realized that a fairy-​tale scheme is something of a trap, they sometimes struggle with feelings of frustration, anxiety, or even oppression. In Co się stało z naszą bajką? (What Happened to Our Fairy Tale?, 1994) by Hanna Krall, metafiction is interwoven with ethical and philosophical questions. Being painfully aware of how much disliked they are, the Big Bad Wolf, the Wicked Witch, and Cinderella’s stepsisters resent the roles they have to play. This awareness enables a bitter diagnosis of their own lives. Moreover, by presenting their dilemmas, Krall undermines the traditional fairy-​tale division between protagonists and antagonists, and she questions the very idea of such division. “Good” and “evil” turn out to be inadequate to perceiving the world. In Butenko’s variant of “Little Red Riding Hood,” included in the Krulewna Śnieżka [Not So Snow White] collection (2008), the protagonist is tired, bored, and unhappy due to her awareness of being forced to exist in a fairy-​tale matrix. Cinderella, created by this author in another tale from the same volume, also dreams about freeing herself from the imposed scenario. By applying such metafictional strategies, Krall and Butenko create fairy-​tale spaces of physical and mental oppression that characters want to challenge or escape. Conversely, Dorota Terakowska in Jedna noc czarownicy (Witch’s One Night, 2003) presents the story of a witch who desperately wishes to return to her story after she accidentally gets out of the book. Her appearance in inappropriate stories threatens the integrity of the fairy-​tale land, which is why other characters aggressively try to get rid of her. Outside Poland, a similar concept has been exploited by Lauren Child, yet in the opposite direction of the action’s development. In Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book? (2002), after repeatedly disrupting fairy-​tale scenarios, the child reader accidentally falls into his book. The characters whom he has tormented decide to make his life difficult in every way. Therefore, the boy tries to return to the “real” world as soon as possible. The involvement of Polish authors in the global trend of metafictional transformation of fairy tales can also be seen in the concept of the interaction of fairy-​tale characters with the narrator of a given story. For example, the It’s Not a Fairy Tale series (2017–​), created by Josh Funk and Edwardian Taylor, presents Jack, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Three Little Pigs, who engage in dialogue with the storyteller. These “conversations” are sometimes hilarious and reveal a character’s rebellious nature, and sometimes they are emotional and indicate a character’s frustration. This kind of metafiction, while inspiring, is nothing new. In the above-​mentioned collection by Butenko we are dealing with the narrator who does not resemble a staid storyteller, but turns out to be as pert as the characters of the fairy tales he tells when he suggests that the listeners who are insufficiently interested in his stories leave and do not bother him. Moreover, at the end of Butenko’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” the grandmother, deprived of her daily supply of victuals (because the other heroes and heroines have disappeared somewhere), is forced to ask for help from the narrator, who thus becomes a character in this fairy tale. All these metafictional motifs deconstruct the vision of the fairy tale as a cultural fossil sanctified by literary tradition, introducing fractures and disruptions in its textual coherence and integrity. Another global trend is exploiting well-​known fairy-​tale topoi as inspirations and templates for narratives that draw attention to diverse problems of our contemporary reality. This current is represented by such authors as Laurence Anholt in Eco-​Wolf and the Three Pigs (2004), where the issue of environmental pollution is raised; Colin Stimpson with his Jack and the Baked Beanstalk (2012), which includes a motif of economic difficulties; and Wallace West, who created Mighty Red Riding Hood: A Fairly Queer Tale (2022), about the importance of living in harmony with one’s own identity. A Polish example of this kind of fairy tale is the collection Siedmiu wspaniałych (Seven Great Men, 2010) by Roksana Jędrzejewska-​Wróbel, in which all the tales deal with various problems that

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affect many families. For example, a reinterpretation of “Snow White” tells the story of a toxic relationship between a vulnerable girl and her insensitive mother; a new variant of “Cinderella” presents two selfish heroines treating their mother as a servant; a retold “Rapunzel” reveals how meaningless a career in mass media can be; “Three Little Pigs” here raises the problem of consumerism; and a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” describes the despair of parents whose child is seriously ill. In turn, in Jaś i Małgosia (Hansel and Gretel, 2005), Leszek Talko describes the problem of projecting one’s ambitions onto one’s children. The author presents the characters’ mother as a professionally unfulfilled woman who forces her daughter and son to take part in casting calls for TV advertisements and films. Similarly, Michał Rusinek in Kopciuszek (Cinderella, 2006) tells a hilarious and ironic yet thought-​provoking story about worrying, if not dangerous, aspects of globalization. The main character here is an enthusiastic reader of fashion magazines. Her dream is to marry a millionaire, but there is no chance he will remember her because she looks and behaves like thousands of other girls. Thus, the author critically depicts the phenomenon of creating one’s image based on the beauty standards promoted in the media. I am by no means claiming that the problems related to the culture of consumption or the condition of the contemporary family are the same in every region of the world. I do note, however, that by transforming fairy-​tale topoi, Polish authors refer to the essential problems of today’s Western world –​some of which are likely to occur globally –​and to the practice of retelling fairy tales engaged in by writers outside Poland.

Deconstruction of Traditional Gender Roles As has been proved many times (Tatar, Heads; Zipes, Fairy Tale), fairy tales reflect sociocultural relations characteristic of a particular place and time. Therefore, they may reinforce petrified norms and patterns or, contrarily, challenge them. Frequently rooted in feminist criticism and gender studies, contemporary transformations of fairy-​tale topoi are aimed at negating and changing the ways of thinking typical of patriarchal culture. According to a Polish researcher of world literature addressed to young readers, Anna Czabanowska-​Wróbel, It is hard to find a better example of phenomena which, seen from a distance, reveal their similarities than contemporary works intended for children. Observed from a distance, they can reveal [...] that the topics they take up appear simultaneously in many countries, and new and current motifs considered bold and original in relation to specific works have surprisingly many equivalents in the literature created in different languages. (12) Indeed, it is not difficult to find Polish fairy tales that critically engage traditional constructions of girlhood and femininity, as well as (although much less often) boyhood and masculinity. While these narratives are innovative in Poland, there is a vast variety of works of this kind published in other countries; The Paper Bag Princess (1980) by Robert Munsch, Don’t Kiss the Frog! (2007) by Fiona Waters, Not All Princesses Dress in Pink (2010) by Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple, Wild Swans (2018) by Xanthe Gresham Knight, and The Little Mermaid (Or, How to Find Love Underwater) (2021) by J. M. Farkas are just a few examples. Joanna Olech, in her Czerwony Kapturek (Little Red Riding Hood, 2005), discusses a problem of passivity that is culturally attributed to girls. The main character is depicted here as an obedient child –​both a daughter and a schoolgirl –​unable to speak up to satisfy her needs, silently accepting annoyance and humiliations instead. As in Perrault’s version of this tale, having encountered the wolf, the girl is lost forever as she cannot and does not even want to defend herself. In this way, the author draws the reader’s attention to a harmful model in girls’ upbringing. The need to change 370

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the conservative model of girlhood and femininity seems obvious in contemporary fairy-​tale retellings. However, in the stories available on the English-​language market for children’s books, a different model of fulfilling this need dominates. Staying with the example of “Little Red Riding Hood,” I notice the authors’ inclination towards presenting the protagonist in a way they believe she should be presented –​ as a rebellious, independent, and “go-​getting” girl. Pretty Salma: A Little Red Riding Hood Story from Africa (2006) by Niki Daly, Ninja Red Riding Hood (2014) by Corey Rosen Schwartz, Super Red Riding Hood (2014) by Claudia Davila, and Little Red (2015) by Bethan Woollvin are just a few examples. Agnieszka Suchowierska and Wojciech Eichelberger, as well as Małgorzata Jóźwiak, use a different strategy of exploiting fairy-​tale topoi to reveal gender stereotypes. Respectively, in collections titled Królewicz Śnieżek: Baśniowe stereotypy płci (Prince Snow White: Fairy-​Tale Gender Stereotypes, 2012) and O dzielnych księżniczkach i pięknych królewiczach (On Brave Princesses and Beautiful Princes, 2015), they invert all the characters’ sex, but maintain the fairy-​tale scenarios popularized by Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen (and, in one case, by Jeanne-​Marie Leprince de Beaumont). This inversion leads to the potential reader’s sense of dissonance at the portrayal of heroes and heroines: the first appear passive, infantile, and –​ consequently –​boring, while the latter turn out to be active, self-​reliant, and full of self-​determination. Outside Poland, there are numerous fairy-​tale retellings addressed to the child reader that similarly invert the characters’ sex, such as Prince Cinders by Babette Cole (1987), Kate and the Beanstalk and Sleeping Bobby by Mary Pope Osborne (2000, 2005), and Little Red: A Fizzingly Good Yarn by Lynn Roberts-​Maloney (2005). Contrarily, the strategy of non-​violation of fairy-​ tale plot structures applied by the above-​mentioned Polish authors allows for highlighting social associations connected to traditional gender roles. For example, it provokes readers to consider their attitude toward the unconventional motifs of Prince Snow White (from the collection of stories by Suchowierska and Eichelberger), who dutifully cares for seven female dwarfs and their household, or a male incarnation of Cinderella (from the same volume) who submissively accepts humiliation at the hands of his stepmother and stepbrothers. Presumably, once hypothetical readers have realized their traditional reaction to the nontraditional gender model, there is room for reflection on sociocultural norms.

Adapting to Historical, Cultural, Social, and Political Contexts While the tales I discuss below further exploit the fairy-​tale topoi rooted in Western culture, they transform the pre-​texts regarding the experience of the complicated Polish past. According to Tatar, “Our cultural stories are the products of unceasing negotiations between the creative consciousness of individuals and the collective sociocultural constructs available to them. These negotiations [...] always leave a mark on each version of a tale” (Heads 230). I argue that not only the canonical variants of fairy tales but also their reinterpretations are conditioned by the cultural region inhabited by the author and that region’s history. In this section, I refer to Polish fairy-​tale narratives published after the end of the Second World War in 1945 because I assume that this was when the local contextualization of global topoi became clear in works by such writers. In 1947, Zofia Lorentz published a collection titled Mali bohaterowie. Opowieść o dzieciach walczącej Warszawy 1940–​1944 (Little Heroes: A Tale of the Children of Fighting Warsaw 1940–​ 1944). The second edition, enriched with a few short stories, appeared in 1971. The works included in the volume show the inhabitants of occupied Warsaw. Many of them are directly involved in the uprising against the German occupiers. Each story is presented from the perspective of a child experiencing war trauma. The author refers to well-​known fairy tales as pre-​texts in telling about the wartime fate of the youngest Warsaw inhabitants. Thus, Little Red Riding Hood carries grenades in her basket, Hansel and Gretel bake biscuits for Poles imprisoned by the Nazis, Puss in Boots distributes 371

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underground newspapers, and the Little Match Girl regularly gets from the Warsaw ghetto to the “Aryan side” to sell matches. The author planned this collection of stories (they are not fairy tales) to testify to the war experiences of children living in occupied Warsaw. As she explains in the introduction, the volume was written at the request of her little son, who, when he moved out of the ruined Warsaw with his mother, desperately wanted to explain to his new school friends what trauma he had experienced. Since the children were unable to accept the rational account of the enormity of Nazi cruelty, Lorentz decided to use fairy-​tale language. Her stories combine reportage with fairy tales, although the latter are devoid of magic (Kostecka, “Andersen”). In 1949, during the Congress of the Polish Writers’ Union, socialist realism was decreed the mandatory creative method. Therefore, specific obligations of writers and literature itself were announced. Folk and fairy tales were also to be used for sociopolitical purposes. As a Polish researcher on the Grimms’ fairy tales and their Polish reception, Kamila Kowalczyk, points out, The reason for the modification of fairy-​tale patterns [was] primarily the political situation –​ socialist realism [turned] princes into bricklayers, and princesses into workers. Whereas fairy-​ tale texts published just after the war were to mainly satisfy the needs of the market and the growing social needs, those published after 1949 were to satisfy the needs of socialist realist doctrine.3 (307) Interestingly, it became evident that the fairy tale itself has propaganda potential. As I have written elsewhere, “The propagandists valued the fairy-​tale vision of the world as a harmonious, logical, exceptional, and inventible one. Hence, the task of writers was to transfer these qualities to communist reality. Fairy-​tale conventions were to accustom people [to] the new political order, leading in turn to optimistic, approving attitudes toward the communist regime” (“They” 301). Polish researcher Jan Galant (who refers to the term proposed in the 1990s by another Polish literary scholar, Michał Głowiński) has examined the ways of creating the totalitarian fairy tale and its influence on Polish society in the period of Stalinism (1949–​55). As he rightly argues, “fairy-​tale character is an attribute of this reality’s image as produced by the communist ideology, the totalitarian system, and its propaganda apparatus. Thus, it is not a feature of the reality of those years, but a feature of the world’s image as created by newspeak” (165). Consequently, some Polish writers for children created “mildly ‘progressive’ versions of classic tales” (Woźniak, “Power” 5). In 1949, Ewa Szelburg-​Zarembina published a collection entitled Baśnie. Był sobie raz (Fairy Tales: There Was Once). The “Little Red Riding Hood” here is a story about the importance of human work, especially in its collective dimension in a local community. Moreover, it presents a specific family model: a multigenerational and traditional one, in which women find fulfillment as caring housewives, men work hard, and children are cherished (Kowalczyk 324). The princess of the glass mountain is saved by a creative steelworker, and Cinderella, perfectly aware of class inequalities, chooses a hardworking shoemaker as her husband instead of a prince who is a bourgeois idler. Another well-​known Polish writer, Jan Brzechwa, published in 1969 his version of “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the witch, a janitor at a candy factory, only teaches children a lesson for illegally and selfishly having eaten treats, an action seen as idleness and as battening on the efforts of others. The anxieties, ideas, and attitudes of Poles who lived through the communist reality have not disappeared after the victory of democracy in Poland. On the contrary, they are still being reflected in the literary works of many writers, including those directing their books at children. While the purpose behind applying fairy-​tale conventions in propaganda tales was to manipulate readers and “sell” a totalitarian vision of the world, late twentieth-​ and early twenty-​first-​century authors have challenged diverse elements of the fairy tale to deconstruct, mock, and overcome these communist 372

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realities. “Krulewna Śnieżka” (Not So Snow White) by Butenko from the above mentioned collection and Kopciuszek idzie na wojnę (Cinderella Goes to War, 2012) by Sławomir Shuty present various metaphors of fear of the totalitarian system. This fear takes many different faces: the feeling of oppression and entrapment, dread of repression and incarceration, hatred toward those in power. All these destructive experiences have strongly affected Poles’ worldview in both a social and a political sense (Kostecka, “They” 302). In his retelling of “Snow White,” Butenko discusses the utopia of the single correct ideology, reveals the mechanism of a totalitarian regime and the tragedy of those repressed, and considers the very nature of discrimination. He tells the story of seven unusually short people who are deported to the Wild Mountains. Their fate has been decided by the dictator, who believes that as they deviate from the norm, they must be separated from society. Consequently, the miserable citizens, deprived of their civil rights, are forced to work in the mines. Despite being isolated, the deported are still afraid of denunciation. Moreover, Butenko (exploiting the jargon of the Polish communist leaders and the former official state press) refers to the so-​called postcommunist syndrome, which consists “On the one hand [...] in perceiving the sociopolitical system as completely untrustworthy and dreaded –​and, on the other hand, [of having] fun and feel[ing] satisfied when cheating it” (303). Here, this mindset is ironically reflected on the level of narration because the rulers –​liars, manipulators, and criminals –​ are depicted both bitterly and amusingly. In turn, in his metafictional story, Shuty shows how and why the fairy-​tale characters do not want to reject the oppressive scenario of “Cinderella” (and other tales) and choose to follow it submissively. To some extent, this tractability reflects the Polish mentality in the second half of the twentieth century: we had been living under oppression so long that, in some ways, it became invisible (307). According to the Polish economist Andrzej Kozminski, the communist mentality means that “In exchange for their compliance, ‘ordinary people’ feel entitled to the total protection and services provided by the ‘communist welfare state’ ” (2). Shuty makes this problem one of the major themes of his tale. Clearly, both Butenko and Shuty reinterpreted not only popular Western fairy tales but also the bitter Polish past.

Final Thoughts According to Czabanowska-​Wróbel, The “children’s” world canon consists of unquestionable, commonly known masterpieces and outstanding or even just successful, but equally widely known books translated into many languages. Considering significant local differences, it is much easier to obtain an agreement in this area among scholars in various countries than in the case of disputes over the adult canon. (7) I have no doubts that popular fairy tales such as those by Perrault, the Grimms, and Andersen are indeed fundamental memes and “commonly known masterpieces” that belong to the “children’s world canon” (although we must remember Bacchilega’s recommendation in “ ‘Decolonizing’ the Canon” that one should question the existence of the singular, “universal” canon). “The crucial elements in the evolution of the memetic process are repetition and memory,” writes Zipes (Fairy Tale 18–​19). And these are precisely the key factors in fairy-​tale circulation: particular fairy-​tale memes are repeated locally, both shape and reflect the potential reader’s sociocultural identity in global and local dimensions, and interact with the local collective memory. Obviously, this chapter has not explored all possible aspects of fairy-​tale circulation. For example, one could seek answers to the following questions: (1) How do fairy-​tale topoi exploited in other countries join global literary trends, and what makes us consider a given tendency global? (2) How 373

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are fairy-​tale topoi locally contextualized in other countries? (3) In what sense are Polish translations of Perrault’s, the Grimms’, and Andersen’s fairy tales local realizations of world literature?4 Finally, a fascinating issue today is a turn towards regional folklore –​we are more and more willing to explore tales produced by dominated, colonized, and marginalized groups. In the last few years in Poland, the number of retellings of “global” fairy tales has been decreasing, while transformations of vernacular stories –​works inspired by local tales (folktales, legends, and so on) from various towns and regions of our country –​have been becoming more popular.5 Paradoxically, considering that the latest and obviously mainstream Disney productions have moved away from classic fairy tales in favor of fairy-​tale topoi originating in Mexico, China, or Colombia, we can safely argue that local is becoming global. Nevertheless, fairy tales will never stop circulating as long as we want to tell them in different forms, contexts, and circumstances.

Notes 1 I use the term “fairy tale” and not “folktale” as I work on the assumption that, as JoAnn Conrad expresses it, “The folktale is a form of traditional, fictional, prose narrative that is said to circulate orally. In both colloquial use and within folkloristics, the term ‘folktale’ is often used interchangeably with ‘fairy tale,’ ‘märchen,’ and ‘wonder tale,’ their histories being interrelated and their meanings and applications somewhat overlapping. [...] the folktale was conceived of as oral, whereas –​although fairy-​tale themes exist in folktales –​the ‘true’ fairy tale was a literary genre, and the ambiguous märchen and wonder tale were deployed to reinforce the requirement of orality in the more general folktale” (363). 2 In this chapter, I do not consider the difference between world literature and global literature, as I follow Przemysław Czapliński’s assumption that “today’s global production and circulation of literature create inequalities that blur the distinction between ‘global’ and ‘worldwide’ ” (21). All translations from Polish into English are mine. 3 Kowalczyk explains: “Grimm’s fairy tales, just because of their genre, could be treated in the analyzed period as ‘reactionary,’ backward in terms of their content. There is also no doubt that in communist Poland, the anti-​ German policy was also reflected in selecting library collections” (319). Similarly, Monika Woźniak argues that “[a]‌fter World War II their German identity (and the appropriation of their Märchen by Nazi propaganda) [...] made the Brothers Grimm initially personae non gratae in communist Poland” (“Power” 5). 4 On the subject of Polish translations, see Woźniak, “Time”; Pieciul-​Karmińska; Sochańska. 5 Collections of tales by Zuzanna Orlińska and Papuzińska and the book series by Jędrzejewska-​Wróbel are the most recent (2021–​22) examples.

Works Cited Allan, Cherie. “Postmodern Fairy Tales.” A Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Karen Coats, Deborah Stevenson, and Vivian Yenika-​Agbaw, John Wiley and Sons, 2022, pp. 207–​17. —​—​—​. “Postmodern Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​ Meibauer, Routledge, 2017, pp. 201–​208. Bacchilega, Cristina. “ ‘Decolonizing’ the Canon: Critical Challenges to Eurocentrism.” Teverson, pp. 33–​44. —​—​—​. Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-​First-​Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder. Wayne State University Press, 1993. —​—​—​. “Narrative Cultures, Situated Story Webs, and the Politics of Relation.” Narrative Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 27–​46. Beckett, Sandra L. Red Riding Hood for All Ages: A Fairy-​Tale Icon in Cross-​Cultural Contexts. Wayne State University Press, 2008. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Convergence: Inventories of the Present. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise, Harvard University Press, 2004. Conrad, JoAnn. “Folktale.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, vol. 1, edited by Donald Haase, Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 363–​66. Czabanowska-​Wróbel, Anna. “Literatura dziecięca –​ pomiędzy literaturą światową i globalną.” Wielogłos, vol. 27, 2016, pp. 1–​15. Czapliński, Przemysław. “Literatura światowa i jej figury.” Teksty Drugie, vol. 4, 2014, pp. 13–​40. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton University Press, 2003.

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Fairy Tales and Circulation de la Rochère, Martine Hennard Dutheil, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak, editors. Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Wayne State University Press, 2016. Fraser, Lucy. The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid”. Wayne State University Press, 2017. Galant, Jan. “O baśni totalitarnej –​ dopowiedzenia.” Baśń we współczesnej kulturze, vol. 1, edited by Kornelia Ćwiklak, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2015, pp. 164–​75. Haase, Donald. “Decolonizing Fairy-​Tale Studies.” Marvels and Tales, vol. 24, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–​38. —​—​—​. “Global or Local? Where Do Fairy Tales Belong?” Teverson, pp. 17–​32. Joosen, Vanessa. Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-​ Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings. Wayne State University Press, 2011. —​—​—​, and Gillian Lathey, editors. Grimms’ Tales Around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception. Wayne State University Press, 2014. Khan, Pasha M. The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu. Wayne State University Press, 2019. Kostecka, Weronika. “And They Lived Happily Never After: On the Anti-​Utopian Function of Postmodern Polish Fairy Tales by Bohdan Butenko, Hanna Krall, and Sławomir Shuty.” Marvels and Tales, vol. 32, no. 2, 2018, pp. 296–​313. —​—​—​. “Andersen w Powstaniu Warszawskim: O zapomnianych opowiadaniach Zofii Lorentz.” Andersenowskie inspiracje w literaturze i kulturze polskiej, edited by Hanna Ratuszna, Marzenna Wiśniewska, and Violetta Wróblewska, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK, 2017, pp. 111–​20. —​—​—​. “New Subjects, Disrupted Principles: Fractured Fairy Tales in a Postmodern Reality: Selected Examples from Poland.” Fractures and Disruptions in Children’s Literature, edited by Ana Margarida Ramos, Sandie Mourão, and Maria Teresa Cortez, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 209–​27. Kowalczyk, Kamila. Grimmosfera polska: Baśnie ze zbioru Wilhelma i Jakuba Grimmów w polskiej kulturze literackiej (1865–​2015). Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT, 2021. Kozminski, Andrzej K. Catching Up: Organizational and Management Change in the Ex-​Socialist Block. State University of New York Press, 1993. Marzolph, Ulrich. 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition. Wayne State University Press, 2020. —​—​—​. The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective. Wayne State University Press, 2007. Miele, Gina M. “Intertextuality.” Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Jennifer Schacker and Christine A. Jones, Broadview Press, 2013, pp. 499–​502. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, vol. 1, 2000, pp. 54–​67. Moss, Geoff. “Metafiction and the Poetics of Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 1990, pp. 50–​52. Murai, Mayako, and Luciana Cardi, editors. Re-​Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations Across Cultures. Wayne State University Press, 2020. Nikolajeva, Maria. “Children’s Literature.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, edited by Donald Haase, vol. 1, Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 185–​94. —​—​—​. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. Garland, 1996. Pantaleo, Sylvia. “The Metafictive Nature of Postmodern Picturebooks.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 67, no. 5, 2014, pp. 324–​402. Papuzińska, Joanna. Zatopione królestwo: O polskiej literaturze fantastycznej XX wieku dla dzieci i młodzieży. Wydawnictwo Literatura, 2008. Pieciul-​Karmińska, Eliza. “Bloody, Brutal and Gloomy? On the Cruelty in Children’s and Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm in the Context of Their Polish Translations.” Mediating Practices in Translating Children’s Literature: Tackling Controversial Topics, edited by Joanna Dybiec-​Gajer and Agnieszka Gicala, Kinder-​und Jugendkultur, -​literatur und -​medien, vol. 125, 2021, pp. 51–​69. Silva-​Díaz, Maria C. “Picturebooks and Metafiction.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Routledge, 2018, pp. 69–​80. Sipe, Lawrence R., and Sylvia Pantaleo. Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-​Referentiality. Routledge, 2008. Sochańska, Bogusława. “Was a New Polish Translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Stories Necessary?” Przekładaniec: A Journal of Literary Translation, vol. 22–​23, 2009/​2010, pp. 77–​116. Tatar, Maria. “National/​International/​Transnational: The Brothers Grimm and Their Fairy Tales.” Teverson, pp. 80–​91. —​—​—​. Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton University Press, 1992.

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Weronika Kostecka Teverson, Andrew, ed. The Fairy Tale World. Routledge, 2019. Wilkie-​Stibbs, Christine. “Intertextuality and the Child Reader.” Understanding Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2005, pp. 168–​79. Woźniak, Monika. “Once upon a Time There Was a Puss in Boots: Hanna Januszewska’s Polish Translation and Adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales.” Przekładaniec: A Journal of Literary Translation, vol. 22–​23, 2009/​2010, pp. 33–​55. —​—​—​. “The Power of Imagination: Polish Illustrations of Fairy Tales in the Communist Period (1945–​1989).” Études de lettres, vol. 310, 2019, pp. 1–​14. Zipes, Jack. The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton University Press, 2012. —​—​—​. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. Bergin and Garvey, 1982. —​—​—​. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. Routledge, 2006.

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31 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND TRANSNATIONALISM Clare Bradford, Kristine Moruzi, and Michelle J. Smith

Brenton E McKenna’s graphic novel trilogy Ubby’s Underdogs (2011–​19) is set in the remote pearling town of Broome, Western Australia, just after the Second World War. Its protagonist, Ubby, an Aboriginal girl who is the leader of the Underdogs gang, forms a friendship with Sai Fong, a newcomer from China. Their relationship is at the core of the Underdogs trilogy, bringing together representatives from two ancient cultures who encounter each other in an Australia dominated by racially based hierarchies. In an episode from the first book of the trilogy, Sai Fong dresses Ubby in her own clothes to enable Ubby to evade regulations that force Aboriginal people to sit in the back seats of Broome’s outdoor cinema. Passing as Chinese, Ubby will gain access to the front seats (white people occupy the best seats in the middle of the cinema). She looks at her image in the mirror, admiring her new identity, and says to Sai Fong, “Thanks for letting me wear this, it’s proper nice.” Sai Fong bows formally, responding, “Anytime you need it, it’s yours” (1:99). Ubby may look like a Chinese girl, but she maintains her Aboriginal English language (“proper nice”). The girls’ exchange is strategic and knowing, disrupting in its small way the nation’s racial order, in which Aboriginal people occupy the lowest place in hierarchies of races. Ubby and Sai Fong’s transnational negotiations cut through the racialized categories of the Australian nation-​state, inviting readers to admire their strategies of evasion, which enable Ubby to move beyond the boundaries imposed on Indigenous populations. The term “transnational” conjures up the mobility of its prefix, trans, which always conveys a sense of movement. Neither the prefix nor the word can easily be pinned down, since the movement suggested by trans may take place across (as in transcontinental), from one place or state to another (as in translocation), through (as in translucent), or beyond (as in transcendent). Combined with “national,” the prefix unsettles the notion that nations comprise fixed, stable entities populated by peoples whose identities are formed by allegiance to common ideals, languages, and histories. In this chapter we argue that transnational texts for the young engage in a dialectical way with conceptions of nationhood. That is, the narratives and styles of representation characteristic of texts such as Ubby’s Underdogs present views of the nation that complicate orthodox or official versions of nationhood. The term “nation” may seem to possess a solidity, an internal consistency, that renders nations, national identities, and national histories normal and natural. The dialectical orientation of transnational literary studies directs attention to texts produced by writers who inhabit the margins of the nation, where they engage with ideas and literary forms that depart from the norms of national literatures. It is no accident that transnationalism and postcolonialism draw on related theoretical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-36

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perspectives. Postcolonial literary studies take as their field of study the literature and culture of nations shaped by colonization, from the first encounters of colonizers with indigenous peoples. Transnational studies have a wider remit, since they investigate how diverse forces –​local, regional, national –​ shape cultural practices and texts, and how diasporic communities develop and change over generations. Both postcolonial and transnational literary studies are ways of reading as much as they are fields of research. For instance, both reject the idea that there exists a universal set of standards or values, stemming from European norms, that defines “quality” in literature. Rather, they ascribe value to the nonstandard, hybrid genres and idioms that emerge from marginal writers working between languages and cultures. The term “globalization” is often used as a synonym of “transnationalism,” but it carries a different range of meanings. As Paul Jay observes, the term global [...] refers to any entity or phenomenon that can be thought of as involving the entire world (whether related to communication, travel, corporations, or cultural commodities from music to food). In contrast, transnational [...] has a more general meaning suggesting fluidity or mobility, with its emphasis on moving across, beyond, or transcending geographic, cultural, or national borders. (38) In writing this chapter we selected texts that represent the fluid, mobile identities forged when young protagonists move across or beyond “geographic, cultural, or national borders.” While our choices are constrained, we focus on three categories of transnational texts: Indigenous-​authored works, narratives thematizing migrant experiences, and works that address the stories and memories of families and communities living far from their original homes.

Transnationalism and Indigeneity The idea of nationhood takes on complex meanings in countries where colonists have invaded lands previously inhabited by Indigenous peoples. We focus here on texts from the settler colonies of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In these nations, colonial invaders prioritized the acquisition of land, wresting territories from their original inhabitants and installing settlers in their place. As Patrick Wolfe remarks, “invasion is a structure not an event” (388). That is, settler colonization did not occur once, or over a single period, but established practices and habits of thought that are sustained into the present. The Indigenous people of settler colonies affiliate with groups that they variously characterize as clans, tribes, or nations. These ancient connections between individuals and communities were disrupted by the ongoing depredations of colonialism, so that after long years of frontier violence, the survivors of massacres and forced displacement struggled to maintain identities built on attachment to kin and ancestral land. In the face of these settler-​colonial histories, it is astonishing that Indigenous peoples should have survived, let alone that they have maintained and recuperated cultures and languages. Indigenous peoples have increasingly published fiction and nonfiction to introduce narratives and values to Indigenous children, affording these children the experience of encountering texts located in their own cultures. One such text is John Herrington’s Mission to Space (2016), published by White Dog Press, an imprint of the tribally owned publishing house Chickasaw Press. Herrington, the author and first-​ person narrator of this nonfiction work, was the first tribally enrolled Native American to become a NASA astronaut. Since its beginnings, NASA has been a potent sign of American nationhood, offering visions of a new frontier where astronauts perform feats of exploration and endurance. Popular-​culture depictions of astronauts generally sustain a version of America that privileges 378

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whiteness, so that Herrington’s Mission to Space offers a corrective to this overdetermined representation. The narrative is accompanied by a series of photographs tracing Herrington’s history from childhood through his training as an astronaut and his participation in the sixteenth Space Shuttle mission in 2002. Pictured along with his fellow astronauts in their red spacesuits against a white and blue background, Herrington seems to be subsumed within the symbols and colors of the nation. At this point the narrative shifts tone, describing a ceremony that takes place at the Kennedy Space Center, where the leaders of the Chickasaw Nation present an ornately decorated blanket to NASA. As the astronauts blast off into orbit, the facing picture shows Chickasaw people, dressed in regalia, celebrating Herrington’s achievement through song and dance. These striking contrasts between Chickasaw and American signs and symbols position Herrington as a traveler between nations as he moves across the notional divide between the two. In a striking portrayal of this conjunction, one photograph features Herrington’s eagle feather and flute floating inside the International Space Station, untethered to Earth’s gravity. A further assertion of Chickasaw nationhood appears in the glossary, which shows Chickasaw translations and their pronunciation. The explanatory note says that Chickasaw, like other languages, creates new words to encode new meanings. These words build on existing terms; for instance, the literal meaning of the word “astronaut,” translated as “aba’nowa’,” is “above walker” (23). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chickasaw children were sent to boarding schools where they were prohibited from speaking their language. Mission to Space plays its part in the Chickasaw nation’s project of revitalizing its language not merely by drawing attention to Chickasaw vocabulary but by foregrounding the productive creativity evident in coinages of new words. Herrington’s narrative models a transnational identity forged from his Chickasaw heritage and melded with his work as an astronaut. This textual negotiation between and across nations invokes the long history of settler colonization. In a similar way, the narrative of Richard Van Camp and Scott B. Henderson’s graphic novel A Blanket of Butterflies (2015) hinges on personal, local, and national histories. In addition, its frame of reference stretches beyond national boundaries. The adventure story that structures A Blanket of Butterflies involves an encounter between Shinobu, a Japanese man who visits the Northern Life Museum in the Northwest Territories of Canada, and Sonny, a young Dene boy. Shinobu has come to the museum to reclaim a Samurai suit that belongs to his family, but he discovers that Benny the Bank, a local criminal, has stolen the family’s prized sword. After Benny and his gang attack and wound Shinobu, Sonny takes him to his grandmother (Ehtsi) to be healed. When Shinobu discloses that he comes from Nagasaki, the narrative turns to transnational exchanges that complicate the idea of the nation. Sonny’s grandmother recalls a prophetic vision that foretold the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki by the United States. She explains that uranium ore mined in the Northwest Territories was used in the manufacture of the bomb. Some of the Dene who worked in uranium mines, among them Sonny’s great-​grandfather, later died of cancer. The uranium traveled along “the highway of the atom” (van Wyck), from Dene land to a laboratory in Montreal and eventually to the plane that bombed Nagasaki, its deployment enabled by a transnational accord (the Manhattan Project) between Britain, Canada, and the United States. The Canadian nation was complicit in the death of many thousands of civilians in Nagasaki. Sonny’s grandmother understands this only too well since she holds family and cultural knowledge about how Dene land was plundered in the interests of powerful nations intent on the destruction of Japanese cities and people. The narrative foregrounds scenes in which she passes on Dene ideals of responsibility and reciprocity to Sonny, to the Japanese man Shinobu, and to Benny, who is trapped in grief and anger over the childhood death of his granddaughter from cancer. Weaving together these strands of memory and history, A Blanket of Butterflies confronts the unequal relationships of settler colonialism, proposing a transnational dynamic in which Dene beliefs and practices enliven 379

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and enrich the settler nation. This book is silent about Japan’s brutal colonialism in East Asia and its involvement in the Second World War. Rather, its treatment of the unlikely friendship between the Dene boy Sonny and the ex-​Samurai Shinobu makes an argument for transnational friendships forged in the interstices of geopolitical conflict. Settler colonization in Australia was premised on the idea that settlers and Indigenous people constituted opposites of each other. The binaries of white/​black and civilized/​savage gave cover for the systematic elimination of Indigenous people. But this foundational binary was a fiction, since Indigenous peoples around Australia had participated in trade and cultural exchanges with peoples from Asia and the Pacific region for centuries prior to white settlement. Such exchanges are central to McKenna’s Ubby’s Underdogs graphic novels, which feature characters from China, Japan, Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia), and elsewhere who work in Broome’s pearling industry. The trilogy incorporates a mode of transnationalism that engages with regional, ethnic and linguistic difference within the nation. As Paul Sharrad notes, this insistence on diversity “disturb[s]‌ the image of the nation as a smoothly homogeneous geo-​social space within clear boundaries” (2). The first volume begins with a prologue in which ancient China is riven by warfare with the Hede, a “barbaric tribe” (1:3) that threatens to annihilate the people of the mountains in the north of China. Injured in battle, the Phoenix Dragon flees to Australia, where he seeks healing from the Sandpaper Dragon of the desert. In the third volume, the Hede pursue and imprison the Chinese girl Sai Fong, the human incarnation of the Phoenix Dragon. She is rescued by Ubby, whose discovery of her power as a dragon-​summoner plays out in conjunction with her emergence as a leader. The Hede are destroyed, and the two dragons return to their respective homes in the Australian desert and the northern Chinese mountains. These mythic events form the backdrop to a rollicking series of adventures involving Ubby’s gang of Underdogs. The gang’s five members come from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Malaya, and China, and they are differentiated as to dialect, world view, and appearance. Often their cultural differences lead to comedic moments such as when Fin, the Irish boy, tells Sai Fong that it is customary to spit whenever the English are mentioned. Accordingly, when Sai Fong is introduced to an Englishman, she spits into his hand, confident that she is observing protocol. This episode, with its allusion to the colonizing relations of Britain to Ireland, points to Fin’s internalized sense of resentment, which he has learned from his father’s habit of spitting when he mentions the British (3:3). In the trilogy’s world of postwar Broome, there exist strong alliances between Indigenous people and the non-​Indigenous workers who work as laborers in the pearling trade. These ethnic groups have in common their lowly place in the racialized and class-​based hierarchies of Broome, where British pearling masters oppress workers and force them into dangerous work. In the first volume, the British businessman Paul Donappleton is a harsh employer whose son Scotty, leader of the Pearl Juniors, the Underdogs’ rivals, takes every opportunity to gloat about his father’s power. In the third volume Scotty rejects his father for his collaboration with the Hede and throws his lot in with Ubby, taking on his father’s business as “the new Donappleton in town” (3:221). This sign of positive change suggests the possibility of shifts in the postcolonial and transnational order of Broome. Whiti Hereaka’s young adult novel Legacy combines a contemporary framing narrative with time-​ travel sequences in which Riki, a young Māori man living in 2015, is thrust into the war experience of his great-​great-​grandfather, Te Ariki Puweto, a volunteer in the Māori Contingent during the First World War (1914–​18). These flashbacks are interspersed with transcripts of tape recordings made in 1975, when Te Ariki’s grandson Alamein interviewed him. Shifting among 1915, 1975, and 2015, Legacy probes the meaning of “nation” for Māori, the Indigenous people of New Zealand. When Britain declared war in 1914, Māori across the country were divided in their attitudes to involvement in the conflict, since British settlers, supported by the colonial authority, had confiscated large swathes of Māori land during the nineteenth century. Many Māori did not view themselves as part of 380

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the nation, but owed their primary allegiance to their iwi (nation, tribe) and their whanau (extended family). Early in Legacy, Riki gathers with the other men of the Māori Contingent for an official welcome by the Māori medical officer, Captain Peter Buck. Buck says, “Though we are only a handful, the remnant of the remnant of a people, yet we consider that we are the old New Zealanders. No division can be truly called a New Zealand Division unless it numbers Māoris amongst its ranks. [...] Give us a chance!” (54–​55). Buck’s address conveys the sense that prowess in war will enable Māori to demonstrate their standing as “the old New Zealanders,” so claiming a place in an emerging (trans) national identity that incorporates Māori culture and people. The novel undermines Buck’s vision of a transnational New Zealand by quoting a noncommittal comment from Te Ariki’s diary: “Captain Buck gave a fine speech” (81). A more direct critique appears in the form of a cautionary tale passed on to Riki by one of his companions, about a Māori boy who enlisted in a Pākeha (white) contingent. Anxious to prove his zeal, he always kept his boots shiny and his buttons polished. But one day his companions were bored and conducted a mock trial in which he was found guilty simply “of being Māori” (78). He was stripped and forced to carry a sack of sheep manure on his back while his “friends” ridiculed him. In a 1975 interview Te Ariki makes short work of the supposition that Māori soldiers were “fighting for equality” in the First World War: “An ant wouldn’t fight for equality with an elephant” (118). These competing ideas about nationhood center on Te Ariki, who enlisted as a soldier in the hope that his service would render him equal to Pākeha. When he returned to New Zealand he wanted to “leave ‘Te Ariki’ behind” (219); he called himself Michael and got on with his life. Riki, caught between his own time and Te Ariki’s war, shares with him a sense of being “Queasy. Off balance. Disoriented” (27). The novel’s ending refuses any easy closure, except for the implication that it is impossible for anyone, Māori or Pākeha, to live in New Zealand without experiencing a sense of the nation’s uneasy accommodation to its transnational state.

Migrant and Refugee Narratives Narratives of migrant and refugee experiences enable the depiction of young people who grow up outside of the country in which their parents or grandparents were born and raised. While these stories often emphasize the way in which child protagonists move beyond the notion of identification with one nation to draw together aspects of the family’s cultural and ethnic traditions with the lifestyle and norms of their new home, some contemporary migrant narratives remain ones of assimilation to a new national identity. The ability to transcend physical and cultural borders is typically understood in positive terms; nevertheless, in Mem Fox’s I’m Australian Too (2017), the ease with which migrants become “Australian too” elides cultural difference. As Debra Dudek observes, this picturebook sets out from a premise of promoting cultural diversity but relies “upon a rhetoric of sameness rather by demonstrating respect and responsibility for all people regardless of difference” (373). I’m Australian Too describes in verse how various children have come to identify as Australian. The opening spread shows two children sitting on a ledge surrounded by native Australian cockatoos, with the verbal text declaring “I’m Australian! How about you?”. The verses that describe the lives of several of the migrant parents, grandparents, and other ancestors in their home countries emphasize the harsh conditions that they escaped. Families from Lebanon, Somalia, and Afghanistan “fled a war,” left behind a country “torn with strife,” and “fled” via boat. One family emigrated from Ireland in 1849 during the Great Famine: “A million hungry people died but now we’re doing fine.” In contrast, living conditions in Australia, whether in the city or the country, are illustrated by Ronojoy Ghosh as idyllic and free from worry or discrimination. The only hint of the frequent political hostility to migrant and refugee intake in Australia in recent decades is the page that shows a refugee housed behind razor wire in immigration detention who is “not Australian yet” because she is waiting 381

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to be “let in.” This spread supports the depiction of Australia as a desired sanctuary for those from countries in conflict, even as –​at the same time –​it illustrates the ongoing politicization of refugees through harsh immigration detention policies. Rather than unsettling the conception of the nation as fixed and stable with common ideals, I’m Australian Too reinforces a singular notion of Australian identity. The penultimate double-​page spread is an aerial view of near-​identical houses in a beachside suburb. While the children playing in the illustration are racially diverse, the life of “an Australian” is shown as relatively homogenous throughout the book, with little in the visual or verbal text that refers to any aspects of culture that the migrant families brought with them. A Lebanese family now sings “Advance Australia Fair!”, while a Chinese family “call[s]‌out, ‘G’day mate!’ ” The one exception is the double-​page illustration of an Italian family feast, including various pasta dishes, which shows appreciation of perhaps the most accepted of cultural differences –​ food –​ and embodies what Stanley Fish describes as “boutique multiculturalism” (378). Ultimately, I’m Australian Too references the transnational in terms of the ease with which people from migrant backgrounds become Australian and, most often, find a “better” life than the one that their family or ancestors left behind. While clearly intended to promote acceptance of Australians from a migrant background, Fox’s book erases the reality of hybrid cultural identities and of the difficulties faced by migrants, including racism, in order to produce a straightforward account of one nationality being replaced with another. In contrast, both Bao Phi and Thi Bui’s A Different Pond (2017) and Ingrid Laguna’s Songbird (2019) can be understood as transnational children’s literature because of how they depict the primacy of familial connection and cultural practices, such as fishing, singing, and cooking, and the capacity for these links and ways of being to be transported to an unfamiliar and even hostile nation. Contrary to narratives of assimilation, which extol the virtues of belonging to a comparatively untroubled nation that accepts migrants and refugees, transnational narratives focus less on child protagonists and their families becoming American or Australian. Instead, fiction such as A Different Pond and Songbird depicts family connections being maintained, familiar aspects of life reimagined, and interactions with fellow migrants –​with whom these families share language and culture –​being understood as just as important as new American and Australian friends. A Different Pond acknowledges the reality of economic and cultural difficulties when Vietnamese refugees adopted the United States as their new nation and emphasizes the amalgamation of Vietnamese and American culture within the depicted family, which is intended to represent Phi’s own family. Phi dedicates the book to his family and “refugees everywhere,” signaling the global nature of the refugee crisis and the potential commonalities in their experience of movement. Multiple perspectives on events, places, and people are enabled through graphic novelist Thi Bui’s illustrations, which range from multiple panels on a single page to full-​and double-​page spreads, some of which include further inset illustrations. The ideological and political barriers for migrants, particularly refugees, are depicted metaphorically in the physical obstacles surrounding the pond that father and son visit early in the morning to fish. The pair must “climb over the divider between the road and the trees” and cross “tangle and scrub” as they pass a sign reading “POSTED. NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT.” The notion of “a different pond” carries fishing tradition from Vietnam to the United States, and the shared experience of father and son mirrors the relationship that the father used to enjoy with his brother in Vietnam, before the latter was killed in the war. Fishing at a different pond also yokes the natural world and food cultures of Vietnam and the United States. The fact that many cultures are part of this landscape is visible in the illustration of the bait store the father and son visit, which is situated next to Pineda Tacos, whose signage combines Spanish and English language text. It is also evident in the positive representation of the diverse Americans they bond with over time at the pond, including “a Hmong

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man” who likely fled Laos as a refugee and “a black man” who shows the child protagonist his “colorful lure collection.” Water is the persistent metaphor in the book and provides a fitting way to depict transnational flows of people and cultures. It is also a way to convey differing perceptions and prejudices. For instance, the boy notes that a fellow pupil at this school “said my dad’s English sounds like a thick, dirty river,” while to the boy “his English sounds like gentle rain.” This allusion to racism is compounded by the difficulty of life as a Vietnamese refugee in the United States. The father must fish early on a Saturday morning before he travels to his second job. The son asks his father why they must fish for food if he has two jobs, to which he replies, “Everything in America costs a lot of money.” Through the son’s touching of his father’s calloused hands, the sight of the older man’s “teeth broken,” and the description of the mother as “tired” as she is about to bicycle to her own job, the reader is positioned to understand how hard the unnamed family works to survive. Nevertheless, while the book acknowledges the difficulties of life as a migrant, the focus on the unity and joy of the extended family as they enjoy the fish dinner provides an optimistic ending that suggests that the family will prosper despite being in “a different pond.” The double-​page illustration shows them gathered around a table with the cooked fish, rice bowls, and chopsticks, showing the living influence of their Vietnamese culture. In the final illustration, the boy sleeps contentedly, surrounded by the image of fish in a pond, after he has noted in the verbal text that when the family sleeps “we will dream of fish in faraway ponds.” The family remains connected to their Vietnamese relatives and homeland in the same way as fish can traverse water that flows across, and links, disparate parts of the world. Ingrid Laguna’s middle-​grade novel Songbird (2019) likewise depicts a refugee child, Jamila Hussain, whose movement from Iraq to Melbourne, Australia is not without its challenges but also enables the eventual reconstitution of family and a sense of belonging in a new, and radically different, country. In this example, the Songbird, or Mutraba, a term that Jamila’s friend Mina in Baghdad gave to her before their separation, provides a similar metaphor from the natural world that links the child protagonist with her homeland and symbolizes her capacity to prosper in her new home. The novel begins with Jamila; her Mama, Safir, who speaks limited English; and her infant brother, Amir, struggling to adjust to life in Australia without Jamila’s father, a journalist who has not yet been able to leave the country. The reader is positioned to understand the two worlds Jamila must negotiate: her past in Iraq, which continues most visibly in her difficult home life, and her present in Australia, in which she struggles with schooling in English. While Jamila was an outstanding student in Iraq, she finds it difficult to communicate the full breadth of her thoughts in English. Early in the novel she carefully copies down the word “acrobat” in her dictionary booklet, then writes “its meaning in her own language,” which is then followed by Arabic script on the page (11). The unfamiliarity of the script for readers with no knowledge of Arabic encourages them to appreciate the unfamiliarity with which Jamila might view the English language. The primary barrier in the novel to the depiction of migrancy as an experience of fluid movement and hybridity is the splitting of the Hussain family, with Jamila’s Baba (father) still in hiding due to his prior imprisonment for his journalism, and unable to join his family in Australia. While A Different Pond uses water to evoke connection between places, Songbird deploys celestial bodies to mark physical separation: “The world was spinning slowly: Jamila had the sun, so Baba had the moon. As long as Jamila was in Australia and Baba was in Iraq, they would never both have the sun or the moon at the same time” (16). Never being in the same hemisphere as her husband is also depressing for Jamila’s formerly independent mother, who stops encouraging Jamila with her schoolwork and depends on her daughter to act as translator to shop for food and communicate with officials, such as the welfare office. Jamila’s diary entry from 20 August 2015 encapsulates the ways in which they feel out of place:

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I wish we could shop at the bazaar like we used to. Maybe then Mama would smile again. This is not our home. I miss walking the alleys of clucking chickens with Mama and Baba, and Amir on Baba’s shoulders. I want to smell the spices and see the watermelons stacked in a pyramid and fish laid out in rows. I want to hear my language everywhere, like music around me. (26) The solution that Jamila finds is to pursue her love for singing, to once again be a Songbird. After auditioning for a school concert, she eventually sings her own composition “My Faraway,” with her close Australian friend Eva providing harmonies. While Jamila disobeys her mother by performing at the concert rather than traveling to the airport to greet a relative (who, it turns out, is also traveling with her father), the family is soon united and able to find happiness and a sense of the familiar in Melbourne. The novel closes with the description of a Saturday morning trip to the Preston Market, at which the family and Eva shop for fruit and vegetables to make a feast, and share knafeh (“sweet cheese pastry with crushed pistachios soaked in sugar syrup”) (164). Here Jamila learns that Mina’s family has also applied for visas, and she excitedly plans to show Eva how to make tashreeb dajaj (chicken stew), signaling her lasting bond with her Iraqi friend and her desire to share her culture with her new Australian friend. Jamila does not neatly fit into the “I’m Australian too” category as in Fox’s picturebook; rather, her narrative shows how familial happiness can transcend the national, by figuring togetherness as the most important aspect of contentment. Both A Different Pond and Songbird celebrate a transnational orientation that celebrates both cultures that the protagonists must learn to negotiate.

Transnational Identities In the final section of this chapter, we turn to two texts that focus on the “doubleness” of transnational identities and how they are negotiated “between and across cultures and languages” (Bradford 24, 23). In Meenal Patel’s author note in her picturebook Priya Dreams of Marigolds and Masala (2019), she writes of her heritage and reflects on a visit to India from her home in the United States, where she was born and raised. She was “struck by how [India] was both foreign and familiar to me. Many things that were a part of my childhood home growing up felt so different from others in the United States but turned out to be so common in India.” The dislocation of living in a minority culture is also evident in Saadia Faruqi’s author note in the novel A Thousand Questions (2020), in which she describes her love for Karachi before emigrating to the United States in her early twenties. On her return to Karachi with her American-​born children to visit their grandmother, she witnessed “their attraction to the motherland they’d never known, their repulsion toward the poverty around them, and their difficulty in communicating in a language they should know, but don’t” (303). Both authors have written books that respond to the emigration of family members to other places with different cultural norms. These authors embody one of the important fractures that Jay identifies about transitional literature: they have “experienced the kind of displacement and mobility characteristic of twentieth-​ and twenty-​first-​century life” (52). Their author notes articulate the “doubleness” of their transnational identities informed by their mobility between and across cultures and languages. Unlike the books discussed in the previous section, which focus on the migrant or refugee experience explicitly, the books in this section are set long after the period of emigration. Instead, they prompt us to consider how transnational literature “turns our attention to literary production in liminal spaces and border zones, to characters and stories marked by mobility, to texts that explore the experience of migrancy and the formation of new, hybrid identities” (Jay 53). Both texts discussed here reflect on the cultural dislocation prompted by emigration, but also on how identity can be simultaneously understood as part of –​and separate from –​“homes” in different nations. 384

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In Priya Dreams of Marigolds and Masala, the distance between India and the United States is seemingly unfathomable. The story begins with an opening spread depicting a modest gray house on a white background on the left, and white text on a gray background on the right. The main sources of color on both pages are a garland of marigolds under the house and a single marigold above the page of text, which explains that “This house is on a small street in a small city in the United States.” It could be any house anywhere in the country, but it is also the “only house on the street” with an Indian family, eating rotli for dinner, and an old woman in a sari who picks marigolds from the garden. From this quiet, contained opening spread, young Priya bursts onto the scene on the next page, pushing the door open and rushing to help her grandmother make rotli, all the while peppering her with questions about India. These interactions establish the transnationalism of the book, in which the intergenerational family simultaneously calls both the United States and India home. The family members inevitably assign different meanings to these connections, as Priya asks “What is India like?” and whether her grandmother misses her homeland. These questions reveal different perspectives, yet they are informed by transnational frameworks that “combine and blend elements from different cultures” and thereby “resist unitary readings which fail to take these diverse elements into account” (Bradford 31–​32). The Indian scenes depicted in the following spreads attempt to share the experience of India not only through the brighter, deeper color palette of the illustrations, but also through the grandmother’s response. Her description of India is focused on the senses: “The smell of roasted cumin and the masala… . that tickles your nose,” the “swish-​swish” of a sari, the “beep-​beep” of a tuk-​tuk, the feel of the hot sun and the “drenching monsoon rains,” and the taste of the steaming cup of cha. The first spread depicting India includes Priya and her grandmother in the bottom left corner with rough brush strokes suggesting the grandmother is painting a picture of India for her granddaughter. The subsequent pages no longer include the two protagonists, presumably because they have been imaginatively transported to India by the evocative descriptions. As they return to the present moment making dinner, the marigolds from India spill onto the page, indicating how the flowers –​and the potentiality of their seeds to grow in a new location –​have traveled with the grandmother to America. Her answer to Priya’s question about whether she misses India is telling: “Sometimes, yes. But then I remind myself that India is here in the marigolds from our garden” as well as being “with us in the things we do everyday.” The idea of India is found in ideas, beliefs, and cultural practices that are enacted in daily habits in the new country, where they can grow and flourish. These daily habits have transformative potential. As Clare Bradford explains, “the term ‘transnational’ is potentially more useful [than globalization] for enabling investigation into how children’s texts work across and between cultures” (27). In the picturebook, Priya’s schoolmates are shown to be interested in her cultural background. Early on she explains rotli to them, and later, when she starts making paper marigolds in art class, they join in to help. Importantly, she first tells them about the marigolds along with the masala and the sound of the tuk-​tuks. The schoolchildren’s decision to help is framed by their understanding of the marigolds’ cultural significance. They hang the garland of flowers in the doorway, to the grandmother’s joy, and she exclaims in large capital letters that “SHARING INDIA WITH OTHERS IS THE VERY BEST WAY TO CARRY IT WITH YOU.” The ideological underpinning of this message is explicitly transnational since sharing Indian values and beliefs enables the development of this American community. The final spread of the story echoes the opening one and emphasizes the geography of transnationalism. The right-​hand page contains a marigold at the top of an orange background with white text: “Halfway across the globe is a house on a small street in a small city in Gujarat, India.” This small house is specifically located, unlike the generic house in small-​town America found at the beginning, and it is “one of many houses” with a family eating rotli with a garland of bright orange marigolds, and an old woman who picks flowers from the garden. This concluding spread highlights the cultural continuity between Priya’s grandmother in her Gujarat community and the same figure 385

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in her home in America. Everyday actions and beliefs can be successfully relocated to another distant location, even if they require transformation (for instance, using paper flowers in the winter) to be effective. This book celebrates its transnationalism by showing American schoolchildren finding value and beauty in learning to help their friend do something meaningful for her grandmother. The complexities of transnational identity are more explicitly addressed in A Thousand Questions, a middle-​grade novel about eleven-​year-​old Mimi’s first trip to Pakistan to visit her grandparents. The longer form and older implied readership enable a more nuanced discussion of belonging. Mimi’s dislocation is most evident when she first arrives at the airport in her mother’s hometown of Karachi. She explains how “there are a million people around me, all talking faster than I can understand, and anyway they’re all talking in Urdu so I have only a vague idea of what they’re saying” (1). Her ability to communicate is an ongoing obstacle that reinforces her feeling of strangeness even as she soaks in the realities of the city. She can “smell so many things” (4), but unlike the fond memories of Priya’s grandmother, here none of the smells –​ garbage spoiling in the sun, sweat, and muddy shoes –​is positive. She is so surprised by the traffic that she exclaims, “My eyes are literally popping out of my head” (6). Yet the experience is also exciting: “It’s all so strange, but also cool and bright, an explosion of color so sharp it reaches inside me and draws out a little sigh” (6). The confronting sensory experiences of her arrival highlight the disorientation caused by her dual identity as both American and Pakistani, and the remainder of the novel depicts her attempts to figure out where she belongs. In many ways, Mimi is the quintessential American. Born in the United States, despite her father’s abandonment she has opportunities that far exceed those available to most people in Pakistan. This contrast is made explicit when she meets Sakina, a household servant and the cook’s daughter. The novel alternates between the perspectives of the two girls. Readers are introduced to Sakina as she rushes to join her father on their way to work. The family’s poverty is obvious in her matter-​of-​fact description of her mother washing their clothes in the courtyard sink “as the pipe sputters murky water” (10) and of how her family shares “one big bucket of water among us each day” (12). The neighborhood in which Sakina lives has only intermittent water, gas, and electricity, and later in the novel the family is unable to pay for a hospital visit or vital medicine for her father. The affordances of Mimi’s transnational identity enable her to recognize inequalities to which the rest of her family is oblivious. She “feels like the new girl in school” (60) as she tries to understand the realities of Sakina’s life, in which going to school is not an expectation for a servant girl. She challenges her mother about Sakina’s subordination, but her mother, while sympathetic, fails to act even on a limited scale. It is the transnational Mimi who precipitates change that enables Sakina to attend school, teaching her English so she can pass the admission test and encouraging her to explain her desire to learn to Mimi’s grandmother. At the same time, Mimi is also trying to figure out her relationship to Pakistan. Her ignorance about basic things –​ such as the taste of a fresh mango or the experience of riding in a rickshaw –​ make her feel like “a stranger in my own land” (127). This ignorance is explained by the fact that she is “new to this country” (107), yet it does not take long for America to feel “so far away” (132). A visit to the mausoleum of Qaid-​e-​Azam, the founder of Pakistan, offers Mimi an opportunity to learn about the country’s history and to feel a sense of belonging she has never felt before. She explains that “this place is growing on me” (138) because “everyone is the same brown, desi, Pakistani. [...] It feels familiar” (139). She does not stand out as a person of color in the way that she does in America. Mimi’s transnationalism enables her sense of belonging even as it allows her to question some of the class injustices experienced by children in Pakistan. She is “indignant” when some servant children are forced to give way to a group of schoolchildren because, Sakina explains, children who go to school are in “a better class” (140). Yet even as Mimi is upset about this reality, the focalization through Sakina demonstrates how tenuous the servant girl’s position may be. When she upsets Mimi,

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she is worried that her father might be fired or that Mimi will refuse to continue teaching her English. Mimi is simultaneously distanced from and also a part of the Pakistani upper class that has been buttressed by money and education. The strength of this novel as a transnational text is evident in how the two girls offer alternating perspectives. Faruqi gives each girl the chance to understand the other’s perspective, and together they learn new things about each other and themselves as their friendship develops. In this sense, the novel “unsettle[s]‌our habitual ways of thinking and reading by taking on the perspectives of others” (Bradford 32). Moreover, the reciprocity of this relationship enables them both to see the limitations, but also the benefits, of their circumstances.

Conclusion The works discussed in this chapter highlight the unfixity of both “trans” and “national” in children’s literature, featuring facets of the transnational experience through representations of indigeneity, refugees and migrants, and the diaspora. These texts all engage with conceptions of nationhood that are informed by ideas about home and belonging despite being characterized by mobility and its impacts. Children’s books from different countries demonstrate their transnational similarities, in which the connections between the old and the new nations are to be protected and shared. Only Fox’s I’m Australian Too deviates from the pattern because of its assimilationist agenda. The others reflect more complex and nuanced understandings of the connections between nations and between people that promote individuality while also encouraging commonality. Children’s literature has a special capacity to produce transnational texts. Authors of many of the books discussed here make conscious decisions to embed non-​English terms into their written texts and sometimes also include glossaries to facilitate transnational understanding. Transnational children’s texts also often embrace unconventional literary forms, such as the graphic novel and picturebook, in which the interrelationship of visual and verbal text works to elucidate the protagonists’ connections to diverse ideals, languages, and histories. Child protagonists –​also located in a transitional and temporary space with respect to age –​are similarly unfixed in their evolving identifications and sense of belonging. While adults may be more invested in upholding the ideals that underpin the nation, such as maintaining the racial order, the child characters we have discussed are depicted as readily capable of incorporating aspects of more than one culture, forging transnational identities, and even deliberately subverting national values and hierarchies.

Works Cited Bradford, Clare. “Children’s Literature in a Global Age: Transnational and Local Identities.” Barnboken, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 20–​34. Dudek, Debra. “Seeing the Human Face: Refugee and Asylum Seeker Narratives and an Ethics of Care in Recent Australian Picture Books.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 2018, pp. 363–​76. Faruqi, Saadia. A Thousand Questions. HarperCollins, 2020. Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 378–​95. Fox, Mem. I’m Australian Too. Scholastic, 2017. Hereaka, Whiti. Legacy. Huia Publishers, 2018. Herrington, John. Mission to Space. White Dog Press, 2016. Jay, Paul. Transnational Identities: The Basics. Taylor and Francis, 2021. Laguna, Ingrid. Songbird. Text Publishing, 2019. McKenna, Brenton E. Ubby’s Underdogs: The Legend of the Phoenix Dragon. Vol. 1, Magabala Books, 2011. —​—​—​. Ubby’s Underdogs: Return of the Dragons. Vol. 3, Magabala Books, 2019. Patel, Meenal. Priya Dreams of Marigolds and Masala. Beaver’s Pond Press, 2019. Phi, Bao, and Thi Bui. A Different Pond. Raintree, 2017.

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32 TRANSCULTURAL COMPARISON AS METHOD Korean and Hebrew Children’s Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century Dafna Zur and Rachel Dwight Feldman Introduction: Why Compare? Over the last few decades, comparative literary studies have won renewed attention amid debates over what literary studies can and should do. Comparison is not without its pitfalls; as Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman note, it can be accused of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism, and of being “a homogenizing process [...] that distorts the uniqueness of the objects being compared” (1). Such a process would be enacted if, for example, in comparing works from two literary traditions, one were taken as a normative model, casting the other as derivative and inferior.1 Another example would be if analysis resulted in effacement of differences so as to suggest that world literature has no markers of particularity, no traces of place. Such an approach has the potential to efface consideration of (trans)cultural difference. At the same time, we argue that comparison can be both ethical and productive. Again, to quote Felski and Friedman: Comparison is central to the analysis of world systems, transcontinental connections, and interculturalism, not only in the current phase of globalization but throughout human history. Moreover, comparison does not automatically authorize the perspective of those doing the comparing, but can also serve as a jolt to consciousness, igniting a destabilizing, even humbling, awareness of the limitedness and contingency of one’s own perspective. (2) It is the “jolt to consciousness” that this chapter is interested in, and the delivering of an “awareness of the limitedness and contingency” of nationally focused perspectives that we seek to provide (2). To this end, we consider the ways that transcultural comparison challenges a nationally bound view of literary works, a linear approach to literary influences, and the production of literary texts informed by Anglo-​ or Eurocentric universalism. Since transcultural comparison destabilizes the binaries of universal/​local, international/​regional, and univocal/​pluralistic or multivocal, we ask how it might also hold the potential to dismantle hegemonic tendencies that align with what African novelist Chinua Achebe has called the “self-​serving parochialism of Europe” (9).2 As a way of acknowledging the groundwork that anti-​and postcolonial scholarship has forged in drawing attention to the disruptive potential of transnational approaches, this chapter reflects upon DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-37

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the confluence of circumstances between Korean and Hebrew children’s literature produced in the early twentieth century by authors who operated within wholly separate religious, moral, literary, linguistic, and national traditions. We argue that it is amidst these clear markers of distinctiveness that we can best visualize the relational experiences that underlie the approaches of Korean and Hebrew authors, whose shared concerns about the child’s cultural importance are rooted in connected notions of struggle against the threat of erasure of cultural identity. And yet, such anxieties are not always apparent. Take, for example, “Leaf Boat” (1924) by Korean poet Pang Chŏnghwan and “Bird’s Nest” (1933) by Hebrew poet Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik.3 These poems were written within a decade of one another, for children, by poets with no knowledge of each other’s existence and in languages illegible to one another. “Leaf Boat” is in pre-​standardized vernacular Korean without Sinitic characters, and “Bird’s Nest” is in Hebrew with vowels, or niqud, to aid the novice reader. “Leaf Boat” takes the perspective of a child who, the previous evening, launched a boat made from a leaf with a paper sail and an insect on board. Then it rained, and now only the drenched paper remains. The child is concerned and asks where the boat has gone and why nothing is left but the sound of rain. The questions indicate her inability to connect rain’s destructive power with the delicate boat’s fate.4 Bialik’s “Bird’s Nest” is written in economical language. At only two words per line –​apart from the third to last line, the twist of the poem –​ the observing child is told that there is a bird’s nest in the tree, that it holds three eggs, and that tiny chicks sleep inside each egg. The antepenultimate line enjoins quiet to avoid waking the chicks. Whom is this interdiction aimed at? Is it a gentle reference to the mother bird, stirring in her nest? Or does it address the listening child? The child is offered a choice –​to be quietly inquisitive or risk upsetting the peaceful scene –​that speaks to her place in the natural world. Implicitly, the poem suggests that the child may want to consider joining the chicks in slumber.5 Structurally and thematically the two poems have much in common. Both take on a double perspective: the child reader, whom the texts lead on an immersive excursion into nature, and the adult writer, who speaks either for the child (“Leaf Boat”) or to the child (“Bird’s Nest”). The poems capture moments in which the child is asked to observe nature (“Bird’s Nest”) or to ponder its power (“Leaf Boat”) in a way that delivers an epiphany. In the Korean poem, the epiphany is that of the ephemerality of existence; beauty is precious because it is fleeting. In the Hebrew, the child is guided towards the recognition that life exists in spaces of vulnerability, and that this rhythmic revelation may have the added benefit of inducing sleep. Both poets played a central role in establishing children’s poetry in their national traditions. Both were deeply influenced by the global Romanticism6 that saw in nature a point of origin to which one was to return, and both believed the child to be a redemptive figure whose innocence could facilitate such a return by providing adults with spiritual qualities that they had lost. Both were inspired by a need to revive their national language and by doing so connect the intimate, inner world of children and the emotions they elicited to the rebirth of a nation that was either colonized (Korea) or not yet in existence (Israel). In the process, both looked to folktales for inspiration and turned to translation for new modes of storytelling. In that light, comparison seems intuitive. Still, why compare? Does it make sense to compare two texts from different parts of the world? What is the best way to go about such a comparison? In this chapter we argue that comparison across cultures and literary traditions is critical to appreciating how children’s culture has taken form across the globe and to understanding its shared concerns and divergent paths. We present here a productive method for approaching children’s texts: transcultural comparison. From the many comparative approaches available, this chapter engages with the one raised by Shu-​mei Shih in “Comparison as Relation” (2013). Shih asks: What is the best way to compare so as to respect difference, illuminate singularity, and yet bring out interconnectivity? How do we avoid 390

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implicit assumptions about normativity? Shih proposes studying texts “in a horizontal fashion across different geographical regions in terms of structures, simultaneities, and interrelations, as opposed to predominant studies of vertical continuities of national histories” (“Comparison” 82). In the model Shih provides, literatures from different places should be investigated based on, for example, shared forms, genres, and content (84). We find Shih’s goal inspiring: “not to arrive at the universal, but to arrive at interconnections” (86). Accordingly, this chapter proposes to follow transcultural comparison as method through five keywords. These keywords are by no means exhaustive, but they bring out both the singularity and the interconnectedness of each poet’s body of work. We seek to understand the following: How can we characterize global flows of children’s culture of the early twentieth century? What were poets most concerned with? What were their creative responses to these concerns? We insist that new light may be shed on the study of children’s literature through the application of transcultural comparison. We will return to a finer articulation of this argument in the conclusion.

Transculturality in Five Keywords Picking up on Shih’s call for “comparison as relation,” this study proceeds in a horizontal fashion by juxtaposing four writers: Pang Chŏnghwan (1899–​1931),7 H. N. Bialik (1873–​1934),8 Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890–​1957),9 and Leah Goldberg (1911–​70).10 These four were prose writers and poets, translators and publishers, educators and activists. They were also major intellectual figures and tastemakers.11 They were active in multiple fields, yet considered children’s literature the most important site for working out pressing issues. Their investment in children’s literature aligns with what Naomi Sokoloff calls an “artistic cross-​fertilization” between adult and children’s books, particularly in the context of linguistic revivalism (281). In comparing these writers, we seek to evaluate how transcultural Korean and Hebrew discourses illuminate youth literature’s status and quality at the turn of the twentieth century. Five keywords –​language, folktales, translation, nation, and children –​highlight shared areas of concern in light of the shifting political and aesthetic trends of the early twentieth century. When read comparatively, each keyword becomes a marker that helps us re-​envision the influences of forced migration, imperialism, and colonialism upon Korean and Hebrew children’s literature in the early twentieth century. These five keywords showcase how the selected authors intervened in children’s literature and culture, and testify to transcultural, global developments.

Language Linguistic revivalism was a major concern for both Korean and Hebrew writers. Turn-​of-​the-​century Korea witnessed heated debates over the perceived disunity of the spoken and written language, or ŏnmun ilch’i. While the Korean alphabet hang’ŭl had been invented in 1446, the elite continued to use literary Sinitic for official writing, which was a highly cumbersome method of representing the Korean language, one that favored the (mostly male) educated elite.12 Children were primary targets of language reform, since intellectuals prioritized the education of children (and their mothers) as a means of building a modern nation. Ch’oe and Pang led the demand for such change through experimentation with new forms of expression. Ch’oe, who penned what is considered Korea’s first modern poem, “Hae egesŏ sonyŏn ege” (From the Sea to the Youth), also translated folktales for young readers (Zur, Futures 40). Ch’oe used in his translations the polite verb ending (-​ssŭmnita) normally reserved for exchanges between adults of elevated or equal status (Zur, Futures 81).13 Pang, too, believed that Korean society needed to shift the perception of young people and of written and spoken language for children. He called on authors to write about children’s experiences in a grounded language that would bring them joy (see

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Pang, “Tongyo”; Zur, Futures 92). In translating the Grimms’ tales, for example, Pang did three things. First, he deployed vernacular Korean expressions rather than words of Sinitic origin: the princess sobs (hulchŏk hulchŏk), the wolf snores (k’urŭrŭng k’urŭrŭng), the kids squirm in his belly (mungk’ul mungk’ul and pulluk pulluk). Second, he used rhythmic repetition such as kiptŭi kip’ŭn (deep) and kuch’ahadŭi kuch’ahan (pathetic). Third, he used long dashes (—​) to draw out vowels and mimic oratorical emphasis: chok—​koman (small), nu—​rŏn (yellow), and ha—​yŏn (white). For Pang, language was key to producing change in children’s emotional states. He and other poets bonded with composers to write sung poems (tongyo) that became the primary vehicles for channeling Korean idioms and structuring modern emotion (Hwang and Zur). Bialik’s most productive period coincided with the Hebrew Revival Period (1882–​1923). Like the ŏnmun ilchi movement in Korea and Japan, the Revival Period was concerned with creating a radically new idiom. Bialik looked to models from Yiddish and Hebrew folklore, as well as traditional Hebrew texts, in order to infuse ancient syllabic stresses with new forms of pronunciation. Two poems exemplify this thematic and linguistic shift. The first, “El ha-​Tzipor” (1891), contains at its center the image of a migratory figure that returns to its European nest after flying south to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) for the winter, a journey that the poet would not take himself until 1907 (Bialik, Tzipor). In “Ken la-​Tzipor” (1933), or “Bird’s Nest,” referenced above, wonder resides in that which remains untested; the speaker implies that the child will soon learn the secrets held within the eggs. In both, the bird evokes the sensory experience of a young reader’s engagement with modern Hebrew poetics. Each poem is emblematic of the transition towards a new, contemporary accent. Further, while the first poem maintains the Ashkenazi Hebrew stress pattern of Yiddish, the second is composed in the “harsher, end-​stressed beat of Sefaradit [‘Iberian/​Middle Eastern Jewish’], or ‘Israeli’ Hebrew” –​what we now call modern Hebrew” (Carmi 41). The poems act as bookends for the shift from the “old” Ashkenazi accent to “new-​accent” poetry, which was at first only published for the very young (Rubin 62–​83).14 Goldberg belonged to the generation of modernist émigrés from the Palestinian Period (1920–​47) who assumed the daunting task of creating a Hebrew literary culture that would invite children’s linguistic innovations. In her poem “Metzi’a” (Discovery, 1949) a child’s claim to have discovered “a piece of the sky” within a puddle demonstrates the originality and wonder that she saw in children’s expression (qtd. in Darr, Nation 125). For Goldberg, whose prose and picturebooks portray children’s language as lyrical and exploratory, the child’s voice was most powerful in its dexterity: the skills of “infant tongues”15 had tremendous potential for nation-​building. All four writers were inspired by the idea of a modern, national language that reflected and prescribed new forms of belonging. Ch’oe and Pang played with vernacular hangŭl expressions and developed generic forms to approximate what they considered authentic emotion and experience. Bialik and Goldberg explored language’s potential to push against constraints of traditional texts and sources. For all four, the natural world was a particularly productive site in which to explore new values. Above all, the task of inventing, and not merely reflecting, the child’s voice became the opportunity to create a modern, “native” idiom.

Folktales Each of these writers turned to folktales as a means of developing their literary and linguistic philosophies. Ch’oe and Pang translated foreign folktales and rewrote Korean ones. In 1913, Ch’oe encouraged young readers to find and transcribe stories passed down orally in their circles: Everyone can agree that the stories of old were not only extremely entertaining but were also valuable for their educational value, and therefore we should lose no time in collecting these

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stories. [...] I propose that we work with you, dear readers, to collect these stories that are spread throughout our country in a manner that will be both rewarding and fun. This will be a long-​term project, and I will provide you with some direction. Please transcribe [them] and I will provide more details in the next issue. (qtd. in Zur, Futures 82) These guidelines convey the enlightenment principles of Ch’oe’s time –​ that traditional storytelling forms be vehicles for modern content. Pang saw folktales as critical to the preservation of Korea’s colonized voice. In 1922, Pang announced his own call for folktales: We must gather our strength and uncover tales that have been buried in every corner of the land for the sake of the revival of children’s literature, which is the source of our people’s spiritual character. It is for this purpose [...] that I propose and announce this collection contest. (qtd. in Zur, Futures 84) Pang believed that Korean people’s ignorance of their storytelling traditions was emblematic of the nation’s backwardness and the reason for its loss of sovereignty. The task of translating and collecting tales, begun by Ch’oe a decade earlier, was therefore part of a struggle to preserve Korean identity by unlocking the potential hidden in the vernacular language. The preservation of a shared identity also motivated Bialik and Goldberg –​ both of whom were prolific translators –​to mine diverse oral sources, including folktales, for literary materials for children. Between 1908 and 1911, while still in Odessa, Bialik compiled an anthology of hundreds of tales in Sefer Ha-​Aggadah she be-​Talmud u-​ve-​Midrashim (The Book of Legends from Talmud and Midrash, 1936).16 In his essay “Halakhah and Aggadah” (1916), Bialik criticizes the hierarchical relationship between classical halakhah (Jewish religious law) and the more open discourses of folklore, and offers the reintegration of the aggadah as a model for modern Jewish literary culture: “Halakhah [...] is the dryness of prose, a formal and permanent style, the language of gray monochrome –​ the sovereignty of the mind; and [aggadah] is the lushness of poetry, a current and ever-​changing style, the language of rainbow polka-​dots –​the sovereignty of the heart.”17 For Bialik, the power of folklore lay in its reflection of the sublimated symbolism of Jewish religious law. From his distinctly modern perspective, folklore and law inextricably enhance one another; aggadah is not a replacement of halakhah but rather a manifestation of the creative, shifting, and enduring voice of the people. For Goldberg, too, the process of compiling oral folk materials was part of a struggle to preserve Jewish identity against violent anti-​Semitism. Amid reports of the atrocities coming out of Europe, Goldberg began to write melodic verse in the style of Slavic folk ballads18 in a collection entitled Shir ba-​Kefarim (Songs in the Villages, 1942). In poems such as “Yaldut” (Childhood), a nine-​part poem published in the adult Hebrew literary periodical Davar between 1935 and 1942, she returned to European folktales to articulate her feelings as a new immigrant. In the fifth installment, roughly translated as “The Mirror,” she provides a topsy-​turvy reflection of her childhood in Kovno, Lithuania, portrayed through literary references to European folk and fairy tales that she would go on to translate into Hebrew. “Childhood” speaks to the immigrant’s sense of place in flux: displaced from her story, the child narrator steps out of the page and into her new context as an act of self-​translation. The image of the displaced child became a central motif in Goldberg’s later works,19 whose figures include the “hidden child”20 Lena in Ba’alat Ha-​Armon (Lady of the Castle, 1954), as well as in her collaborations with photographer Anna Riwkin-​Brick as part of a project of exporting modern Hebrew children’s folk culture to a global audience.21

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All four poets turned to folktales as a means of breaking out of constraints –​of classical/​diasporic language, stifling tradition, religious morality –​ and explored the emancipatory possibilities of “folk” voices and symbols. Folktales provided these writers with a palette of archetypal characters and behaviors that could stand in for the local and global at the same time, and whose outlandish imaginings and anthropomorphism, often perceived as the purview of children’s literature, could give voice to human experience.

Translation Translation played a central role in the emergence of children’s literature in Korea and pre-​state Palestine. In Korea, pre-​twentieth-​century children’s culture had little in the way of dedicated reading materials outside of the Confucian primers in Sinitic script that were used to teach proper comportment and moral values. Ch’oe and Pang became inspired by the children’s culture they encountered as students in Japan: magazines, fiction, and translations by writers such as Iwaya Sazanami, Ogawa Mimei, and Suzuki Miekichi (Zur, Futures 59). As part of their effort to inject fresh content into their publishing endeavors, Ch’oe and Pang turned to translation to develop a written language for young readers (Zur, Futures 79–​82; 88). Ch’oe perceived translation as a path to a new writing style; he viewed the act of translation as practice in rewriting. In his essay on the domestication of foreign tales, Ch’oe notes: Stories are powerful and can enjoy longevity only when they are adapted to their national culture. Obviously, race and customs are different across geographical locations; they have their own mountains, streams, plants, and grass, as well as animals of the land and sea, so that when stories travel from one part of the world to another, they must be adapted. (qtd. in Zur, Futures 90–​91) Ch’oe believed in the superiority of modern, European knowledge (which drew him to translate the Grimms’ tales), but he also believed in the importance of creative translation that would adapt foreign content to its new environment (Zur, Futures 96). Many of his translations were closer to adaptations than to translations. Pang also engaged in folktale translation as a means of developing literary language for children. His collection of translated tales, Sarang ŭi sŏnmul, was one of the best-​selling books of its time. Pang’s Grimm translations used onomatopoeia and kept certain rhyme schemes as a way of retaining aural charm. By creating a vibrant voice that brought out nuances of character, description, and color, Pang helped to establish a genre that he hoped would revive Korea’s own storytelling and empower young readers (Zur, Futures 83, 94, 98). Modern Hebrew children’s literature similarly relied heavily upon translation in developing the nascent genre. Until the twentieth century Hebrew was primarily an ethnoreligious and liturgical heritage language, and Hebrew poetics was comprised primarily of devotional poetry, poetic liturgy, prose written in archaic biblical Hebrew, and midrash, a literature that interprets and elaborates upon biblical texts. With the turn of the twentieth century, influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah (1781–​1881), the interaction of Hebrew culture with the pan-​European movements of Romanticism, Formalism, Modernism, and Futurism, and the lifting of restrictions on Hebrew publishing, writers such as Bialik began adapting traditional Jewish narratives and translating works of world literature (Carmi 44–​45). From the age of thirteen, Bialik made use of his encyclopedic familiarity with Jewish literary sources to compose original works and produce translations of world literature alongside anthologies of Jewish folktales, fables, and biblical legends. Unlike his poetry and prose, which mostly targeted adults, the majority of his translations aimed at a mixed audience of adults and children. He focused 394

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on works that reflected the ruach Ivri (Hebrew spirit) –​ the spiritual sustenance that could act as a bridge between life in the Diaspora and life in the new culture forming in pre-​state Palestine (Rubin 65). In his view, translation would help lead Jewish culture out of Galut (exile) and transform Jews into pioneers. In her translation work, Goldberg sought to negotiate the affective demands on children and adults who were being “reborn” into Hebrew. She presented herself as a poet who straddled the misty forests of Lithuania and the Mediterranean shore (Back 14–​15; Carmi 46). Goldberg sought to diversify Hebrew’s literary landscapes by translating and adapting folk and fairy tales and works of world literature. Drawing on the Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, and One Thousand and One Nights, Goldberg’s work demonstrates an attentiveness to the imagination of child immigrants to Israel.22 For writers looking to create new content for a new audience, such as the writers profiled above, translation may not seem an obvious choice. After all, how could literature written in a foreign language and intended for a non-​native audience be mobilized for purposes of domestic, local revival and innovation? And yet, that four major pioneers of children’s literature in Korean and Hebrew engaged actively in translation demonstrates the extent to which translation functioned as re-​creation and exploration of language, form, and content.

Nation The dawn of the twentieth century brought massive geopolitical changes to the reformation of Korean and Hebrew as national languages. Korea was colonized by Japan in 1910 after decades of social unrest; rebellions led to reforms in 1896 that accomplished some social and political change, but Korea’s social and political precarities could not withstand the imperialist ambitions of a modernized Japan. Children’s literature emerged at the precise moment of loss of sovereignty, and this loss was a central preoccupation of Ch’oe and Pang. In a period in which culture and language were defined by nation, these writers grappled with the irony of having to write in the national language under conditions of censorship and assimilationalist policies. Ch’oe thought literature would transform Korea’s youth. He opened the first issue of the youth magazine Sonyŏn with this pronouncement: “Let us make our great nation into a nation of youth; in order to realize this goal, let us educate and reform our youth so that they may bear that responsibility” (qtd. in Zur, Futures 38–​39). To do so, youth had to be removed from the family and its distinctly unmodern ways through public education and modern curricula. Youth were perceived to be free from the yoke of the past, embodying Korea’s potential for a fresh start. Such narratives of progress were realized in Sonyŏn’s texts, illustrations, and photographs.23 Pang, for his part, was oriented towards values that he absorbed through Chŏndogyo, an indigenous Korean religion whose precepts demand respect for all people regardless of age. While Pang was attuned to the implications of colonization, his works were less politically engaged than Ch’oe’s. Instead, he was devoted to providing children the tools they needed to make sense of the world intellectually and, more important, emotionally. The magazine that Pang edited, Ŏrini, was driven by his mission to elicit empathy for Korea’s children by bringing to the page a world of experience more humanistic than national.24 Both Bialik and Goldberg viewed children’s literature as a revolutionary force that would play a vital role in the birth of a new nation. The State of Israel was officially founded on 14 May 1948, but Zionist writings explored a national identity in children’s genres at least a decade prior (Hertzberg). The adoption of Hebrew as a national language also cemented its status as the new “mother tongue” at the expense not just of Yiddish but also of the other tongues spoken by Jewish communities for millennia in the diaspora.25 395

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In their work for children, Bialik and Goldberg articulated the stakes around the new nation-​ state. Both recognized the critical importance of Shelilat ha-​Galut, or negating Diaspora, in defining national Zionism. However, for Bialik, Jewish cultural life in the Jewish State and in the Diaspora were not necessarily at odds. Bialik’s calls to record folklore of Eastern Europe alongside traditional Hebrew texts illustrates his resistance to the denunciation of Diasporic Jewish life. At the same time, he believed that the revival of Hebrew was the key to developing a national identity. In his words, “The soul language of a nation is the age of the nation itself. It is created with it; it is identified with it” (qtd. in Dinur 117–​18). Ironically, Bialik’s public persona as the “National Hebrew Poet” was formed by political factions within the Labor movement to which he was committed neither ideologically nor aesthetically. His status as “National Poet for Children” was consolidated only after his death and did not fully account for his vision of a transnational and secular modern Hebrew children’s literature for both the children of the Land of Israel and those of the Diaspora (Darr, Nation 45–​55). Goldberg did not engage in protracted debates over the geographical and linguistic boundaries of Hebrew literature even in her more ideologically oriented work.26 Instead, she interrogates language and identity centering on literary representations of pioneering children, particularly children raised on the early kibbutzim, or social collectivist agricultural settlements, in which children were removed from the traditional family unit. Although picturebooks such as Treisar Tzabarim (A Dozen Sabras, 1949) and Harpatka Ba-​Midbar (Adventure in the Desert, 1966) depict children who manifest traits of the sabra (“pioneering New Jew”), others such as Sar Ha-​Yeladim (The Minister of Children, 1949) and Dod Kosem (Mister Magic, 1959) articulate a universal world of dreams and wonder. In Ha-​Mefuzar Mi-​Kfar Azar (The Absent-​Minded Guy from Kfar Azar, 1943), the adult-​child hero is evocative of the racialized discourses surrounding immigrant Jews of Middle Eastern descent as well as Holocaust survivors. When the immigrant is transformed into a clown, how are children meant to respond? Goldberg’s picturebook demands of its young audience, and their adult interlocutors, a critical answer.27 The four writers penned national children’s literature at a time when the nation –​ a sovereign Korea, a Jewish State of Israel –​ was either nonexistent or precarious. For that reason, the task of writing in a national idiom had to be imagined and invented; there was no canon on which to lean. In the absence of nation, writers developed in their works for children an awareness of a nationally inflected interiority and affinity with the (national) natural world that furthered the connection between the sovereign body of the child and the nation.

Children As noted above, Ch’oe saw youth as the sindaehan sonyŏn, or “children of the new and great Korea.” Ch’oe’s essays, poetry, and translations reflected his anticipation that youth would be critical participants in their nation. In his writing for children and his editorial choices, Ch’oe demonstrated his belief that children were blank slates on which a modern canon could be inscribed (Zur, Futures 29–​46). For Pang, however, the keyword was tongsim, a combination of the Sinitic characters tong (child) and sim (heart/​mind). Pang wrote out of a conviction that children’s bodies and minds placed them on the threshold of culture. As such, they needed protection from the corrupting influences of the world and careful guidance into it through emotionally appropriate texts, images, and sounds. Pang explains in the essay “In Praise of the Child”: “Children sing with the lark when spring arrives, prance with the butterflies when the flowers bloom. [...] To them, all is happiness, all is love, all is genuine friendship” (qtd. in Zur, Futures 56–​57). At the core of tongsim is children’s affinity with nature. Their movements are described as inevitable as the spring bloom (Zur, “Literature” 455). He believed that children live almost outside of language, responding to the world with involuntary movement and primordial sound. 396

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It is little wonder that songs, or tongyo, became one of the most celebrated genres of Korean children’s literature. In tongyo, poets and composers merged language and music to create original tunes composed in a musical grammar that was both intimately local and recognizably global (Hwang and Zur 10). The first such poem appeared in 1923 with the title “Hyŏngjae pyŏl” (Star Brothers).28 It heralded a new era: first, the inclusion of Western notation indicated that this format was considered legible, and the practice of attaching music to words was now a common feature of children’s poetry. Second, “Hyŏngjae pyŏl” experimented with 3/​4 meter and leaned on vernacular Korean rather than Sinitic. Third, sung poems combined the Western seven-​tone scale with the five-​tone scale more common in East Asia. Tongyo were thus expressions of both local aesthetics and global sonorities (Hwang and Zur 16). The essays about children by Ch’oe, Pang, and their contemporaries give a comprehensive view of their conceptions of the child, and the literary and artistic manifestations of these visions in their fiction, poetry, and music demonstrate what they thought children should hear, read, and feel. Bialik and Goldberg viewed children as active participants in public discourse, whose tastes could be shaped by exposure to high-​quality literature. In this sense, to write for children was to cultivate their aesthetic and ideological education. While Bialik and Goldberg supported the Labor movement, their writing was in many ways antithetical to the party’s view of children as young revolutionaries. Bialik and Goldberg did not seek to enlist children into a political agenda, and instead worked to create a more liberated and egalitarian dialogue with them. One of the ways the writers accomplished this end was through their cultivation of child-​friendly literary personae: the honorary “uncle/​aunt” and the “friend of the child” (Darr, Doda). Bialik was portrayed as a paternal figure (Greenberg 300–​301; Glicksberg 24) whose compositions were gifts “to the children of Israel [...] From me, who loves you very, very much, H. N. Bialik” (qtd. in Darr, Nation 50).29 For him, the keyword was yaldei Yisrael, or “the children of Israel”: a transcultural, global group with a Jewish childhood grounded in classical Hebraic poetics. Bialik was preoccupied with kinnus and k’hillah, or the “ingathering” of fragmented Jewish culture from the many regions of the Diaspora, which included global diasporic landscapes as well as the Yishuv in pre-​state Palestine. Simultaneously, Bialik’s use of the phrase yaldei Yisrael evokes the phrase b’nei Yisrael,30 which is how the Hebrew Bible often refers to the entire people of Israel. In light of Bialik’s intimacy with classical Hebrew poetics and his love for children, his form of address is one of specificity; in rewriting the phrase to highlight the yaldei, or children, Bialik privileges them as his primary audience and creates poems that allow the child to play with Hebrew. Bialik’s poem “Parash (Rutz ben Susi)” (Rider: Run Little Horse) from his collaboration with Tom Seidmann-​Freud on Sefer Ha-​ Devarim (The Book of Things, 1922) portrays the child as part of the world at large and the world to come, a master of both, riding above and through them with the ease of an eagle and the power of an arrow.31 The poem was later simplified in collaboration with Nahum Nardi32 and adapted into a song for children. In “Beyn sofer yeladim le-​kor’av,” an essay in the periodical Davar Li-​Yeladim (Davar for Children), in which she sets criteria for writing for and about children, Goldberg declares: “The writer does not scream from every sentence: ‘I’m a child, I’m your friend,’ but dares to tell his little readers –​ I’m an adult who sees you, the children, as humans, little people, but having all human qualities, I respect you and tell you about yourself in complete earnestness” (6). In her literary critiques for children published in Davar Li-​Yeladim, Goldberg, like Bialik, adopts the role of an aunt. “Aunt Leah” converses with a fictional child-​protagonist, “Miriam,” who is the one reading the texts and relaying her impression to her “aunt”; in this way, Miriam is the real literary critic (Goldberg, “Beyn” 77–​79). Goldberg, like “Aunt Leah,” is also presenting the reader with children’s advanced capabilities. Her picturebook Ma osot ha-​ayalot? (What Do the Deer Do?, 1949) reflects on the poetic quality of infants’ earliest articulations. Similarly, Goldberg admired the older preschool child’s “spontaneously created childish poetic expressions” (Darr, Doda 130–​31). By placing value upon expressions of the 397

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child’s inherent innocence and unmediated creativity, Goldberg offers readers the image of even the youngest child’s natural proclivities as potentially radical. Children’s literature is written by an age-​defined group of adults who have access to the world’s intellectual and emotional content on behalf of an age-​defined group called “children,” who are perceived as lacking that access. Literature for children, then, captures not only the adult author’s poetic vision but also the way the child is conceptualized. The significance of the child as a transcultural trope –​ standing for the innocent, the natural, the native –​produces a vision of the child and children’s literature as creations of adult discourse. In comparing constructions of the child in Korean and Hebrew literature, we see representations of children whose voices are disruptive, visionary, and valued.

Conclusion Transcultural comparison sheds new light on global flows of culture and on the shared concerns and responses of contemporaneous writers to these concerns. Specifically, transcultural comparison of twentieth-​century Korean and Hebrew children’s writers underscores the ways that children’s literature was a force of sociocultural revivalism in the wake of colonial and imperialist oppression. Korean poets contended with maintaining their cultural identity under Japanese rule; Hebrew authors wrote in the wake of the British annexation and partition of Mandatory Palestine, the Russian Revolution, and the outbreak of two world wars, which threatened the existence of the Jewish people and their language. Linguistic revivalism, explored through processes of translation, the establishment of publishing centers, and the production of children’s literature, helped develop distinct cultural and national identities for children and generated new cultural materials amid massive sociopolitical shifts. By juxtaposing Korean and Hebrew writers, we refuse to take one set of authors as the model and the other as its derivative. We also push against insular study that considers only local or regional contexts. Instead, we point to global currents in which our writers were immersed and the generic forms that they grappled with to address the day’s pressing questions. What our comparisons show is not that the solutions followed a predictable arc –​an argument that may lead to claims of canonicity and authenticity, origin and imitation. Instead, we draw attention to the fascinating problems that these writers shared once children became important, and once childhood became something to be celebrated and protected.

Notes 1 Friedman warns that bad comparison “presumes a normative standard of measure by which the other is known and often judged” (34). 2 Achebe highlights the inequities inherent in using the term universal in comparative discussions of non-​ Western literary traditions, wherein the Western perspective is used as a neutral standard and other traditions are read as strange (9). 3 This article follows McCune Reischauer romanization for Korean names and words. The romanization of Bialik’s name has multiple spelling permutations including Haim Nahmun Bialik, Chaim Nachmun Biyalik, and Hayyim Nahmun Biyalik. 4 For a full translation of “Leaf Boat” (1924) by Pang Chŏnghwan, see Zur, Futures 47. 5 A historical recording of “Bird’s Nest” (1933) by Bialik that brings out the lullaby character of the music can be heard here: www.nli.org.il/​en/​items/​NNL_​MU​SIC_​AL00​3753​372/​NLI. 6 The Romantic movement in Europe put imagination and fantasy ahead of reason, in a reaction against the rationalistic mindset of the late Renaissance and Enlightenment. Romantic literature for children prompted the transformation of ideas about children and childhood and encouraged the production of a new kind of material culture for children. For the influence of the global Romantic movement on children’s literature in Asia, see Zur, Futures; Ortabasi. 7 Pang was a promoter of children’s rights who sought to break with backward, musty, moralizing materials for children. He revolutionized Korean children’s literature by creating a magazine for young readers

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(Ŏrini), writing creative works and translating foreign literature into Korean, and establishing Children’s Day, a holiday that continues to be celebrated in South Korea. Bialik was the foremost Hebrew writer of his generation and Israel’s first “National Poet” for both adults and children. His linguistic and literary innovations to modern Hebrew poetics helped forge a new idiom. A contributor to Hebrew children’s periodicals worldwide, Bialik also helped found Hebrew presses that published children’s books and formulated critical essays concerning the ideologies and aesthetics of modern Hebrew children’s literature. Ch’oe was only fourteen when he went to study in Japan, eighteen when he established the youth magazine Sonyŏn, and twenty when Japan officially colonized Korea. As a student, Ch’oe was exposed to Japan’s thriving children’s culture and publishing scene. He then returned to Korea and laid the foundations for a vibrant Korean counterpart. Goldberg was a prolific author of picturebooks, comics, verse, prose, and plays for children. She sought to strike a balance between her generation’s ideological and apolitical factions in her writing and in the presses she managed. Alongside her work as artist and academic, her editorial work in children’s periodicals and a book series for children helped build a literary canon for a new Hebrew-​speaking generation in pre-​state Palestine and the State of Israel. The participation of prominent writers and artists in children’s literature is a global phenomenon often referred to as “dual audience,” “dual readerships,” or “double audiences,” where different levels of address can occur both simultaneously and in separate works. Ross King explains the situation in Korea as diglossia and digraphia: the H variety, or official written language, was hanmun, or Classical Chinese in its Korean guise, while the L variety, or spoken vernacular, was a series of related, unstandardized dialects of Korean, the most prestigious being that of the capital, Seoul; it was written in the native Korean script, called ŏnmun, or “vulgar script” (“Nationalism” 35). See also King, “ ‘Diglossia.’ ” At this time, the Enlightenment Club (Kyemyǒng Kurakpu) led a sociolinguistic campaign to use polite speech toward children. For example, in May 1921, members discussed how children’s use of polite language may inculcate mutual respect. For more, see Zur, Futures 81. Despite the importance of his work for Hebrew Revivalism, Bialik went on to call the intended Ashkenazi pronunciation of his Hebrew poems “distorted” when compared to the sounds of Hebrew spoken by children in pre-​state Palestine. For more, see Bialik, Igerot; Rubin 62–​83. Our use of the term “infant tongues” is informed by the work of Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff. Aggadah translates roughly to “lore” or “legend” but functions as an umbrella term referring to non-​legalistic biblical exegesis, parables, histories, proverbs, and folklore. The translation is Rachel Feldman’s. For a published English translation, see Bialik, “Halacha.” For more on Goldberg’s experimentation with melodic and symbolist modes in her wartime poetry, see Hever. For more on the image of the displaced child in Goldberg’s work for children, see Feldman. “Hidden child” refers to Jewish children who were hidden to protect them during the Holocaust (Anne Frank being the most famous example); some survived by hiding or living under disguised identities with their rescuers, others were found and deported to concentration camps. For more, see Anna Riwkin-​Brick’s Children of the World, a fifteen-​volume series published 1951–​71 and written in collaboration with celebrated female writers such as Astrid Lindgren. For more on the figure of the child immigrant in Goldberg, see Feldman. See particularly the discussion of Ch’oe’s poem “Boys at Sea” in Zur, Futures 40–​46. See the expanded discussion in Zur, Futures 47–​74. Building a new nation of linguistically and culturally diverse Jews whose children would grow up speaking Hebrew instead of the languages of their parents also meant that writers had to obfuscate aspects of their non-​Hebrew cultural heritage. In this sense, the Israeli case is distinct due to the negative emphasis put upon Jewish life in the Diaspora. As Yael Darr has noted: “In the Zionist case, the ‘old’ had to be ‘ancient’ (that is, before [...] 70 C E ) in order to serve as an acceptable cultural heritage” (Nation 72). In modern Hebrew children’s periodicals, the ideological efforts of the Labor movement coalesced with those of educators interested in reforming the traditional cheder models. Together, their goal was to commission high-​quality children’s literature in order to begin a new Hebrew literary canon that would serve the Labor party. Under Goldberg’s editorial direction, Davar li-​Yeladim (Davar for Children) and Shai Mishmar li-​Yeladim (A Gift for Children “on Guard”) published a variety of literature for children that oscillated between being overtly political and apolitical. For more, see Darr, Nation 27–​44. For more on the conflation of the immigrant and the clown, or fool, see Feldman.

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Dafna Zur and Rachel Dwight Feldman 28 In Ŏrini, vol. 1, no. 8 (1923), p. 6, the poem is attributed to Chŏng Sunch’ŏl, but it appeared first in the women’s magazine Sinyŏsŏng in September 1922 with Pang credited as the poet and Narita Tamezō as composer. Wŏn Chongch’an writes that scholars have yet to recover the Japanese original, so it remains unclear who actually wrote and composed this song (156–​57). 29 This quote comes from Bialik’s sixtieth birthday, 13 January 1933, which was celebrated with the publishing of a jubilee edition of the Hebrew children’s periodical Musaf li-​Yeladim in his honor. 30 In biblical Hebrew, b’nei, the plural genitive form of banim, “sons,” and its singular form ben, “son,” often does not refer to male children in the reproductive sense; instead, its function is relational. 31 For more on Bialik’s collaboration with Tom Seidmann-​Freud, see Feldman. 32 For more on Bialik’s work with Nardi and his partner Brakha Tzefira, see “Nahum Nardi.”

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. Heinemann, 1975. Back, Rachel Tzvia. Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama. The Toby Press, 2005. Bialik, Haim Nahmun. “Halacha and Aggadah.” Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays, translated by Leon Simon, Ibis Editions, 2000, pp. 45–​87. —​—​—​. Igerot C. N. Bialik [Bialik’s Letters]. Vol. 1, edited by F. Lachower, Dvir, 1937. —​—​—​. Ken La-​Tzipor [A Nest for the Bird: Poems and Songs for Children]. Carmel, 2007. —​—​—​. Parash: Rutz Ben-​Susi [Rider: Run, Little Horse]. Dvir, 2003. —​—​—​. Sefer Ha-​Aggadah she be-​Talmud u-​ve-​Mudrashem [The Book of Legends from Talmud and Midrash]. Edited by H. N. Bialik and Y. H. Ravnits, Dvir, 1936. Carmi, T., ed. and trans. The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. Penguin, 1981. Chongch’an, Wŏn. “Chosŏnŏ tongyo wa olbonŏ ch’angga u ̆i taegyŏl” [A Comparison of Sung Poems in Korean and in Japanese]. Ch’angbi ŏrini, vol. 13, no. 1, March 2015, pp. 156–​74. Darr, Yael. Doda Shel Shum Ish [Nobody’s Aunt: Classics of Hebrew Literature]. Am Oved, 2014. —​—​—​. The Nation and the Child: Nation Building in Hebrew Children’s Literature, 1930–​1970. John Benjamins, 2018. Dinur, Ben-​Tsiyon. “Bialik on the Council of ‘Mefitse Haskalah.’” Keneset, vol. 1, 1936, pp. 117–​18. Feldman, Rachel Dwight. The Mother Tongues and Multilingual Specters of Modern Hebrew Children’s Literature. PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2023. Felski, Rita, and Susan S. Friedman. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Why Not Compare?” Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 34–​45. Glicksberg, Chaim. Bialik Yom Yom [Bialik in Daily Life]. Ha-​Kibbutz Ha-​Meuchad, 1945. Goldberg, Leah. Lady of the Castle: A Dramatic Episode in Three Acts [Ba’alat Ha-​Armon, 1954]. Translated by T. Carmi, Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1974. —​—​—​. Beyn sofer yeladim le-​kor’av: ma’amarim be-​sifrut yeladim [Between a Children’s Books Writer and His Readers]. Edited by Leah Hovav. Sifriat Poalim, 1977. —​—​—​. Yaldut [Childhood], Davar, 1935–​1941. Goodenough, Elizabeth, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff, eds. Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Wayne State University Press, 1994. Greenberg, Hayim. “A Day with Bialik.” Hayim Greenberg Anthology, edited by M. Syrkin, Wayne State University Press, 1968. Hertzberg, Arthur. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Doubleday and Herzl Press, 1986. Hever, Hannan. Suddenly, the Sight of War: Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s. Stanford University Press, 2016. Hwang, Yoon Joo, and Dafna Zur. “When Songs Don’t Work: Western Tonalities and Korean Breath in Children’s Songs of the Colonial Period.” Korean Studies, vol. 46, 2022, pp. 8–​42. King, Ross. “Ditching ‘Diglossia’: Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-​Modern Korea.” Sunggyun Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–​19. —​—​—​. “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea: The Questione della Lingua in Precolonial Korea.” Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity, edited by Timothy Tangherlini and Hyung-​il Pai, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 33–​72. “Nahum Nardi: Composer, Arranger, and Pianist (1901–​1977).” Jewish Music Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2014, https://​jew​ish-​music.huji.ac.il/​cont​ent/​nahum-​nardi, accessed 13 January 2023.

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Transcultural Comparison as Method Ortabasi, Melek. “World Children’s Literature.” The Cambridge History of World Literature, edited by Debjani Ganguly, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 668–​90. Pang, Chŏnghwan. “Namunip pae” [Leaf Boat]. Ŏrini, vol. 2, no. 6, 1924, p. 1. —​—​—​. “Tongyo chinnŭn iege” [For Those Thinking of Writing Children’s Songs]. Tonga ilbo, 1 January 1925. Rubin, Adam. “Hebrew Folklore and the Problem of Exile.” Modern Judaism, vol. 25, no. 1, 2005, pp. 62–​83. Shih, Shu-​mei. “Comparison as Relation.” Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Edited by Rita Felski and Susan S. Friedman, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 79–​98. —​—​—​. “Race and Relation: The Global Sixties in the South of the South.” Comparative Literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 2016, pp. 141–​54. Sokoloff, Naomi. “From Shir hashirim to Sir hasirim: Hebrew Children’s Literature and Its Critics.” Prooftexts, vol. 12, no. 3, September 1992, pp. 276–​89. Zur, Dafna. “Children’s Literature in South and North Korea.” The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, edited by Heekyoung Cho, Routledge, 2022, pp. 453–​67. —​—​—​. Figuring Korean Futures: Children’s Literature in Modern Korea. Stanford University Press, 2017.

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33 MARKETING AND FRANCHISING Naomi Hamer

Introduction Throughout the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, the commercial practices of marketing and franchising have become the central tenets of mainstream media production for young people by multinational corporations such as Disney, Nickelodeon, and Time Warner. In turn, these practices have influenced children’s book publishing on a global scale. The majority of contemporary English-​language children’s books are designed, marketed, distributed, translated, and consumed as part of branded multimedia franchises that may include film adaptations, tie-​in merchandise, video games, and social media forums. However, while digital technologies offer new opportunities for the marketing and franchising of children’s texts, the history of children’s literature has intersected in nuanced ways with children’s material and commercial cultures since the eighteenth century. This chapter maps the influence of marketing and franchising in the history of children’s literature and culture with examples from a variety of linguistic and national contexts, highlighting the expansion of these practices from the transnational distribution of merchandise to the consumption of branded experiences at tourist sites and theme parks. The chapter further addresses character branding and licensing, transmedia storytelling, and social media marketing with reference to scholarly work focused on commercial practices in the production and consumption of children’s literature.

Intersecting Histories of Children’s Literature and Commercial Cultures Robin Bernstein observes 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” (“Toys” 459). Moreover, the practices of “marketing” and “franchising,” specifically, play ongoing roles in the commercialization of children’s book publishing and children’s material culture more broadly. The American Marketing Association website defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (“What Is Marketing”). Robert F. Lusch maps out the shifts in the definition of marketing in the American context towards “collaborative processes” rather than a focus on products for trade and consumption (265). Consequently, these shifts in the conceptualization and practices of marketing alongside the development of digital technologies and

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convergence cultures have influenced the ways children’s literature has been marketed over the last century. June Cummins observes that “marketing is as essential to the development and dissemination of children’s literature as technology was” (146). In terms of English-​language children’s book publishing, John Newbery is often identified as central to the development of children’s literary texts as marketable products, including the practices of product placement within the narratives and the sale of tie-​in toys sold with the book, such as the pincushion and ball targeted to gendered consumers and readers of A Little Pretty Pocket-​Book (1744). There are many examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of toy theatres, paper dolls, and other interactive hybrid texts such as movable books that relate to literary narratives such as Robinson Crusoe (O’Malley; Paul, Book; Reid-​Walsh). Small-​sized books such as Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–​79) predated Beatrix Potter in the design of books as interactive print media for young readers with small hands (Paul, “Learning” 133). The Victorian period continued to expand the marketable products connected to children’s literature through affiliated distinctive and collectible merchandise. The soft toy, board game, and dishware designed in conjunction with Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902); gift books such as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations (1906); and Mabel Lucie Atwell’s Peter Pan collectible postcards of the 1920s all indicate the blurring of toys and literary texts as marketable commodities prior to the advent of early twentieth-​century advertising, franchising, and licensing in children’s culture. The practice of marketing prize books for young people (a book given as an award by an educational or religious institution, often for attendance or other meritorious conduct) in Edwardian England may be traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (O’Hagan 72). In an examination of catalogs from six prize-​book publishing houses, Lauren O’Hagan argues: In the Edwardian era, mail-​order catalogues were a precursor of modern mass media. [...] Prize-​ book catalogues, specifically, used a product-​oriented and text-​based approach based on persuasive language, claims, stereotyping, style, appeal and values to transmit an ideology that perpetuated traditional gender roles and presented a world view that was synchronous with that of the target awarding institution. Through an astute blend of all of these factors, publishing houses were able to target specific educators and encourage them to invest in their books as opposed to others available on the market. (91) These catalogs exemplify a shift in the ways children’s books were marketed through visual design to represent character traits and development directed at particular readers and consumers. Many of the stereotypical images of gender and socioeconomic class in these catalogs were reinforced through character branding as a central marketing practice for children’s franchises in the periods that followed. While the modes of marketing have changed, book prizes –​ now rewarding the book rather than the reader –​continue to play a significant role in the twenty-​first century, particularly in the marketing and sale of children’s books to teachers and parents. The visual and tactile qualities of prize stickers on winning children’s books (for example, the Caldecott Award or Newbery Medal stickers) function as semiotic signifiers of literary or artistic value for adult educators and in their role in children’s books as physical objects of design. Some book prizes recognize texts that may be perceived as valuable tools for social justice or historical testimony (for instance, Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; see Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth B. Kidd’s chapter in this volume). These texts carry moral or social weight in the same way that, as O’Hagan describes, moral or social values of prize texts were marketed to adult consumers in the Edwardian period (O’Hagan).

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Character Branding and Licensing Contemporary marketing of children’s literature is often closely linked to the practices of branding and licensing within a franchise system. Thomas S. Dicke discusses “modern franchising” in the American context as a method of organization that combines large and small business into a single administrative unit. In a franchise system one large firm, often called the parent company, grants or sells the right to distribute its products or use its trade name and processes to a number of smaller firms. (2) Early marketing and merchandising practices of children’s books were significantly expanded through the practices of character branding and licensing, particularly for illustrated texts, following the Victorian period. In 1902, Peter Rabbit became the first licensed children’s book character through an agreement between Potter and Frederick Warne & Co. Not only do Potter’s books focus on the character branding of Peter Rabbit and others, but a signature branded format and design style is connected to Potter herself. The small format series contains “little books for little hands,” all printed and bound as small hardcover illustrated books with thick matte paper and watercolor plate images of woodland settings and animals. In her analysis of Peter Rabbit across multiple decades, Margaret Mackey traces the licensing and merchandising, examining Potter’s involvement in the early marketing and merchandizing of her series as well as the cross-​media franchising of the world from Royal Doulton collectibles to multiple television and film adaptations (“Communities,” Case). A number of illustrated texts and picturebooks establish a strong relationship between character licensing and the marketing and franchising of Anglo-​American children’s literature. Examples discussed by scholars include Johnny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann (1915; Bernstein, Innocence), Paddington Bear (1958; Clarkson), and the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise based on Wilbert Awdry’s 1945–​72 series (Mackey, “Communities”). A. A. Milne’s Winnie-​the-​Pooh was originally published in 1926, with merchandising rights purchased in the United States and Canada in 1930, followed by the Walt Disney Company ultimately acquiring the rights to the Pooh character in 1961. In many cases the popular film and television adaptations of characters in children’s literature texts become the known brand images of children’s literature characters, overshadowing the original characteristic illustration styles that gave the print texts their identifiable features. Avi Santo observes that the property licensor, Stephen Slesinger, “was the one who dressed up Pooh in his iconic red shirt in an effort to distinguish the character from other teddy bears on the market, a tactical marketing decision with decidedly creative and cultural impact” (8). Winnie-​the-​Pooh and other early illustrated children’s books led to the licensing and merchandising of picturebook characters (particularly those in a series) including Margret and H. A. Rey’s Curious George, Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar, and Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline. Many illustrators of children’s picturebooks simultaneously worked in advertising, comic art, animation, and/​or graphic design as well as in children’s book publishing, and these dual career experiences may have profoundly contributed to the ways children’s books have been marketed, illustrated, and designed since the Victorian period.

Mass-​Market Publishing and Franchising “The Little Golden Books” by Simon and Schuster were designed in a manner distinct from other picturebooks of their era, which were produced as isolated literary texts while the Little Golden Books were intentionally produced as a series with direct connections to popular children’s texts including films, television, and toys. In Golden Legacy: The Story of Golden Books (2007), Leonard Marcus maps the history of the Little Golden Books, which emerged from the invention of less costly printing technologies and the influence of television culture. Since the 1940s these texts primarily based on 404

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popular film, television, and comic books geared to young people have been distributed widely and sold in chain grocery and department stores alongside toys and other merchandise products rather than bookshops and educational publishing catalogs. Disney, Warner Brothers, Marvel, Mattel, and other multinational corporations have continued this trend of distributing cheaply produced illustrated books that primarily function as tie-​in texts to promote recent brand products while also constituting products in themselves. Even publishing houses with an educational market of teachers and schools, such as Scholastic, tend to sell popular franchise texts that rely on novelizations focused on character branding as well as a range of hybrid texts that may be defined as a combination of book-​game-​toy texts. These hybrid texts draw upon the marketing and design strategies from a range of children’s culture industries. The Klutz series of how-​to books covering a range of topics including crafts, hair braiding, and magic (1977–​present) often provides some of the required play items beyond the book itself. In Designing for Children: Marketing Design That Speaks to Kids, art director Mary Ellen Podgorski discusses her design for the brand, remarking, “Many publishers want their books to look well-​designed. Often, our approach is to make it look as though no designer ever came near the page. [...] We intentionally go for a potpourri look” (qtd. in Fishel 27). The targeted consumers of these texts seem to be young people, distinguishing the series from texts geared at parents who purchase books for their children. The mass-​market production of books themselves (beyond tie-​in merchandise) began with the Stratemeyer Syndicate in the United States and spread to other mass-​market publishers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, again with a target audience of young people as the books’ consumers rather than librarians, teachers, or parents. The Nancy Drew franchise exemplifies the early commercialization of series books aimed at young female readers. Inaugurated in 1930 and written by Stratemeyer ghostwriters under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, Nancy Drew is one of the most recognized book series for girls in the United States. The original series (1930–​2003; there are thirteen series in all, containing over 600 titles) popularized fiction that depicted fantasy-​infused adventures with female heroines. As Sherrie Inness has argued, the commercialization of series books at this time sets the stage for later developments in children’s book publishing in the context of mass-​market entertainment (Inness). Since the publication of the first Nancy Drew book, The Secret of the Old Clock, various adaptations and related merchandise have been developed, including feature films, a television series, a computer game, and most recently graphic novels. Nancy Drew provides a model for the content, design, and commercialization of contemporary tween books and their transmedia franchises. While the production and marketing of multiple platforms and products affiliated with series books has been a common practice in the history of children’s book publishing, this trend has radically expanded in the last two decades. Most twenty-​first-​century children’s publishers are situated as part of global media companies that have strong connections to the entertainment, food, and toy industries. Increasingly, these connections tend to influence the design and distribution of children’s books by rooting decision-​making in market trends rather than in artistic/​literary merit (Zipes 7–​8). Children’s books are often produced and marketed simultaneously by or in conjunction with media companies for television, film, mobile app, and video game platforms for cross-​media distribution. In many cases, the marketing tactics employed to target the tween niche in the realms of fashion, television, or music have been applied also to the marketing of books. The Mary-​Kate and Ashley Olsen series books exemplify the positioning of tween books as popular culture commodities. Originally child stars on the popular television sitcom Full House (1987–​95), in 1993 the Olsen sisters established Dualstar, a production company that expanded into a global transmedia franchise embracing DVDs, video games, books, clothing, accessories, fashion dolls, and beauty products. Mary-​Kate and Ashley have starred in a number of television and video series, including The Adventures of Mary-​Kate and Ashley (1994–​97), Two of a Kind (1998–​99), and so little time (2001–​2002). These television and video series all involve companion book series 405

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aimed at tween and younger girl readers, series books characterized by explicit marketing within the transmedia franchise. Like all Mary-​Kate and Ashley products from fragrances to feature films, the covers of these books are dominated by the photographic image of the girls as young, fashionable, attractive, wealthy, white, all-​American twin sisters. The books’ design presents a particular concept of American girlhood that pervades all aspects of the representation and composition. The branded tag-​line “Mary-​Kate and Ashley Olsen: real books for real girls” is revised and repeated across the transmedia franchise to describe each specialized product. The logo mary-​kateandashley echoes the idiom of the now defunct URL mary-​kateandashley.com, where many of the products were available for purchase in the early 2000s during the height of the franchise. Tween franchises such as the Olsens, Hannah Montana, and Lizzie McGuire in the late 1990s into the early 2000s (see Coulter) influenced adaptations of canonical children’s literature into film franchises during that time period –​for example, the 2005 Disney/​Walden Media adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and others in the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. The franchise produced character-​branded trends with focused development of the four Pevensie siblings as brand images that extend and are elaborated through the affiliated video game avatars, behind-​the-​ scenes texts, character-​focused collector books in cereal boxes, and other tie-​in merchandise. The digital fandom of videos and fanfiction around these texts functions to expand these character brands, further linking Lucy and Susan Pevensie to the tween girl coming-​of-​age narratives in popular culture and other Disney franchises such as The Princess Diaries and High School Musical (see Hamer, “Chronicles”).

Participatory and Critical Engagement with Children’s Franchise Texts Scholarly and journalistic work on the cross-​media franchising of children’s texts in the 1990s and early 2000s tended to focus on the role of marketing from the point of view of producers of young people’s cultures, often positioning children and young people as victims in the rise of a commercially dominated industry as opposed to active agents in meaning-​making (see, e.g., Buckingham; Quart; Kline; Lamb and Brown). In contrast, more recent scholarly work has tended to emphasize the role of young people as participatory consumers and players who negotiate meanings in texts and influence decision-​making through their playful engagement and fandom (Jenkins; Dyson; Buckingham and Sefton-​Green). Some cross-​disciplinary research, such as that by Meredith Bak and by Jackie Marsh and Elaine Millard, has focused on cross-​media play with the books and tie-​in texts that exemplifies the ways in which the commercial practices of marketing and franchising have developed more sophisticated and agentive meaning-​making and engagement with children’s literature, often through individualized play across modes, digital fan cultures, and social media networks; for an example of such research, see Angela Colvert’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of one small consumer’s playful interaction with portions of the PAW Patrol franchise. Contemporary adaptations of texts that have been transformed previously in different time periods invite active participation by the consumers of these texts and assume a repertoire of cross-​media knowledge of previous incarnations. In reference to the Tim Burton-​Disney adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Anna Kérchy observes the “peculiar interpretive position [that is] offered to spectators of the Burton-​Disney Alice adaptation who must [...] rely on their visual literacy as well as their sub-​conscious memory impressions to make an integral sense of the movie” (69). Similarly, the Series of Unfortunate Events book franchise challenges its readers and consumers to actively engage in a critique of children’s literature conventions, including the marketing of the author through the dual identities of Daniel Handler (the author) and Lemony Snicket (the alter ego fictional author). Kendra Magnusson argues, “Lemony Snicket is intimately intertwined with the series as a commodity: the alter ego enables Handler to negotiate the pressures of contemporary commodity culture and to express his ambivalence about the conventions of children’s 406

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literature” (96). Through marketing material, author readings, multiple tie-​in texts, and interviews with Handler himself, the transmedia world created is self-​reflexive and parodic at all levels of discourse, requiring the reader to engage at the level of critical consumer of the franchise.

Transmedia Storytelling, Fictional Storyworlds, and Immersive Experiences Many children’s literature scholars have drawn upon Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) to explore transmedia storytelling in their examinations of a range of children’s lit adaptations. Rooted in fandom studies and audience studies, Jenkins’s book defines the “transmedia story” as one that “unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (95–​96). His framework focuses on the creation of a transmedia world across multiple platforms and reflects an interest in media industry consolidation through synergy to understand a complex set of fictional worlds. Moreover, within a transmedia story, each new text may meaningfully extend, inform, or subvert the discourses of the narrative. This terminology around transmedia is often used interchangeably with “multiplatform” or “multimedia” or “multimodality” to account for all sorts of cross-​media adaptations and franchises. Marsha Kinder coined the term “transmedia intertextuality” to describe how brand characters are adapted across media in children’s media cultures at the levels of both production and consumption. Many children’s books have been adapted and franchised across media from apps to video games; some examples might illustrate something closer to Kinder’s 1991 definition of “transmedia intertextuality” (1), while others offer the contributions suggested by Jenkins in his work. Alastair Horne observes that [a]‌ttempts to launch franchises that are transmedial from conception are relatively new to publishing, which has tended historically to develop such properties either by licensing content from other channels […] or by extending into other media a property originating in print. (64) As discussed in this chapter, there are many examples of the successful franchising of children’s books across media forms and the creation of transmedia storyworlds more broadly prior to digital cultures and the dominance of multinational media conglomerates (see Freeman); however, as Horne notes, the Harry Potter franchise is often cited as the point in children’s book publishing at which the influence of transmedia storytelling on marketing and franchising practices took on new approaches and venues (64). While Rowling’s book series expanded into film adaptations and prequels, toys, plays, theme parks, computer games, and a range of merchandise, the development of the Pottermore website in 2012 presents “an unusual example of an author, rather than a publisher, maintaining control over a franchise originating in print. Crucial to any understanding of the site is the fact that, exceptionally for an author, Rowling retained the rights to publish the digital editions of the Harry Potter novels herself” (Horne 64). Pottermore (subsequently replaced by a new website, Wizarding World) offered a virtual experience of the Hogwarts world, as well as new stories and a venue to purchase ebooks. Inevitably, however, most children’s authors and smaller publishers do not have the sustained budgets to support direct sales of digital content and tend to partner with media conglomerates. Matthew Freeman explores how “marketing agencies alongside leisure and tourism developers are focusing their attention on using transmediality as a way of creating and expanding their brand universes” (124). He examines the role of immersion in the transmedia story world through branded experiences such as the Warner Bros. Studio Tour London –​The Making of Harry Potter, arguing that “immersion concerns the engagement of audiences between and around media texts –​ it is simultaneously a paratextual and an all-​consuming practice” (125). Participatory practices within the transmedia franchise model have transformed the ways children’s book franchises are 407

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marketed and, as Max Giovagnoli puts it, “contribute to the creation of the true, tangible difference between the marketing mix used to tell a brand/​product, and transmedia used to embody and ‘become’ the brand/​product itself” (251). This transformation marks the movement from consumption and engagement with a range of franchise products to exploration and active participation within broader storyworlds. Transmedia practices of franchising may encompass both digital and virtual experiences such as Pottermore/​Wizarding World alongside expansion into immersive spaces such as theme parks and other tourist sites where franchise items may be marketed, purchased, and experienced. The now defunct Anne of Green Gables theme park Canadian World in Japan, as well as the museums and experiences directed at L. M. Montgomery and Anne fans in Prince Edward Island (see Bergstrom), exemplify some of these offers of engagement with transmedia worlds within immersive spaces. Often the fans visiting these sites are nostalgic adults with investment in these worlds across multiple sites and platforms, from the geographical sites of inspiration mapped out in Montgomery’s work such as “The White Way of Delight” to the multisensory consumption of raspberry cordial. In a recent five-​part podcast (The Moomin Phenomenon, Apple podcasts 2022), Jennifer Saunders hosts an exploration of the Moomin brand and the experiences of fans (primarily young adults) and their engagements and investments in a range of Moomin character merchandise and their embodied engagement from tattoos to global theme parks such as MoominWorld (Finland) and Moominvalley Park (Japan). Moomin franchise images and products have also been used and sold by Moomin Characters Inc. in partnership with charitable campaigns such as the Invisible Child Oxfam campaign in the United Kingdom (2017), the #OURSEA campaign, and the women’s strike protests in Poland (Dymel-​Trzebiatowska), illustrating the ways a franchise may market to and engage with various audiences of consumers attracted to the literary and artistic motifs and characters but also with a connection to the overarching values and philosophies of a transmedia world. Similar to the engagement offered to fans of Anne of Green Gables and Montgomery, the engagement with a mythic narrative of author Tove Jansson’s biography is an element of the immersive experience and a significant part of the transmedia worldbuilding. Story apps based on children’s book authors and series have the potential to extend the meanings of a particular print narrative or storyworld in expansive ways beyond tie-​in texts and toys. The My Very Hungry Caterpillar AR app (Storytoy 2017) employs augmented reality through the use of the camera on a mobile smartphone to bring the character from Eric Carle’s much-​loved picturebook (1969) into the reader/​player’s physical world, enabling users to feed and nurture their own caterpillar characters. This app, like other story apps developed as adaptations or part of broader franchises since 2010, may be seen as refashioning the print picturebook in a new media platform while also remediating design elements from film, comics, video games, and theatrical performance (Hamer, “Picturebooks”; Bolter and Grusin). This app may also be seen as a part of a broader transmedia world that encompasses Carle and Very Hungry Caterpillar tie-​in texts, toys, bedroom decor, and even the exhibits and gift items at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts. This venue, founded in 2002 by Carle and his wife, may be understood as a remediation in architectural form of the white space and colors of Carle’s art as well as a place to reinforce and appreciate the educational and aesthetic values of his work and children’s picturebooks as artistic objects through exhibits, programs, and products (Hamer, “Exhibits”). Award-​winning artist Oliver Jeffers has cultivated a distinctive illustrative style and color palette for his picturebooks that has been adapted into a multisensory immersive exhibit, “The Wonderful World of Oliver Jeffers,” at the Discover Children’s Story Centre in Stratford, London, England. His picturebook Heart in a Bottle (2012) has been remediated thoughtfully into an app with narration by Helena Bonham Carter and animated effects that profoundly extend the print text’s illustrated meditation on grief and loss. These immersive experiences have been expanded beyond the textual world to products that remediate the style and tone of Jeffers’s illustrations 408

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and story messages. In 2022, Jeffers produced a number of collectible limited-​edition slippers in partnership with Feit, a natural shoe company based in New York. The handcrafted slippers feature Jeffers’s illustrations and were shipped with a small limited-​edition companion miniature illustrated storybook entitled “All That We Need.” This combination of limited products indicates a nostalgia for the handcrafted materiality and design of distinctive children’s books as usable art objects alongside the handcrafted shoes. This product cost over $300 USD and was primarily marketed as a limited-​edition item through social media by Jeffers and Feit, exemplifying the use of social media as a marketing strategy to cultivate a direct connection to the author and his values of sustainability and focused enriching experiences. Digital cultures and mobile technologies have increasingly become key modes for engagement with and extension of fairy tale narratives for young audiences, while a range of virtual and material texts through “transmedia storytelling” provide the potential to negotiate and subvert the central discourses of canonical texts that have been adapted across old and new media forms (Jenkins). The image of the mermaid presents a wide-​ranging and long-​running cross-​media case study of how transmedia storytelling may offer opportunities for disruptive play and the potential for reimagining queer and nonbinary gender identities and experiences rooted in children’s literature and its filmic adaptations. Nevertheless, the ubiquity of Disney’s animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Mermaid” across tie-​in picturebooks, affiliated products, apps, and digital fandom often results in the privileging of heteronormative paradigms and dominant discourses of gender, race, ability, and sexuality in cross-​media narratives related to the figure of the mermaid. The affordances of cross-​media texts across material and digital spaces invite participatory and embodied play for the youngest of players. Nat Hurley sees the reception of “The Mermaid” by trans young people as a case of “rogue circulation [...] the productive circulation of a text or artifact in unpredictable or unexpected ways” (260), “opening up new sites of cultural identification that mobilize some aspects of Andersen’s tale while leaving some of its complications behind” (262). Some of those complications involve an avoidance or omission of the suffering and pain that the mermaid must endure. Bak explores how a toy related to Disney’s Little Mermaid Prince Eric’s Castle Play Set illustrates the possibility that a tie-​in text can unintentionally disrupt dominant meanings in a children’s literature text or in the franchise adaptation itself: Upon the toy’s release, a string of customer complaints flagged the play set’s flimsiness and, in particular, the tendency for Ariel’s legs to almost immediately snap off her body. [...] That the character’s legs –​which bear enormous thematic significance within the narrative –​are so indifferently rendered in plastic as to break suggests a disconnect between the story as narrative and its embodiment within material culture. The toy, meant to enable children to play out the story’s happy ending, undercuts rather than facilitates the opportunity for this narrative to emerge, requiring the child to adapt accordingly. (332) Various tie-​in texts and fan cultures more intentionally offer extensions and sometimes interruptions of the dominant discourses of identity –​ often of gender and sexuality rooted in the earlier texts through fanfiction, fan cultures, and video game play. This point is illustrated in work on Harry Potter slash fanfictions by Catherine Tosenberger, discourses in popular media and fandom around #BlackHermione, and examples of intersectional fandom such as Thomas Xavier Sarmiento’s exploration of Glee and queer Filipina/​o American identity or Tison Pugh’s queer reading of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda video games. However, the most potential for digital media cultures seems to be harnessed by adolescent and young adult participants, or at least those with access and ability to use the tools of user-​generated material and social media with less surveillance than children typically experience. 409

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Social Media, Independent Publishers, and Marketing Social media has become a key venue for promotion and marketing of children’s texts. Although most children’s authors do not have the marketing or direct-​sale power of Rowling with Pottermore and other products, many contemporary authors use Instagram and Twitter distinct from their publisher sites to actively engage with their adult and child readers to promote new books, speaking/​performance tours, affiliated products, and exhibits at museums. While authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often went on book-​signing tours to schools, bookstores, and public libraries, social media offers a seemingly intimate relationship that establishes a more sustained dynamic between authors and readers. Children’s authors such as American teen novelist John Green have established a fandom of devoted viewers in the last decade by using new digital technologies such as vlogs to promote texts but also to engage with fans through live dialogue or weekly/​monthly reports. During the COVID-​19 pandemic, this type of active engagement with fans took the form of live social media storytime readings, sometimes coordinated by children’s museums or publishers but also by individual authors such as picturebook author/​illustrator Mo Willems (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus [2003]), who became extremely popular with his daily “Lunch Doodles” sessions on the Kennedy Center’s website and YouTube channel (“Lunch Doodles”). Many independent smaller children’s book publishers and presses have also used social media and digital fundraising campaign websites such as Kickstarter or Gofundme to complete small print runs of books that could not be published by mainstream children’s publishing houses, or at least not with the same degree of flexibility around content and editorial processes. Digital marketing and online communication are often the primary methods of marketing. Consider Flamingo Rampant, a Canadian micropress. Founded in 2012 by S. Bear Bergman and j. wallace skelton through a successful social media fundraising campaign, Flamingo Rampant provides picturebooks that move away from the stories of bullying and harassment of queer young people and their families dominant in mainstream publishers and entertainment media to produce “feminist, racially diverse, LGBTQ positive children’s books” (Flamingo Rampant website). The founders of Flamingo Rampant distinguish their books from “insipid books whose proud ‘message’ was that gay parents aren’t necessarily bad. [… [instead aiming to] show LGBT2Q+​ kids, families, and communities that are full of fun, celebration, adventure, shenanigans and lots of love” (FR website). This press also prioritizes the work of QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color) authors and illustrators, and places human queer characters and families at the center of their picturebooks, which are marketed through news media, social media, book launches at LGBTQIA+​ and BIPOC-​centered bookshops, conferences, class visits, and workshops for teachers. In addition to author/​illustrator and publisher accounts on social media as a mode for promotion, marketing, and engagement with audiences, book reviewer accounts on social media, particularly Bookstagram (on Instagram) and BookTok (on TikTok), have become popular as new modes to promote and review books as part of a community of readers. In The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (2018), Simone Murray notes that “the characteristic tone of digital book-​review culture is personal, intimate, conversational, resoundingly and unembarrassedly affective” (125). A New York Times article in March 2021 discussed how practices of engagement with books on TikTok may have pushed E. Lockhart’s bestselling 2014 young adult novel We Were Liars back onto the bestseller list almost a decade after its publication through “BookTok,” a hashtag “where users recommend books, record time lapses of themselves reading, or sob openly into the camera after an emotionally crushing ending” (Harris). While fanfiction writing communities focused on children’s and teen fiction have been extensively addressed by scholars, online/​social media book reviewer communities (often consisting of teenagers and young adults) play unexpected roles in children’s book publishing that have not been fully explored.

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The children’s book publishing industry and media cultures have been influenced by marketing and franchising trends and practices since the eighteenth century. This chapter maps out how new technologies and their associated practices have continually affected the ways that children’s books may be produced and consumed and intersections between older and newer media have been present in children’s book publishing throughout this history. Significantly, twenty-​first-​century practices associated with convergence cultures, social media, and transmedia storytelling reflect the development of a distinctive set of tools for the marketing and franchising of children’s literature, but also the creation of franchise texts as part of immersive storyworlds from Moomin theme parks to Willems’s participatory live video drawing time. These transmedia practices and texts offer new modes for engagement but also the potential for venues where authors and readers may take on unexpected roles in children’s book publishing that will continue to evolve with each new technological development and the increased collaborative participation of producers and consumers.

Works Cited Bak, Meredith. “Material Culture (Fairy-​Tale Things: Studying Fairy Tales from a Material Culture Perspective).” The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy-​Tale Cultures, edited by Pauline Greenhill, Jill Terry Rudy, Naomi Hamer, and Lauren Bosc, Routledge, 2018, pp. 328–​36. Bergstrom, Brian. “Avonlea as ‘World’: Japanese Anne of Green Gables Tourism as Embodied Fandom.” Japan Forum, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 224–​45. 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. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Polity Press, 2001. —​—​—​, and Julian Sefton-​Green. “Gotta Catch ’Em All: Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Children’s Media Culture.” Media, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 3, 2003, pp. 379–​99. Clarkson, Shirley. Bearly Believable: My Part in the Paddington Bear Story. Harriman House, 2008. Coulter, Natalie. Tweening the Girl: The Crystallization of the Tween Market. Peter Lang, 2014. Cummins, June. “Marketing.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, New York University Press, 2011, pp. 146–​50. Dicke, Thomas S. Franchising in America: The Development of a Business Method 1840–​1980. University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Dymel-​Trzebiatowska, Hanna. “Moomins Take the Floor: Finnish Trolls in Contemporary Mass Social (Media) Events.” Children’s Literature in Education, August 2022, pp. 1–​16, doi:10.1007/​s10583-​022-​09497-​6. Dyson, Anne Haas. The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write: Popular Literacies in Childhood and School Cultures. Teachers College Press, 2003. Fishel, Catharine. Designing for Children: Marketing Design That Speaks to Children. Rockport Publishers, 2001. Flamingo Rampant. Flamingo Rampant, www.flam​ingo​ramp​ant.com/​sub​miss​ion-​gui​deli​nes, accessed 20 February 2023. Freeman, Matthew. “Transmedia Attractions: The Case of Warner Bros. Studio Tour–​The Making of Harry Potter.” Freeman and Gambarato, pp. 124–​30. —​—​—​, and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, eds. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, Routledge, 2019. Giovagnoli, Max. “Transmedia Branding and Marketing: Concepts and Practices.” Freeman and Gambarato, pp. 251–​59. Hamer, Naomi. “The Hybrid Exhibits of the Story Museum: The Child as Creative Artist and the Limits to Hands-​on Participation.” Museum and Society, vol. 17, no. 3, 2019, pp. 390–​403. —​—​—​. “Picturebooks, Merchandising, and Franchising.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer, Routledge, 2017, pp. 505–​15. —​—​—​. “Remixing The Chronicles of Narnia: The Reimagining of Lucy Pevensie Through Film Franchise Texts and Digital Cultures.” Children’s Film in the Digital Age: Essays on Audience, Adaptation and Consumer Culture, edited by Karin Beeler and Stan Beeler, McFarland, 2015, pp. 63–​77.

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Naomi Hamer Harris, Elizabeth A. “How Crying on TikTok Sells Books.” The New York Times, 20 March 2021, www.nyti​mes. com/​2021/​03/​20/​books/​book​tok-​tik​tok-​video.html. Horne, Alastair. “Transmedia Publishing: Three Complementary Cases.” Freeman and Gambarato, pp. 62–​71. Hurley, Nat. “The Little Transgender Mermaid: A Shape-​Shifting Tale.” 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. 258–​80. Inness, Sherrie A. Nancy Drew and Company: Culture, Gender and Girls’ Series. Bowling Green State University Press, 1997. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press, 2006. Kérchy, Anna. Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. McFarland, 2016. Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. University of California Press, 1991. Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. Verso, 1993. Lamb, Sharon, and Lyn Mikel Brown. Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes. St. Martin’s Press, 2006. “Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems.” The Kennedy Center, www.kenn​edy-​cen​ter.org/​video/​educat​ion/​lunch-​ doodles/​epis​ode-​1/​, accessed 21 February 2023. Lusch, Robert F. “Marketing’s Evolving Identity: Defining Our Future.” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, vol. 26, no. 2, 2007, pp. 261–​68. Mackey, Margaret. “Communities of Fiction: Story, Format, and Thomas the Tank Engine.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp. 39–​51. —​—​—​. The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children. Routledge, 1998. Magnusson, Kendra. “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: Daniel Handler and Marketing the Author.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 86–​107, doi:10.1353/​ chq.2012.0013. Marcus, Leonard. Golden Legacy: The Story of Golden Books. Random House, 2007. Marsh, Jackie, and Elaine Millard. Literacy and Popular Culture: Using Children’s Culture in the Classroom. Paul Chapman, 2000. “The Moomin Phenomenon: Soundtelling on Behalf of Moomin Characters.” Apple Podcasts, September 2022, https://​podca​sts.apple.com/​hu/​podc​ast/​the-​moo​min-​phe​nome​non/​id164​4347​601. Murray, Simone. “Consecrating the Literary: Book Review Culture and the Digital Literary Sphere.” The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, pp. 111–​40. My Very Hungry Caterpillar AR App for iPad. Storytoy, 2017. O’Hagan, Lauren. “The Advertising and Marketing of the Edwardian Prize Book: Gender for Sale.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-​1920, vol. 62, no. 1, 2019, pp. 72–​94. O’Malley, Andrew. Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Paul, Lissa. The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century. Routledge, 2011. —​—​—​. “Learning to Be Literate.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 127–​42. Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. 1902. Penguin, 2002. Pugh, Tison. “The Queer Narrativity of the Hero’s Journey in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda Video Games.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 48, no. 2, 2018, pp. 225–​51, doi:10.1353/​jnt.2018.0009. Quart, Alissa. Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers. Random House, 2003. Reid-​Walsh, Jacqueline. “Movable Morals: Eighteenth-​and-​Nineteenth-​Century Flap Books and Paper Doll Books for Girls as Interactive ‘Conduct Books.’ ” Girls, Texts, Cultures, edited by Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015, pp. 211–​36. Sarmiento, Thomas Xavier. “The Empire Sings Back: Glee’s Queer Materialization of Filipina/​o America.” MELUS, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp. 211–​34. Santo, Avi. Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing. University of Texas Press, 2015. Tosenberger, Catherine. “Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash FanFiction.” Children’s Literature, vol. 36, 2008, pp. 185–​207. “What Is Marketing?” American Marketing Association, www.ama.org/​the-​def​init​ion-​of-​market​ing-​what-​is-​ market​ing/​, accessed 20 February 2023. Zipes, Jack. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. Routledge, 2001.

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34 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE WEBSITES AND FANDOM Sara K. Day and Carrie Sickmann

We have come a long way since Roald Dahl ranted against the dangers of television in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964. Twenty-​first-​century fears about Internet usage and screen time sometimes echo Dahl’s insistence that television “kills imagination dead! /​ It clogs and clutters up the mind! /​It makes a child so dull and blind /​he can no longer understand /​a fantasy, a fairyland!” (139). However, authors, publishers, teachers, parents, and critics also recognize that digital spaces offer enhanced opportunities for reading, disseminating, and interacting with literary fantasies, fairylands, and children’s stories of all kinds. Author websites supplement popular book series; children’s literature causes fandom sites to proliferate; and book clubs coalesce over digital forums. The reading, imagination, and play that Dahl associates exclusively with books can now bridge page, screen, and playroom. Christine Stephen notes this potential for transmedia engagement: As digital activities have sunk into everyday life[,]‌ so too do children’s play activities blend together traditional and digital resources and activities. On-​line viewing prompts physical pretend play, traditional games are enacted in virtual worlds, and figures for small world play or storytelling are downloaded from internet sites. (59) The Internet appears to promise endless possibilities for children to pursue their passion for literature and connect with other readers across the globe.1 When researching author websites in spring 2022, we turned first to Dahl’s website to see whether and how the estate of this formerly screen-​averse author would invite readers –​ especially children –​ to engage with the texts online. Sprinkled with Quentin Blake illustrations from novels such as Matilda (1988) and The BFG (1982), at that time the landing page offered users three options for advancing to the site. Entering as a “teacher” led to lesson plans and ideas for in-​class activities (notably, mostly offline). Choosing the “Grown-​Up” option led to a slightly different landing page before highlighting ways to find Dahl-​themed afternoon teas, purchase tickets for stage musicals, and buy branded merchandise. And if a user entered as a “kid,” the site signaled an assumption that child readers (aka “young heroes”) might be seeking “help with [their] homework.” Other features differed in small ways: the adult versions of the site included a banner with quotations from Dahl novels, while that section of the children’s site offered jokes. But the most substantial difference came in the form of a kids’-​section-​only alliance with PopJam, a “creative community” for seven-​to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-39

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twelve-​year-​olds that allowed young users to create and collaborate on content related to Dahl’s novels, such as the question of which fate from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the child would rather face: “Blown up like a blueberry or thrown into the rubbish?” Social-​media-​inflected options to “love” and comment on various topics allowed children to connect, if in limited ways, with other young fans. Colorful and well designed, the Dahl website acknowledged child viewers as craving more interactivity and community engagement than the gatekeepers who might visit the site. In many ways, this site captured several key questions surrounding digital spaces for children’s literature and child audiences: it addressed both young readers and the adults who control their access to literature (online and in the real world); it emphasized consumption and commodification; it signaled Dahl’s status as canonical children’s author; it offered children the opportunity to interact and engage with Dahl’s work and other young fans; and it gestured toward other ways in which children can use the Internet to gain literacy and find entertainment. By fall 2022, however, the website had become notable in another way –​ it had been completely reimagined, and the organization and interactive features discussed above had disappeared. Like most other children’s literature websites we discuss in this chapter, the Dahl site now features little content exclusively for young visitors and offers no opportunities for children to engage online beyond reading the material listed under tabs such as “Roald Dahl Stories” and “About Roald Dahl.” The other tabs, “Teacher Resources,” “Museum,” and “Charity” (the latter two of which played no role in the website’s previous iteration), explicitly address adults. The PopJam alliance is gone, as are the interactive quizzes the “kids’ ” section once featured. And all of these changes took place over a few months, offering a reminder of another key factor for research on children’s literature and fandom: things change quickly on the Internet. While some websites might once have offered spaces for authentic engagement with children’s literature, many of those sites are now ghosts or relics. In this chapter, we first consider how children’s literature websites have been understood in the twenty-​first century, as well as the primary patterns that can be traced among sites from publishers and authors. We then turn to questions of children’s engagement with online spaces that connect them with other child readers in a discussion of children’s fandoms. Finally, we look to the emergence of online book clubs, podcasts, and YouTube channels as representatives of the evolving relationship between children’s literature and the Internet. Throughout, we are drawn to these related, at times overlapping questions: To what extent are online spaces about or for literature for children designed for adults? How do these spaces reinforce or subvert ideas about a children’s literature canon? What challenges do researchers face when navigating children’s online engagement with texts? And do children turn to the Internet to participate in fan activities?

Pedagogies, Literacies, and What Scholars Have Seen in Children’s Literature Websites Early critical responses to children’s literature materials on the Internet focused primarily on their usefulness in classrooms, a trend that, as we discuss below, mirrors contemporaneous scholarship about fanfiction for young audiences. This focus on pedagogical usefulness privileges the didactic uses of children’s literature over reading for pleasure; it also assumes that most sites will (and perhaps should) serve teachers rather than children. Many early discussions of children’s literature online therefore focused on providing readers with potential resources. For example, Maureen Morriss’s 1997 article “Children’s Literature Possibilities on the Web” functions primarily as a list of websites that, she says, “[provide] opportunities to read whole texts, sample excerpts, join in discussion groups, be informed of new materials, share strategies and suggestions, visit author/​illustrator homepages, and much, much more.” Rachel A. Karchmer’s 2000 article “Exploring Literacy on the Internet: Using the Internet and Children’s Literature to Support Interdisciplinary Instruction” begins with an overview of “central sites,” websites that “compile information on many different areas of 414

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literature, such as authors, illustrators, books, and teacher resources” (100). Such sites proliferated during the 2000s and into the 2010s, often run by librarians or scholars, though they appear somewhat less common (and less frequently updated) now. A particularly common focus of early research on children’s literature websites is literacy or literacies, especially as the term “digital literacy” gained traction. A 2004 article by Donald J. Leu and four coauthors notes, Children’s literature provides a special opportunity to help children make the transition to an expanded discourse that includes these new literacies. It builds on children’s understanding of story, a world they are familiar with from their early experiences with oral language and foundational literacies. Connecting these experiences with opportunities to acquire new literacies on the Internet should be a part of any literature program designed to prepare children for the literacy world that awaits them. (500) Other articles from the 2000s and 2010s similarly argue for the importance of integrating children’s literature and websites in classrooms. In her discussion of the place in education of Literacy 2.0, a term coined by Anne Haas Dyson, Karen E. Wohlwend argues, “Literacy 2.0 practices involve ways of participating in vast digital networks through posting, blogging, recording, remixing, uploading, and downloading. Children find ways to ‘play at’ Literacy 2.0 practices that they see in daily use in the world around them” (147). Wohlwend and others advocated for incorporating children’s knowledge of video games and the Internet into so-​called Literacy 1.0 classrooms, both by bringing more technology into these spaces and by developing assignments based on online interactivity and collaboration –​a hallmark of online fandoms, as we discuss later in this chapter. As this example suggests, however, many scholars do not turn to websites about children’s literature to consider literacy. This point connects to another important avenue of discussion arising from the pedagogical focus of early conversations about children’s literature websites: the possibility of understanding any website children were encouraged to visit as children’s literature. In 2000, Peter Hunt considered the ways in which “hypertexts” (a term that conveniently engages both technology and literary theory) follow or challenge the traditional linear narratives of print texts, predicting that “for the foreseeable future, two quite different mindsets will be operating at the same time in our educational system, and what we think of now as children’s literature –​ narrative for children –​ will be at the center of it” (118). Indeed, we see Jennifer C. Stone and Erika S. Veth take up this debate in a 2008 article in which they argue that websites commonly visited by children serve “the purposes of children’s literature” in that they “provide entertainment, evoke imagination, engage children in vicarious experiences, present children with moral reasoning, and provide support for literacy and academic development” (22). Given the degree to which children visit the websites for Barbie, American Girl, and Hot Wheels, among others used for their study, Stone and Veth assert the need to apply literary analysis to “unofficial texts” in order to better understand how new media might be effectively incorporated into early education (21). Notably, scholarly discussion about children’s websites seems to have ebbed by the early 2010s, suggesting that the evolving nature and role of technology in classrooms may have moved conversations away from websites to more general educational sites and apps. More recent work on children’s engagement with literature on the Internet –​ either through children’s literature-​related sites or through fanfiction and other fanworks –​ has increasingly turned to questions of equity and representation. That is, scholars have become more critical of assumptions that all children will have access to the Internet (perhaps in response to growing awareness about “digital deserts” during the COVID-​19 pandemic) while also raising questions about whose stories are being told and celebrated in online spaces.2 Very few scholars seem to have taken up Hunt’s question as to whether we should 415

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consider websites for children to be children’s literature, regardless of their topics, and in some ways that discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. We therefore have restricted our examination of websites to those directly related to children’s literature, though our consideration of fandoms and YouTube channels allows us to at least briefly consider the ways in which Hunt’s question could be explored in future studies.

Children’s Literature Websites and the Canon To some extent, the proliferation of children’s literature websites has functioned as a way to create and reinforce a canon for young readers, both through sites dedicated to “classic” texts and, perhaps more importantly, through education-​oriented sites that provide teachers with text recommendations, suggested lessons and activities, and other resources that may influence which children’s books appear in classrooms. Just as librarians and teachers have largely shaped what has been understood as “good” literature for children, websites designed by or for members of these groups suggest a desire to influence how we understand “quality” as it relates to online materials. However, it is worth noting that some of the best-​known works of literature for children have little to no web presence. Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan texts generate many hits when Googled, but they do not have dedicated websites of the type we discuss here. Instead, the sites associated with these “classic” texts reflect their prominence among adults –​including but not necessarily academics –​rather than child audiences. For example, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz website is a fanmade site run by Eric Gjovaag, a teacher who started the page in 1995 as a repository for his extensive Ozian knowledge. The Oz Club, another Baum-​related page, is the Internet home for the International Wizard of Oz fan club, established in 1957 and run by and for adults. Other children’s authors and illustrators from the mid-​ to late twentieth century are represented online by sites managed by and highlighting adult-​ run and adultcentric organizations. For example, the Maurice Sendak Foundation maintains a website about the Wild Things creator that offers a biography and bibliography but more clearly focuses on ways for adults to engage with his work through his home, archive, and art exhibits. Likewise, the Astrid Lindgren website is run by the Astrid Lindgren Company and offers extensive biographical information, lovely (often black-​and-​white) photographs of the author, and a “virtual visit” to Lindgren’s apartment. Many of the most polished author and series sites we encountered appear to be aimed primarily at parents and teachers who grew up with texts by Dr. Seuss, Beverly Cleary, or Stan and Jan Berenstain, to offer just a few examples. Sites for texts that were originally published in the 1960s and ’70s and have been mainstays in children’s libraries and classrooms ever since suggest that contemporary child readers may be pushed to the periphery in order to privilege adult readers whose decisions about what books to purchase, share, or teach are shaped by their childhood memories rather than a desire to interact with newer texts. The small sample of websites we discuss here, then, potentially reflects efforts less about reifying the nineteenth-​ and early twentieth-​century canon of children’s literature (to the extent that one exists) than about celebrating adults’ nostalgia and establishing the mid-​twentieth-​century “classics.” We also want to note that many of the websites we’re looking at here are linked to authors with controversial legacies, with J. K. Rowling being perhaps the most visible example. Occasionally (but not often), author sites will acknowledge issues of racism, antisemitism, or other forms of oppression in the author’s texts: the Seussville website, for example, briefly mentions the 2021 decision to remove six of the author’s titles from print,3 but Dav Pilkey’s omits any reference to The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future (2010) and does not link to his apology video.4 These websites allow authors and texts to continue circulating among child audiences despite challenges. 416

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Patterns in Children’s Literature Websites: Consumption, Hidden Adults, and Offline-​Only Engagement In order to gain insight into children’s literature websites, we visited several different types of websites: general sites from publishers such as Scholastic and Disney Books; series-​specific sites for franchises such as the Magic Tree House, Junie B. Jones, and Percy Jackson; and author sites, some curated by publishers and others seemingly designed and maintained by the authors themselves. These websites represent children’s books from picturebooks to early readers to middle-​grade fiction, which accounts for some differences in content and expectations regarding audience –​ tweens are much more capable of navigating to sites than toddlers. Across the websites we discuss, we noted various patterns relating to the dual audiences of both children’s literature and websites, which are often most explicit in the emphasis on consumption and commodification, as links to buy books and related products feature prominently on most sites. Surprisingly, we find that while many websites feature some multimedia material, including video readalouds, they frequently don’t provide other forms of interactivity for children; instead, the “fun activities” are in many cases simply printable coloring and activity sheets. Although Stephen argues that “on-​line viewing prompts physical pretend play” (59), these offline activity sheets don’t optimize the interactive possibilities of digital media, nor do they connect to paired digital content. The role of consumption influences the design of children’s literature websites, most notably in how they signal an expectation of multiple audiences –​ usually the adults who buy books and the children for whom they are purchased. Mo Willems’s homepage highlights “Mo’s F.A.Q.’s,” a link to a Blogspot site clearly intended for adults. Similarly, the Eric Carle website signals an expectation of adult users first and foremost: the rotating banner at the top of the homepage includes links to the FAQ and resources for parents and educators, while more “kid-​friendly” materials can only be accessed by multiple, often unintuitive clicks. In other cases, sites suggest a primary interest in the child user while nevertheless tailoring content for adults. The Magic Tree House site, for example, positions “kids” as the default audience in its banner, requiring users to input their birthdates in order to access the site’s parent and teacher pages. Seussville likewise signals in a number of ways that the site is primarily for children –​ the links for “Parents” and “Educators” are located at the top of the homepage, and they are smaller than the other links found there. The site also uses Seussian rhymes when a user clicks on “adult” content; for example, clicking on the links on the “Experience” page leads to a pop-​up that says, “Going this way may seem like fun, but it’s just for Grown Ups… are you one?” before prompting users to enter their birthdates. Given that this page is accessed from the apparently “kid-​oriented” homepage, the website seems to be acknowledging what Perry Nodelman has termed the “hidden adult” by presenting children with “experiences” that must be mediated (and purchased) by adults. This emphasis suggests that the primary form of interaction between website and user is a transaction, a point further demonstrated by the relatively small number of sites offering child users the chance to engage in play. A few sites, such as Cleary’s, include quizzes in their “fun and games” sections, though these seem akin more to assessment than to entertainment. Willems’s homepage does link to a second site, titled Pigeon Presents, which is more child-​oriented and features an interactive game in which users “catch” pigeons as they fly across the screen. Unfortunately, the game takes under a minute to complete and doesn’t require users to navigate around the site. The reward? A printable certificate to color offline. Indeed, on a surprising number of the websites we explored, the “fun and games” promised to child readers take the form of coloring pages, activity sheets, and game instructions that must be downloaded and printed, presumably by adults. Notably, children’s literature websites do not seem, by and large, to be actively contributing to children’s digital literacy. Instead, these examples indicate the much more common tendency to assume that an adult gatekeeper will be present to assist the child’s navigation of digital spaces. Ultimately, then, consumption and 417

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the adults who make purchases appear to be prioritized over children’s enjoyment of literature and participation in fan communities.

Children’s Fandoms and/​or Children as Fans In many ways, digital spaces for engaging with texts and other readers provide insight into the offline activities of child readers, who frequently develop games, (re)tell stories, and otherwise extend their love of literature beyond the pages of favorite books. As Kyra Hunting notes, “if we look primarily at fannish behaviours and the intensity of affective attachment to media text, then one could argue that fandom is the default position for many children, particularly very young children” (100). This point may be particularly true of contemporary children. Henry Jenkins has argued that by the early twenty-​first century, fans were beginning to dictate what movies, television shows, and video games were being produced; “fandom,” he asserts, “represents an experimental prototype, the testing ground for the way media and culture industries are going to operate in the future” (361). It is unsurprising, then, that children who have grown up in an era dominated by fan culture would almost necessarily engage with media in ways that we used to see as limited to “true” fans. Notably, though, child fans have historically been excluded or given only passing attention in fandom studies, for multiple reasons.5 Participatory culture for adults and adolescents is generally driven by personal interest in a text or team, and they are able to navigate various spaces occupied by others who share those interests. Children’s access to the spaces we’ve come to associate with participatory culture, in contrast, requires adult intervention and guidance. Online, children are generally barred from sites that have come to be understood as the “home” of fandoms –​spaces such as FanFiction.net and An Archive of Our Own require users to be at least thirteen years old.6 Restrictions aren’t the only limiting factor: in studying middle-​school fandoms, Shannon K. Farley concludes that “young teens’ experience of the internet is entirely app based. [...] The kids of this generation use the web for school and apps for fun,” and if fanfiction sites want to thrive, they need to develop apps.7 Regardless of whether and how children access fan-​related opportunities, studying their engagement there is made difficult due to efforts to protect them and their privacy, as well as methodological concerns about gathering information through surveys administered to young children or their parents. While we cannot ascertain how many children spend time in online affinity spaces, it is possible to consider the activities available to them and how they may shape engagement with both the Internet and literature as children grow older and gain more access. The 2010 Digital Youth Project identified three different “genres of participation” that such digital platforms facilitate: “hanging out,” “messing around,” and “geeking out.” This project categorizes writing fanfiction as a type of “messing around,” “an open-​ended activity that involves tinkering and exploration that is only loosely goal directed” but “can transition to more ‘serious’ engagement in which a young person is trying to perfect a creative work or become a knowledge expert in the genre of geeking out” (Ito et al. 23). Some children may seek such fan experiences on their own, despite age restrictions on sites, but studies have more frequently focused on fanfiction as a pedagogical tool, which we discuss in more detail in the next section.8 Other intersections of fan studies and pedagogy have explored how fandom’s collaborative nature can be employed to design projects that seek to use online children’s literature (sometimes loosely defined) to engage students and create lifelong readers. Geoff Walton, Janet Hetherington, and Mark Childs describe how the AMORES project, which included children and young adults from across the European Union, turned to social media and videoconferencing to allow participating students to share and react to artifacts they’d created while reading (199–​200). The now-​defunct bilingual Scarecrow Project, though emphasizing individual work relating to children’s literature-​inspired Webquests, also incorporated an online competition element involving children’s analytical and artistic responses to 418

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a common work (Gilete 51). It is also potentially useful, beyond fanfiction’s immediate pedagogical uses, to consider how online fandom may inform children’s engagement with literature more generally, especially in the interrogation of “the classics.” As Bronwen Thomas has noted, Perhaps the main contribution of fanfiction to the evolution of the concept of canon will be the way in which its terminology and critical and aesthetic practices foreground and make more transparent the role of discussion and dialogue in building and sustaining any kind of interpretive community. (9)

Engaging Children and Mediated Connections Some children’s literature websites do present fandom and fan activities as starting points for interactive opportunities. The Magic Treehouse site, for example, seems to offer a fandom environment: members who join the “Kids’ Adventure Club” become “Junior Explorers” who can win digital prizes and earn passport stamps by “travel[ing] the world and beyond with Jack and Annie.” However, rather than transporting fans into a virtual fictional space with beloved characters or fellow Tree House fans, the site features glorified comprehension quizzes testing readers’ knowledge of the historical facts embedded in the books. We see little evidence here of the communal, interactive, creative, or countercultural characteristics typically associated with young adult or adult fandoms. Other sites, such as that for Junie B. Jones, do a better job of capturing the voices and personalities that initially won over readers. Junie B. welcomes her fans into her Google-​Classroom style homepage with “Wowie Wow Wow, you found my very own website!” and a handwritten “My Letter to You” complete with doodles, emoji-​speak, and brightly colored annotations. The site provides at least the illusion of community, with a “Haha! Funny Jokes!” section featuring contributions from fans: “What do you call a fake noodle?” asks Sally from New York. “An impasta!!!!” The sites that successfully facilitate fan activities usually do so through game play, as we see with Scholastic Kids’ Home Base. Home Base serves as a sort of Second Life for people under age thirteen, with an explicit focus on interactivity around various Scholastic texts. Players navigate “islands” where they can interact in limited ways with avatars of authors and characters. There are also games, a scavenger hunt in which players appear to find literal Easter eggs,9 and some product placement for merchandise –​ notably, players accrue in-​game currency that they can use to buy items such as branded apparel. Unsurprisingly, there’s a virtual Scholastic Book Fair. Most importantly, registered users can chat with other kids and create content that can be shared to the entire community via the News Feed. The game’s communal nature is emphasized in various ways, including the virtual Summer Reading Club, although there isn’t the focus on a single text that we generally associate with fandoms. Of course, the series that has most successfully embraced a website as part of the franchise’s transmedia storytelling process is Harry Potter. Wizarding World, previously Pottermore, caters to fans of all ages. Like other sites we have examined, it offers quizzes, puzzles, and shopping opportunities, but it also enables more substantial fan engagement with series content. After joining the “fan club,” users become first-​years at Hogwarts and go through the sorting process, pick out a wand, and determine their patronus. More than most, this site positions users as characters within the fantasy world: Players imitate the swish and flick of the wand with a “click, drag, and release” of the mouse to call forth for the first time their patronuses, which skitter or scamper or slither across the page. As players pursue their unidentified patronus down the forest path, the cursor leaves a shower of stars in its wake. As critic Cassie Brummitt explains, in the early years (2011–​15), Pottermore functioned as “an immersive experience that also enabled particular forms of interactivity” as well 419

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as “an encyclopedia and a primitive fan community” (114). As readers worked their way through the books in the series, they could access new content online, including mini-​games. However, in 2015 the website was entirely revamped, eliminating much of the transmedia storytelling and all opportunities for fan interaction. “Much of Pottermore” after 2015, Brummitt writes, “is dedicated to ensuring that Rowling’s traditional authorship retains its power, while expanding the franchise and attempting to unite its various, sometimes disparate products” (121). Rowling’s encyclopedic contributions eliminate much potential for fan speculation, critical interpretation, and imagination. Even her more substantial, narrative-​driven contributions forestall fan imaginations, sometimes introducing problematic content; the “Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” appropriates and misrepresents Native American culture in the name of expanding the franchise into North America. When the site rebranded yet again in 2019 as Wizardingworld.com, it distanced itself slightly from Rowling’s aggressive authorship, relegating these writings to the “J. K. Rowling archive” (which nonetheless still features prominently) and releasing new content by the “Wizarding World Team.” However, this new content also focuses on authorizing and promoting official content –​it’s more about controlling fans than about cultivating a fandom. Websites that encourage fan interaction, art, and writing for children usually operate under the aegis of an educational setting. Biblionasium, for instance, winner of the 2013 AASL Best Website for Teaching and Learning, offers children ages seven through twelve a “safe alternative to Goodreads” where they can complete reading challenges, review books, and share their reviews directly with others in their “network.” These networks are mostly created by classroom teachers, who then provide parents with a registration number for their child. In their testimonials, teachers praise Biblionasium as a community-​building tool centered on books: “Part of reading is not keeping the reading to yourself. Part of reading is sharing that experience and being able to talk to others about that experience” (“Zilker”). Another writes that students like to “feel like they’re participating in social media” (Franz). For the most part, even these more community-​oriented educational sites don’t really promote fanfiction, though some embrace fan art. Spaghetti Book Club, “the largest site of book reviews written and illustrated by kids for kids,” gives “kids a place to share insights and opinions with readers around the world” (“Spaghetti”), as well as original artwork. Jesse R, creator of an image of a becaped Harry Potter, with the text “Harry Potter Rocks” standing between Mrs. Norris and Dobby, writes, “You should read the book because you and your friends can talk about it and have a great time doing so! [...] When I read the book I felt like I was a wizard myself, flying on broomsticks and a lot of the other fun wizard stuff.” In their testimonials, teachers rave about the site’s easy integration into curricula, alignment with writing standards, and opportunities for lessons in technology and digital literacy. One second grader writes, “It feels exciting to know that your book review is on the Internet. Almost EVERYONE uses the Internet. So a lot of people will be reading them” (“Spaghetti”). Children, it seems, are eager to enter online spaces and become content creators, but most of these opportunities are still only available through a school framework, with teachers (or sometimes parents) determining access and the structure of the content.

YouTube Channels, Podcasts, and Social Media Certain digital platforms and technologies, including social media, YouTube, and podcasts, seem to offer more opportunities for children to participate directly in fandoms than the author or series-​based websites. Children’s literature has inspired some viral sensations, such as the #Matildachallenge, that attest to social media’s power in developing fan communities and encouraging imaginative play. Fans of Dahl –​ or maybe of actress Mara Wilson –​ recreate Matilda’s now iconic dance to “Little Bitty Pretty One” with a little digital magic. As they dance and point in imitation of Matilda, lights flicker and objects “fly” seemingly by magic, but actually after hours of careful film editing. Participants 420

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contribute their own faces and interpretations of the scene to the larger #matildachallenge conversation on Twitter (now X), TikTok, YouTube, or the platform of their choice. The authorized author accounts also join the fun: the Dahl HQ YouTube channel produces its own version featuring six child fans. These challenges offer children who are on social media platforms the chance to connect over shared interests, insert themselves into literary scenes and worlds, and position themselves as fictional characters. Heather A. Horst and luke gaspard argue that platforms such as YouTube and Twitch have replaced “traditional top-​down broadcast models of communication” by offering “opportunities for individuals to ‘broadcast themselves.’ ” These platforms offer “the ability to circulate and create culture, share knowledge, build social networks, and connect and play with others in ways never previously envisaged” (40). Users can thus enter shared digital spaces and participate directly in online communities. However, most studies of these platforms as sites of fandom focus predominantly on adolescents, not children. They do so for good reason: examples featuring children, such as the #Matildachallenge, are rare. Those studies that do feature “youth” largely approach participation in fandoms as a social endeavor or experiment in media literacy, rather than a substantive intervention or participation in a literary oeuvre. We might see the #Matildachallenge not as an engagement with Dahl’s story but as a media literacy challenge to reproduce Danny DeVito’s special effects. Even the single chapter on fandoms in The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children, which focuses on young people aged eight through fourteen, ignores literary fandoms in favor of musical ones (One Direction and Harry Styles) and concentrates primarily on “making friends and countering unwanted contacts” in digital fan communities (de la Fuente 161). Given that YouTube specializes in allowing users to become content creators and that literary fandom communities for adults/​teens (such as BookTube) pervade the platform, why don’t we see more evidence of children’s participatory culture surrounding children’s literature? In part such evidence is absent because YouTube seems to focus on disseminating adult creations of fan content to child consumers. In many cases, this authorized content comes directly from the authors, publishers, and producers: on YouTube Kids, for instance, Willems offers read-​aloud videos and drawing instruction; the Netflix Jr YouTube channel provides supplementary videos where “kids can learn, sing and play with their favorite Netflix characters”; and the Wizarding World supplies “Behind the Scenes” looks at “The Making of Harry Potter Magical Movie Moment.” Other channels focus on unauthorized content that is nonetheless produced by adults. Kids looking for a little more Harry Potter magic in their lives can find everything from BBC Newsround’s “How to cast a spell tutorial!” to the unboxing of Harry Potter Yule Ball and Triwizard Tournament Dolls to home videos of family trips to the Orlando Wizarding World amusement park. We don’t see amateur videos of children chattering about favorite characters, inventing plotlines, or engaging in child-​centered imaginative play. Also notably absent: opportunities for child viewers to converse with each other or develop a sense of community. YouTube’s capacity to foster participatory culture for children has been inhibited by increased regulations due in part to the “ElsaGate” scandal in 2017, when beloved characters including Peppa Pig and Frozen’s Elsa were re-​edited with scenes of sex and violence and circulated on YouTube Kids (Walczer 161). In response to this and the threatened mass exodus of advertisers (the “adpocalypse”), YouTube implemented various policy changes, including shutting down channels and disabling comments on videos that featured minors (Feller and Burroughs 579). In 2019 the United States Federal Trade Commission fined the company for failure to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and YouTube implemented even more content restrictions, dictating that “anyone uploading content to YouTube is required to determine whether the content is ‘made for kids’ during the upload process. [...] Videos marked as ‘made for kids’ now mean no more comments, no more searching content tagged as ‘made for kids,’ [and] no more channel notifications” (Feller and Burroughs 581). While essential to discouraging pedophilic comments on videos featuring minors, 421

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eliminating the comment feature from YouTube Kids and on videos “made for kids” simultaneously eliminated viewers’ abilities to converse about favorite videos and engage in some of the fan practices that drive non-​child-​oriented YouTube content. These restrictions also furthered the already-​trending professionalization and corporatization of YouTube content by children, who are both consumers and workers in the YouTube industry. The mother of three-​year-​old Ryan Kaji, for instance, started taking iPhone videos of Ryan playing with toys. After watching YouTube toy review channels, Ryan asked his mother, “How come I’m not on YouTube when all the other kids are?”, so she started posting the videos (Schmidt). One went viral, and the “Ryan ToysReview” channel skyrocketed, hitting a million subscribers in 2016 and eventually earning the family millions of dollars annually from ad revenue (Schmidt). The professionalization didn’t stop there. Ryan was subsequently picked up by Pocket.Watch, a digital production and distribution studio enterprise founded by former Nickelodeon, Disney, and Maker Studio executives. Pocket.Watch recruits, promotes, and manages child YouTube content creators with the potential to become “kidinfluencers” (Feller and Burroughs 575) –​ all under the guise of “bringing kids more of what they love” (https://​poc​ket.watch/​). They treat children’s creations as “intellectual property around which the company can build a more expansive and lucrative brand” (Feller and Burroughs 583). With the help of Pocket.Watch, “Ryan ToysReview” expanded to “Ryan’s World,” now offering a proprietary toy line, clothing line, smartphone apps, and multiple YouTube channels. While “Ryan’s World” and Pocket.Watch’s child-​produced content certainly exemplify Jenkins’s “convergence culture” by featuring favorite characters and stories across a variety of platforms, their aim is not to cultivate transmedia storytelling or to form fandom communities, but to monetize children. Although Pocket.Watch markets their child stars as engaging in many of the core values we associate with children’s literature –​ “meaningful pretend play,” “solv[ing] mysteries,” “empowerment and friendship” –​ultimately Feller and Burroughs conclude that “Pocket Watch takes [...] neoliberal values of individualism and consumerism to a new low” by using child creators to target children ages two through eleven as consumers (584). In this highly professionalized and consumerist digital space, the amateur child fan seeking to “geek out” or “mess around” might be in danger of getting lost –​or worse, recruited. Podcasts, in contrast, seem more focused on cultivating fan communities for children and disseminating their creative responses to literature. Unlike author websites, which often first present viewers with opportunities to shop, the first question to pop up on many children’s podcast sites is whether viewers “want to be on the show.” The Book Club for Kids, for instance, pitches itself as “the place where young readers meet to talk about books.” This twenty-​minute podcast hosted by adult Kitty Felde focuses on middle-​grade books and readers, and each episode features at least three middle-​schoolers discussing a book, an interview with an author (including Kwame Alexander, Jason Reynolds, Rebecca Stead, and Sharon Draper), and a celebrity reading. Other podcasts are “made by kids for kids.” As Jenny Horn at “We Edit Podcasts” writes, “[Kids] are getting involved in the podcast industry, whether hosting, writing, and in some cases, even editing their own shows. [...] They’re proof that the podcasting sphere is truly for everyone –​whether young or old –​ and that there is a space for everyone to share their story and talents with the world.” The podcast By Kids, for Kids presents childrens’ stories as audio dramas “performed by kids from across the globe.” On this podcast, children perform everything from a twenty-​four-​episode rendition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Greek myths to works by Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm. In other cases, adults bring children’s original writings to life. On The Story Pirates podcast, renowned entertainers such as Lin-​Manuel Miranda, John Oliver, Billy Eichner, and Claire Danes turn stories written by kids into sketch comedies and songs. “Bonus Content” on the website showcases the children’s original stories alongside the audio file of the podcast. In essence, the adult entertainers function as fanfic writers of the children’s original stories. Story Pirates signal-​boosts

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stories such as “I Never Knew Tacos Were So Good” by ten-​year-​old Amanda and “Goats to Go” by ten-​year-​old Charlie to a much wider readership than what would presumably otherwise be confined to family/​teachers/​friends, but also mediates and adds to them. These podcasts showcase a limited number of children’s creative works and responses to literature and disseminate them to a wider target audience of (largely) child listeners. They are curated by adults who choose the children to participate in the book club, audition performers for audio dramas, and select the stories that will make the most successful episodes. While this curation might not replicate the freedom we associate with digital fandoms centered on adults and adolescents –​for example, FanFiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and Discord –​the podcasts nonetheless offer children a space to contribute their thoughts and writing to a fanbase and to listen to peers engage in fan behaviors.

Conclusion While it seems reasonable to expect that children’s literature websites would be active in promoting children’s engagement with texts and exploration of fandom in virtual spaces, in fact most such sites privilege adults’ needs, focus on consumerism, and treat imaginative play and the potential for transformative engagement with texts as “offline” activities. With few exceptions, there are not many spaces featuring online community experiences of fandom for children, suggesting that while children may be eager to create content and connect with fellow fans, the Web doesn’t facilitate these opportunities in the same way that it does for adolescent or adult fans. And when those opportunities exist, they are often fraught in the ways that they position children as creators or collaborators. This is not to say that there are no effective or positive online spaces for children to engage with and even produce children’s literature. However, the most exciting uses of websites for/​by children are likely behind firewalls –​ in classroom and library spaces where safety measures allow less restricted interactions (though still interactions mediated through adult gatekeepers). Podcasts and online book clubs do invite children’s participation in conversations about the texts they read, but these forums are highly structured and limited in terms of the amount of control that children may be able to exert. Ironically, social spaces not explicitly designed for children –​ including YouTube and Discord –​may offer the most extensive opportunities for children to engage with literature and fellow fans. Future studies should continue to explore these platforms (and the many more that are sure to come) and the contradictions surrounding children’s literature and the Internet.

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4 5

6

Due to language and access limitations, we focus primarily on children’s authors from the United States and United Kingdom. That said, the various websites and fandom networks are accessible beyond these borders. See, for example, Bennett, Gunn, and Peterson. More generally, Penni Cotton has explored how European children’s literature websites about multicultural literature can be used to teach intercultural understanding. The press release from Dr. Seuss Enterprises is posted under “News and Events,” an easy-​to-​miss tab on the homepage. It states, “Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s catalog represents and supports all communities and families.” For further discussion of these titles’ withdrawal, see Andrew Zalot’s chapter in this volume. Only weeks after the Seuss Enterprises announcement, Scholastic pulled Pilkey’s book from production and he posted an apology letter on YouTube, in which he acknowledged anti-​Asian racism in the text and pledged to donate to charity the royalties it had generated over its eleven years in print. Some scholars have suggested that this omission reflects a desire to deflect the infantilization of fandom. As Anna Wilson notes, fannishness “is associated with an immature emotional life –​with immoderate passion, unrequited crushes, a preference for fantasy over reality, and inappropriate or transitional object choices for one’s desires outside of the heteropatriarchal structures of adult reproduction.” That these sites require users to state that they are at least thirteen does not necessarily prevent younger people from creating accounts and posting stories. Popular children’s series such as The Magic Tree House,

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Sara K. Day and Carrie Sickmann Junie B. Jones, and Where’s Waldo? have all inspired fanfic that appears to have been produced by younger authors. We also see evidence of teachers using fanfic repositories as part of writing assignments –​ at least one of the eighty-​five stories on FanFiction.net inspired by The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is accompanied by an author’s note explaining that the work was written for school. 7 Discord is one such app-​based fandom site that is becoming increasingly popular for identifying affinity spaces, participating in RPGs, and sharing fanfiction and fan art. However, it too requires users to be thirteen or older (though there is no “gate” in place to verify self-​reported ages). As with other fanfiction sites, there are many spaces devoted to children’s literature –​Disboard lists 833 Percy Jackson servers, 1809 Harry Potter servers, and seventy-​three Wonderland servers –​ and other than the occasional self-​reporting, it’s impossible to know how many participants are actually under thirteen. 8 Rebecca W. Black has explored ways in which online fanfiction writing can serve formal goals in the teaching of writing and composition. 9 While the Scholastic site uses digital images of Easter eggs, they reference the more general definition of the term in online and gaming spaces. The OED defines this figurative use of Easter eggs as “An unexpected or undocumented message or feature hidden in a piece of software, intended as a joke or bonus. Also: a feature of this kind in film, music, and other forms of information or entertainment.”

Works Cited Bennett, Susan V., AnnMarie Alberton Gunn, and Barbara J. Peterson. “Access to Multicultural Children’s Literature During COVID-​19.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 74, no. 6, 2021, pp. 785–​96. Brummitt, Cassie. “Pottermore: Transmedia Storytelling and Authorship in Harry Potter.” Midwest Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, pp. 112–​32. Cotton, Penni. “Picture Books Across Cultures: A Leap into the Unknown?” Bookbird, vol. 51, no. 3, 2013, pp. 81–​87. Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Puffin, 2007. de la Fuente, Julián, and Pilar Lacasa. “Teens’ Fandom Communities: Making Friends and Countering Unwanted Contacts.” Green et al., pp. 161–​72. “Easter Egg,” 2nd definition. Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., edited by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, Clarendon Press. Farley, Shannon K. “Further Future Fandom: A Conversation with Middle School-​Age Fans.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 28, 2018, doi:10.3983/​twc.2018.1514. Feller, Gavin, and Benjamin Burroughs. “Branding Kidfluencers: Regulating Content and Advertising on YouTube.” Television and New Media, vol. 23, no. 6, 2022, pp. 575–​92. Franz, Laura. “Biblionasium Case Study.” Biblionasium, https://​blog.bibli​onas​ium.com/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​ 2022/​03/​Case-​Study-​Laura-​Franz.pdf. Gilete, Raúl Montero. “Children’s Literature and the Internet in the Classroom.” International Education Studies, vol. 4, no. 5, 2011, pp. 47–​52. Green, Lelia, Donell Holloway, Kylie Stevenson, Tama Leaver, and Leslie Haddon, eds. The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children. Routledge, 2021. Horst, Heather A., and luke gaspard. “Platforms, Participation, and Place: Understanding Young People’s Changing Digital Media Worlds.” Green et al., pp. 38–​47. Hunt, Peter. “Futures for Children’s Literature: Evolution or Radical Break?” Cambridge Journal of Education, vol. 30, no. 1, 2000, pp. 111–​19. Hunting, Kyra. “Finding the Child Fan: A Case for Studying Children in Fandom Studies.” Journal of Fandom Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2019, pp. 93–​110, doi:10.1386/​jfs.7.2.93_​1. Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C. J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson. “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project.” John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, 2008. Jenkins, Henry. “Afterword.” Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by C. Harrington, Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss, NYU Press, 2007, pp. 357–​64. Karchmer, Rachel A. “Exploring Literacy on the Internet: Using the Internet and Children’s Literature to Support Interdisciplinary Instruction.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 54, no. 1, 2000, pp. 100–​104. Leu, Donald J., Jill Castek, Laurie Henry, Julie Coiro, and Melissa McMullen. “The Lessons That Children Teach Us: Integrating Children’s Literature and the New Literacies of the Internet.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 57, no. 5, pp. 496–​503.

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Children’s Literature Websites and Fandom Morriss, Maureen. “Children’s Literature Possibilities on the Web.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 20, no. 4, 1997, pp. 321–​29. Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Schmidt, Samantha. “6-​Year-​Old Made $11 Million in One Year Reviewing Toys on You Tube.” The Washington Post, 11 December 2017, www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​news/​morn​ing-​mix/​wp/​2017/​12/​11/​6-​year-​old-​made-​ 11-​mill​ion-​in-​one-​year-​review​ing-​toys-​on-​you-​tube/​. “Spaghetti Book Club.” Happy Medium Productions, www.spaghe​ttib​ookc​lub.org/​about.php. “Stars.” Pocket.Watch, https://​poc​ket.watch/​stars. Stephen, Christine. “Young Learners in the Digital Age.” Green et al., pp. 55–​61. Stone, Jennifer C., and Erika S. Veth. “Rethinking the New Literatures of Childhood: Cultural Models of Gender in Popular Websites.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education, vol. 4, no. 2, 2008, pp. 21–​39. Thomas, Bronwen. “Canons and Fanons: Literary Fanfiction Online.” Dichtung Digital: Journal für Kunst und Kultur digitaler Medien, vol. 37, no. 9, 2007, pp. 1–​11, doi:10.25969/​mediarep/​17701. Walton, Geoff, Janet Hetherington, and Mark Childs. “AMORES: Discovering a Love for Literature Through Digital Collaboration and Creativity.” Young and Creative: Digital Technologies Empowering Children in Everyday Life, edited by Ilana Eleá and Lothar Mikos, Nordicom, 2017, pp. 193–​207. Wilson, Anna. “Fan Fiction and Premodern Literature: Methods and Definitions.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 36, 2021, doi:10.3983/​twc.2021.2037. Wohlwend, Karen E. “A Is for Avatar: Young Children in Literacy 2.0 Worlds and Literacy 1.0 Schools.” Language Arts, vol. 88, no. 2, 2010, pp. 144–​52. “Zilker Elementary School.” Biblionasium, https://​blog.bibli​onas​ium.com/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​09/​ zilkereleme​ntar​ysch​ool.pdf.

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PART V

Institutions

We have noted in the introduction to this book that as an academic discipline, the study of children’s literature draws primarily from three disciplines: literature, education, and information science. Some outstanding exceptions aside, literary scholars in particular tend to focus on text-​based approaches rather than examining children’s literature through an institutional lens, but this preference has more to do with critical fashions and training than with a sense that looking at children’s literature institutionally might not be productive. For children’s literature, like other manifestations of children’s culture and still more than literature for adults, is perennially and inevitably mediated by a sizable number of institutions and gatekeepers, from publishers to schools to self-​appointed industry watchdogs and beyond. This final section begins with three case histories in children’s publishing. In “Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Courtney Weikle-​ Mills discusses the circulation in the East and West Indies of early British primers and storybooks for children, showing how practices specific to particular locations within the British Empire helped to shape content and consumption. Emily C. Bruce moves in “Children’s Book Publishing in Europe: A Historical Approach” to the European continent, focusing principally on the Germanophone and Francophone traditions in order to show how changes in understandings of childhood intersected with changes in institutions including the family, schools, and children’s publishing to transform the content, goals, and materiality of books for the young. And in “Contemporary Asian Book Publishing,” Shih-​Wen Sue Chen juxtaposes publishing trends in China, Japan, and India to explore the dominance of series fiction and/​or imported titles, the influence upon publishing practices of demographic issues such as Japan’s low birth rate or India’s polyglot society, and the effect of globalization. As all three chapters demonstrate, children’s literature (like other cultural products) is always highly dependent upon social and ideological context, and this influence is to some degree reciprocal. Another three chapters consider particular institutional contexts for the distribution of children’s literature. In “Children’s Literature in Schools,” Etti Gordon Ginzburg draws upon practices in the United States, Britain, and Israel to explore the divide between “real” children’s literature, which seeks to engender enjoyment or enlightenment, and the reading primer, designed to teach literacy. Meanwhile, Margaret Mackey’s “Libraries” looks at school, public, and home libraries in the United States, Canada, and Britain, paying particular attention to the financial and social pressures shaping these institutions and the books they can provide to young users. And Julie Fette and Anne Morey’s “Book Clubs” provides a detailed account of two representative clubs, one in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-40

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mid- twentieth- century United States and the other in contemporary France, as straddling boundaries separating or uniting four stakeholders in children’s literature: publisher, family, school, and library. The remaining chapters examine three practices that actively seek to affect the content and quantity of texts for children. In “From Canon-​Making to Participatory Prizing: Children’s Book and Media Awards,” Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth Kidd chronicle the growing importance of children’s preferences in prizing, as top-​down awards, through which adults identify and promote works that reflect the values of the adult selectors, increasingly coexist with bottom-​up awards upon which children vote. In “Promoting Children’s Reading Internationally,” Valerie Coghlan surveys institutions such as book fairs and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), providing a history of their development and scope. Finally, moving from the encouraging of the circulation of children’s literature perceived as valuable to the discouraging of the circulation of texts perceived as deleterious to the standards of particular communities of adults, Andrew Zalot examines in an American context “Censorship and Shifting Contexts in Children’s Literature,” an issue whose importance to the discipline is such that it is raised elsewhere in this volume in multiple chapters and national contexts. The term “children’s literature,” like “children’s media,” emphasizes the consumer. Together, these chapters serve as reminders also of the importance of who disseminates children’s texts, to whom these producers are answerable, and how and why the works are distributed to the young.

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35 BOOK PUBLISHING AND THE BRITISH SPHERE OF INFLUENCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES Courtney Weikle-​Mills

In 1842, William Warner, a Moravian missionary working on the Danish-​controlled Caribbean island of St. Croix, wrote to the Young Men’s Missionary Society (YMMS) of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, asking the group to produce a catechism for enslaved youth.1 He specified that the book should not only be written in English, but should also look like British books circulating in the Caribbean: “We wished to have it exactly the size of the English textbooks” (Warner 1842). Warner, an American, wanted an English publication because he believed Afro-​Caribbean people were better off on British islands and because patrons had failed to invest in the mission’s earlier texts in Dutch creole, which imitated eighteenth-​century publications by Danish Lutherans. He envisions the English book’s global significance: “Surely from Greenland’s icy mountains and from India’s coral strand, many thanks [...] is offered up for such benefactors” (Warner 1842). After the YMMS teens sent the catechism, Warner forwarded a creole hymnal for display at their museum, proclaiming, Now the language is forever buried [...] so that the books may well be preserved as relics in Museums. On my arrival in 1840 the language was in full bloom & now it is pushed as it were in death to make place for its successor the English. What a change!! (Warner 1843) This anecdote represents one pivotal moment in the history of how British conceptions of children’s books became globally powerful. It reflects publishing trends resulting from trade and colonization, while exhibiting how the adoption of British and English-​language forms depended on regional contexts. As I will discuss, British children’s books from textbooks to storybooks circulated in the Caribbean, making it logical that Warner would look to them as a model.2 Warner’s ingenuity in soliciting his own book simultaneously demonstrates that those promoting English books did not depend on commercial publishers’ selections, but had the flexibility to tailor books to local conditions. Warner’s choice reflects competition among religious groups and colonial powers. His vision of the English book’s global support nonetheless asserts a belief in the universal value of Anglocentric versions of expression, which he uses to justify erasure of local forms.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-41

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British influence did not unfold the same way everywhere. Warner’s hunger for an English format in some ways mirrors changing British approaches to education in the East Indies by the mid-​nineteenth century. Yet an index of British influence in Asia is the quantity of translations that emerged. After the British government renewed the East India Company’s charter in 1813, giving missionaries access to the Company’s territories in India and Southeast Asia, mission presses translated The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s religious allegory often read by children, into Bengali (1821), Tamil (1826), Hindi (1835), Urdu (1840), Marathi (1841), and several other South and East Asian languages.3 Following the First Opium War (1839–​42) and the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which gave Britons access to all five of China’s trading ports, the book was translated into Chinese (1853). Mary Martha Sherwood’s popular children’s book The History of Little Henry and His Bearer (1814), written in India but first published in England, had only a slightly more modest range; it was translated into Marathi (1835), Tamil (1840), Malayalam (1846), Bengali (1849), and Chinese (1856).4 These publications had a domino effect. Patrick Hanan notes that Sherwood’s book prefigures a slew of children’s books translated in China after 1842, including Hannah More’s Parley the Porter (original 1810, Chinese 1875) and Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (original 1867, Chinese 1878) (436–​37). Later translations in India include Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (original 1715, Sinhalese 1850, Oriya 1878), Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (original 1807, Bengali 1853, Tamil 1872, Urdu 1890, Malayalam 1891), and Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (original 1780, Urdu 1860, Bengali 1865, Hindi 1877). As Supriya Goswami and Shih-​Wen Sue Chen demonstrate, British books influenced children’s literature in both places. This chapter considers British influence in the West Indies alongside its different trajectories in the East Indies to illuminate how distinct imperial circumstances affected children’s book publication, offering pieces of a comparative map for further study. British participation in slavery strongly shaped the spread of children’s books in the Caribbean. Afro-​Caribbean youth were barred from the leisure activities associated with childhood, but they nonetheless faced the indoctrinating elements of children’s literature as targets of agendas to maintain European dominance. With limited economic resources, such children presented few incentives for specific address, producing lasting ramifications. Anticipating Rudine Sims Bishop’s 1990 essay about the importance of children finding mirrors in books, nineteenth-​century educators worried that Caribbean children could not relate to their reading. As one indicator of the missed opportunity for valuing local modes of expression, juvenile books in creole languages, apart from Haitian, remain rare today.5 Conversely, the spread of children’s books in Asia, while not primarily commercial itself, accompanied Britain’s desire to open trade with Asian markets, requiring interaction with Asian languages and forms. British publications in Asia often manifest the assumption that Anglo ideals were universally valuable and translatable because they derived from rational and divine authorities. Translation in this context could be, in the words of Walter Mignolo, a “special tool to absorb the colonial difference” (3). Yet translating yielded local adaptations that exemplify Isabel Hofmeyr’s definition of translation as “a temporary truce between clusters of warring demands” (78). Many British children’s books adapted in Asia are what Chen calls “hybrid transcultural texts,” embracing aspects of Englishness while making space for alternate forms of authority (25). Translation and adaptation continued even after the English Education Act of 1835, which attempted to simplify colonial management in India by reallocating British East India Company funds away from translation toward education in English. Yet the anglicizing pressures reflected in this law and Warner’s comments anticipate British publishers’ desires to increase their role within the global market, making children’s book features more English. Commercial publishers including Frederick Warne defined world literature as British literature through series such as the Round the Globe Library (1865–​84). The Anglocentrism of the series stands out when compared to series compiled in the colonies, such as the Bengali Family Library (1853–​77). 430

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The British impact on global children’s literature unfolded internationally and remotely, creating distance between hybrid experimentation and an emerging Anglocentric canon. In what follows, I move between locations in the West and East Indies to examine three diverging streams of influence: 1) commercial and charitable publishers circulating books internationally, 2) international publishers adapting British books, and 3) British publishers defining global literature. My conclusion points to hybrid works that publishers ignored when creating global series. Unlike such compilations, my history is necessarily rather than intentionally partial, as British influence cannot be exhausted in one essay.6 Overall, British hegemony has meant that contributions to world literature remain uneven. As Emer O’Sullivan argues, “there is no equal exchange of texts” to this day (65). What we often think of as classic British children’s literature may be globally recognizable, but it is not truly global in the sense of mutual participation across the globe. Yet this early era demonstrates some significant examples of blending, which gesture to the possibility of a less centralized unfolding of children’s literature.

Commercial and Charitable Publishers Circulating Books Internationally As M. O. Grenby has shown, the type of books that Warner wanted to produce –​cheap catechisms and primers –​began to circulate between European metropoles and colonies in the sixteenth century. As the British acquired areas of the Caribbean, textbooks were among the first books with wide distribution, leading children’s author A. Selwyn to claim that West Indian children should be pitied because they lack “charming little narratives” and have only read “Vyse’s Spelling Book” (34). A mainstay of eighteenth-​century English classrooms, Charles Vyse’s New London Spelling Book (original 1776) was indeed ubiquitous, appearing, for example, in booksellers’ advertisements in the Kingston Chronicle (1819), Royal St. Vincent Gazette (1826), and Port of Spain Gazette (1836). These sellers –​ and others –​also hawked Vyse’s competitor William Fordyce Mavor’s English Spelling Book (1801). Selwyn’s division between storybooks and spelling books is, in many ways, misleading. While Vyse’s includes the word lists and conduct lessons common in textbooks, the New London Spelling Book contains engravings more typical of storybooks. An 1820 London edition begins with an international alphabet of people in stereotypical costumes, including an indigenous “Virginian” smoking a pipe (5–​8). Mavor’s English Spelling Book contains story-​based lessons about avoiding overindulgence, playing with appropriate toys, and eschewing animal cruelty. As these examples begin to suggest, British children’s literature combines celebrations of bourgeois English manners with strategies for incorporating global difference. While Mavor distills British ideals into a prescriptive universal form, Vyse’s international alphabet manifests the colonial urge to transform the people of the world into objects of British knowledge and wealth. The alphabet can be read against the grain to hint at indigenous know-​how –​ for instance, X for “Xalapanar” depicts an indigenous Mexican using a bow –​yet it tellingly positions a Chinese person against what appears to be a tea chest and the Virginian against a barrel, framing diversity in terms of its value for trade (8). There is a limit to who counted as a participant in this world; enslaved Afro-​Caribbean people do not appear. Despite the invisibility of the West Indies in Selwyn’s comment and Vyse’s alphabet, British storybooks for children entered Caribbean circulation as early as 1784, when an advertisement for “Newbery’s Books for Children” appeared in the Bermuda Gazette (2). By the early nineteenth century, Michael Comerford’s General Store in Grenada touted “A Variety of Entertaining Story Books for Children” (1810) (“For Sale” 1) and Andrew Coltart in Antigua “A Great Assortment of Children’s Books with Handsome Engravings” (1847) (3). Caribbean bookshops stocked texts with mixed-​age audiences, including The Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, by the 1830s.7 Commercial circulation raises the question of audience. After 1700, on most islands seventy to ninety percent of the population was Afro-​Caribbean. The majority were enslaved prior to British 431

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abolition in 1833 and forced to labor beginning around age five. Slaveholders, at least initially, prohibited literacy and restricted access to books. Thus, booksellers’ advertisements likely targeted colonizers and their children. However, many white children returned to England for school, raising the question of how publishers justified investing in the youth market. Book circulation gradually came to serve Afro-​Caribbean readership. As Rebecca Schneider has shown, Black literacy rose in the late eighteenth century when calls for amelioration led some enslavers to accept Christian instruction for people they enslaved (54). Although Selwyn was discussing white children, her comment about the dearth of “charming little narratives” in the Caribbean represents the truth that enslaved children were exposed mainly to educational materials. Missionary educators also favored Christian books such as Watts’s Divine Songs, which appears in an 1829 list of books “available at the school room of the charitable institution” in St. Christopher (now St. Kitts) (St. Christopher Gazette 1). This school was supported by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), an Anglican organization that sponsored Black education in the Americas, in part by sending large shipments of tracts. An 1826 collection of Jamaican children’s handwriting samples forwarded to the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) by British Baptist missionary William Knibb demonstrates the clash between even the solemn ideas of childhood found in these books and the lives of enslaved readers. One girl, Priscilla Brown, copies a hymn common in religious publications, sometimes attributed to Watts: “Thy favour gives me daily bread /​And friends, who all my wants supply; /​And safely now I rest my head, /​preserv’d and guarded by thine eye” (Knibb). The poem’s references to safety and satiation likely do not represent Brown’s experiences. The lines instead evoke a future in which Knibb was invested, when emancipated youth might inhabit this vision of thankful childhood. The BFSS associates this future with continued colonization: “he who in childhood has been taught to ‘fear God,’ will not in mature age refuse to ‘honour the King’ ” (21st Report 28). The Afro-​Caribbean population gained influence and purchasing power over the nineteenth century. Kathleen Drayton notes that the SPCK increasingly sold to the “coloured poor,” who in 1828 bought books costing over £500 (3). Missionaries’ circulation of books as Christmas presents and rewards suggests that Black readers came to expect more interesting material, especially after slavery ended. Moravian Arthur Van Vleck writes from Barbados, “As other schools, besides our own, distribute presents, we must do it also, & if we have re[ceive]d none during the year, we must buy at Christmas fr[om] the mission fund” (Van Vleck). A list of books distributed in St. Croix around 1857 contains Religious Tract Society (RTS) publications such as the evangelical travel narrative The Traveller (1838) and American (Jacob) “Abbott’s books for nursery,” modeled on Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Young Children (1778–​79) and available from commercial publishers (Records). In the second half of the century, Moravians and British Baptists trained Afro-​Caribbean teachers, some of whom created their own educational materials –​such as a hand-​drawn map of Jamaica sent to the YMMS –​ and generated Caribbean-​inflected interpretations of texts. Hofmeyr traces one teacher, Joseph Jackson Fuller, who went on to translate The Pilgrim’s Progress in Cameroon incorporating “traditions of the text” from Jamaican Baptist culture, “in which characters changed race and nationality, transmuting from seventeenth-​century English folk to African American and then Caribbean slaves” (93). Despite these alternative traditions, publishers put little effort into tailoring books for a Caribbean audience. A principal of Barbados’s Codrington College, Richard Rawle, worries in 1849 that “Until some device of Education [...] endows the mind’s eye with telescopic power to see things and customs and the social state of the country from which the books come [...] most little story books, meant particularly for the children’s edification, appear as enigmas” (63–​64). Pleas for more relevant materials mostly went unanswered. Thomas Nelson’s Royal Readers (1877–​96), produced for the British empire and adopted in the Caribbean, use what Valerie Joseph calls a “seductive [...] whitening process” to extend citizenship to Black readers while presenting “White British understanding and experience as

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[...] universal” (151). Drayton assesses that presentations of a “dominant white world [...] can only have been extremely harmful to the psyches of West Indian children” (8). The underlying agenda, she proposes, was to enforce a “division of labor” between Blacks and whites (8). Ads in papers for elite audiences, such as The Port of Spain Gazette, maintain such gaps through Eurocentric definitions of knowledge; the Trinidad bookshop of Henry James Mills carried, for instance, an expensive Juvenile “Cyclopedia” of six volumes (Port 2). Afro-​Caribbean folktales, which addressed mixed-​age audiences, are missing in such publications. A white-​authored book of tales, Mamma’s Black Nurse Stories, appeared in 1890, but Black-​authored stories were not printed for children until Nelson’s West Indian Readers (1927–​31), which used folktales from “L. O. Innis, a Black pharmacist and folklorist” (Campbell 50).8 A later book, No Hickory, No Dickory, No Dock (1995), lampoons the continued outsized influence of British children’s forms in the Caribbean with a mouse insisting he did not run up the clock and a boy who repairs Humpty Dumpty with superglue, exhibiting an ethos of refusing and remixing British stories. Although book circulation initially proceeded more slowly in Asia due to trade and language barriers, the Asian context yielded more opportunities for adaptation. Books had limited dissemination at first because the East India Company feared that cultural indoctrination would disrupt business. The first English publications for children living in India issued from German and Dutch mission presses, such as a press the SPCK donated to Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi) in 1712.9 Although British Baptists surreptitiously entered Bengal and established a press at Serampore in 1800, the floodgates for books did not open until the 1813 charter renewal. Daniel E. White notes that ships leaving England arrived in Bengal bearing “boxes of books” (58). The RTS formed auxiliary societies for distribution. William Jones reports that upon the 1825 formation of the Calcutta Tract Society, the organization sent “40,000 English tracts” (Jubilee 420). British people did not fully control the circulation or publication of British books in India, however. Citing reports of an itinerant bookseller selling tracts in Madras, Jones observes, “So general has been the circulation of English books, that they have been found in distant places where no Christian agency existed” (431). RTS agents wanted tracts to replace what they considered pernicious texts, such as Thomas Paine’s works, which were “still much read by many natives” (433). Yet local investment meant involvement in how books were packaged. Circulation gave way to translation, first by English people with Indian collaborators and then by Indian people themselves. Examples include missionary translations of Aesop’s Fables, designed to help proselytizers adjust to Indian life, and versions of Maria Edgeworth’s Little Merchants and Simple Susan (1800) by native translators aiming to develop vernacular literature (Catalogue 84).10 After missionaries gained access to the East India Company’s territories in India, they set their eyes on China, where adaptation became necessary for different reasons. From 1783 to 1842, the Chinese limited British trade to one port, Canton (Guangzhou), which restricted entry for non-​Chinese subjects. Missionaries were not allowed between 1808 and 1842, and the East India Company maintained a monopoly on trade until 1833. The first British children’s books were part of the clandestine circulation of religious materials, largely from missionary outposts in Chinese-​inhabited Malacca, Batavia, and Penang (now Malaysia), where, after 1816, the East India Company allowed publications in Chinese, English, and Malay. William Milne, sent to China by the London Missionary Society in 1812, describes how trade politics heightened the stakes of book circulation: Such is the political state of this country at present, that we are not permitted to enter it. [...] Tracts may, however, penetrate silently even to the chamber of the emperor. They easily put on a Chinese coat, and may walk without fear through the length and breadth of the land. (qtd. in Jones 476)

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Milne’s optimism downplays the difficulties missionaries encountered. Evading restrictions meant enlisting maritime workers to distribute tracts to nearby ports where Chinese people did business. British books were slow to take hold among adults and children, in part because China had an established tradition of educational books. Leona O’Sullivan notes that “wastage must have been considerable and disintegration rapid” (97). Although these efforts were not commercial –​ and would not have survived if they had been –​ missionaries understood their work as connected to the success of British trading goals, which meant avoiding the appearance of meddling in Chinese affairs. Missionaries sometimes engaged in outright subterfuge; Prussian-​born Karl Gützlaff (Charles Gutzlaff when he wrote in English) disguised himself in Chinese clothing to distribute tracts illegally in the Chinese interior. (Demonstrating the alliance between government, trade, and missionary work, Gützlaff held positions in the British government after 1835, including that of secretary to the governor of Hong Kong.) Milne’s “Chinese coat” metaphor refers not only to the machinations used to circulate materials, but also to the need for adaptation. Milne too supposedly dressed like a Chinese person when learning the language, potentially as an attempt at cross-​cultural understanding (Abbott 237). His early publications, including A Catechism for Youth (1817), looked like Chinese books in that they used woodblock printing techniques. In Milne’s case, the costuming was not meant to be wholly superficial. When designing his youth’s catechism, he abandoned a “mere translation” of Watts’s Catechism, aiming for readers’ greater “ease and pleasure” by tailoring a book to his audience (Philip 204). The Pilgrim’s Progress and Little Henry and His Bearer also appeared in “costume” (Jones 491). Thomas Beighton’s Malay-​language Pilgrim substituted Penang locations for the stops leading to the Celestial City and dressed Christian in a baju, or embroidered jacket (L. O’Sullivan 94). Leona O’Sullivan posits that this work “must have proved very offensive” to locals; Beighton blamed a Muslim collaborator, Abdullah bin Abdul al Kadir (also known as Munshi Abdullah), for scratching out lines from his manuscript (94). Kadir, for his part, describes being confused by British Malay books, as they did not have the correct idiom for the language (84). Costuming ultimately gave way to greater collaboration. In my next section, I discuss how repackaging of books by publishers in the West and East Indies produced hybrid forms and shifted meanings.

International Publishers Adapting British Books Grenby proposes that the spread of European children’s literature should be understood as a two-​phase process in which exportation was followed by international operations printing European books. This model does not work perfectly when it comes to the Caribbean. Although many islands had presses for government business, missionaries largely did not, due to an enslaver class that wanted tightly controlled production of texts. Hence, Warner had to rely on the exertions of American teenagers to find a publisher. It is nonetheless striking that Warner created his own book rather than drawing from existing stock. This decision reflects competition among educators of different denominations, as well as among colonial powers. Warner jettisons not only the creole hymnal, but also the (Lutheran-​ influenced) nondenominational catechism that the Danish government produced for enslaved youth. He had this freedom because colonial publication functioned at times as a cottage industry, responding to missionaries’ assessments of local conditions. Although he resisted translation, Warner responded to conditions in his own way, advancing a transnational Anglo-​American sensibility. English in the Caribbean had been used to strip enslaved people of their native languages and to solidify colonial rule, but after abolition English was also considered dangerous on non-​British islands because knowledge of antislavery texts might spark rebellion (hence some enslavers in St. Croix insisted their slaves speak creole). Warner found the Danish plan for gradual emancipation, which included educating enslaved children, inadequate: “Our great hindrance on this island which keeps them behind the English islands is that baneful slavery 434

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which casts many stumbling blocks into our way” (Warner 1841). Warner was motivated partly by self-​interest in wanting English influence; on the British islands, he writes, the African population contributed money to the mission. He implies that English opens the door to an enlightened world, while expressing his biased opinion that creole-​speaking youth could not contribute culturally. Moravians’ previous creole publications, conversely, demonstrate the hybridity resulting from some small printing endeavors. Their creole primers, printed in Germany but almost certainly produced with Caribbean collaborators, resemble European educational texts including British primers such as The Protestant Tutor (1679), but they incorporate words reflecting the Caribbean culture and landscape. ABC-​Boekje voor die Neger-​kinders (1825) includes the term “Roenkertje,” translated by Cefas van Rossem and Hein van der Voort as buzzer, meaning bee or hummingbird –​ the latter an animal that has not lived in Europe for millions of years but is native to the Americas and prevalent in the Caribbean (184). Caribbean nature was later absent from books; author Merle Hodge remembers that, as a child, her environment “did not seem real” compared to what appeared in stories (Gershel 78). Chen proposes that international adaptations and translations of European books should be viewed not simply as cultural imperialism, but also as intermixing. She labels such books “hybrid transcultural” texts, drawing from Nicholas Mirzoeff’s definition of transculture as “the violent collision of an extant culture with a new or different culture that reshapes both” (Chen 25). Such texts pose questions about how they might best be read, as hybridity can support as well as challenge colonial systems. Swapna Banerjee ponders whether adaptations exhibit derivative discourse or border thinking, defined by Mignolo as “a redistribution of the geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo 64). Books published in the East Indies occupy both categories, leaving room for alternatives to British authority. Hybridity accelerated in India as British colonizers adopted policies designed to improve colonial control by achieving greater cultural and linguistic influence. Official policy shifted with the English Education Act of 1835, which transferred East India Company funds from translation to English instruction. This decision was influenced by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute Upon Indian Education” (1835), in which he offensively asserts that no person “could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (109). Missionaries, at least those working remotely, had their own reasons to support this change. Jones of the RTS fantasizes that English books might be a way for children to hide Christian influence from parents: “young Hindoos can read in the houses of their fathers, books on religious subjects in English which they dare not read in their own language” (433). Translations continued, however, with international publishers forging their own motivations for publishing English materials, including mediating and challenging British influence. In 1837, Parsi publisher Furdoonjee Murzban produced a side-​by-​side English-​Gujarati version of Mavor’s Spelling Book. The book engages in a careful balancing act exhibiting the double consciousness of Indian subjects, especially those with some economic privilege such as the Parsis. Following a dedication to the British governor of Bombay, the Gujarati introduction asserts that “it is essential that the book gets published with the great support of the Government,” claiming that it “is filled with wisdom” (4, 6).11 Accordingly, the text offers a celebration of British knowledge and its transfer to the book’s target audience: “rural people” outside of Bombay (4). Translated stories about domesticated animals and toys present enticement for Indian youth to aspire to British childhood. The text further facilitates British colonization with an introduction to European branches of science; an invitation to delight in global capitalism, for instance, in a section on the provenance of silver; and instructions on being an effective tradesperson. The introduction suggests, however, that knowledge of English is useful primarily for gaining employment. Changing Mavor’s moral lessons into language lessons, the editor claims that he has excluded elements alluding to Christian authority that might cause “hatred” and “wrong thinking” 435

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(5). This claim is partially deceptive marketing, as multiple passages invoking a Christian god remain intact. The lip service to religious diversity resembles the earlier East India Company effort to avoid offending trading interests. Yet the editor has drawn the line at biblical poetry, cutting, for instance, a poem called “The Bible the Best of Books” (Mavor 139). Undermining Christian authority, even in this small way, implies that Indian children need not adopt British ideas along with the language and leaves room for alternate sources of authority. To this point, while the text includes engravings from the original, it replaces the three-​tiered frontispiece, which shows children clustered around white educators. In a new version “Engraved and Published for the Prop[rietor]s,” two tiers show boys and girls, some wearing head coverings, in educational settings (1). Another shows a man at a dais, perhaps representing an interface with colonial government. Rather than collapsing difference, the engraver experiments with capturing nonwhite skin, using constellations of dots. Most strikingly, the education settings show children listening to figures with partially darkened faces wearing Indian styles of dress. The text thereby separates English learning from British authority. This separation anticipates authors such as Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore who drew on English children’s materials to promote Indian nationalism. Sreemoyee Dasgupta has shown that Mukhopadhyay’s Kaṅkābatī (1892) riffs on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to make a moderate case for independence. Even straightforward adaptations demonstrate how meanings can shift when embedded in an international context. Kathātaraṅga (1865), a translation of Day’s Sandford and Merton by Madhusudan Mukhopadhyay for the Vernacular Literature Committee, established in 1851 to enrich the Bengali language, “retains the English names and the settings of the original text” (Gangopadhyay). Yet the text’s central problem –​Tommy Merton’s bad behavior resulting from his Caribbean upbringing –​signifies differently in this colonial setting. While the original text criticizes slavery, Day does not blame Tommy’s slaveholding father for the child’s misconduct, instead scapegoating Tommy’s mother and his enslaved caretakers. The translation, however, clarifies that the “excessive indulgence” derives from (both of) Tommy’s parents (1). While the original claims that slaves were “forbidden” to contradict Tommy, treating the authority of the enslaver as self-​evident, the Bengali version foregrounds the removal of their agency: “they did not have the power to stop him from doing illegal things” (1). An advertisement included in the book further decenters British authority by positioning the text alongside other vernacular publications, including the story of Pratapaditya, a Bengali leader who resisted the Mughal empire and was embraced by twentieth-​century Indian nationalists as a defender against foreign rule. Although Anglicization pressures were not as high in China, Hanan notes a shift in translation methods following the First Opium War from creative mimicking of Chinese forms to “straight” translations, which accompanied a greater focus on children’s books (435).12 He writes, “[E]‌arlier novelists tended to imitate the form of the traditional novel, and even to use Chinese chronology, but from the 1850s, their successors made [...] less attempt to simulate the Chinese novel” (435). Texts also moved away from offering “persuasion” to instead celebrate “noble endurance of suffering” (Hanan 435). Such messages were underwritten not only by an abstract Protestant work ethic, but also by the concrete goals of economic exploitation. As an index of a slightly earlier shift in Malacca, around 1841 missionaries produced a Malay version of the RTS’s Moses the Pious Negro (original 1840), which depicts an enslaved man living in the American South to promote the virtues of hard work.13 The tract’s publication in Asia reveals an attempt to universalize Anglo-​American views of Black labor as an extractable resource, implying that nonwhite people in other parts of the world might contribute to Western wealth. Yet work could be a way for international youth to claim some agency in the English publishing world. British mission presses in Malaysia and China involved young people in production, setting the stage for local creation of transcultural texts.14 At the Batavia press, children participated in composing, distributing, and sorting type (Chinese Repository 90). These contributions gave rise to larger 436

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collaborations. Milne’s successor in Malacca Claudius Henry Thomsen worked with Kadir to publish Bustan Arifin (1821–​22), a Malay-​English children’s magazine meant to furnish local youth with “useful knowledge” (vol. 1, iii). Many pieces in the magazine –​including a positive account of the imperial ambitions of Alexander the Great and a treatise on keeping the Sabbath –​demonstrate that the magazine’s definition of knowledge was Eurocentric. However, its influences indicate that British ideas were only a small part of the world of its readers. The publication was modeled not only on British youth miscellanies and mixed-​ age English-​language missionary publications such as the Indo-​Chinese Gleaner (1817–​22), but also on an Arabic title meaning “the Garden of the Literati” (iii). Ian Proudfoot argues that Muslim publications, including collections of moral advice for youth, better reflect Malay “popular reading habits” because, unlike British publications, they thrived commercially (28). Bustan Arifin’s first issue claims a part in this tradition by announcing that it “conform[s]‌to the taste of the people” and captures “the idiom of their language,” recalling Kadir’s comment that previous British publications had failed in this regard (iv). The magazine’s prospectus reveals one way the creators meant to ensure success: “One piece for each number will be written by a Native” (qtd in van der Putten 425). As many contributions lack attribution, it is unclear whether this plan came to fruition. Its goals were likely twofold: incorporating local viewpoints, while prompting youth to adopt Western styles of communication. Proudfoot notes that English publications pulled Malay youth “in the direction of the West” with “new ideas of individual participation in reading and writing,” which later influenced the region’s schools (20). Although an English essay on the “Art of Writing” in Volume One gives an international history of written communication, including Egyptian and Chinese innovations, it suggests that writing is important primarily because of the need to share knowledge after the Judeo-​Christian Fall (1). While promoting the idea that writers for the magazine will exert their own influence, the text funnels local know-​how toward universal profit, compatible with British exertions in the region. This model of producing periodicals with local collaboration proved popular in China, leading to more transcultural texts. A similar but longer-​running magazine, The Child’s Paper (1852–​97), used Chinese artists and was edited by high school students at the Presbyterian Lowrie institute (Chen 78). These practices created a wider vogue for local production; the Chinese Child’s Paper inspired versions in other areas, including Greece, Turkey, Persia, and India. In China, Chen claims, the training of locals ultimately led to Chinese-​run publishing. She notes, for instance, that the founders of the still-​active Commercial Press (established 1897) “learned printing, engraving, and bookbinding techniques” as students at Lowrie (18).

British Publishers Defining Global Children’s Literature Contrasting with these moves toward local contribution, publishers devised a remote means of influence in the latter part of the nineteenth century: creating “global” libraries that defined world literature. This Anglo-​American phenomenon includes the Child’s World Library (1878), the Wonderful Globe Series (1887), the All Over the World Library (1891–​98), and The Traveler-​Tales Series (1895–​98). Frederick Warne, a major contributor to the British Golden Age known for debuting Beatrix Potter, Randolph Caldecott, and Walter Crane, created several globally oriented series, which interestingly feature stories rather than the nonfiction accounts that appeared in similar series. His Round the Globe Library, conceived after he separated from his partner George Routledge in 1865, drew on Routledge’s business model, which involved popularizing what the firm considered quality literature. The series included some works about foreign characters, such as the title story in The Italian Boy: And Industrial Men of Note (circa 1879) and Mrs. H. B. Paull’s Pride and Principle, or The Captain of Elbedon School (circa 1879), featuring a mixed-​race Jamaican protagonist attending an English school. Yet most of Warne’s Round the Globe books feature white English children and 437

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settings. In this category, the publisher chose some books circulating globally by Sherwood and others, but also Harriet Myrtle’s (Lydia Mackenzie Falconer Miller’s) Story Book of Country Scenes (circa 1845), about a girl moving from London to the countryside, and Mrs. Fenton Aylmer’s Alec Tomlin, or, Choose Wisely (circa 1880s), set in Dorset, where British aristocrats are only metaphorical “slave-​drivers” and the only foreign item an “Indian box” (40, 83). A later incarnation of the series in the 1940s highlights Japan, South America, India, and other “exotic” locations, but using only British authors. The inclusion of mostly British books in a global series sends a message about British publishers’ attempts to dominate the global canon. In contrast, the Bengali Family Library, published in India by the Vernacular Literature Committee, includes many stories translated from English, including Kathātaraṅga, but also international classics including Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales (original 1835–​74, Bengali 1857–​76) and Bernardin de Saint-​Pierre’s Mauritius-​based Paul et Virginie (original 1788, Bengali 1859). The series also contains selections from Bengali periodicals and an original children’s work, Tale of Sushila: An Instructive Tale for Bengali Girls (1877). An 1845 catalog of the books held by the East India Company presents yet another version of a global library. This collection contains many transcultural texts, including an English-​Bengali periodical, Digdarshan (1818–​21); Hitopadesha: A Collection of Fables and Tales, in Sanskrit, by Vishnusarma (1830), edited by Lakshmi Náráyan Nyalankár; and Bengali-​English animal biographies created by the Calcutta School Book Society, a secular organization run by Europeans and educated Indians. The Company library holds an English translation of the Confucian classic Four Books, read by Chinese children, as well as Chinese maxims translated into English. There is a limit to this plurality; no West Indian books appear. Its collection, however, includes multiple translations of Arabian Nights’ Entertainment (1802), an English-​language text based on the internationally influential Thousand and One Nights, which circulated in the Caribbean. On the one hand, possession by the East India Company suggests that the organization did not find these books threatening to British interests. The collection captures international knowledge as part of the colonial endeavor, and tellingly, we lack evidence that most of these books were read by children. Yet on the other hand and in conclusion, such international libraries present a more complex and collaborative vision of global children’s literature than that embraced by publishers in Britain, allowing us to at least imagine a more authentically decentralized global literature and to anticipate contributions still unfolding in our world today.

Acknowledgments Thanks to the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) for permission to publish quotations excerpted from manuscript sources preserved there, and to RushTranslate and Saquib Ahsan for permission to quote from translations made by Ahsan.

Notes 1 Britain competed for St. Croix before being expelled by the Spanish; the island was later colonized by the French, then the Danish. Abolition did not happen until a slave rebellion in 1848. 2 Many books for youth in global circulation are educational materials, making it necessary to use an expansive definition of children’s literature. Books read by global youth also include classic children’s tales, steady-​ selling books for mixed-​age audiences, and religious tracts. 3 Most of the primary sources mentioned in this chapter, including translations, can be found in Worldcat. 4 Sherwood wrote her own children’s version of The Pilgrim’s Progress for the Indian context, The Indian Pilgrim (1810). 5 An exception is Alis Advencha ina Wandalan: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Jamaican Creole (2016), by Tamirand Nnena De Lisser.

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Book Publishing and the British Sphere of Influence 6 The Caribbean is diverse; future studies might concentrate on specific islands. Fuller treatments of Asia can be found in studies by Hanan, Goswami, Chen, Banerjee, and Daniel White. Isabel Hofmeyr’s work provides a great starting place for Africa. 7 As many of these books were published by multiple publishers, whose international records are incomplete, it is difficult to pinpoint who did the most business in the Caribbean. James Raven suggests that “North American newspaper advertising and colonial booksellers’ catalogues were used to retail London wares in a manner similar to provincial English practice” (6). 8 Some Black commentators considered these readers inappropriately superstitious for children seeking class mobility. Carl C. Campbell contends that the books do not include stories of “blacks […] as people” (51). 9 The Tranquebar press published Thomas Dyche’s A Guide to the English Tongue (original 1727), likely for British children connected with the East India Company. 10 Aesop’s Fables is not a British text; however, John Locke influenced its use as a children’s book by recommending it in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). 11 Translations from the Gujarati Mavor’s and Bengali Kathātaraṅga are by Saquib Ahsan. 12 English-​language children’s books did not circulate widely in China until the twentieth century. Chen explains that “the driving force” of circulation, the Christian Literature Society for China (the extension of an organization established in 1887), published translated books including Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe and “also began to import English books by becoming agents for Oxford University Press, John Murray, Sampson Low & Co., Longmans and other presses” (16–​17). 13 No copies appear to be extant. 14 Chen’s chapter in this volume traces contemporary book publishing in Asia, including its blending of local and global influences.

Works Cited 21st Report of the British and Foreign School Society. London: Printed by J.B.G. Vogel, 1826. Abbott, Jacob. China and the English. New York: William Holdredge, 1843. ABC-​Boekje voor die Neger-​kinders na St. Thomas, St. Croix en St. Jan. Gnadau, 1825. Agard, John, and Grace Nichols. No Hickory, No Dickory, No Dock: Caribbean Nursery Rhymes. Candlewick Press, 1995. “Andrew Coltart.” Antigua Observer, 23 December 1847, p. 3. Banerjee, Swapna. “Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-​Century India: Some Reflections and Thoughts.” Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood. Volume II, edited by Rosie Findlay and Sébastien Salbayre, Presses Universitaires François-​Rabelais, 2007. Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives, vol. 6, no. 3, 1990, pp. ix–​xi. Bustan Arifin (Malay Magazine), vol. 1, 1821. Campbell, Carl C. “Education and Black Consciousness: The Amazing Captain J. O. Cutteridge in Trinidad and Tobago, 1921–​42.” Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 18, no. 1, 1983, pp. 35–​66. Catalogue of the Christian Vernacular Literature of India, compiled by John Murdoch. Caleb Foster, 1870. Chen, Shih-​Wen Sue. Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. The Chinese Repository Vol. 5. Printed for the Proprietors, 1837. Dasgupta, Sreemoyee. “A ‘Moderately’ Bengali Alice: Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Kankabati.” Children’s Literature, vol. 48, 2020, pp. 1–​31. Day, Thomas. Kathātaraṅga (Sandford and Merton). Translated into Bengali by Madhusūdana Mukhopādhyāẏa, Calcutta School Book and Vernacular Literature Society, 1865. Drayton, Kathleen. “Politics of Textbooks: School Books and the Making of the Colonial Mind.” Presented at the First Biennial Inter-​Campus Conference on Education, Jamaica, April 1990. Fenton Aylmer, Mrs. Alec Tomlin, or, Choose Wisely. Frederick Warne, circa 1880s. “The Following Books Have Been Received.” St. Christopher Gazette, 2 January 1829, p. 1. “For Sale by Michl. Comerford.” St. George’s Chronicle, and Grenada Gazette, 12 May 1810, p. 1. Gangopadhyay, Gargi. Children’s Books from Bengal: A Documentation. http://​bengal​ichi​ldre​nsbo​oks.in/​ index.php. Gershel, Liz. “Merle Hodge: Crick Crack Monkey.” A Handbook for Teaching Caribbean Literature, edited by David Dabydeen, Heinemann, pp. 71–​85. Goswami, Supriya. Colonial India in Children’s Literature. Taylor and Francis, 2012. Grenby, M. O. “Going Global: Transnational Networks and the Spread of Early Modern Children’s Books.” Gryphon Lecture, 15 April 2021, University of Illinois. Online Event.

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Courtney Weikle-Mills “H. J. Mills Has Imported.” Port of Spain Gazette, 21 June 1836, p. 2. Hanan, Patrick. “The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-​Century China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 60, no. 2, 2000, pp. 413–​43. Hofmeyr, Isabel. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of Pilgrim’s Progress. Princeton University Press, 2004. “Imported in the Ship Clio.” Royal St. Vincent Gazette, 29 July 1826, p. 1. Jones, William. The Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society. London: The Religious Tract Society, 1850. Joseph, Valerie. “How Thomas Nelson and Sons’ Royal Readers Textbooks Helped Instill the Standards of Whiteness into Colonized Black Caribbean Subjects and their Descendants.” Transforming Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 2, 2012, pp. 146–​58. “Just Received.” Kingston Chronicle, 5 August 1819, p. 4. Kadir, Abdullah bin Abdul al. The Autobiography of Munshi Abdullah. Translated by W. G. Shellabear, Methodist Publishing House, 1918. Knibb, William. Manuscript Letter to BFSS and “Slave Book,” 1 December 1828, BFSS papers, no. BFSS/​1/​5/​ 1/​8/​4/​3, BFSS Archives, Brunel University. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Printed for A. and J. Churchill, 1693. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute by the Hon’ble T. B. Macaulay.” Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–​1839), edited by H. Sharp, Government Printing, 1920. Mavor, William. The English Spelling Book. London: Longman, 1818. —​—​—​. Mavor’s Spelling Book with its Goojrathee Translation. Summacher Press, 1837. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/​Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press, 2000. O’Sullivan, Emer. Comparative Children’s Literature. Translated by Anthea Bell, Routledge, 2005. O’Sullivan, Leona. “The London Missionary Society: A Written Record of Missionaries and Printing Presses in the Straits Settlements, 1815–​1847.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 57, no. 2 (247), 1984, pp. 61–​104. Philip, Robert. The Life and Opinions of the Rev. William Milne. Herman Hooker, 1840. Proudfoot, Ian. Early Printed Malay Books. Academy of Malay Studies, 1993. Raven, James. London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–​1811. University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Rawle, Richard. A Report of the Assembling of Church Schoolmasters at Codrington College. Barbadian Office, 1849. Records of Fridensthal Day School, La Grande Princess Rural Day School, 1857. EWI St. Croix Papers, no. 32.1, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “Samuel Hurst.” Bermuda Gazette, 10 July 1784, p. 2. Schneider, Rebecca. “Black Literacy and Resistance in Jamaica.” Social and Economic Studies, vol. 67, no. 1, 2018, pp. 49–​65. Selwyn, A. The Little Creoles. William Cole, 1820. van der Putten, Jan. “Abdullah Munsyi and the Missionaries.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-​, Land-​en Volkenkunde, vol. 162, no. 4, 2006, pp. 407–​40. van Rossem, Cefas, and Hein van der Voort. Die Creol Taal: 250 Years of Negerhollands Texts. Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Van Vleck, Arthur. Manuscript Letter to the Young Men’s Missionary Society, Barbados, 13 March 1850, YMMS papers, no. 107, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Vyse, Charles. The New London Spelling Book. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, 1820. Warner, William. Manuscript Letters to the Young Men’s Missionary Society, Friedensthal, St. Croix, 14 April 1841, 13 August 1842, and 17 July 1843, YMMS papers, no. 109, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. White, Daniel E. From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793–​1835. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Worldcat, OCLC, Inc., www.world​cat.org/​.

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36 CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN EUROPE A Historical Approach Emily Bruce

This chapter’s aim is to trace the development of continental European children’s books before the First World War, with an emphasis on the social, economic, and cultural institutions that shaped them. I touch briefly on landmark titles and survey the scholarly literature about European publishing for children, which is both extensive and, for some regions, longstanding. For brevity’s sake, the geographic emphasis is on the better-​documented German and French texts with occasional excursions north, south, and east.1 Courtney Weikle-​Mills and Shih-​Wen Sue Chen similarly call attention to institutions shaping traditions of children’s literature through their chapters in this section. Colonial power, religion, translation, hybridity, and the market all played a part in the development of the continental European counterpart as well. Yet the scope of this chapter is quite different. Temporally or geographically narrower settings allow Chen and Weikle-​Mills to evidence particular arguments more thoroughly, while also articulating each case’s global significance. By contrast, this chapter travels the long path through a forest of linguistic traditions and across many centuries. I have aimed to make this survey as capacious as possible, particularly by pushing the starting point further back in time than is typical. The abundant references to stories and scholarship that follow constitute breadcrumbs I hope will lead to further reading. In seeking to synthesize research across varied contexts, I have found that the study of European history and the study of children’s literature should be antiphonal. The call to explain a particular text or author can be met with a response from the history of technology, political theory, education, hierarchies, and so on. But as critically, questions about social and political formation in the past should heed conversations about children’s books, which too often historians still neglect.

The Medieval and Early Modern Periods The origins of stories for children in Europe, as everywhere on the globe, stretch back to time immemorial: the lullabies sung by the earliest humans (Mithen) and the tales that formed an oral tradition eventually recorded through fables and epics in the ancient Mediterranean (Hansen). Later in time, the medieval period has provoked scholarly quests to locate its children’s literature. For the narrow stratum of young Europeans who could read between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, both explicitly instructional and entertaining manuscripts circulated, from alphabet books to school plays (Kline). Medievalists have endeavored to expand the canon back in time and to dismantle the most DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-42

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extreme interpretation of the thesis advanced by Philippe Ariès and his followers that because medieval infant mortality rates were so high, parents could not love their children, and therefore that the concept of childhood did not exist. Susan Morrison, for instance, shows that even a Carolingian mother’s moralistic courtesy book for her son includes “intimate and tender yearnings” (4). But the readership of these texts is often ambiguous –​ as Gillian Adams asks, should a catechism for “an unlearned audience including [but not specialized for] youth” be considered children’s literature (255)? Medieval reception can be even harder to interpret than reception is for later periods because of the more limited extant documentation. Children of course read texts intended for adults during the Middle Ages, as they do today (Kline 5). Some of the most compelling recent work uses marginalia to examine children’s reading practices, such as Deborah Ellen Thorpe’s study of doodles in a fourteenth-​century Neapolitan manuscript of astronomical tables and sermons. Thorpe scrutinizes these drawings to argue convincingly not only that they are the product of a child’s hand, but also that some suggest collaboration between two children of different ages (2). But more research and published translations are needed for this era, especially on the vernacular languages in which medieval children read alongside Latin. Children’s literature of the early modern era also remains understudied, even with the entrance of print. Although Johannes Gutenberg introduced his version of moveable type around 1440 CE in Mainz, the spread of printed books across Europe was neither immediate nor evenly distributed. The earliest cities to acquire presses were in Central Europe, followed by the Italian peninsula. Old trade routes guided the transfer of presses and printed books alike (Hellinga 385). It was nevertheless, as Elizabeth Eisenstein argued in 1968, a revolution in volume: “A hard-​working copyist turned out two books in little less than a year. An average edition of an early printed book ranged from two hundred to one thousand copies” (3). Regulations, printing privileges (early copyright protection), and censorship also evolved in complex ways over time and across different political and confessional regimes (Shaw 399–​401). By the early sixteenth century, printed books began developing distinctive features (such as title pages and more legible typography) that would characterize publishing in future centuries, including children’s literature (Archer-​Parré 86). After moving on from hand-​drawn illustrations in early print, woodcuts and copper engravings joined moveable type in a critical technological innovation for later picturebooks (Shaw 396). Some incunabula (the earliest printed texts) deal with childhood, such as one published in 1483 on pediatric medicine by Flemish physician Cornelius Roelans (Adams and Fras 583). Latin textbooks were printed as early as the 1480s (Hellinga 387). But as far as I know, no incunabulum has been identified as addressing solely a young audience. Research on youth literacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has often centered on the education of elite older boys or young men through their correspondence and textbooks, as in Steven Ozment’s classic Three Behaim Boys (1990) and Alan Ross’s Daum’s Boys (2015), both located in Central Europe. The latter includes discussion of a fascinating document: a 1652 list of books pupils had chosen as rewards for passing the Easter exam. The youngest students received more books in German than those in higher grades (who selected Latin, Greek, or bilingual titles), as well as more utility texts, such as hymnbooks and catechisms (Ross 102–​103). Ross uses the list to chart the development of the youths’ literacy skills, but also observes that the senior students chose the most varied books, suggesting their position allowed for following whims rather than the prescribed curriculum. While there are other excellent studies of textbooks during this period, age has not been a primary category of analysis (Campi et al.). If sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century textbooks exist at the intersection of adult and youth literature, one early modern title has been anointed “arguably the greatest children’s book of the seventeenth century” (Immel 30) and is often called the first picturebook: Johann Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures, 1658). Bilingual (in Latin, the language of scholarship, and German, a vernacular language of Moravia), the text introduced illustrations as a third language to help young readers interpret the natural and social world (Trumpener 57). Discussed by Giorgia Grilli and Karen Coats elsewhere in this volume, it influenced the later development of 442

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illustrated children’s books, schoolbooks (Michel), and encyclopedic nonfiction to amuse and instruct child audiences. Comenius held views about education that might seem ahead of his time: that girls and boys of all birth should attend school, and that corporal punishment should be abandoned. Robert Dent persuasively ties these attitudes, and the intense efforts Comenius gave to pedagogy, to his Millenarian spirituality and membership in the Bohemian Brethren (the early Moravian Protestant church, which was unusually egalitarian). Meanwhile, Margaret R. Higonnet frames the Orbis Pictus as an imaginative travel narrative, in which Comenius invites readers to visualize the book as their path into the world (244–​45). Actual travel stories for children became important from the seventeenth century onward. Examining Dutch examples such as Jan Vander Linden’s Heerlycke ende geluckige reyse naer het Heyligh Landt ende de stadt van Jerusalem (Glorious and Fortunate Journey to the Holy Land and the City of Jerusalem, 1634), Feike Dietz argues that these books presented young readers with a paradox: at once emancipating the child’s imagination with an invitation to travel and subordinating it to adult expertise on faraway places (“Education” 208). Travel narratives could elicit children’s curiosity –​a morally contested quality in the early modern period (Koepp; Stronks). More straightforward was the production of Bibles and hymnbooks targeting children (although the specific content of some religious texts was controversial in a Europe still emerging from the age of religious wars). Protestant German children’s Bibles were generally small, contained illustrations, and initially emphasized Old Testament excerpts (Bottigheimer, “Reading” 68). In Catholic Spain, seventeenth-​century paintings of the Virgin Mary’s education have provoked debate over whether these were intended to encourage girls’ literacy instruction or the reverse, by emphasizing the Immaculate Conception and rendering Mary inimitable. Charlene Villaseñor Black points out that contemporary viewers might have received the images in a number of different ways, and argues convincingly for considering the context in which the paintings were displayed: convents and schools for orphaned girls where female literacy was valued (105–​106). Institutional context is also important for Xavier Bisaro’s innovative analysis of how French primers and plainchant books were presented typographically to support oral learning and bring children’s voices under control. John Exalto has shown how early school readers were similarly intertwined with Calvinist religious texts in the Dutch Republic, where the curriculum was “ABC”: alphabet, Bible, and catechism (see also Gabriele von Glasenapp’s chapter in this volume). Alphabet books constituted another important genre for early modern children. Not all the earliest examples necessarily targeted a young audience as opposed to autodidacts of any age (Houston 104). Other ephemeral early literacy instruments, such as hornbooks (known as carte or tavole in the Italian states and as chartes, palettes, or tablettes in France), have largely not survived (Chartier 514; Bailey). Inexpensive secular texts that were accessible with basic reading skills, which we now call chapbooks (in German: Volksbücher), likely circulated among youth as well (Chartier 517; Hürlimann xv). In France, these were part of the bibliothèque bleue, named for its blue paper covers and popular since 1602 (Delcourt and Parinet). Over time, the bibliothèque bleue began to publish adaptations of seventeenth-​century fairy tales originally written to amuse adults at court, or as political allegory (Velay-​Vallantin). These tales –​penned by Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, and others –​constitute a founding block of the fairy-​tale canon that transformed into a genre for child readers over the course of the nineteenth century (Jean; Seifert; see also Weronika Kostecka’s chapter in this volume).

The Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries While it was once true that children’s literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was neglected along with the medieval and early modern periods in favor of the later “Golden Age,” scholarship on this pivotal era has developed extensively. Indeed, it is plausible now to argue that the century between 1750 and 1850 should be considered the foundational age of European 443

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children’s literature, since it witnessed a reading revolution (Engelsing, Bürger), the emergence of the middle-​class family ideal (Bruce), and transforming ideas about child readers (Grenby). Bourgeois pedagogues and parents across the continent increasingly marked childhood as the life stage critical to self-​formation, young readers’ independent curiosity was cultivated alongside their moral development more than ever before, and new genres were born. How did literacy change in the late Enlightenment? The expansion of a reading public was both qualitative (albeit in debated and regionally specific dimensions) and quantitative (albeit persistently challenging to measure). Generally, Western Europeans moved from intensively reading only a few religious books, largely in Latin, to extensively reading a wide range of more secular books, often in vernacular languages. While texts for children still make occasional vague references to faith, “they emphatically prepare children for life in this world, not the next,” writes Joke Spaans (325). New modes of private, introspective reading emerged, as well as the possibility of index and reference reading (Blair). The most reliable literacy measurements come from regional studies; national averages conflate differences emerging from legal regimes, urbanization, confessions, and of course limitations by class and gender. In East Prussia, one of the poorest areas in the German lands, the proportion of peasants able to sign their names at the time of marriage grew from ten percent in 1750 to forty percent in 1800 (Engelsing, Analphabetentum 62). By the 1840s, fewer than ten percent of all Prussian men were recorded as illiterate (Vincent, ­figures 2 and 3). In Paris, ninety percent of men and eighty percent of women could sign their names by 1789. Figures in Amsterdam were similar: eighty-​ five percent of men and sixty-​four percent of women by 1780. Rates remained lower in Russia (van Vliet 427–​28). Institutions supporting the book trade grew rapidly in this period as well, including the specialization of printers, publishers, and booksellers; the birth of journals for book reviews; and fairs such as the great biannual Leipzig Buchmesse, which was longstanding but expanded in the eighteenth century (Freedman 15–​62). In 1755, the Leipzig catalog included 1,231 titles. That number rose to 2,025 by 1775, and 3,368 books were listed just twenty years later (van Vliet 426). Two-​thirds of the books available at German fairs were written after 1750 (Engelsing, Bürger 53). Across the eighteenth century, nearly 3,500 new periodicals appeared in the German lands alone (van Vliet 427). As the market share of religious texts declined from 1740 to 1800, pedagogy became one of the top genres (Fronius 140–​41). In 1775, the busy publisher and bookseller Friedrich Nicolai wrote in a review, “We are beginning to receive a great wealth of writings for young people [...] thus the young soul finds here such matters through which it must be awakened to the fear of God and love of humanity, once it is able to accept good thoughts and sentiments” (Bruce 32; see also Selwyn). While censorship was still fierce in many corners of the continent, a “violen[t]‌ passion for reading” during this century helped Europeans resist the authoritarian restriction of ideas (Mollier and Cachin 486). New technologies emerging during this era included marketing innovations, such as Johann Cannabich’s Kleine Schulgeographie (Short School Geography, 1818–​51) advertising a discounted school atlas from the same printer with purchase of the Cannabich text (Bruce 15). Furthermore, books began becoming cheaper in the early nineteenth century. The development of the more powerful iron press made reproducing woodcuts easier (Banham 454–​56), and the handpress in general was soon on its way out in favor of mechanization (Hellinga 385). Penny Brown has shown how the rise of illustrations in French children’s books after 1770, while shaped by technological possibilities, also facilitated new ideas about children’s needs in the Enlightenment –​such as portraying children interacting without adult supervision (“Childhood” 440–​41). Among those new ideas about the child, literacy’s critical importance for Enlightenment pedagogues cannot be overstated. Despite Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s denunciation of books as “sad furnishings” for a boy’s world, even his followers such as Johann Heinrich Campe were convinced that supplying children with tailor-​made reading experiences was essential to their self-​formation (Bruce 175–​76).2 In this “pedagogic century” between 1750 and 1850 (Sheehan 131–​32), European 444

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philosophers placed the child as symbol at the center of political discourses about reason, governance, and the self; at the same time, some directed their attention to children’s development, reimagining childhood as a vital stage separate from adulthood. There was far from consensus on what precisely should rest on the young person’s shelf –​ as Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker write, “never before had books been considered so important and yet so dangerous to the child’s soul” (119). Pedagogues across the continent lectured parents about age-​grading, sentiment, literary quality, religion, language, and even the proper binding for the books they should offer their children, as well as under what conditions children should read (Apgar; Baggerman and Dekker 119–​70; Bérenguier; Dietz, Readers; Popiel 112–​39). Schoolbooks in the nineteenth century filtered new ideas about learning from pedagogues of the eighteenth. These texts were produced for use at school or at home, since school attendance was still limited and uneven across Europe. In some regions, even peasant and working-​class children had access to common schools. For example, nearly a hundred percent of German children in the Duchy of Baden attended primary school by the 1840s (Maynes 104). At the same time in the French département Indre-​et-​Loire, an inspection found that nearly forty percent of the village schools needed to meet the 1833 Guizot Law (which had guaranteed a primary school place for every boy) were lacking (Strumhinger 14–​15). More boys than girls attended secondary school, but by 1864 there was at least one secondary school for girls in every Prussian city or large town (Jacobi 10).3 For middle-​ and upper-​class children, the curriculum both in institutions and for informal learning at home expanded from the medieval trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) to include new academic genres such as natural science, geography, and world history. Books could also provide instruction in letter writing (Poster and Mitchell), manners and comportment (Bérenguier), and even dance patterns (Bruce 48). German geography books for youth illustrate general trends across this era in European schoolbooks: from a catechetical model in the mid-​eighteenth century –​ for which readers were assumed to be elite young men –​a participatory, problem-​driven model emerged, for which users’ particular needs were considered, including their age, gender, and desire to be amused (Bruce 89–​90). Both academic and moral instruction arrived with a new genre at the end of the eighteenth century: youth periodicals. Taking off in the 1770s in Central Europe (Joeres 197–​98) and by the 1790s in France (Brown, History 202–​204), these magazines, weeklies, and yearbooks capitalized on the power of print and expanded literacy to deliver directly to children a hodgepodge of poetry, serialized fiction, illustrations, riddles, games, theology, history, botany, fables, and more (Göbels). Galleries of exemplary lives appeared in both periodicals and world history textbooks (Bruce 52–​53). Brown demonstrates that this old narrative form gained new utility and urgency for cultivating child readers’ virtues in the first decade after the French Revolution (Brown, “Children” 213–​15). One of the earliest French youth periodicals, Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfans (The Young Misses Magazine, first published 1756), has long intrigued scholars.4 This interest is partly due to its almost immediate transnational popularity, translated as it was into English in 1757 and German in 1761. It also exemplifies the importance of periodicals to an emerging literature specialized for girls (Bérenguier; Nickel). Similarly, Christian Felix Weiße’s enormously influential weekly Der Kinderfreund (The Children’s Friend, first published in 1775) spread quickly around the world (Zille et al.). In 1775, Weiße addressed his readers directly: “The appetite with which you will collect it from the publisher and read it will soon persuade me whether I should continue these little family amusements or should break it off” (vol. I, no. 1, p. 7). Serialization helped position the book as an essential commodity that the middle-​class child should desire. Among the various genres included in early youth periodicals were songs (including fold-​out sheet music) and dramatic dialogues. For example, Christian Carl André’s Der Mädchenfreund (The Girl’s Friend, 1789–​91) provided the lyrics and notation for such songs as “To Youth,” “The Worth of Religion,” and “Diligence” (Bruce 36). Stage directions indicate that the plays were intended to be 445

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performed, or at least read aloud with siblings and friends. For example, in “The New Year’s Wish” from the Neujahrsgeschenk für Kinder von einem Kinderfreunde (New Year’s Gift for Children from a Child’s Friend, first published 1778), the actress playing Lottchen was meant to give part of her performance “in a sing-​song tone” (Bruce 41). Dialogues offered young readers the chance to assume different characters, take on the authority of direction, and enjoy the pleasure and humor of the physical action. Both song collections for children and dramas for family use could also be found as standalone volumes in the eighteenth century (on songs, see Mueller 105–​42 and Hürlimann 1–​20; on plays, see Prilisauer). Fables and fairy tales, too, occasionally appeared in serial publications. But in their own right, these genres were finally claimed by a young audience during this pivotal period. Despite Aesop’s many adult audiences over the centuries since the fables attributed to him were first told in seventh-​ century BCE Greece, Seth Lerer has made a forceful claim for the genre as fundamentally concerned with children and childhood (35–​56).5 The Enlightenment saw that connection tighten. More than two millennia after Aesop, the French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine modeled his collection on the ancient Greek version and dedicated it to the then six-​year-​old Dauphin (Birberick). Similarly, the oral tradition across Europe (indeed, around the world) that later coalesced into a corpus of fairy tales was heard as much by adults as by children. While debates have flared over the years about the nature of the fairy tale’s origin, the modern age sees it essentially as a young person’s genre.6 The early nineteenth century saw two developments: an ethnographic (and nationalist) approach to documenting regional folklore emerged (Hopkin 13–​26), and the tales themselves were increasingly offered to middle-​class children as “bedtime stories.” These trends met in Central Europe through the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The first edition of their Kinder-​ und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) appeared in 1812 and 1815. By the final full edition of 1857, this text had transformed the genre and was dominating the fairy-​tale market. The collection was produced with an explicit class-​based vision for a newly defined group of children with pocket money and serious reading responsibilities (Bruce 59). The participation of middle-​class German children was thus indispensable to the Grimms’ publishing success. As Kostecka shows in this volume, fairy tales are the quintessential transnational genre of children’s literature. This is certainly true for how the Grimms and other German fairy-​tale collectors (Johann Musäus, Ludwig Bechstein, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and others) from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have traveled the world (Blamires; Bottigheimer, “Bechstein”; Dollerup; Shmeruk 186–​87).

The Golden Age Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1845) forms something of a bridge from the enthusiastically expanded children’s literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the more sophisticated Golden Age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth. Sometimes misread as an archaic piece of didacticism, it is really a fantastic parody of those earlier moralizing stories. The trailblazing children’s literature scholar Harvey Darton describes scenes such as the tailor chopping off the thumbs of a little boy who was sucking them as an “Awful Warning carried to the point where Awe topples over into helpless laughter” (250). Walter Sauer’s careful account of the book’s publishing history illuminates the institutional context of children’s literature through details such as Hoffmann’s insistence that it be made available at an inexpensive price (240–​41); the author-​illustrator’s close supervision of the lithographer “ ‘lest he improve [his] dilettantish figures artistically and stray into the ideal’ ” (236); and one of the first German copyright cases, sparked by another publisher’s plagiarism (221–​24). Struwwelpeter was almost instantly popular across translations and has had more staying power than most of its Enlightenment predecessors.7 Recent studies of the collection’s transnational influence include Anna Daszkiewicz’s comparison of the original with a Polish adaptation and Friedrich Karl Waechter’s 1970 critically reimagined Anti-​Struwwelpeter, Hüsinye Koçak and 446

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Onur Yilmaz’s examination of the didactic values a bilingual Turkish-​German edition offers to a plural society, Lea Heiberg Madsen’s exploration of how Struwwelpeter haunts two twenty-​first-​century British novels, and Martino Negri’s reception study of the story (as “Pierino Porcospino”) in Italy over two centuries. The flourishing of children’s book publishing in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries arose from several institutional, cultural, and technological factors. Books could be acquired and distributed easily in every part of Europe by 1900 –​ in Paris, they could even be purchased in railway stations as of 1853 (Poslaniec 30). Spanish publishing increased from 500 titles per year in the 1870s to 2,000 in 1905; the Italian catalogs grew from 2,000 books in 1830 to 8,000 in 1890. By 1913, Paris produced 32,000 books and Germany over 35,000 annually (Mollier and Cachin 488). Paper became cheaper in the 1860s and 1870s, which was sorely needed for publishers’ profit margins –​even if it did endanger the archival preservation of more recent books (Banham 454). Advancements in the technologies of reproducing images facilitated an increase in both the volume and the artistic ambitions of picturebooks (see Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer’s contribution to this volume) and illustrated chapter books. Color illustrations and covers could be found more often after 1840 (Banham 466). Beautifully adorned books became presentation gifts for school competitions. Christian Poslaniec points to “stories in images” such as La Famille Fenouillard by Christophe (Georges Colomb), published in a youth periodical in 1889, as precursors to twentieth-​century bandes dessinées (38–​42). Notable illustrators of this era include the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, sometimes considered the father of the comic strip; the German Wilhelm Busch, known for his slapstick style and the 1865 novel Max und Moritz he authored and illustrated; the French Paul Gustave Doré, celebrated for moody fairy-​tale drawings; the Danish Kay Nielsen, who later contributed to mid-​ twentieth-​century Disney films (Pitz 53–​56); and the French watercolorist Edmund Dulac, whose work has been compared to that of the English virtuoso Arthur Rackham (Dalby 80–​85). Many of the styles and tropes these artists originated came to define the best in illustrations for children. Institutions first established earlier in at least some corners of the continent became more widespread by the turn of the twentieth century, such as copyright protections for authors in addition to printers (Hellinga 384). One of the first histories of children’s literature appeared during this era, Adalbert Merget’s Geschichte der deutschen Jugendliteratur (History of German Youth Literature, 1867), suggesting a strong appetite for information about and debate over the quality of books for young readers. Transnational publishing continued, albeit with more regulation (Lathey, Role 112). Whether it was the Danish Hans Christian Andersen traveling to Britain via German editions (Alderson and Immel 394), Johanna Spyri’s “very Swiss” novel Heidi (1881) establishing one particular image of Switzerland for generations around the world (O’Sullivan 154), or foreign titles such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) filling the gap left by Catholic publishers for youth in France under the extension of laïcité (state secularism) between 1890 and 1914 (Poslaniec 42–​45), it is certain that, as Emer O’Sullivan and Virginie Douglas demonstrate in this volume, we should pay attention to the translation of children’s books as an art and a business. School attendance and literacy rates, too, increased across Europe in the late nineteenth century, although most children still only received a primary education (Harp 8). The political messages of textbooks in Germany and France after 1870/​71, despite the challenge of assessing youth reception, have engaged modern European historians (Kennedy). The apparatus of consumer culture also continued to develop in the later nineteenth century (Cook; Denisoff). Some working-​class children and youth controlled small amounts of their own cash for the first time in European history and could spend it on the goods they desired, including mass-​market literature. Some of the European children’s authors and titles best known today emerged during these decades before the First World War –​ far too many to discuss fully here. The era, one of intensifying colonialism, industrialization, regime change, and transformations of the social order, has also given rise to a substantial scholarly literature on how stories written for children seek to shape readers’ understanding 447

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of difference. For example, Annegret Völpel argues that the decline of humor in German Jewish children’s books on religious topics over the course of the long nineteenth century can be attributed to leaders who felt Jewish minority culture was under threat from Reform and assimilation (110–​ 11). Karen Ghonem-​Woets and Piet Mooren show that in the tolerant and emancipated Netherlands, Catholic publishing firms resisted secular education until the Second World War (410–​11). Gender analysis suffuses one of the key surveys of French children’s literature that includes this period, Brown’s A Critical History of Children’s Literature. She traces the gender specialization of late nineteenth-​century adventure stories targeting boys and domestic novels targeting girls that also unfolded in other national markets –​ while acknowledging that actual readers did not necessarily follow authors’ and publishers’ intentions (vol. 2, 25). Nor was the gender division of genres straightforward, as Nancy Twilley demonstrates through a queer reading of German advice literature, boarding school novels (nominally for girls), and sea-​adventure stories (nominally for boys) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The intersections of gender and empire have also received attention from scholars showing that European colonial ambitions required capturing the imaginations of both girls and boys, even if they were sent on different missions (Bowersox; Gallagher). The old educational genre “galleries of peoples” took on new political power in the later nineteenth century to justify a racial hierarchy in the metropole (for example, in Lothar Meggendorfer’s “movable picturebooks” [Brian 94–​95]) and expansion of overseas imperial control (for example, through the travels of Jules Verne [Dine 183–​86]). The world-​opening aims of European children’s literature, stretching back at least to Comenius, suited the tradition to colonial knowledge production. Further marvelous tales for children from the European Golden Age, especially written in its geographic peripheries, call out for attention here. Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1906–​7) began as a geography textbook and became one of the classics of Swedish children’s literature (Hürlimann 260–​61). From Italy, Carlo Collodi’s inventive L’avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883) has been translated 220 times, as well as adapted into other media (O’Sullivan 149–​54). In Russia, forty-​eight percent of the population was under the age of nineteen on the eve of the First World War, and growth of the reading public accelerated from 1890 to 1917. Fairy tales such as those collected by Alexander Afanasyev and published for children in 1870, translated foreign titles, and newly affordable books for novice readers (as publisher Ivan Sytin advised, “the very best and as cheap as possible”) were among the notable genres of that era (Hellman 170).

Conclusion The study of children’s literature is enriched by historical analysis of the varied economic, political, and social institutions that contributed to its production. We can trace general trends across the continent and over time, such as the shift from primarily instructive (if still sometimes amusing) to primarily entertaining (if still didactic) texts. Yet a chronologically extensive and geographically comparative approach shows that the development of children’s literature depended on technological access, government and church policy, and market forces as much as on individual artistic genius. In turn, the study of mentalités and the reconstruction of past worlds is enriched by attention to stories for children and the agendas they reveal. Young people’s books contributed to the cultivation of patriotism, racial ideology, gender norms, new philosophies of individual liberty, middle-​class family sentiment, attacks on and defenses of religion, and more. Historians should read stories for children –​ and not only those most familiar –​alongside any great European novel from the adult canon. My mention of Afanasyev’s Russian fairy tales returns us to the beginning: the oral traditions that predated and continue to weave themselves into literary texts for children. Creative methodologies for accessing those earliest stories have constituted some of the most enthralling work in the history 448

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of European children’s literature. Where should this field go next? This chapter does not do justice to the existing scholarship on books for children in eastern, southern, and northern Europe. Still, there remains more to learn about child readers and publishing institutions beyond the powerhouses of France and Germany. Temporality, too, is an opportunity: now that the earliest printed books and even medieval manuscripts are more widely accessible via digitization, I expect to see additional studies of medieval and early modern child readers. Marginalia may prove useful on that front, as well as further investigation of the relationship between children’s writing and the books they read (such as Baggerman and Dekker pursued through young Otto van Eck’s eighteenth-​century diary). As we continue to tell and retell the story of stories for children, there is still more to learn from European history.

Notes 1 Like all European institutions, the children’s book market was upended by the First World War (Paul et al.). Many developments within the better-​known European children’s literature of the past century parallel those in the Anglo-​American sphere discussed in other chapters of this volume. 2 Perhaps Campe’s best-​known book is Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779), which built from Daniel Defoe’s novel to become an oft-​translated international bestseller seen as offering the best moral guidance to the modern child (Merveldt). 3 For a thorough national-​level comparison of expanding secondary schools for girls, see Albisetti et al. 4 The French word magasin meant at that time more “treasury” than “magazine.” But Leprince de Beaumont does imply that her collection will grow over time and promises to issue future annual volumes. 5 As with any residue of the oral tradition, the authorship of the tales attributed to Aesop is uncertain. The earliest extant collection dates from three centuries after he is presumed to have lived. 6 Jack Zipes has written of commingled Middle Eastern, Italian, French, English, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Slavic origins for tales that then reformed and recirculated across Europe. In addition to the seventeenth-​ century French court tales mentioned earlier, important literary predecessors to the brothers Grimm include early modern writers of the Italian peninsula (Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile). Hans Christian Andersen joined the canon in the 1830s. For more on the oral versus literary origins of fairy tales, see the debate sparked by Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s controversial Fairy Tales: A New History (2009), captured, for example, in a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore, vol. 123, no. 490 (2010). 7 Twenty-​six German editions of Der Struwwelpeter appeared within the first fifteen years of its publication, selling tens of thousands of copies. Today it is available in over a hundred languages (Sauer, “Classic” 245, “Polyglotte” 73).

Works Cited Adams, Gillian. Review of Medieval Literature for Children. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4, 2003, pp. 254–​56. Adams, Paul L., and Ivan Fras. Beginning Child Psychiatry. Brunner/​Mazel, 1988. Albisetti, James C., Joyce Goodman, and Rebecca Rogers, eds. Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Alderson, Brian, and Andrea Immel. “Mass Markets: Children’s Books.” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: 1830–​1914, vol. 6, edited by David McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 382–​415. Apgar, Richard. Taming Travel and Disciplining Reason: Enlightenment and Pedagogy in the Work of Joachim Heinrich Campe. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD dissertation, 2008. Archer-​Parré, Caroline. “Type, Typography, and the Typographer.” Rose and Eliot, pp. 81–​94. Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick, Vintage Books, 1962. Baggerman, Arianne, and Rudolf Dekker. Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary. Brill, 2009. Bailey, Merridee L. “Hornbooks.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 3–​14. Banham, Rob. “The Industrialization of the Book 1800–​1970.” Rose and Eliot, pp. 453–​69. Bérenguier, Nadine. Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France. Ashgate, 2011.

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Emily Bruce Birberick, Anne L. Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de La Fontaine. Bucknell University Press, 1999. Bisaro, Xavier. “Verbal Regulation in Early Modern French School and Plainchant Books.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1, 2019, pp. 43–​62. Black, Charlene Villaseñor. “Paintings of the Education of the Virgin Mary and the Lives of Girls in Early Modern Spain.” The Formation of the Child in Early Modern Spain, edited by Grace E. Coolidge, Routledge, 2016, pp. 93–​119. Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2011. Blamires, David. Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books, 1780–​1918. Open Book Publishers, 2009. Bowersox, Jeff. “Boy’s and Girl’s Own Empires: Gender and the Uses of the Colonial World in Kaiserreich Youth Magazines.” German Colonialism and National Identity, edited by Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, Taylor and Francis, 2010, pp. 57–​68. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “Ludwig Bechstein’s Fairy Tales: Nineteenth Century Bestsellers and Bürgerlichkeit.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 15, no. 2, 1990, 55–​88. —​—​—​. “Bible Reading, ‘Bibles’ and the Bible for Children in Early Modern Germany.” Past and Present, vol. 139, no. 1, 1993, pp. 66–​89. Brian, Amanda M. “Imagining the World in Bavarian Children’s Books: Place and Other as Engineered by Lothar Meggendorfer.” Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Emer O’Sullivan and Andrea Immel, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017, pp. 89–​107. Brown, Penny. “Children of the Revolution–​the Making of Young Citizens.” Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006, pp. 205–​20. —​—​—​. “Capturing (and Captivating) Childhood: The Role of Illustrations in Eighteenth-​Century Children’s Books in Britain and France.” Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2008, pp. 419–​49. —​—​—​. A Critical History of French Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2008. Bruce, Emily C. Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class. University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. Campi, Emidio, Simone De Angelis, Anja-​Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, eds. Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe. Librairie Droz, 2008. Chartier, Anne-​Marie. “Teaching Reading: A Historical Approach.” Handbook of Children’s Literacy, edited by Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant, Kulwer Academic, 2004, pp. 511–​38. Cook, Daniel Thomas. The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Duke University Press, 2004. Dalby, Richard. The Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration. Chartwell Books, 2002. Darton, F. J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Cambridge University Press, 1932. Daszkiewicz, Anna. “ ‘Struwwelpeter,’ ‘Anti-​Struwwelpeter’ und ‘Złota różdżka’: Ein pädagogisches Bilderbuch zum ‘Leviten lesen’ im Vergleich.” Convivium, 2013, pp. 85–​113. Delcourt, Thierry, and Élisabeth Parinet, eds. La bibliothèque bleue et les littératures de colportage actes du colloque (Troyes, 12–​13 novembre 1999). École des chartes, 2000. Denisoff, Dennis, ed. The Nineteenth-​Century Child and Consumer Culture. Routledge, 2008. Dent, Robert A. “John Amos Comenius: Inciting the Millennium through Educational Reform.” Religions, vol. 12, no. 11, 2021, pp. 1–​14. Dietz, Feike. “Mediated Education in Early Modern Travel Stories: How Travel Stories Contribute to Children’s Empirical Learning.” Science in Context, vol. 32, no. 2, 2019, pp. 193–​212. —​—​—​. Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment: Literacy, Agency and Progress in Eighteenth-​ Century Children’s Books. Springer Nature, 2021. Dine, Philip. “The French Colonial Empire in Juvenile Fiction: From Jules Verne to Tintin.” Historical Reflections /​Réflexions Historiques, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 177–​203. Dollerup, Cay. Tales and Translation: The Grimm Tales from Pan-​Germanic Narratives to Shared International Fairytales. John Benjamins Publishing, 1999. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 40, no. 1, 1968, pp. 1–​56. Engelsing, Rolf. Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–​1800. J. B. Metzler, 1974. —​—​—​. Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft. Metzler, 1973.

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Children’s Book Publishing in Europe Exalto, John. “Alphabet, Bibel, Katechismus: Das ABC der vormodernen Grundschule in den Niederlanden.” Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, vol. 15, no. S2, 2012, pp. 65–​77. Freedman, Jeffrey. Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Fronius, Helen. Women and Literature in the Goethe Era 1770–​1820: Determined Dilettantes. Clarendon, 2007. Gallagher, Maureen. Young Germans in the World: Race, Gender, and Imperialism in Wilhelmine Youth Literature. University of Massachusetts Amherst, PhD dissertation, 2015. Ghonem-​Woets, Karen, and Piet Mooren. “The Trinity in Educational Publishing: The Constant Factors in the History of the Dutch Catholic Publishing Houses Zwijsen and Malmberg.” Religion, Children’s Literature, and Modernity in Western Europe, 1750–​2000, edited by Jan de Maeyer, Hans-​Heino Ewers, Rita Ghesquière, Michel Manson, Pat Pinsent, and Patricia Quaghebeur, Leuven University Press, 2005, pp. 407–​21. Göbels, Hubert. Zeitschriften für die deutsche Jugend: eine Chronographie 1772–​1960. Harenberg, 1986. Grenby, M. O. The Child Reader, 1700–​1840. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Hansen, William, ed. The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths. Princeton University Press, 2019. Harp, Stephen L. Learning to Be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–​ 1940. Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. Hellinga, Lotte. “The Gutenberg Revolutions.” Rose and Eliot, pp. 379–​92. Hellman, Ben. Fairy Tales and True Stories: The History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People (1574–​2010). Brill, 2013. Higonnet, Margaret R. “Travel as Construction of Self and Nation.” Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Emer O’Sullivan and Andrea Immel, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017, pp. 235–​51. Hopkin, David M. Voices of the People in Nineteenth-​Century France. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Houston, R. A. Literacy in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2017. Hürlimann, Bettina. Three Centuries of Children’s Books in Europe. Translated by Brian Alderson, Oxford, 1967. Immel, Andrea. “Children’s Books and Constructions of Childhood.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel. Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 19–​34. Jacobi, Juliane. “Girls’ Secondary Education in Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century Germany, Austria and Switzerland.” European Conference on Educational Research, Göteborg, Sweden, 10 September 2008. Jean, Lydie. “Charles Perrault’s Paradox: How Aristocratic Fairy Tales Became Synonymous with Folklore Conservation.” Trames, vol. 11, no. 3, 2007, pp. 276–​83. Joeres, Ruth-​Ellen.“The German Enlightenment (1720–​1790).” The Cambridge History of German Literature, edited by Helen Watanabe-​O’Kelly, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 147–​201. Kennedy, Katharine D. “Regionalism and Nationalism in South German History Lessons, 1871–​1914.” German Studies Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 1989, pp. 11–​33. Koçak, Hüsniye, and Onur Yilmaz. “Eine Vergleichende Studie zu Didaktischen Elementen in der Deutschen Kinder-​ und Jugendliteratur: ‘Savruk Peter–​Der Struwwelpeter’ und ‘Nur Mut, Kurt!–​Cesur Ol Korkut!’” Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, vol. 37, no. 2, 2020, 424–​36. Koepp, Cynthia J. “Curiosity, Science, and Experiential Learning in the Eighteenth Century: Reading the Spectacle de la nature.” Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–​1800, edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, Routledge, 2006. Kline, Daniel T., ed. Medieval Literature for Children. Routledge, 2003. Lathey, Gillian. The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers. Routledge, 2010. Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter. University of Chicago Press, 2008. Madsen, Lea Heiberg. “Neo-​Victorian Naughty Children: Double Narratives, Struwwelpeter and (Mis)Reading Misbehaviour.” Neo-​Victorian Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 83–​109. Maynes, Mary Jo. Schooling for the People: Comparative Local Studies of Schooling History in France and Germany, 1750–​1850. Holmes and Meier, 1985. Merget, A[dalbert]. Geschichte der deutschen Jugendliteratur. Berlin, Plahn’schen Buchhandlung, 1867. Merveldt, Nikola von. “Multilingual Robinson: Imagining Modern Communities for Middle-​Class Children.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 51, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1–​11. Michel, Gerhard. “Die Bedeutung des ‘Orbis Sensualium Pictus’ für Schulbücher im Kontext der Geschichte der Schule.” Paedagogica Historica, vol. 38, no. 2, 1992, pp. 235–​51. Mithen, Steven. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Emily Bruce Mollier, Jean-​Yves, and Marie-​Françoise Cachin. “A Continent of Texts: Europe 1800–​1890.” Rose and Eliot, pp. 485–​97. Morrison, Susan S. “Introduction: Medieval Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 1, 1998, pp. 2–​6. Mueller, Adeline. Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood. University of Chicago Press, 2021. Negri, Martino. “The Reception of the Struwwelpeter in Italy.” Rivista di Storia dell’Educazione, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017: 307–​24. Nickel, Petra. Mädchenzeitschriften–​Marketing für Medien: Eine kommunikationswissenschaftliche Analyse der Marktstrategien und Inhalte. Waxmann, 2000. O’Sullivan, Emer. “Does Pinocchio Have an Italian Passport? What Is Specifically National and What Is International about Classics of Children’s Literature.” The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader, edited by Gillian Lathey, Multilingual Matters, 2006, pp. 146–​62. Ozment, Steven E. Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany: A Chronicle of Their Lives. Yale University Press, 1990. Paul, Lissa, Rosemary Johnston, and Emma Short, eds. Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War. Routledge, 2019. Pitz, Henry C. Illustrating Children’s Books: History–​Technique–​Production. Watson-​Guptill Publications, 1963. Popiel, Jennifer J. Rousseau’s Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in Modern France. University of New Hampshire Press, 2008. Poslaniec, Christian. Des livres d’enfants à la littérature de jeunesse. Gallimard/​Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2008. Poster, Carol, and Linda C. Mitchell, eds. Letter-​ Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies. University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Prilisauer, Birgit. Das Kinderschauspiel der Aufklärung–​die Intentionen der Autoren im Kontext der Zeit. Universität Wien, Diplomarbeit, 2009. Rose, Jonathan, and Simon Eliot, eds. Companion to the History of the Book. Wiley, 2019. Ross, Alan. Daum’s Boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany. Manchester University Press, 2015. Sauer, Walter. “A Classic Is Born: The ‘Childhood’ of ‘Struwwelpeter.’” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 97, no. 2, 2003, pp. 215–​63. —​—​—​, ed. Der polyglotte Struwwelpeter. By Heinrich Hoffmann, Edition Tintenfaß, 2008. Seifert, Lewis C. Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690–​1715: Nostalgic Utopias. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Selwyn, Pamela E. Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment. Penn State University Press, 2021. Shaw, David J. “The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century.” Rose and Eliot, pp. 393–​406. Sheehan, Jonathan. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton University Press, 2005. Shmeruk, Chone. “Yiddish Adaptations of Children’s Stories from World Literature.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 6, 1990, pp. 186–​200. Spaans, Joke. “From Schoolbook to Children’s Literature: The Evolution of a Dutch Book Market for Youngsters in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The Book World of Early Modern Europe, vol. 2, 2022, pp. 324–​46. Stronks, Els. “Curiosity, Youth, and Knowledge in the Visual and Textual Culture of the Dutch Republic.” Science in Context, vol. 32, no. 2, 2019, pp. 213–​36. Strumingher, Laura S. What Were Little Girls and Boys Made Of? Primary Education in Rural France, 1830–​ 1880. State University of New York Press, 1983. Thorpe, Deborah Ellen. “Young Hands, Old Books: Drawings by Children in a Fourteenth-​Century Manuscript, LJS MS. 361.” Cogent Arts and Humanities, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–​18. Trumpener, Katie. “Picture-​Book Worlds and Ways of Seeing.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel. Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 55–​75. Twilley, Nancy. Reading Gender in Late Nineteenth-​Century German Young Adult Literature. Washington University in St. Louis, PhD dissertation, 2012. Velay-​Vallantin, Catherine. “Tales as a Mirror: Perrault in the Bibliothèque bleue.” The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, edited by Roger Chartier, Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 92–​135. Vincent, David. “The Progress of Literacy.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2003, pp. 405–​31. Völpel, Annegret. “Religion, German Jewish Children’s and Youth Literature and Modernity.” Religion, Children’s Literature, and Modernity in Western Europe, 1750–​2000, edited by Jan de Maeyer, Hans-​Heino

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37 CONTEMPORARY ASIAN BOOK PUBLISHING Shih-​Wen Sue Chen

Mapping contemporary children’s book publishing in Asia is challenging, as this region encompasses such diverse cultures and rich literary histories. This chapter focuses on the twenty-​first-​century publishing landscapes in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, and Japan because of their distinctive political, sociohistorical, and literary traditions. It examines key forces such as booksellers, book pricing, government policies, and gatekeepers. It also considers the relationship between publishers and literary festivals, book fairs, and book awards and discusses the influence of globalization. Case studies of some major presses explore their vision, key authors they publish, and strategies they have adopted in response to new directions in publishing. Joel Taxel notes that in the globalized world, “there has been a dramatic shift in the way books are conceived, commissioned, produced, and sold” (482). Other scholars have observed that contemporary children’s book publishing has been affected by neoliberalism to such an extent that publishers view children not as “readers of books, but as consumers of ideas” (Hade and Edmondson 140). Multinational conglomerates in particular focus on the “branding” of children’s stories, preferring to invest in characters that can be licensed across films, television, and other consumer products such as toys and clothes. That publishing giants, driven by the desire to maximize profits, are now less likely to take risks on new authors or experimental writing has led to a form of market censorship. Remarking that many small independent publishers are being pushed out of the market, Daniel Hade and Jacqueline Edmondson argue that “[c]‌hildren ought to be able to have experiences with books without being subject to the homogenized, synergized, commercialized texts dominating the children’s book market today” (143). While their article focuses on the United States, their comments also apply to the PRC, Japan, and India, where bestseller lists are frequently occupied by series books.

The People’s Republic of China The General Administration of Press and Publications, formerly the China National Publishing Administration (CNPA), is the government agency that monitors and regulates book publishing in the PRC. In 1977, one year after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–​76), 192 new children’s titles were published (Bi and Fang 64). Before 1983, publishing houses operated under strict regulations about what they could publish, but after Deng Xiaoping announced the “reform and opening up” policy, they had relatively more freedom. Many private booksellers emerged, providing competition for the state-​owned Xinhua bookstores. Although Xinhua controlled ninety-​five percent of the book

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market in 1979, they lost this dominance by 1988, when “nearly two thirds of the book market was controlled by private and collective stores” (S. Chen 352). With increased competition, fewer subsidies from the CNPA, and higher taxes putting pressure on publishing houses, publishers began to seek to understand the public’s reading preferences (Y. Chen). In response, they produced a record number of book series in the 1980s, sparking a “book series fever” (Fang et al.). China’s children’s book market has grown exponentially since the 1980s, particularly after 2002, the beginning of what Teri Tan calls the “golden era of children’s books” in the PRC (“Looking”). In 2019, 950 million copies of children’s books were printed, and in 2020 there were 20,000 new titles published (“Shaoer”). The increase in the number of commercial books has been attributed to the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series in the country as well as the opening of the book market to foreign capital (Taxel). As of 2022, there were 600 children’s book publishers in the PRC targeting a market of 370 million children under age eighteen (Tan, “Shanghai”). Nevertheless, Tan described China’s children’s book market in April 2020 as “young, with its picture book industry barely a teenager” (“More”). In terms of distribution, online stores such as DangDang and JD.com have surpassed brick-​and-​mortar booksellers (Ren and Kang), while publishers are exploring the best social media platforms for marketing books to young audiences, including Douyin (TikTok), WeChat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and more. In 2019, the total sales of children’s trade books in China increased by 3.1 percent (Ren, “Industry”). Analyzing data between 2015 and 2019, Dianshun Ren reports that the market share of children’s literature (excluding picturebooks) has been decreasing, while comics and picturebooks have been increasing. In 2020, the COVID-​19 pandemic caused a decline in the number of new books published and a drop in the retail market. The decrease in new children’s titles is also due to the government’s decision to prolong the application process for CIP (Cataloging in Publication) numbers in an effort to “cool down the booming segment” (Tan, “Looking”). However, children’s books still maintained a growth rate of 1.96 percent over the previous year (Ren and Kang). The focus on “knowledge-​based” texts, especially popular science books, has been particularly noticeable after 2020, when there was an explosion in the number of informational books published. In 2021, children’s books accounted for 58.5 percent of book sales in China, and the total book market was up by 11.45 percent compared to 2020 (“Chinese”). The first publishing house dedicated to issuing children’s books was Juvenile and Children’s Publishing House, established in December 1952, shortly after the founding of the PRC. Its focus was on educating children through literature after the Chinese Civil War. China Children’s Press and Publication Group (CCPPG) is now the country’s largest children’s book publisher in terms of output. Phoenix Juvenile and Children’s Publishing is also a key player, having released Hans Christian Andersen Award winner Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze and Sunflower and other novels to international readers. Other top publishers in terms of retail sales are 21st Century Publishing House, Sichuan Children’s Publishing House, Zhejiang Children’s Publishing House, Tomorrow Children’s Publishing House, and Dolphin Media,1 but their individual market share ranges from two to four percent, indicating that there is currently no children’s publishing giant (Ren, “Development”). While there are a number of high-​quality literary standalone works for young adult readers by authors such as Cao and Chen Danyan, this section will focus on book series. In 2019, titles from Bei Mao’s Mi Xiaoquan series occupied the top eight rankings on the children’s bestseller list, while Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White and Totto-​Chan: The Little Girl in the Window by Kuroyanagi Tetsuko held the ninth and tenth spots, respectively. (White’s and Kuroyanagi’s books have consistently been among the top thirty best sellers for the past decade, indicating that the Chinese market favors long-​time classics [Fan et al.; “Shaoer”].) Similarly, in 2020, series books occupied more than half the positions on the top 100 bestselling children’s book list. While classics have proven their longevity in guaranteeing revenue, book series are attractive to publishers because they can be produced quickly and because readers buy new books more readily if they are part of a series (Shiao 220). Younger readers are drawn to series because they provide familiarity and repeatable 455

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pleasures (Watson; Newland; see also Annette Wannamaker and Jennifer Miskec’s chapter in this volume). Series books are also “an important part of [children’s] apprenticeship in learning to read” (Ross 197). Finally, series books tend to be more affordable. For example, in 2019 a Mi Xiaoquan book was priced between 16 and 20 RMB (approximately 2.5 to 3 USD) while Totto-​Chan was priced at 39.5 RMB (approximately 6 USD). Although “the actual purchase price of many children’s books is below 30% [sic] the list price” (Ren and Kang 496) because online retailers offer discounts, for the two-​thirds of China’s 370 million children living in rural areas, access to books remains an issue. The dominance of series means that it is difficult for young readers to access emerging authors; even the “new” titles on the 2020 top 100 list were part of existing series. Chinese publishing industry experts note that there are few innovations in children’s books, and publishers worry that genuinely new works cannot become bestsellers (“Shaoer”). The saturation of series books lessens the chance that high-​quality works will reach young people. The Mi Xiaoquan’s School Diaries series (2012–​), published by Sichuan Children’s Publishing House, is known as China’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Written in diary format, the books about a naughty but appealing boy focus on the hilarious observations of Mi Xiaoquan from first grade to fourth grade. According to their author, The biggest challenge in creating children’s literature lies in the need to change our way of thinking. [...] Not only must one have child-​like thinking beyond imagination, but [one must] also understand what children are thinking, what they like, what cartoons and toys are popular recently, etc. (Meng) Bei’s ability to portray children’s daily lives is reflected in both the written text and the cartoonlike line drawings rendered in bold colors. Ming Qing, one of Sichuan Children’s Publishing House’s senior editors, works closely with him. She considers the target audience’s reading ability and suggests the length and physical size of each book. Capitalizing on Mi Xiaoquan’s popularity, they have issued other series such as Mi Xiaoquan Brain Teasers and Mi Xiaoquan Comic Idioms. There has also been a TV series featuring Mi Xiaoquan and his friends. The strong editorial direction, attention to young audiences’ needs, and vigorous afterlife of this series illustrate the extent to which marketing drives content in contemporary children’s publishing in the PRC. Another popular publisher of school series is Tomorrow Publishing House, one of the top five publishers in the children’s market in 2017 (Ren, “Development” 150). It is known for publishing one of China’s most popular children’s authors, Yang Hongying.2 Heralded as “the Queen of children’s books in China,” Yang has been praised for her sense of humor and her ability to convey “complexity and depth of emotions” (Li, “World” 17). Her twenty-​four-​volume fantasy series, The Diary of a Smiling Cat, has sold over 52 million copies since it was launched in 2006 and has been translated into English, German, Indonesian, Korean, and Thai. Yang’s earlier popular series Mo’s Mischief (2003–​), published by Jieli Publishing House, made Ma Xiaotiao one of the most recognizable boy characters in Chinese children’s literature. Like Mi Xiaoquan, Ma Xiaotiao is mischievous and optimistic. He frequently challenges adult authority. The series (twenty-​nine volumes to date) explores his troublemaking antics at school and often focuses on misunderstandings between adults and children, which are resolved in humorous fashion. Yang “reflects the problems with Chinese education” in these stories and invites readers “to think about the gaps between Ma Xiaotiao’s interpretations of his world and their own more informed understanding” (Li, “Subjectivity” 88; Li, “Trends” 474). Prior to the publication of the Mo’s Mischief series, Yang had authored other school stories such as Bad Boy of Class 3, 5th Grade, and Fairy Teacher and Bad Boy. Of every hundred children’s books sold in 2017, three were by Yang (Ren, “Development” 152). Lifang Li points out that there are many imitators of her works, leading to a surge in publications 456

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focusing on naughty children and school life that are of questionable quality,3 and that “the children’s literature community has been appealing to the public to reject superficiality [...] to avoid taboo topics as a basis for humor, and to avoid rude jokes as a cheap means to attract readers” (“Subjectivity” 89–​90). However, Yang’s books demonstrate that “rude jokes” can be profitable. For example, Mo’s Mischief: Four Troublemakers (2008) includes a major character nicknamed Penguin who is known for his farts: “Whenever he suddenly giggled in class, you knew he had just done a silent but deadly one” (28). The text proceeds to describe his nonsilent farts, comparing them to the sound of a “machine gun,” “cannon ball,” “saxophone,” and “Chinese string instruments” (29). Readers also learn that he “ate all day long, even in the classroom, which was strictly against the rules” (35). Penguin is described as “short, chubby” and “a bit of a cry-​baby,” which associates fatness with negative qualities (28, 31). Yang’s writing resonates with young readers, but this example suggests that some of the books have problematic ideologies. Although ninety percent of Tomorrow Publishing House’s sales in 2018 came from reprints of popular titles (“Books”), it has also published some innovative picturebooks, including several by noted illustrator Xiong Liang (aka Kim Xiong), such as The Little Stone Lion, The Toy Rabbit Story, Kitchen God, and The Clay General. He often collaborates with his brother Xiong Lei, and the duo are “considered the first authors to pioneer and experiment with the fresh format of picture books in mainland China since 2000” (Chen and Wang 21). Xiong Liang uses a variety of artistic techniques, including ink wash painting and woodblock painting, and is admired for experimenting with different styles. His illustrations have been described as a “one-​of-​a-​kind fusion of traditional and modern art” (“Xiong” 14). The Little Stone Lion, published in Taiwan by Heryin Books in 2005 and in the PRC in 2007 by Tomorrow, contains only 173 words. In the first spread, the stone lion is bigger than the surrounding objects, and the second and third spreads make it seem even larger. Xiong plays with perspective and distance to surprise readers when they discover that the lion is actually smaller than a cat. The book reflects on homesickness, the passage of time, memory, and nostalgia in a subtle and charming manner. Xiong was shortlisted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2018. Yet despite supporting creative author-​illustrators such as Xiong, and publishing picturebooks by the award-​ winning Cao Wenxuan, Tomorrow produces relatively few new titles each year, meaning that many talented authors cannot break into the market. In addition to school stories, young Chinese readers are invested in animal stories. “China’s King of Animal Stories,” Shen Shixi, publishes bestselling books in the “animal novel series” issued by Zhejiang Children’s Publishing House. He is known for tragic stories about animals in harsh physical environments. Shen revealed in an interview that he thinks animal fiction “can easily penetrate through human culture and social formality, break the confinement of morality, as well as dismantle the falsehood in the civilized society, so as to reveal and show the original state of life” (qtd. in Hou 353). Several of his novels have won literary awards, including The Dream of the Wolf King, The Life of a Vulture, and The Complaints of the Elephant Mother, and his books are required reading in many schools. Unlike the lighthearted series books mentioned above that provide readers with quick entertainment, Shen’s work is serious and complex, although it has been criticized for “sentimental anthropomorphism,” sexism, and reflection of patriarchal ideologies (You). To make his novels more attractive to potential buyers, publishers have marketed them as part of series, such as the Shen Shixi Award-​Winning Books series. Yet Shen’s book series are very different from Yang’s Mo’s Mischief series, suggesting that appearing in a series does not mean that a book must be simple, formulaic, and lacking literary quality. A recent strategy adopted by China’s publishing industry is the “go global, bring in” policy, which aims to distribute original content around the world and make the best international books available in China. One forum for promoting Chinese children’s literature is the China International Children’s Book Fair (CCBF), held annually in Shanghai since 2013; as Valerie Coghlan establishes elsewhere in this volume, such fairs are important global events for publishers, licensing companies, 457

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and educational institutions as well as writers, illustrators, book critics, translators, and other industry professionals. The CCBF is the only fair in the Asia Pacific region devoted to books for children aged sixteen and under. During the CCBF, awards are given to the winners of the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Competition and the Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award (CICLA), recognizing excellence in children’s literature and picturebook illustration. Publishers are also making use of augmented reality (AR) technology to attract readers to their picturebooks. In most cases, readers use mobile devices that have an AR app installed to make certain parts of a page three-​dimensional and animated, sometimes speaking to the reader. Some publishers are experimenting with how virtual reality technologies might help promote their publications, but it remains to be seen whether AR and VR really make children’s reading experiences more interactive and dynamic or whether they are passing fads; a recent study of how parents and preschool children in Shaanxi province responded to AR picturebooks shows that the books’ quality and design could be improved (Wang). Future trends forecast by publishers such as Sun Zhu, president of CCPPG, include “Cross-​disciplinary titles that combine literature with history and science, or picture books that offer both elements of science and art” (Tan, “Looking”). One notable title of this type is Wang Wei’s Dakai Zijincheng [Opening the Forbidden City], a pop-​up book that won the 2021 Meggendorfer Prize for Best Paper Engineering–​Trade Publication. The book, which is over three meters long when unfolded, is a work of art that also includes historical tales and information about the architecture and the emperors who lived and worked in the Forbidden City. Yet although innovation is apparent and book awards and book fairs aim to draw readers’ attention to excellent Chinese children’s literature, there is still much room for Chinese children’s authors and illustrators to move away from series books to standalone novels and picturebooks. Furthermore, research indicates that male authors dominate bestseller lists and that gender stereotypes are prevalent in bestselling books, suggesting a need for more diverse books in China (Li et al.). Even so, industry watchers are optimistic that “the Chinese children’s book industry en masse is moving from sheer quantity to higher quality” (Tan, “Looking”). Several crowdfunding campaigns have allowed new authors to publish their books, and smaller presses that aim to publish high-​quality original works such as Hulijia (Fox’s Family) and Milai Tongshu (Milai Children’s Books) have found recent success in the competitive PRC children’s book market. Jieli Publishing House is aware of the barriers that unknown writers face, and their strategy is to continue to release new works by established authors and reprint their backlist so they can use the sales revenue to support and promote new authors (Tan, “Jieli”). This is an encouraging sign that publishing houses are trying to ensure children’s access to a broader range of texts.

Japan Japan monitors the Chinese children’s book market closely because China is currently Japan’s biggest rights market. Both countries have a long history of producing books for young readers. Although it has been posited that Japanese children’s literature did not exist before the nineteenth century, R. Keller Kimbrough and others argue that books written for children appeared in the seventeenth century (Kimbrough 114). Since the seventeenth century, Japan has also become renowned for manga, although here too it has been posited that manga itself was born during the period of British influence in Japan, and found its figurehead in Osamu Tezuka (1928–​89). Inspired by Walt Disney and Hanna and Barbera’s publications and animation work, he established the foundations for shōnen manga, comics for boys, and even created the first shōjo manga, its counterpart for girls. (“Manga”)

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One of the biggest challenges the contemporary Japanese children’s book market faces is the low birthrate. In 2021, Japan recorded a 3.5 percent decrease from 2020 in the number of births, and the fertility rate was down for the sixth year in a row (Jiji). Not only does the declining birthrate affect the number of potential readers, but it also affects distribution of books, as the number of working-​ age adults is dwindling. Nearly 10,000 brick-​and-​mortar bookstores closed between 2008 and 2018 (Tan, “Market”). Japanese children’s book publishers, aware of the need to broaden their range of potential customers, are looking towards overseas markets, particularly China. Kuroyanagi’s Totto-​Chan: The Little Girl at the Window is a longstanding favorite in the PRC with over 11 million copies sold, and has consistently been on the top ten best sellers’ list over the past decade (Ren). This autobiographical text was first published as a series of magazine articles between 1979 and 1981, then issued in book form by Kodansha. Primarily known in the United States for manga titles such as The Ghost in the Shell and Attack on Titan, Kodansha was founded by Seiji Noma in 1909 with the mission to “educate people and develop society” (Kodansha). Although Kodansha began as a publisher of magazines and only committed to book publishing in 1949, it has a strong position in the Japanese children’s book market. Kodansha is also the publisher of the Penguin series written by Saito Hiroshi and illustrated by Takabatake Jun; titles include Penguin Exploration Team, Penguin Firefighter Team, and Penguin Detective Team. These books are full of action and unpredictable events, complemented by humorous illustrations. Like Chinese publishers, Japanese publishers have found that packaging and marketing books as “series” increases sales, even though Japan has a longer history of producing innovative and outstanding picturebooks and illustrated books. Kodansha’s most successful children’s series is the Aoitori series, which has sold more than 35 million copies. Some of the books in the series are translations, while others are original Japanese fiction titles. They are designed for middle-​grade readers and feature simple grammar and vocabulary. All the kanji used in the books have furigana (phonetic guides) to help readers know how to pronounce the word. The Young Innkeeper Is a Grade Schooler!, written by Reijo Hiroko and illustrated by Asami, is a twenty-​volume series under this imprint that has been very well received, with over three million copies sold; it has been adapted into an anime series and a feature film. To attract more readers, Kodansha has invited children to join the Aoitori book club, which has more than 5,000 members worldwide. Members can become “junior editors” who help with proofreading and give feedback on content (Tan, “Children’s Book Publishing”).4 Kodansha also encourages quality children’s literature through three awards: Kodansha Picture Book Newcomer Award (1959–​), Kodansha Award of Children’s Literature for Newcomers (1959–​), and Kodansha Publication Culture Award for Children’s Books (1970–​). Kaisei-​sha, founded in 1936, is another major children’s publisher whose titles have been translated into over forty languages. Its most popular picturebook series, Nontan, features a naughty white kitten whose friends include a piglet, three rabbits, a bear, and a tanuki (raccoon dog). Written by Kiyono Sachiko, the first Nontan book was published in 1976. The characters enjoy birthday celebrations, swimming, and Christmas but also learn about the importance of sharing, inclusion, and friendship. In the first book, Let Me Go on the Swing, Nontan, Nontan initially refuses to let his friends play on the swing. After much pleading from the other animals, Nontan agrees to get off the swing after counting to ten, but because he doesn’t know the numbers after four, he only counts to three repeatedly. In the end, all the animals count to ten together and play happily. The series is notable for its use of onomatopoeia, which Joost Pollman argues helps enhance the dynamics of the story because Japanese onomatopoeia is “more integrated in the picture than western typography is capable of” (qtd. in Ito 457). Kaisei-​sha has also published several picturebooks by renowned author/​illustrator Tashima Seizo, including Tobe batta (Fly, Grasshopper), Kusamura (Ball in the Grass), and the Yagi no Shizuka

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(Shizuka the Goat) series. Yagi no Shizuka is a seven-​volume series (1975–​83) about a little goat who is given to a girl as a gift, while Tobe batta tells the story of a grasshopper who decides to face his enemies, including the snake, the spider, and the praying mantis, rather than hiding from them and living in fear. In the process, he learns to fly. The book has been translated into languages including Chinese, Korean, English, Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali. Rendered in watercolor mixed with white glue, its illustrations highlight “the dynamism of nature’s life-​or-​death struggle” (Hiromatsu 66). For its part, Kusamura was created using computer-​designated colors rather than painted by hand (Sawata 12–​13). As these three examples hint, Tashima’s over 150 picturebooks span a wide range of artistic styles and topics, from serious issues such as war, environmental degradation, and discrimination to folktale retellings and humorous stories for babies (Hiromatsu). In 2009, Tashima challenged the concept of the picturebook genre by creating a “walk-​in picture book” at the site of an abandoned school in Niigata prefecture, the Museum of Picture Book Art. The 3D picturebook space is filled with driftwood, nuts, bamboo, and other objects. Tashima’s first picturebook, Chikara Taro (Strongman Taro), which won the Golden Apple Award at the Second Biennial of Illustration Bratislava, was published in 1967 by Poplar. The book employs “humorous shapes and dynamic page compositions” to retell the famous folktale of farmers’ aspirations using earthy tones and raw brushwork (Hiromatsu 65). Established more than seventy years ago, Poplar is also the publisher of Kaiketsu Zorori (Zorori the Flamboyant Thief or Incredible Zorori), a series about a fox that “is the most loved storybook hero for children aged six to 10 years” (Tan, “Children’s Book Publishing” 37). The bestselling series (seventy-​one volumes) was established by Hara Yutaka in 1987 and features manga-​like content for younger readers. Another popular series, Masamoto Nasu’s Zukkoke Sannin-​gumi (Slapstick Threesome or Zukkoke Trio, 1978–​), which features the adventures of three boys, has almost sixty volumes to date. With the passage of time, the protagonists, in sixth grade in the initial books, are now in their forties and appear in “reunion books.” Although the books are usually light-​hearted, some address difficult topics such as divorce and alcoholism (Kokkola). Several Poplar titles, including Little Mouse Wants an Apple and Happy Birthday, Coco, have found success in countries such as Vietnam, France, the United States, Australia, and the Czech Republic (Tan, “Children’s Book Publishing”). Japanese publishers note that new authors find it hard to break into the market because parents and grandparents who buy books prefer “generational bestsellers [that] offer a sense of comfort and familiarity” (Tan, “Children’s Market”). To address this issue, publishers encourage their authors to participate in “Picture Book World,” an important children’s book festival organized by the Children’s Reading Promotion Council and held annually since 2000. It features lectures and workshops by children’s authors and illustrators; more than 10,000 children’s books are usually on display. They also nominate books for prizes such as the Sankei Children’s Book Award (1954–​), Japan’s oldest children’s literary award.

India Whereas Japan has a shrinking population of young readers, India has the world’s largest population of children under eighteen: 444 million. One of the challenges of publishing for children in contemporary India is the country’s vast number of languages and dialects. Other factors include lack of publication subsidies, low literacy rates, high production costs, and an emphasis on reading for academic purposes rather than for pleasure. As of 2022, educational publishing accounts for more than ninety-​ five percent of the publishing industry (Mathur). It is difficult to compile statistics about publishing in India because nontraditional book production and sales, especially in nonmetropolitan areas, are often left untracked and because book piracy is a problem. Nevertheless, it is estimated that children’s titles account for about fifteen percent of English-​language publications, and the number continues 460

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to grow (Subramaniam 27–​28). As in China, series books tend to top bestseller lists. Imported series such as The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and the Hunger Games trilogy have outperformed books by Indian authors, according to Nielsen Bookscan. Of the top 1000 books sold in India in 2012, “no original, contemporary children’s books published in India within the last decade” were on the list (Subramaniam 30). This absence highlights the need for more support and promotion of local authors. The announcements of the Children’s Literature category for the Crossword Book Award in 2009 and the Bal Sahitya Puraskar award in 2010 were an incentive for publishers to nurture original Indian children’s books. To encourage the development of children’s literature in languages used in regional areas, the Indian government initiated the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All) program (Ghai). India has many literary festivals, such as the Jaipur Literary Festival and the Hay Festival in Trivandrum, but the first children’s literature festival, Bookaroo, was only established in 2008. It was an initiative of the owners of the first children’s bookstore in India, Eureka! Bookstore, which opened in 2003. The bookstore sells many books based on Indian mythology, including Hitopadesha tales, fables from the twelfth century, and Panchatantra. India has a long tradition of oral storytelling, and folktales have been passed down to children over the generations. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, “pioneering folklorists tried to recover the nation’s immense oral heritage, reclaiming the tales and rhymes that had so long been neglected [...] by a blinkered foreign culture” by “preserving them in print” (Gangopadhyay 143). In the years following India’s independence in 1947, publishers aimed to help develop a “pan-​Indian identity” and instill national pride in young readers by issuing retellings of folktales and legends based on Hindu and Buddhist sources (Banerjee 185). In 1957, Shankar Pillai, a political cartoonist, established the Children’s Book Trust to promote the “production of well written, well illustrated and well designed books for children” (Children’s Book Trust). It primarily publishes books in English and Hindi. A decade later, Anant Pai founded Amar Chitra Katha, known for publishing folktales retold in comic book or graphic novel form. To date, it has issued more than 400 comics in over twenty languages that have sold over 100 million copies (Amar Chitra Katha). Although there has been a trend to “revive homegrown folklore and mythology,” “original children’s writing in India seems to have taken a backseat” (Subramaniam 32). In recent years many independent publishers have focused on producing books in multiple Indian languages.5 Pratham Books, for example, established in 2004, has issued over 300 original titles in over eighteen Indian languages. This not-​for-​profit publisher relies on donations from organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Child Foundation, and Microsoft to meet its mission to see “a book in every child’s hand.” They believe that the way to address the issue that “every second child in India cannot read at her grade level” is to improve access to books in a child’s mother tongue (“About Us”). It has won Publishing Next Industry Awards as well as The Federation of Indian Publishers’ Award for Excellence in Publishing. Notably, Pratham’s StoryWeaver initiative is a digital platform that enables creative writers to publish online. StoryWeaver is an important outlet for emerging authors, and it also works with established authors and illustrators to make their productions accessible for children. Over the last decade, 36,925 original titles have been published in over 301 languages on the platform, which won the 2020 Library of Congress Literacy Award for addressing children’s reading needs during the COVID-​19 pandemic (Azad and Chakravarty). Other key independent publishers include Tulika Publishers and Tara Books. Tulika means “old-​ fashioned feather quill,” and it represents how the publishing house produces content that “dips into the old and the new to give children a sense of their world” (Tulika, “About”). This company, whose tagline is “many languages… many voices,” was founded in 1996 by Radhika Menon. Their mission is to create picturebooks that “reflect a broader ‘Indianness’ rather than a dominant Indian identity” and feature culturally distinct illustrations and stories (Tulika, “Show”). They began publishing books in nondominant languages after observing the lack of good books in regional languages. Believing in the importance of issuing books that “reflect a pluralistic world,” Tulika now publishes multilingual 461

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picturebooks in nine languages: Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, and English. It won the Excellence in Literary Translation award at the London Book Fair in 2019, and one of its early publications, Zai Whitaker’s Kali and the Rat Snake, which addresses questions of identity and belonging by featuring the story of a lonely boy whose father is a snake-​ catcher from the Irula community, was well received not only in India but also in the United States (Gupta). Some of Tulika’s books, such as My Mother’s Sari and Takdir the Tiger Cub, have been issued in non-​Indian languages such as Russian, Kurdish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and German. Tulika’s Wordbird series sources “traditional and contemporary” stories from different regions and uses illustrations of birds that “streak across the page explaining the meanings of certain words used in the story in the original language” (Tulika, “Publishing”). One book from the series is And Land Was Born, which relates the creation story from the Bhilala tribe in central India. Editor Sandhya Rao is credited on the cover as the reteller of the story narrated by Guna Baba. The picturebook is illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy, a teacher at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Chennai, who based the artwork on pictures painted on the walls of the storyteller’s home, later made available in a documentary. The illustrations feature vibrant reds, yellows, and greens, and the scenes typically have a colorful patterned border. Krishnaswamy is also the illustrator of Cathy Spagnoli’s It’s Only a Story, a traditional chain story.6 The inspiration for the pictures came from the Warli folk tradition. The borderless double-​page spreads feature animals such as a peacock, elephant, a crow, and an ant, and the repetition of these words in the chain story helps the young reader remember the vocabulary. One of the challenges the company faces is marketing, and although they would like to publish in more Indian languages, finding a market for these books to make doing so sustainable is difficult. Tara Books, which focuses on high-​quality art in picturebooks, won the Bologna Prize for Best Children’s Publisher of the year in Asia in 2013. Founder Gita Wolf set up the publishing house in 1994 with the aim of introducing Indian children to the diversity of Indian folk and tribal art. Noted for promoting experimentation in visual narration, Tara collaborates with folk artists across India and introduces child readers to various art forms through picturebooks with distinctive formats. For example, A Village Is a Busy Place, which uses vibrant colors and patterns to follow the daily life of the Santhal people, is designed to unfold like a scroll. Rohima Chitrakar is an artist from the Patua artisan community in West Bengal whose illustrations invite readers to interact with scenes depicting activities such as harvesting, hunting, singing, dancing, and marketing. The text poses questions for children, encouraging them to examine the pictures closely. Readers are asked questions such as “Did you see her?,” “Have you seen knives like these before?,” “The village cat is waiting for his turn. Who will feed him?,” and “Are people ready to go somewhere?” The book unfolds vertically, and the reader is directed to find items or people against the backdrop of a bustling village rendered in red, brown, green, black, yellow, and white. The unusual format and the questions prompt the reader to slow down, providing children a different reading experience. While A Village Is a Busy Place explicitly addresses a child reader, some Tara products can be considered crossover picturebooks, such as The Night Life of Trees and The London Jungle Book. The former, by Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai, and Ram Singh Urveti, uses silkscreen printing techniques to relate folktales from the Gond tribe in central India. Trees have special meaning for this community, which believes that nighttime is when the trees’ spirit appears. Each illustration is accompanied by a short story, with titles such as “The Home of the Creator,” “The Squirrel’s Dream,” and “The Serpent Hood.” The limited-​edition books are handmade, and the volume has been translated into languages such as German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Bhajju Shyam, a member of the Pardhan subclan of the Gond tribe, also created The London Jungle Book, a visual travelog based on his experiences in London that has been translated into Korean, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Although its title refers to Rudyard Kipling’s children’s text The Jungle Book, Shyam’s work is not necessarily intended for child audiences because the issues it explores, such as “migration, inequality, 462

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and cultural identity,” require the reader to have “nuanced understandings of the cultural politics of storytelling and visual art,” as Shikha Singh puts it (70). Singh argues that the book “presents the paradox of encountering Pardhan-​Gond art as a textual artefact, commoditised in print form for global consumption” (68). While Tara continues to expand the boundaries of the picturebook, its books’ relatively high price makes them inaccessible for many children, given that “the majority of people in India can ill-​afford even low-​priced books” (Bhattacharji 163). It has, however, highlighted the issue of street children and the urban poor in Trash! On Ragpicker Children and Recycling, coauthored by Tara founder Wolf, Anushka Ravinshankar, and Orijit Sen. Steps are being taken to make books more accessible to underprivileged children through mobile libraries organized by the National Book Trust (Bhattacharji). Although publishers such as Tara, Tulika, and Pratham have contributed positively to the development of children’s publishing in India, there remains much to be done to address the overabundance of book series and foreign titles currently dominating the market.

Conclusion The children’s publishing industries in India, Japan, and the PRC share a focus on series, which reflects global market trends as well as research into children’s positive response to such books. However, each country’s unique sociopolitical context poses different challenges for publishers. The small presses in India profiled in this chapter have received both international recognition for their work and support from major international corporations, but structural issues pose hurdles, and it will be years before most Indian children will be able to read and own excellent children’s books. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Japan is facing different demographic challenges. Japanese publishing houses are continuously looking for opportunities abroad as they try to expand their market. Their picturebooks uphold a strong reputation for artistic and creative qualities and have found large readerships in the PRC, South Korea, and Taiwan. The PRC publishing landscape is shifting as more publishing houses adopt technologies such as AR and VR to make their books attractive to young readers. They have also realized how powerful social media platforms are for increasing the visibility of their releases and for marketing. Children’s publishing in Asia is a fast-​paced industry that challenges authors, editors, and publishers to respond to changing tastes among their young readership as well as on the part of adult gatekeepers. Publishers constantly try to strike a balance between making a profit and providing quality literature that contributes to children’s culture. They must also consider government regulations and policies, global publishing trends, and competing media. Although the influence of multinational corporations and transnational conglomerates on publishing in Asia is concerning, many independent publishing houses in the PRC, Japan, and India are working hard to produce high-​ quality children’s literature. As Taxel puts it, The ability of authors, editors, and publishers to resist escalating pressures to commodify children’s literature further and to maintain their independence in the face of bottom-​line imperatives will go a long way in determining the future of children’s literature and have a momentous impact on the social, cultural, and political life of our increasingly interconnected world. (491) There are many opportunities for publishers in Asia to provide more diversity in the children’s book market by supporting new authors and illustrators who have produced experimental and innovative literary and artistic works.

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Notes 1 Dolphin Books was established with the goal of promoting Chinese children’s literature internationally (Chen and Wang 15). 2 Authors in China tend to publish with multiple publishing houses simultaneously. 3 For Chinese names, I put the surname followed by first name, unless the author has published with the surname at the end, as in the case here. 4 For children’s book clubs in the United States and France, see Julie Fette and Anne Morey’s chapter in this volume. 5 China has been publishing books for children in other minority languages since the 1960s. For example, more than 2,500 Tibetan-​language books were published in the region between 2015 and 2020, although many are translations of Chinese and foreign language works (“Children’s Literature”). 6 A chain story in India progresses by repeating the preceding sentence(s) before adding another sentence. The story’s format challenges readers to remember the sequence of events.

Works Cited Amar Chitra Katha. “About Us.” Amar Chitra Katha, www.amar​chit​raka​tha.com/​about-​us/​, accessed 1 July 2022. Azad, Shaveta, and Rupak Chakravarty. “Creating Community of Young Readers during Covid-​19 Lockdown: A Comprehensive Study of a Digital Reading Platform: Storyweaver.” Library Philosophy and Practice, no. 6822, 2022, https://​dig​ital​comm​ons.unl.edu/​libp​hilp​rac/​6822. Banerjee, Suchismita. “Strategic Empowerment: A Study of Subjectivity in Contemporary Indian English Children’s Fiction.” Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications, edited by John Stephens, Routledge, 2012, pp. 181–​95. Bhattacharji, Jaya. “Much to Look Forward: To Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature in India.” Logos, vol. 3–​4, 2010, pp. 161–​66. Bi, Lijun, and Xiangshu Fang. “Childhoods: Childhoods in Chinese Children’s Texts–​Continuous Reconfiguration for Political Needs.” (Re)imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times, edited by Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan, and Roderick McGillis, Springer Berlin, 2013, pp. 55–​68. “Books in China: Tomorrow Publishing House.” Publishers Weekly, 12 March 2018, p. 34. CCBF. “Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award (CICLA).” China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair, ccbookfair.com/​en/​index/​programme/​chen–​bo–​chui. Chen, Minjie, and Helen Wang. “Chinese Children’s Literature in English Translation.” The Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies, edited by Zhengdao Ye, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 1–​52. Chen, Shih-​Wen Sue. “ ‘Crazy Thirst for Knowledge’: Chinese Readers and the 1980s ‘Book Series Fever.’ ” Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory/​Practice/​Politics, edited by Paulette M. Rothbauer, Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Knut Oterholm, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016, pp. 349–​65. Chen, Yi. “Publishing in China in the Post-​Mao Era: The Case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Asian Survey, vol. 32, no. 6, 1992, pp. 569–​70. Children’s Book Trust. “The Institution and Its Many Wings.” Children’s Book Trust, 2019, www. childrensbooktrust.com/​about.html, accessed 9 June 2022. “Children’s Literature in Tibetan Language Turns New Page.” People’s Daily, 24 April 2022, http://​en.peo​ple.cn/​ n3/​2022/​0424/​c90​000-​10088​144.html. “Chinese Book Market up 11%.” Books+​Publishing, 21 September 2021, www.boo​ksan​dpub​lish​ing.com.au/​ artic​les/​2021/​09/​07/​192​807/​chin​ese-​book-​mar​ket-​up-​11/​. Fan, Jun, Li Xiaoye, Liu Chengfang, Mao Wensi, Zhang Wenyan, Tian Fei, Liu Yingchen, Su Zhencai, Yu Xiuli, and Deng Yang. “Report on the Development of China’s Publishing Industry in 2018.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, 2019, pp. 543–​61. Fang, Ming, Teng Mingdao, and Chen Sha. “Congshu Jieshao: Jinjinian Congshu Chuban Zongshu” [Introduction to Book Series: A General Report on the Recent Publication of Book Series]. Zhongguo Chuban Nianjian 1988 [China Publishing Yearbook 1988], Shangwu yinshuguan, 1988, pp. 267–​71. Gangopadhyay, Gargi. “ ‘Our Motherland’: Mapping an Identity in Bengali Children’s Literature.” The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations of Childhood, edited by Christopher (Kit) Kelen and Björn Sundmark, Routledge, 2013, pp. 139–​57. Ghai, S. K. “Children’s Literature in Emerging Indian Markets.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 25, 2009, pp. 264–​70.

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Contemporary Asian Book Publishing Gupta, Meghaa. “Celebrating Different Childhoods, Social Milieus, Cultures and Contexts.” Tulika, January 2021, www.tuli​kabo​oks.com/​info/​divers​ity-​in-​child​ren-​s-​lit​erat​ure, accessed 17 June 2022. Hade, Daniel, and Jacqueline Edmondson. “Children’s Book Publishing in Neoliberal Times.” Language Arts, vol. 81, no. 2, 2003, pp. 135–​44. Hiromatsu, Yukiko. “The Picturebooks of Seizo Tashima: Life in Ongoing Metamorphosis.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 58, no. 3, 2020, pp. 64–​68. Hou, Ying. “Writing Animal Novels in Chinese Children’s Literature.” Translated by Aiping Nie. The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature, edited by John Stephens, Routledge, 2017, pp. 347–​57. Ito, Kinko. “A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 38, no. 3, 2005, pp. 456–​75. Jiji. “Number of Births in Japan Decreases to a Record Low in 2021.” The Japan Times, 3 June 2022, www. japantimes.co.jp/​news/​2022/​06/​03/​natio​nal/​japan–​decl​ine–​bir​ths/​. Kimbrough, R. Keller. “Bloody Hell! Reading Boys’ Books in Seventeenth Century Japan.” Asian Ethnology, vol. 74, no. 1, 2015, pp. 111–​39. Kodansha. “About Us.” Kodansha, kodansha.us/​about/​, accessed 17 June 2022. Kokkola, Lydia. “Masamoto Nasu: Japan * Author.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, 2012, p. 34. Li, Lifang. “The Ideal World of Yang Hongying.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 45, no. 4, 2007, pp. 13–​17. —​—​—​. “Recent Trends and Themes in Realist Chinese Children’s Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature, edited by John Stephens, Routledge, 2017, pp. 472–​81. —​—​—​. “Subjectivity and Culture Consciousness in Chinese Children’s Literature.” Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications, edited by John Stephens, Routledge, 2012, pp. 79–​94. Li, Yi, Hangxizi Su, and Yongning Li. “Is the Chinese Children’s Mainstream Book Market Inclusive Enough? A Data Analysis of Children’s Bestsellers on Dangdang.com.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 36, 2020, pp. 129–​44. “Manga.” The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Daniel Hahn, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2015, n.pag. Mathur, Vikrant. “Frankfurt Book Fair 2022: India’s Book Market Booms.” Publishers Weekly, 21 October 2022, www.publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​intern​atio​nal/​Frankf​urt-​Book-​Fair/​arti​cle/​90699-​frankf​urt-​book-​ fair-​2022-​india-​s-​book-​mar​ket-​booms.html. Meng, Jie. “Mi Xiaoquan Weisheme Neng Changxiao 6000 Wan Ce? [Why Can Mi Xiaoquan Sell More Than 60 Million Copies?].” China Publishers, vol. 8, 2019, www.sohu.com/​a/​32707​3209​_​211​393. Newland, Jane. “Repeated Childhood Pleasures: Rethinking the Appeal of Series Fiction with Gilles Deleuze.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 192–​204. Pratham Books. “About Us.” Pratham Books, 2019, prathambooks.org/​about-​us/​, accessed 17 June 2022. Ren, Dianshun. “Report on the Recent Development of the Children’s Book Market in China.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 36, 2020, pp. 145–​55. —​—​—​. “Report on the 2019 China Children’s Publishing Industry.” Welcome to the Chinese Market: Common Challenges, Shared Opportunities. Bologna Children’s Book Fair 2020. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Ssbt​ PvIV​v10. —​—​—​, and Zishuang Kang. “How COVID-​19 Has Affected China’s Publishing Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, 2021, pp. 494–​502. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. “Dime Novels and Series Books.” Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine Jenkins, Routledge, 2010, pp. 195–​206. Sawata, Seiichi. “The Transforming Creator of Picture Books.” Seizo Tashima: 2020 H. C. Andersen Award Nominee from Japan. Japanese Board on Books for Young People, 2019, pp. 11–​14. “Shaoer Chuban Maiyang Paiming Na Ja Qiang? 2021 Tongshu Shichang Geju Hui Bei Gaixie Ma? [Who is the Strongest in Children’s Publishing? Will the Structure of the Children’s Book Market Change in 2021?]” China Writer, 26 January 2021, www.chin​awri​ter.com.cn/​n1/​2021/​0126/​c404​071-​32012​319.html. Shiao, Ling. “Culture, Commerce, and Connections: The Inner Dynamics of New Culture Publishing in the Post-​May Fourth Era.” From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, Circa 1800 to 2008, edited by Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher Reed, Brill, 2010, pp. 213–​48. Singh, Shikha. “The Politics of Aesthetics of Tara Books’ The London Jungle Book by Bhajju Shyam.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, 2022, pp. 66–​78.

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Shih-Wen Sue Chen Subramaniam, Manasi. “Children’s Book Publishing in India.” Publishing Research Quarterly, vol. 29, 2013, pp. 26–​46. Tan, Teri. “Children’s Book Publishing in Asia.” Publishers Weekly, 2 March 2009, www.publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​ pw/​by-​topic/​childr​ens/​childr​ens-​book-​news/​arti​cle/​10035-​child​ren-​s-​book-​pub​lish​ing-​in-​asia.html. —​—​—​. “Children’s Books in China 2017: Jieli Publishing House.” Publishers Weekly, 17 March 2017, www. publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​intern​atio​nal/​intern​atio​nal-​book-​news/​arti​cle/​73091-​child​ren-​s-​books-​ in-​china-​2017-​jieli-​pub​lish​ing-​house.html. —​—​—​. “Children’s Books in China 2020: Looking Ahead.” Publishers Weekly, 17 April 2020, www. publishersweekly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​intern​atio​nal/​intern​atio​nal-​book-​news/​arti​cle/​83037-​child​ren-​s-​books-​ in-​china-​2020-​look​ing-​ahead.html. —​—​—​. “Children’s Books in China 2020: More Original Children’s Titles.” Publishers Weekly, 17 April 2020, www.publi​sher​swee​kly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​intern​atio​nal/​intern​atio​nal-​book-​news/​arti​cle/​83044-​child​ren-​s-​ books-​in-​china-​2020-​more-​origi​nal-​child​ren-​s-​tit​les.html. —​—​—​. “Children’s Market Spotlight: Japan.” Publishers Weekly, 23 August 2018, publishersweekly.com/​pw/​ by-​topic/​childrens/​childrens-​industry-​news/​article/​77813-​children-​s-​market-​spotlight-​japan.html. —​—​—​. “Shanghai Children’s Book Fair Concludes Its Run.” Publishers Weekly, 6 December 2022, www. publishersweekly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​childr​ens/​childr​ens-​indus​try-​news/​arti​cle/​91075-​shang​hai-​child​ren-​s-​ book-​fair-​conclu​des-​its-​run.html. Taxel, Joel. “The Economics of Children’s Book Publishing in the 21st Century.” Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine Jenkins, Routledge, 2010, pp. 479–​94. Tulika. “About Us.” Tulika, www.tuli​kabo​oks.com/​info/​about-​tul​ika, accessed 13 June 2022. —​—​—​. “Multilingual Publishing: Walking the Tightrope.” Tulika, slideshare.net/​tulikabooks/​multilingual-​ publishing-​walking-​the-​tightrope, accessed 13 June 2022. —​—​—​. “Show and Tell: Folk Art and the Art of the Picture Book.” Tulika, slideshare.net/​tulikabooks/​show-​and-​ tell-​folk-​art-​and-​the-​art-​of-​the-​picture-​book, accessed 13 June 2022. Wang, Rui. “Application of Augmented Reality Technology in Children’s Picture Books Based on Educational Psychology.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2022, doi:10.3389/​fpsyg.2022.782958. Watson, Victor. Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp. Routledge, 2000. “Xiong Liang: Illustrator–​China.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, vol. 59, no. 4, 2021, p. 14. Yang, Hongying. Mo’s Mischief: Four Troublemakers. HarperCollins, 2008. You, Chengcheng. “Who Speaks for Nature? Genre, Gender and the Eco-​Translation of Chinese Wild Animals.” Children’s Literature in Education, 2022, doi:10.1007/​s10583-​022-​09484-​x.

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38 FROM CANON-​M AKING TO PARTICIPATORY PRIZING Children’s Book and Media Awards Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth B. Kidd

While cultural prizing has a longer history, literary prizing more specifically began in 1901 with the Nobel Prizes, followed by the Prix Goncourt (1902) and then the Pulitzer Prizes (1917). Literature was but one arena of an early twentieth-​century culture of competitive prizing with both nationalist and transnationalist tendencies. In fact, from 1912 to 1948, the Olympic Games even included art competitions in five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. (The works of art entered had to be inspired by sports.) Children’s literature has participated energetically in prizing from the start. In fact, the first prize for children’s literature, the John Newbery Medal, was one of the earliest literary prizes to be established overall; it was founded in 1921 by the American Library Association (ALA), was first awarded the following year, and is still going strong today. Children’s book authors are rarely Olympic athletes, and they tend not to write about sports, but with the advent of the Newbery, authors too could go for the gold, even if the Medal is actually bronze. In The Economy of Prestige, James English examines the “logic of proliferation” that makes prizing such a powerful mechanism for taste management and cultural elevation. As he shows, in the logic of proliferation each new prize makes space for yet another, such that the social field is at once prize-​saturated and yet open to more prizes. If the Nobel Prize serves as a baseline for the modern prize, the Newbery Medal plays a similar role for children’s literature, especially in the United States but also internationally. And just as literary prizes more generally mushroomed after the 1960s, with the growing realization of their usefulness for the recognition and promotion of diverse people and voices, so too with children’s literature: hence the establishment in the United States of awards such as the Coretta Scott King (CSK) Awards and the Pura Belpré Awards, founded in 1969 and 1996 for distinction in African American and Latino writing and illustration, respectively.1 While the ALA remains the major (if hardly the only) player in literary prizing in the United States, other professional organizations, institutes, and even national governments now engage in prizing, with complex effects. Though this chapter focuses primarily on award systems and prizing culture(s) within the United States, hundreds of children’s literature prizes now exist worldwide and within many language cultures, from local and regional awards to national and even international ones. Great Britain followed the pattern of American prizing, with the establishment of the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals respectively in 1936 and 1955 (comparable to the ALA’s Newbery and Caldecott Medals) and a subsequent expansion of prizes recognizing diverse genres, creators, and concerns. Canada and Australia likewise sponsor a range of children’s literature prizes, as do many European nations, including Germany, France, Poland, and Iceland. International children’s literature DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-44

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awards include the Hans Christian Andersen Awards, administered by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, run by the Swedish government. Granted, not all prizes survive the test of time, and some prizes are dead or dying. Keeping up a prize requires significant time, labor, and capital. While many awards are successful and ongoing, some initiatives no longer continue, for various reasons. For example, one of the earliest children’s literature prizes was Le Prix Jeunesse, set up in 1934 by Michel Bourrelier of the Bourrelier publishing house and administered through 1972 (see Leriche). Le Prix Jeunesse was a manuscript prize that guaranteed publication and was designed to “give new impetus to children’s literature in the French language, which does not yet seem to have reached its full development.” As this language indicates, national book awards are often designed to support a public sphere of children’s literature. Such was also true in Cuba after the 1959 Revolution, which prioritized children’s literature as a strategy for cultivating national pride in part through literary competitions and published book awards (Ocasio 96). The Cuban prizes are still going strong. In addition to creating awards designed to cultivate national pride and/​or honor diverse people and voices whose contributions to children’s literature were rarely recognized by older awards, the field has continued to create awards that celebrate specific genres and literary categories, ones that again have often been overlooked by already established awards. In 1960, the Newbery-​Caldecott Committee unanimously declined to create a second Newbery Award for nonfiction because it believed too many awards already existed (Horning, “Years” 17). However, in 2001, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), the ALA division responsible for the Newbery and Randolph Caldecott Awards, created the Robert F. Sibert Award for excellence in informational books. In 2004, ALSC also established the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for outstanding books for beginning readers, and in 2023, the Center for Children’s Literature at Bank Street College of Education launched the Margaret Wise Brown Board Book Award “to address the dearth of excellent, developmentally appropriate board books for infants and toddlers” (Kruger, qtd in Payne 109). The ALA awards are now identified as “ALA Book, Print and Media Awards,” as prizes have been established for forms of cultural production beyond the conventionally textual. One of the first media prizes to be established was the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children’s Video, first awarded in 1991, funded through the Carnegie Foundation and administered by ALSC. ALA media awards have since proliferated alongside the expansion of media itself, with prizes established for outstanding or merely “notable” children’s recordings, videos and films, audiobooks, and apps. Since 2009, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), another ALA division, has given prizes for the Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning, with the list’s name and parameters expanding to reflect changes in technology, moving from websites and landmark sites to apps and more. Some of these awards trend more collective than singular, taking the form of curated lists, as with, for example, Fabulous Films for Young Adults, sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) within the ALA. “The purpose of this list,” as explained on the ALA website, “is to identify for collection developers a body of films relating to a theme that will appeal to young adults in a variety of settings. Selection criteria consistent with the Library Bill of Rights shall be applied throughout the selection process. Titles chosen are of acceptable quality and are effective in their presentation.” Children’s literature and media prizes generate publicity and boost the status of recognized titles, in some cases elevating genres or forms in the process. Prizes have helped legitimate children’s literature as both a business and a cultural/​aesthetic endeavor, supporting a kind of canonicity shared between individual award winners and the category that also extends to children’s literature at large. Winners of the Newbery Medal, for instance, are canonical to the extent that they are Newbery-​ winning books on top of their individual merit. Individual winners (and with some awards, honor books, runners up, or shortlisted titles) represent the collective and the category, even as the award 468

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confers status on the winner. Meanwhile the whole affair spotlights the general project of children’s literature. Considering the Newbery specifically, Kenneth Kidd argues that children’s literature prizes in the United States achieve a status linked specifically with educational culture, which he calls “edubrow,” suggesting also that there’s a ceiling to the canonicity of children’s titles due to their association with education and children’s growth (169). For those in the business of producing and selling children’s literature, awards are valuable because they generate buzz and sales. For the organizations sponsoring awards, prizes are valuable because they support the aims and work of the organization. Children’s literature professionals such as librarians and teachers have an obvious investment in prizing activity, now embedded in professional culture. Award committee members are usually librarians of some stripe (from public and school librarians to special collection curators) or children’s literature scholars who have been involved with organizations such as the ALA or National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Their service on award committees is voluntary and unpaid; they assume the responsibility on top of busy careers. Being selected to serve on an award committee is itself an honor, a mark of professional achievement and trust, underscoring how the cultural capital of prizes is entangled with cultures of professionalism. Literary scholars, too, are sometimes interested in children’s literature prizes and their diverse contexts and effects. The Children’s Literature Association even runs its own prizes, the Phoenix Book Award and the Phoenix Picture Book Award, given to titles published twenty years previously that have subsequently been recognized as significant. Children, meanwhile, are sometimes participants in prize culture, mostly as readers but sometimes as evaluators, as with, for instance, children’s choice awards such as the Young Readers’ Choice Award, founded in 1940 (see Miller). Reader choice awards tend to be more local or regional than national in scope and administration and typically involve less professional infrastructure. The Kids’ Book Choice Awards, previously the Children’s and Teen Choice Book Awards, sponsored by the Children’s Book Council and Every Child a Reader, claim to be the only national book awards selected entirely by young people –​hence their tagline, “No Adults Allowed!” (Children’s Book Council). Of course, prizing is not without its problems, especially when it comes to ostensibly elite awards rather than more populist ones. Award criteria can sometimes be too nebulous, with key terms such as “distinction” or “excellence” invoked more than defined. Robert Bittner and Michelle Superle note a structural tension between prizing that prioritizes identity and/​or community and prizing that functions as formalism or as “the last bastion of aesthetics” (with claims of universal value). There are comparatively few prizes emphasizing reader choice, and selection committees in general don’t give sufficient priority to children’s reading preferences. An ongoing flashpoint is the credentialing and selection of prize judges. If awards can help elevate titles and build community, they can also sow resentment and create artificial distinctions with significant market consequences.2 Even as the challenges and tensions of prizing persist, we now live and work in an era of participatory prizing, in which the structures and mechanisms of prizing have become more expansive and accommodating, even more inclusive. Whereas consumer culture is marked by one-​way consumption of cultural products, in participatory culture more people contribute to the making of things and meanings. In a white paper first published online in 2006, Henry Jenkins describes participatory culture as having five elements: 1) relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement; 2) strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others; 3) informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices; 4) members believe their contributions matter; and 5) members feel a degree of social connection with one another (“Confronting”). Jenkins describes the spaces of participatory culture as “affinity spaces,” emphasizing their potential for informal and dynamic learning. Affinity spaces can be physical, virtual, or both. All of these elements can be observed in the contemporary prizing scene, if we mean not only the official (institutional) business of prizing but also the participatory prizing that has emerged 469

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through and around it, largely online and in local communities. Perhaps more than conventional prizing, participatory prizing gives priority to process over end result, with an emphasis on collaborative meaning-​making and community building. Participatory prizing has low barriers to engagement, welcoming participants beyond the professionally sanctioned; community members and even young children can take part. At the same time participants are typically less bound by conventions and have more freedom to reflect on their beliefs and preferences. Participants feel their contributions matter, and they enjoy affinity with one another across differences of age, race, class, and region. In short, most of the elements identified by Jenkins can be seen in participatory prizing initiatives such as mock prize competitions, prize prediction blogs, and other extension activities. That’s not to say, however, that participatory prizing subverts more official prizing or more generally escapes the structures of institutional and professional culture. Quite the contrary. In the United States, the ALA has embraced participatory prizing for some time, in part to broaden the reach of prize culture but also to maintain authority over the scene of children’s and young adult literature. Many of the participatory initiatives are administered directly by the ALA and are designed to support ALA priorities. Participatory prizing has widened and diversified involvement in children’s literature while supporting rather than undermining the expertise of professionals. If the original priority for book and media prizing was to elevate the status of children’s literature, a current additional priority is to maintain the prizing business through managed involvement of a broader community. Moreover, in the era of online visibility and participatory prizing, award-​winning authors and illustrators, as another important group of children’s literature professionals, find themselves players in an ongoing prizing game, expected to participate in such activities as prize anniversaries and book festivals. Like “the song that never ends,” award recipients are linked to their awards and the awarding institutions and are regularly called upon to describe how winning the award affected their professional and personal lives. This onus is particularly strong for some of the lesser known awards and the awards in which creators are likely to receive multiple honors over their careers, such as the CSK and the Belpré. For example, in The Pura Belpré Award 1996–​2016: 20 Years of Outstanding Latino Children’s Literature, the award winners and honor recipients provide short statements about the significance of their books and the award; Yuyi Morales wrote eight entries for the collection, as her work had been honored eight times by the award’s various committees during this time period. Promotion of the award and the individual book creators become intertwined, and creators who have received more recognition often shoulder more of the workload, while ostensibly reaping greater benefits. Similarly, publishers whose books have received prizes and increased sales and visibility through these prizes are expected to support the award, as well as their authors’ and illustrators’ success, through the creation and distribution of award ceremony programs, the hosting of celebratory meals for the award committee members, and donations to the awarding institutions at regular intervals or on milestone occasions such as anniversaries. The publicity machine of prizing is insatiable and involves everyone. If, as Lewis Carroll’s Dodo famously says, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes,” then all must apparently now have prizing too.

Cultivating a Public: Mock Prizes From the Newbery’s start, the ALA recognized the need for individual and community investment in the award. The first selection process in 1921 encouraged any of the nearly 500 librarians who worked at least part-​time with children to recommend a book for the first round of Newbery consideration. As Clara Whitehill Hunt, the chair of the Children’s Librarians’ Section of the ALA who organized the first Newbery selection process, explained, “To give everyone this chance will create interest and induce good feeling” (qtd in Marcus 5). Nevertheless, Hunt also maintained, 470

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It is most important that the final judges of the award be a few of the people of recognized high standards and experience. If a majority vote of all so-​called children’s librarians determines the award it is entirely possible for a mediocre book to get the medal. (qtd in Marcus 5) The ALA agreed with Hunt, approving a resolution in 1924 that assigned the sole selection of the Newbery winner to a committee, removing any popular vote from the membership (Horning, “Years” 13). The ALA and nearly all other large awarding organizations have continued to entrust the official selection process to committees composed of elected and/​or appointed members. Yet they have also embraced community participation through mechanisms such as mock awards and have even incorporated mock programs into the more official awarding culture. In The Economy of Prestige, English notes the development of “mock” or “anti-​prizes” such as the Golden Raspberry Awards (or Razzies) for film or the Bad Writing Contest Gold Medal. These mock prizes ostensibly satirize the business of prizing and the idea of excellence, but in fact they have largely upheld those things. “Alternative” prizes in general are easily incorporated into the machinery of prizing. Adult prize culture has often depended on scandal –​say, the scandal of someone refusing an award or denouncing the institution that gives it –​but scandal has only further entrenched prizing as a practice. Given this circumstance, it’s all the more striking that children’s literature prizing remains an entirely sincere affair. To our knowledge there are no anti-​prizes given for, say, the worst picturebook or middle grade verse narrative. Instead, The Horn Book Magazine runs an annual “Mind the Gap Awards” list to remind readers that “[n]‌ot all deserving books bring home ALA awards” while playfully referencing other deserving titles from the award cycle and riffing on the books’ titles and missed opportunities (“2021 Gap”). Certainly prizes and prize choices draw criticism, lighthearted and otherwise, but that’s the limit of prize scandal, apart from boorish behavior at awards banquets. Mock competitions for children’s prizing, then, are not satirical but sincere, and they make for one of the more interesting features of participatory prizing. Mock competitions are simulations undertaken by adults and children outside the official competition and selection process, and with varying degrees of fidelity to that process. For example, whereas ALA award committee members typically evaluate hundreds of titles over a given year, submitting suggestions and nominations at regular intervals before deliberations, mock competitions are much compressed in time and scale and tend to focus on a short list or more manageable sample. Whereas official award committees tend not to publicize any working shortlists or indeed reveal anything about the selection process prior to the award announcement, mock competitions openly share their book lists and processes.3 As Sara Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl note, the Newbery Medal’s influence “is further amplified by policies and procedures surrounding the selection and announcement of the winner –​procedures designed to heighten anticipation and maximize publicity” (3; see also Horning, “Secrecy”). In fact, no records of Newbery committee discussions or votes have been archived since 1978. The culture of secrecy around official awards helps maintain professional authority even as it builds toward a “grand reveal” publicity. In contrast to such gatekeeping, mock competitions encourage open discussion. And while official award terms and criteria are respected and even passionately defended in mock events, those standards and metrics are sometimes also interpreted or modified. Teacher Melissa Taylor, for example, rephrases the five Caldecott selection criteria to make them more kid-​friendly. Criterion number one for the Caldecott, then –​ “Excellence of execution in the artistic technique employed” –​ becomes in Taylor’s online guide “The illustrations show excellence in artistic technique,” and with this interpretive gloss: “The illustrator skillfully creates the artwork in any technique, including collage, painting, and drawing.” Taylor offers lesson plans for incorporating Mock Caldecotts into various levels of the elementary curriculum; there’s now an extensive advice literature on such activities. 471

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The Mock Caldecott is the most popular and seemingly also earliest conceived mock competition, due to the high visibility of that award and also the comparative ease of accessing and evaluating picturebooks versus other formats. Probably for this reason, Mock Caldecotts appeared even before Mock Newbery events, even though the Caldecott Medal was established in 1938, after the Newbery. But generally mock prize competitions have followed the historical order of the ALA awards, suggesting that the competitions revolve around the more established or popular prizes. Like many mock or simulated prize competitions, Mock Caldecotts are usually held locally within a particular community, usually in a school or specific classroom, or in a public library. Online or virtual Mock Caldecotts were held prior to the COVID-​19 pandemic but have seen a significant uptick in its wake. Mock competitions emerged for multiple reasons, among them the desire to involve more people in discussions of children’s books, as well as to foster a sense of community. The competitions also support and perhaps build from a growing literature for teachers and librarians on how to use and promote award-​winning titles in or around the classroom. Many of those pedagogical aids suggest individual and group activities using Newbery and Caldecott titles especially, and sometimes drawing on online resources, as with Ru Story-​Huffman’s Newbery on the Net and Caldecott on the Net. In addition, individuals serving on award committees seek informal feedback on titles and how to vet them, all the more useful given the high volume of materials to be considered in a compressed period of time. Mock Caldecotts date at least to the early 1990s. In 1994, ALSC published the first Newbery and Caldecott Mock Elections Tool Kit, written by Kathleen Staerkel, Nancy Hackett, and Linda Ward Callaghan. As Steven Engelfried explains on the ALSC blog, a revised edition appeared in 2001, and Engelfried put out another revised edition under his own name in 2011, still the authoritative print version (“Newbery”).4 The toolkit covers everything from program goals and basic procedures to the processes of book selection, program implementation, criteria evaluation, and project expansion. It also includes supplemental materials such as award letters, certificates of participation, planning checklists, and participant evaluation forms. Engelfried reports that he first participated in a Mock Caldecott in 1994 for the Oregon Library Association (“Newbery”). Drawing on the toolkit and other resources, schools and libraries across the country now participate in mock prizing events, usually though not always with child readers (and there’s advice out there on how to conduct mocks with and for different groups). Some children’s literature programs at the university level also conduct Mock Caldecotts, notably Kansas State University, as do some museums, such as the University of Findlay’s Mazza Museum. Mock prize events have expanded to include a number of other awards within and beyond the ALA’s roster of prizes. The Onondaga-​Cortland-​Madison/​Oswego School Library System runs a Mock Caldecott, a Mock Newbery, and a Mock Michael L. Printz (the Printz is given for distinction in young adult literature). NCTE not only administers the Charlotte Huck Award for outstanding fiction for younger children and the Orbis Pictus Award for excellence in nonfiction, but also like the ALA supports mock processes for both, providing resources and encouraging local communities to share their process with NCTE and on social media (“NCTE”). Another praiseworthy development is the expansion of mock prizes to awards recognizing social contribution or significance. This shift is taking place both with individual users and at a more structural level. As Lin Oliver reports, one school librarian began with a Mock Caldecott but then switched to a Mock CSK (both author and illustrator categories), in an effort to support that award and the boosting of diverse voices. Librarians with the Chicago Public Library run several mock prize events, including a Mock CSK and a Mock Belpré, although these don’t yet involve other readers (Alexa). Another interesting children’s book award is the Ezra Jack Keats (EJK) Award for picturebook achievement (technically two awards), which attempts to recognize both “universality and diversity, two seemingly contradictory emphases for one award” (Caponegro, “Legacy” 118). The EJK Award is described by its sponsoring foundation as “the only award that celebrates books that embrace all 472

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ethnic and social groups” (“About”). In 2018 the Friends School of Baltimore initiated a Mock EJK Award event, for which the judges were students from two kindergarten classes who considered twenty titles over two months. The Baltimore event has run several times since and by all accounts has successfully navigated the pressure to pick universally appealing but also diversity-​promoting titles. Drawing from the success of the Friends School’s model, as well as the efforts of a youth literature consultant in Connecticut who started a Mock EJK Award program with third graders, the EJK Foundation created Mock EJK Award Toolkits, accompanied by two recorded webinars that explain the mock award’s criteria, process, and adaptability (“Mock EJK”). For the 2020–​21 school year, the foundation also created a Mock EJK Community Support Facebook group and held a series of virtual community nights for everyone in the United States participating in a Mock EJK Award program, resulting in Mock EJKs being run that year with participants in kindergarten through college classrooms, as well as public libraries. As these examples demonstrate, mock prizing has been incorporated into the broader prizing phenomenon, indispensable for maintaining a public culture of children’s literature. While the official processes of ALA award selection are restricted to those serving on the committees and following the appropriate protocols (including a commitment to discretion), the unofficial processes seek to involve as many people as possible. Mock competitions provide a sense of collective ownership of the awards and invite readers (including young children) to understand themselves as evaluators and collaborators. Prior to the emergence of participatory prizing, the only involvement with the awards experience for those not officially involved in selection came when the awards were announced –​ first in conventional news media and now also on social media. On top of wider and more diverse participation, mock prizing events allow for and even invite other outcomes besides the official ones. It’s common for mock prizing events to choose different titles than those officially recognized. Local mock prize communities can rally around their choice and their ideological and aesthetic commitments. For example, in reflecting on a past Mock Newbery, Engelfried recalls, “One fifth grade group I worked with felt so satisfied with their 2011 choice (Night Fairy by Laura Amy Schlitz) that they commemorated it by having one artistic member create a Mock Newbery seal, which still adorns the cover of one of our library copies” (“Winners” 31). Similarly, the Mock EJK Award Toolkit includes a medal template, so that students can design their own seals to affix to their chosen winners. Through mock seals, ceremonies, and the shared process, mock awards often create tangible and intangible legacies for their participants.

Prize Prediction Blogs Complementing and amplifying mock competitions are prize prediction blogs such as Heavy Medal, Calling Caldecott, Pondering Printz, Guessing Geisel, and Sydney Taylor Schmooze. Blogging has long been an integral part of the children’s literature scene, with both personal and more professional blogs providing reviews, reading recommendations, and general commentary. Prize prediction blogs, basically blogs for mock prizes, keep useful focus on the awards year-​round while promoting the broader cause of children’s literature. It’s unsurprising that the first such blog to be founded, Heavy Medal, is a Newbery Medal blog. It was started in 2008 by Linda Lindsay and Sharon McKellar. Unlike more impromptu and local mock prize competitions, which can be administered by anyone and are open to any interested participants, the Heavy Medal mock competition is restricted to participants who are professionals in the field, chosen by the professionals who supervise the Heavy Medal Award Committee (HMAC) and oversee the blog. The blog is edited by librarians who have served on the Newbery Medal or other ALA award committees. For the 2022–​23 cycle, Engelfried and Emily Mroczek (Bayci) were the mock competition’s chairs and the blog coordinators, and they are both former members of Newbery Medal selection committees (Engelfried having served as chair). This mock competition is aligned as closely 473

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as possible with the actual Newbery process. Title nominations can be made by anyone who wants to participate, but in the final round only twelve to fifteen titles are typically discussed, and only by committee members. Those shortlisted titles are supposed to be chosen based in part on reader nominations. Echoing the official Newbery Committee, the HMAC is made up of fourteen members plus the chair(s), who are selected through an application and vetting process. They tend to be school or youth services librarians and are chosen (as with the Newbery committee) to represent different regions and stages of career. Again, following the official Newbery selection process, HMAC members meet and deliberate and select their winner(s). Unlike those of the Newbery committee, the deliberations of the HMAC are open to the public and can be watched via Zoom. But members of the public do not participate in the “official mock” process beyond the suggestion of titles, making the mock process more an exercise in professional community building than a form of participatory prizing. Readers not on the committee can fill out a Reader’s Ballot in a parallel exercise in selection. Sponsored by School Library Journal, the blog itself is more participatory, with readers invited to serve as guest bloggers ahead of the actual selection process. Calling Caldecott came into being in 2011 when Roger Sutton, then editor of The Horn Book, asked two colleagues to helm a companion blog to Heavy Medal. It too tries to follow official procedures, in this case by imitating the balloting and voting process used by Caldecott committees. Participants are asked to select three titles from the list of eligible books and score those titles using a point system. Books with the highest number of points become the winners and honor books of the Mock Caldecott. The key difference between Calling Caldecott and Heavy Medal as mock prize competitions is that in Calling Caldecott, anyone can fill out and submit a ballot; there is not a (mock) award committee, and there’s no difference between (mock) official and (mock) unofficial selections, as with Heavy Medal. The editors are keen to emphasize that the process is only a simulation, one emphasizing the joys of involvement: “we are staging a mock vote. Mock, meaning ‘not real.’ It is not predictive. It has no bearing on the real world, or the Real Committee’s deliberations and choices. We hold the vote so that our readers can feel part of the process. Yes, it’s all about process, not outcome” (Parravano and Danielson). The blog itself feels very accessible and features commentary by authors and illustrators commissioned by the blog’s two editors. The blog also reflects explicitly on the politics of selection and literary representation, as in, for instance, Martha Parravano’s 2017 Calling Caldecott piece entitled “Silver Medals.” She amplifies and supports a comment made by 2017 Caldecott Medal winner Javaka Steptoe that he considers previous Caldecott Honor titles by African Americans to be gold rather than silver medal books, given what he sees as the pervasive racism of children’s literature and American culture at large. Parravano backs up his claim by rehearsing the all-​too-​white history of the Caldecott Medal. Sponsored by School Library Journal, the Pondering Printz blog, dedicated to spotlighting YALSA’s Printz Award, not only provides detailed reviews of recent young adult titles (many of them fabulously diverse as well as stylistically inventive) but likewise examines the representational politics of both literature and prizing. This blog does not sponsor or play off of a mock Printz process, although those do exist. One contributor, Lalitha Nataraj, titles her blog entry “Transforming the Canon” and writes, I hope people will realize that just one reader’s –​ any reader’s –​ glorious praise of a book holds incredible value for that title and its author. My serious contenders for the 2020 Michael L. Printz Award center underrepresented voices and experiences and, whether or not these books end up winning, I hope they will transform a literary canon that has historically made little room for them. As Nataraj’s post suggests, prize prediction blogs amplify identity-​based books as well as more genre-​tagged awards. 474

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Consider also the Sydney Taylor Schmooze, founded in February 2020 and described as “a mock award blog that reviews Jewish children’s and young adult books year-​round” (Rabinowitz). The blog is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), which runs the Sydney Taylor Book Award, given to outstanding books for children and teens that “authentically portray the Jewish experience” (“Sydney Taylor”). Founded in 1968 as the Shirley Kravitz Children’s Book Award, it was renamed after the 1978 death of Taylor, author of the influential All-​of-​a-​Kind Family series. The award has helped recognize and promote a diverse Jewish children’s and young adult literature for decades now. Launched by Heidi Rabinowitz, former chair of the book award, the Sydney Taylor Schmooze is designed not only to support award contenders but also to publicize Jewish youth materials in general. Volunteer reviewers for the blog, Rabinowitz explains, evaluate the books through the award criteria, which both draws attention to the award and “also shines a light on the importance of representation.” “The mock award has no bearing on decisions of the real award committee,” she clarifies, “but it’s important because it gets more people thinking about Jewish children’s literature year-​round, beyond the annual award announcement.” While you do have to apply to be a reviewer for the blog and are expected to be “well versed in children’s literature and familiar with Jewish customs,” you don’t absolutely have to be a librarian or author; you can also be an “avid reader” (Rabinowitz). Prize prediction blogs extend the reach and scale of the mock prize competitions, and arguably, the reach and scale of the “real” prize processes. The blogs offer additional context and commentary. Some blogs also reflect on prior award-​winning titles, not unlike anniversary lists or retrospective celebrations. A good example is the blog About to Mock, which features a “Newbery Wayback Machine” with detailed reviews of prior Medal titles back to the first decade (see the Newbery Wayback Machine Index specifically). Together, the blogs and competitions keep new titles, authors, and illustrators on the radar and encourage children’s literature stakeholders to read, discuss, and further promote exciting materials.

Edubrow Extension Activities In addition to prediction blogs and mock awards, participatory prizing also promotes books and builds communities through other educational activities designed to deepen readers’ engagement with award-​winning books and broaden the reach of awards and their recipients. These other extension activities often include book discussion guides that encourage readers to reflect more deeply on a book and to relate it to their own lives or to other stories, engagement activities that ask readers to undertake projects based on different aspects of a book, and educational resources that suggest ways in which readers can further explore topics from a book. Many of these extension activities were first created by teachers and librarians seeking to engage and challenge their students, and they have proliferated online, sometimes connected to book creators and publishers, but initially detached from the awarding organizations. Over time, however, they have also become part of the official awards culture, with awarding bodies creating and promoting relevant extension activities after titles have received official recognition. Such practices further entrench children’s book awards in “edubrow” culture. The ALA has regularly published updated volumes of annotated bibliographies of the Caldecott and Newbery winners and honorees, as well as the Medal winners’ acceptance speeches. Moving beyond award history and collection development, ALSC’s The Newbery Practitioner’s Guide: Making the Most of the Award in Your Work (2022) emphasizes how the Newbery “intersects with library work in a range of areas such as collection policy, advocacy, programming, EDI efforts, and censorship” and includes guidance on how to deal with censorship attempts, how to promote award materials on social media, and how to create discussions and activities for specific Newbery books (Schulte-​Cooper). Through this guide, the ALA is directly contributing to a wider array of participatory prizing options beyond mock awards, though ALSC is not the first ALA division to do so. The CSK selection committee, never a 475

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part of ALSC, has a unique charge in that, in addition to the usual tasks of evaluating eligible books, selecting recipients, and assisting with press releases, their list of juror responsibilities in the “Coretta Scott King Book Awards Jury Handbook” also includes “[a]‌ssisting in the writing of book discussion guides for the newly chosen books” (1). These guides are presented at the CSK Awards breakfast at the annual ALA conference (Smith xii), and the guides for the 2009 recipients onward are available online (“Coretta Scott King Book Awards Educational Resources”). The ALA also published Coretta Scott King Award Books Discussion Guide: Pathways to Democracy in 2014, further highlighting the CSK Award’s commitment to education and engaging directly with readers. Through its most recent revision of its award guidelines in December 2016, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award (JACBA) has taken community considerations to the next level. Whereas the Newbery and CSK extension activities primarily endeavor to engage communities with already announced award winners, the JACBA now considers as part of its selection process how effective books will be at engaging readers in discussions about social justice concerns. Established in 1953 as part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and now administered by the Jane Addams Peace Association (JAPA), the JACBA currently has two criteria. The first criterion continues to address literary and artistic excellence, and the new second criterion requires that books that receive the award must “[i]‌nvite dialogue, passionate response, purposeful reflection, and deep questioning related to one or more of the following” questions about actions that can be taken to improve the world (JAPA, “Award Guidelines”).5 This new criterion focuses on readers’ interactions with the book and with the world beyond the book. As the JAPA explains in discussing how the award’s guidelines and mission have evolved, the emphasis is “on how books effectively engage children thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equality for all people. It is the nature of the dialogue, response, reflection, and questioning which a book engenders in young readers that is key” (JAPA, “History”). While selection committee members decide which books they think will best generate this level of participation, the award’s website also contains a “Social Justice Learning” section to promote more opportunities for direct reader engagement.

Conclusion A century after the Newbery Medal launched a culture of children’s book awards, literary prizing continues to support canonicity or something like it, elevating the status of recognized titles and of children’s literature at large. Prizing maintains a sense of literary tradition while consecrating new commodities as potential classics. There’s always been an element of participatory prizing within prize culture, but participatory prizing has expanded significantly in the last few decades and especially with the rise of the internet and social media. On the one hand, participatory practices do democratize prizing, offering more people more ways to engage with book evaluation and selection. Anyone can participate and evaluate, especially in the more informal mock award events. At the same time, participatory prizing does not threaten official prizing processes, as most readers participate separately from the regular business of selection, making them part of the prizing community but rarely official decision makers. Broadly speaking, participatory prizing maintains both the status of book awards and the status of those professionals charged with award selection. Participatory prizing supports the core work of prizing, affirming the association of quality children’s literature with the project of individual and community education.

Notes 1 The CSK Award added its illustrator category in 1974, whereas the Belpré Award always included writer and illustrator categories.

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From Canon-Making to Participatory Prizing 2 For additional criticism of prizing, see Barker, and Kidd and Thomas, whose edited volume Prizing Children’s Literature considers ALA awards but also prizes given by other institutions and/​or in other national cultures, including prizes for translations. 3 While many awards do not release lists of contenders before announcing the award recipients, some do, with the National Book Award probably being the best known user of the list system in the United States. 4 As part of the Newbery Medal’s hundredth anniversary celebration in 2021–​22, ALSC released an online “Mock Newbery Toolkit,” to which Engelfried contributed. 5 The questions asked in the second criterion for the JACBA focus on how people can work to create a more just world; they can be read in full in the “Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Guidelines” online.

Works Cited “2021 Kids’ Book Choice Award Winners.” The Children’s Book Council, www.cbcbo​oks.org/​2021/​12/​09/​2021-​ kids-​book-​cho​ice-​award-​winn​ers/​. “2021 Mind the Gap Awards.” The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 97, no. 4, July/​August 2021, pp. 158. Alexa. “And the Mock Awards Go to These Books for Kids.” Chicago Public Library, 15 January 2020, www. chipub​lib.org/​blogs/​post/​and-​the-​mock-​awa​rds-​go-​to-​these-​books-​for-​kids. Barker, Keith. “Prize-​Fighting.” Children’s Book Publishing in Britain since 1945, edited by Kimberley Reynolds and Nicholas Tucker, Scolar Press, 1998, pp. 42–​59. Beullens-​Maoui, Nathalie, and Teresa Mlawer, editors. The Pura Belpré Award 1996–​2016: 20 Years of Outstanding Latino Children’s Literature. Rosen, 2016. Bittner, Robert, and Michelle Superle. “The Last Bastion of Aesthetics? Formalism and the Rhetoric of Excellence in Children’s Literary Awards.” Kidd and Thomas, pp. 73–​86. Caponegro, Ramona. “Peter’s Legacy: The Ezra Jack Keats Award.” Kidd and Thomas, pp. 118–​29. —​—​—​. “Prizing Social Justice: The Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.” Ethics in Children’s Literature, edited by Claudia Mills, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 207–​21. “Coretta Scott King Book Awards Educational Resources.” American Library Association, www.ala.org/​rt/​ emiert/​core​tta-​scott-​king-​book-​awa​rds-​educ​atio​nal-​resour​ces/​. “Coretta Scott King Book Awards Jury Handbook.” American Library Association, www.ala.org/​rt/​sites/​ala.org. rt/​files/​cont​ent/​Jury%20Han​dboo​k_​Se​ptem​ber%202​018.pdf/​. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005. Engelfried, Steven. Newbery and Caldecott Mock Elections Tool Kit, 2011 Edition. ALSC, 2011. —​—​—​. “Newbery and Caldecott Mock Elections Toolkit.” ALSC Blog, 19 September 2011, www.alsc.ala.org/​ blog/​2011/​09/​newb​ery-​and-​caldec​ott-​mock-​electi​ons-​tool​kit/​. —​—​—​. “The ‘Other’ Winners: The Excitement of Mock Newberys.” Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 30–​33. “Guide to Planning a Mock Newbery Discussion and Election.” Association for Library Service to Children, www.ala.org/​alsc/​mock-​newb​ery-​tool​kit. Horning, Kathleen T. “One Hundred Years: A Timeline of the Newbery Medal.” Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 12–​21. —​—​—​. “Secrecy and the Newbery Medal.” Horn Book Magazine, vol. 87, no. 4, July/​August 2011, pp. 60–​70. “Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Guidelines.” Jane Addams Peace Association, www. janeaddamschildrensbookaw​ard.org/​book-​award/​award-​gui​deli​nes/​. “Jane Addams Children’s Book Award History.” Jane Addams Peace Association, www. janeaddamschildrensbookaw​ard.org/​book-​award/​hist​ory/​. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992. —​—​—​. “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One).” Confessions of an Aca-​Fan (Henry Jenkins’s blog), 19 October 2006, henryjenkins.org/​blog/​2006/​10/​ confronting_​the_​challenges_​of.html. Kidd, Kenneth B. “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of Newbery Gold.” Children’s Literature, vol. 35, 2007, pp. 166–​90. —​—​—​, and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., editors. Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards. Routledge, 2017. Leriche, Mathilde. Le Prix Jeunesse: histoire d’un prix littéraire pour enfants, in 50 ans de littérature de jeunesse. Magnard/​L’École, 1979.

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Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth B. Kidd Marcus, Leonard S. “The People Behind the Medal: John Newbery, Frederic G. Melcher, and Clara Whitehill Hunt.” Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 3–​7. Miller, Carl F. “Precious Medals: The Newbery Medal, the YRCA, and the Gold Standard of Children’s Book Awards.” Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature, edited by Angela E. Hubler, University Press of Mississippi, 2014, pp. 57–​74. “Mock EJK Award Toolkits.” Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, www.ezra-​jack-​keats.org/​mock-​ejk-​award-​toolk​its/​. Nataraj, Lalitha. “Transforming the Canon.” Pondering Printz (blog), School Library Journal, 15 October 2019, www.slj.com/​story/​trans​form​ing-​the-​canon-​ponder​ing-​pri​ntz-​ala-​award-​lali​tha-​nat​araj. “NCTE Mock Book Awards.” National Council of Teachers of English, https://​ncte.org/​ncte-​mock-​book-​awa​rds/​. Ocasio, Rafael. “In Search of a Socialist Identity in Revolutionary Cuban Children’s Literature.” Imagination, Emblems, and Expressions: Essays on Latin American, Caribbean, and Continental Culture and Identity, edited by Helen Ryan-​Ranson, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993, pp. 89–​99. Oliver, Lin. “Matthew Winner: Empowering Students with Mock Book Awards.” Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, www.scbwi.org/​matt​hew-​win​ner-​emp​ower​ing-​stude​nts-​with-​mock-​book-​awa​rds/​. Parravano, Martha V. “Silver Medals.” Calling Caldecott (blog), The Horn Book Magazine, 30 June 2017, www. hbook.com/​story/​sil​ver-​med​als. —​—​—​, and Julie Danielson. “2022 Calling Caldecott Ballot–​Now Open!” Calling Caldecott (blog), The Horn Book, 17 January 2022, www.hbook.com/​story/​2022-​call​ing-​caldec​ott-​bal​lot-​now-​open. Payne, Rachel G. “Board Books Get an Award of Their Own.” The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 98, no. 2, March/​ April 2022, pp. 108–​10. Phelps, Adelaide Poniatowski, and Carole J. McCollough, editors. Coretta Scott King Award Books Discussion Guide: Pathways to Democracy. ALA, 2014. Rabinowitz, Heidi. “The Sydney Taylor Schmooze: A Mock Award Blog for Jewish Children’s Books.” Multicultural Kid Blogs, 13 December 2021, multiculturalkidblogs.com/​2021/​12/​13/​the-​sydney-​taylor-​ shmooze-​a-​mock-​award-​blog-​for-​jewish-​childrens-​books/​. Schulte-​Cooper, Laura, editor. The Newbery Practitioner’s Guide: Making the Most of the Award in Your Work. ALSC, 2022. Schwebel, Sara L., and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, editors. Dust Off the Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial. Routledge, 2022. Smith, Henrietta M., editor. The Coretta Scott King Awards, 1970–​2009. 4th ed., ALA, 2009. Story-​Huffman, Ru. Caldecott On the Net: Reading and Internet Activities. Alleyside Press, 1999. —​—​—​. Newbery on the Net: Reading and Internet Activities. Alleyside Press, 1998. “Sydney Taylor Book Award–​About the Award.” Association for Jewish Libraries (AJL), jewishlibraries.org/​ stba-​about/​. Taylor, Melissa. “How to Host a Mock Caldecott in the Classroom.” Brightly: Raise Kids Who Love to Read, www.readb​righ​tly.com/​mock-​caldec​ott//​.

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39 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN SCHOOLS Etti Gordon Ginzburg

Introduction: Children’s Literature Goes to School The omnipresence of children’s literature in schools, and in elementary school curricula in particular –​ especially in the Anglosphere, but also in Europe and in Israel, where the author of this chapter lives –​ is attributable to the longstanding link between reading and learning as well as that between reading, self-​edification, and academic and financial success. This fundamental association is closely tied to an enduring consensus about literature’s power to support personal and professional growth, and, by extension, national growth. The understanding of literacy as vital for national and economic success (Gabriel 102), and the critical role of literature in literacy acquisition,1 have created a dyad of national proportion, making both literacy acquisition and literature national interests. Yet even before children’s literature enters the school, it becomes prone to a host of social, cultural, and political considerations and pressures (Apple 173–​74). These may emerge from conservative or liberal values, “appropriate” educational standards and objectives, or aesthetic criteria. Furthermore, once it reaches the classroom, children’s literature becomes subject to a highly framed and constrained system of power relations between adult teachers and their child students. While much has been written about the contribution of children’s literature to the promotion of literacy from a pedagogical perspective, less attention has been given to how the didactic and literary perspectives, which separately define much of the discourse on children’s literature in school, interact in educational settings. This kind of reflection can certainly still count as an integral part of the study of children’s literature, whose criticism, Peter Hunt reminds us, may “extend beyond the traditional bounds of literary criticism” (9). Accordingly, it is the purpose of this chapter to offer as balanced a view as possible of some of the political pressures and power relations that shape the selection and role of children’s literature in school and affect its many uses, misuses, and abuses –​ depending on one’s perspective –​within the schools context. The chapter further considers how classroom dynamics, both social and scholastic, affect how elementary school children (and teachers) experience children’s literature in school.

Objectives and Assumptions: The Implications of the Literary-​Didactic Split One important factor underlying approaches to children’s literature in schools is the literary-​didactic split (Nikolajeva 2–​3). Children’s literature was alive and thriving in schools long before it became a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-45

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field of academic study, yet often it is in light of literary criteria (originating in academia), rather than pedagogic value, that books in schools and elsewhere are assessed. Somewhat paradoxically, the divide between the literary and the didactic has grown following the onset of children’s literature as a field of study in the 1970s. Before that time, English departments did not consider children’s literature to be on a par with literature for older readers; since then, however, the question of whether children’s literature belongs within literary studies or within education, and whether a children’s book is primarily a work of art, an object of inquiry, and only then an educational device, or whether these priorities ought to be ranked the other way around, has never been resolved. That this fundamental question remains undecided has resulted in a similar bifurcation regarding discussions on the use of children’s literature in schools, at least on a theoretical level. Writing about literature at large, Jean-​Marie Schaeffer describes this tension as deriving from a misunderstanding of the two equally important functions of literature, the first being the promotion of normative cultural values of importance to society, the second being the “teaching [of] literary phenomena as a worthwhile cultural ideal” (272). While the first function converges with the role of school as a social and cultural agent, promoting literature for its aesthetic and imaginative value is rarely understood as supporting this same project. Therefore, to some degree, the way children’s literature is framed in the classroom depends on whether and to what extent its role is understood by the administration, parents, and teachers to be didactic or literary.

The Didactic Approach The didactic view of children’s literature is rooted in the history of both literature and schooling itself, which initially emerged as an effective control mechanism. Until the sixteenth century in Europe, the church was the exclusive provider of schooling, which was designed for the purpose of teaching religious doctrine and qualifying future priests. However, from that point onward, schooling became part of a civic policy towards children, whose poverty and rising vagrancy became a major disturbance of public order and propelled laypeople and civic organizations to action. A solution was found in the form of institutions where poor children were put under surveillance and received religious and moral indoctrination and practical apprenticeships. Thus combining religious concerns with civic and economic ones, schools became part of a broader welfare reform that took place all over Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (Cunningham 116–​19). Within this constellation, elementary schooling in the vernacular was provided for poor children, but secondary education, conducted in Latin and inclusive of the classical curriculum, was reserved for the children (mainly the boys) of the wealthy. Later, during the eighteenth century, as governments began to play a major role in schooling, schools also became a vehicle for promoting national identity (Cunningham 119–​24) in addition to producing disciplined and productive Christian subjects. Today, it is understood that it is through language that children learn about the world and their relationship with it (Stephens 5), on their way to becoming fulfilled and productive adults. This understanding explains why acquiring literacy –​ that is, mastering the skill of reading –​ is the top priority in primary education. Acknowledged as the cultural and linguistic product of the society in which it is created, literature has been adopted by schools, as in the past, to assist them in their roles as agents of literacy, socialization, acculturation, and knowledge. Consequently, many children are introduced to literature mainly in the context of reading acquisition, and schools have become the largest institutional consumers of children’s literature (together with libraries) and probably its most powerful advocates (Zipes 7). Children’s mastery of reading, as a skill that they must acquire in order to do well personally and economically, thus situates them within the socioeconomic order (Zipes 5–​6). In other words, when children’s literature enters the classroom, it becomes implicated in what Lisa Delpit calls “the culture of power” (282), namely 480

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the power of the teacher over the students; the power of the publishers of textbooks and of the developers of the curriculum to determine the view of the world presented; the power of the state in enforcing compulsory schooling; and the power of an individual or group to determine another’s intelligence or “normalcy.” Finally, if schooling prepares people for jobs, and the kind of job a person has determines her or his economic status and, therefore, power, then schooling is intimately related to that power.2 (283)

The Literary Approach The pleasure-​instruction dialectic, which has informed all literature since time immemorial (Spiegelman 3–​24), has always been particularly pronounced in literature for children (Nikolajeva 2). Indeed, it was the didactic drive that propelled the development of books designed especially for the use of children in Europe and in the New World beginning in the seventeenth century, such as Johannes Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658, discussed in more detail in Karen Coats’s, Giorgia Grilli’s, and Emily Bruce’s contributions to this volume) and John Cotton’s Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1656). Since then, however, Romantic views of childhood have combined with the growing secularization of literacy education and the birth of children’s literature as an academic field to draw increasing attention to its aesthetic, “literary” aspects, making the didactic increasingly disreputable within the field. Notably, in the nineteenth century, tastes started tilting towards the entertaining and imaginative, a movement that ultimately influenced the creation of the corpus of the Golden Age of British children’s literature. It was this corpus that was the focus of early investigations in the newly emerging academic field of children’s literature, when, according to Sara Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, “[t]‌he first generation of children’s literature scholars largely ignored the work of education professors and librarians, focusing instead on [...] Golden Age fiction [...] considered ‘Literature,’ not just ‘children’s literature’ ” (5). Yet the view of childhood as a phase and of the child as an emergent adult maintained the cogency of the didactic streak, which was never completely canceled. It simply coexisted with a growing division in the discourse between pedagogical and literary engagement with children’s literature, and between “literary” children’s books and instructional texts designed for reading at school. It is notable, however, that even the literary approach is covertly didactic in its tacit aim to inculcate in the child a refined (not to say, middle-​class) aesthetic taste for “good” books. Like the didactic approach, the literary approach produces a hierarchy –​ in this case, a hierarchy of texts that closely correlates with the tastes of the social pecking order.

In Practice: Functional vs. Complex Literacy In order to understand the practical expression of the didactic-​literary split in the classroom, it is instructive to consider the difference between instrumental literacy and reflective reading. Whereas the first is a vital skill for engaging with texts in that it enables the decoding of information, mastery of the latter involves an intellectual capacity to read expansively and critically as well as to tolerate ambivalence. Yet reflective or “deep” reading (Wolf 110), which is affiliated with a more literary approach, is relatively neglected in elementary schools despite its value to promoting literacy (Wolf 109–​40). In school, emphasis is usually put on instrumental literacy, and school culture is characterized, as Jack Zipes writes, by “constant testing, positivist knowledge, quick thinking, efficiency, [and] maximum productivity at all costs” (41). The growing schism between the literary and the didactic permeates not only the practice but also the rhetoric of children’s literature in schools. In fact, while talk about children’s literature is 481

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often embedded in liberal-​humanist parlance, in practice, interest is mainly found in its instrumental function. Today, for example, educating the masses, especially by equipping them with literacy, is often viewed as a foundational support of democratic regimes and as a threat to nondemocratic rule. Yet talk about “faith in the book and in human civilisation” (Hunt 10), or about the right of children to read (International Literacy Association), doesn’t always reflect reality, in which the use-​ value of children’s literature is mostly deemed to be its service to school curricula and basic learning objectives.

Social and Political Factors Like the importance of reading and literacy, children’s right to read and enjoy diverse books seems uncontested (Hartsfield and Kimmel 419). However, reading practices in schools suggest a discrepancy between a rhetoric that evokes freedom and neutrality and a de facto politicized and instrumental approach, in which selection criteria and even censorship are indicative of what Michael Apple describes as “the politics of official knowledge” in both the United Kingdom and the United States (174). Upon entering school, all literature becomes children’s literature.3 However, the division between authentic children’s books and reading schemes is unique and specific to schools and is not without implications for children’s experiences. In Britain, there has been much debate contrasting the use of the two. Authentic children’s books do not abide by any learning objectives or vocabulary or thematic requirements and instead reflect an approach that places some value on the emotional and aesthetic experience of children’s reading. In contrast, schematic school readers are a graded series of books with controlled vocabulary constructed specifically for the purpose of literacy acquisition. In their developmentally oriented design, they reflect an understanding of instruction as a gradual and sequential process. In that they are written for children, they fit the definition of children’s literature, but their instructional constraints mark them as different from “real books.” Recent research questions the advantages of reading schemes for developing competent readers; Ayten Kiris and her coauthors review studies suggesting that low-​achieving pupils in particular benefit most from a combination of real books and a focus on core phonic and sight vocabulary skills. However, even when teachers use authentic children’s literature in the classroom, most of the time its use is functional. That is, teachers select books for their instrumental value more often than for their capacity to entertain (Kiris et al. 14–​16). In elementary schools in Israel, literature has always been studied as part of literacy acquisition. But whereas until the early 1980s, authentic literary texts were used and attention was given to their thematic and aesthetic aspects, curricula have since shifted to focus on informative and journalistic texts such as op-​eds, with an emphasis on developing linguistic and communication skills. This change was implemented following reforms that put stress on the study of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), a trend that intensified in the 1990s (De-​Malach 25–​33). Hence, readers that used to consist mainly of authentic literary texts now contain a miscellany of texts and language exercises (32–​34). The way texts are presented to children shapes their perceptions of reading, their motivation, and their future reading habits –​their development as readers –​which is at least as important as the skill of reading. Once the entertaining aspect of children’s literature is ignored and viewed as no different from other school materials, literature is also “deprived of its magic powers to heal or sustain or, at the very least, to aid our entry into other worlds,” as Johann Aitken puts it (205). Aitken protests: “Until or unless some authoritative bell tolls, could we continue to plunge into literature as from the drudgery of school knowledge and adults who socialize us for this good cause or that?” (215). As it is, children’s literature of the “real” kind, even in its raw state, is not typically perceived in the school context as merely entertaining, a “meaningless pastime,” but rather as instrumental. 482

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The inattention given to children’s enjoyment of reading may relate to the fact that the children comprising the compound noun children’s literature are often perceived as a homogenous group set apart from adults by age. The Romantic construction of children as impressionable and innocent, and as devoid of morality, politics, and sexuality, grants them the protection of adults, but at the expense of agency and voice. This approach is less conducive to real children’s needs than to those of children as constructed in the eyes of the adults whose role it is to look after them. School, a bit like children’s literature, is also based on the perception of childhood as a distinct phase. This perception, as Andrea Immel articulates, implicates the child “in a sort of quarantine” or an “enlightened segregation from adults” (21), where texts are discussed in terms of their suitability for a child’s age and developmental stage. Accordingly, the child who is learning to read is often perceived as a tabula rasa, not to mention passive, dependent, and vulnerable. Encounters with individual flesh and blood children such as occur in school do not seem to dramatically change the cultural construction underlying this view or the practices ensuing from it. In fact, most schools still maintain a generic view of children, despite the “material reality that children are not a homogeneous population, but are diverse” (Thomson 369). Perhaps this point explains why ethnographic research on children’s primary schooling and on their experiences of reading or of learning to read is scant and why extant studies tend to “write the younger child, who is learning to read, out of the picture” (Scherer 25). Consequently, children, the main addressees of children’s literature, often remain inactive and silent about children’s literature in school settings, where they are the largest population: as Lexie Scherer observes, “At best, children emerge as ‘silent partners’ in the enterprise of learning to read. There is little sense that they might be agents in the process” (17). This perception is sufficiently widespread as to suggest the radical nature of the kinds of participatory research into children’s literature Justyna Deszcz-​Tryhubczak describes in her chapter in this volume, in which children’s agency is not only acknowledged but foregrounded. In the absence of children’s voices, and given the lack of a clear policy,4 professionally compiled reading lists and scholarly appraisals frequently fill the void to inform the selection of “good” children’s books and serve as a source of expert knowledge for teachers. Prizes are also often used as a basis for text selection, decided according to amorphous and subjective criteria such as “merit” and literary excellence, although these nebulous standards can be easily contested on an individual basis or clash with children’s preferences (Hartsfield and Kimmel 423; see also Caponegro and Kidd in this volume). In Israel, selection of texts is to a large extent up to the teachers, though since 2014 this autonomy has been directly and indirectly delimited by a list of recommended works compiled by the Ministry of Education. Publishers have, since its inception, used the list as the basis for the texts they choose to include in student readers, as well as for the choice of texts for which they release scholarly and semi-​ scholarly editions for teachers’ use. Additionally, since many teachers are not familiar with children’s literature (as well as having no background in literary education), and/​or are not avid readers themselves, they find the list helpful and often use it uncritically. Hence, despite the growing schism between scholars and their (middle-​class) engagement with the literary, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of children’s literature on the one hand, and elementary school teachers and their practical, working-​class, pedagogical concerns on the other, the two groups have not severed all ties. Even if scholarly discourse does not directly shape their teaching practices, teachers seem to acknowledge the authority of professionals, researchers, or librarians insofar as they allow their judgments to influence the selection of classroom texts. Still, once selected, the books’ “aesthetic qualities” may be “overlooked to fit their role in literacy acquisition, reading practices and assessment” (Gabriel 93). Alongside this circumstance, even what seems to be neutral professional advice, of the kind provided by professional academic committees entrusted with the task of recommending books to 483

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schools, is not free of subjectivity (Hartsfield and Kimmel 419, 422). Such recommendations are often intended to give support to the curriculum, after all, and a curriculum “is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge [...] somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always part of a selective tradition, someone’s selection, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. It is produced out of the cultural, political, and economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that organize and disorganize a people” (Apple 195). This is the reason that the demand for instructional materials that are universally effective for teaching reading (especially in the phonics system) is similarly misleading. According to Rachael Gabriel, the idea that “high-​quality instructional materials” (HQIM) are universal, rather than contingent on the particular communities they are designed to serve, is a clear example of the influence of corporate interests over the dynamic needs of an increasingly diverse student population. Corporations benefit from an education system that is continually in crisis because they can provide products that purport to be the solution to the perpetual problems of schools. Conservative policymakers also benefit from an education system that is perpetually in a state of crisis because it makes the argument for privatization more palatable, and the likelihood that private enterprise will be required to solve the problems of public schools, more viable. (194) Censorship of children’s literature by policymakers, parents, and librarians on behalf of dominant cultural norms and ideologies bears the strongest evidence of the political aspects of the genre. As Andrew Zalot points out elsewhere in this Companion, children’s books that depict LGBTQ+​characters and contain references to sexual activity are often excluded as controversial and are unlikely to enter reading lists, especially at the elementary school level, while works that don’t fit progressive views of race may find themselves dropped from American reading lists as well. Consequently, as individual teachers are always under surveillance, many may use their discretion to avoid controversial or age-​ inappropriate texts in the first place. This kind of “preemptive censorship” (Fanetti 8) can limit the variety of books available in schools, in some cases leaving “young readers with materials that seem irrelevant to their experiences and interests” (Hartsfield and Kimmel 421; Zipes 7).

Teacher Preference Although children’s literature is inextricably interwoven with the elementary school curriculum, literature as a field of study comprising aesthetic or literary analysis does not constitute an independent discipline (Popp xx). Rather, literature is used as a means of teaching mainly literacy, but also geography, history, religious or national values, and even intercultural competence and leadership skills. As such, children’s literature is seldom an integral part of sequential planning and is more prone than other subjects to teachers’ individual preferences. This status has its advantages, mainly in that it theoretically allows teachers more freedom in choosing their materials and mode of teaching. However, it can also result in overlap and repetition of the same books over the course of elementary schooling (Stewig 519). Additionally, while most often it is the individual teacher who selects authentic books for classroom use, this autonomy is frequently curtailed by the host of other factors at work in school, some of which have been mentioned above, not least among them teachers’ potentially poor familiarity with children’s books. That all of these issues are adult-​centered invariably means that in the end, it is “adults’ ideas of what children want to read and, more importantly, about what they should read, that shape the collection of children’s literature in schools” (Kutzer 721). 484

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The Classroom as a Democratizing Space Reports about decreasing numbers of readers bear witness to the important role of schools in trying to change this trend –​ and there is a lot to change. In the United States, for example, despite anecdotal cases of school success, the literacy gap has not moved since 1992 (Wolf 39). This may be explained by the fact that gaps in literacy do not begin in school but rather “from the very first day any child is born” (Wolf 39), and in fact, parental involvement has by far the strongest effect on children’s reading habits.5 Within the scope of this involvement, being read to “remains one of the most powerful predictors [...] of later reading ability” (Wolf 40), yet in Europe, between thirty and fifty percent of elementary school children are not read to at home (Kiris 32; Davis and Magee 9), with similar rates found in the United States (Wolf 40). Therefore, it is notable that schools have the ability to democratize reading, acquainting children with literature they would not read otherwise (Davis and Magee 7). For these children, encountering literature in school has the potential to “reconstruct the social and cultural conditions for the recognition of the importance of individual reading” (7), especially when done through dialogic teaching that makes room for the child’s voice alongside the adult’s. When teachers are attentive to children’s responses, they can to some extent emulate reading behavior outside school and model this option for children without any reading experience. As the above comments may imply, reading literature, especially children’s literature, is largely a feminine, middle-​class activity (Nodelman 32). As around ninety percent of teachers in elementary schools are women (Apple 117), their classroom practices may be perceived as emulating, and compensating for, the lack of a middle-​class style mother-​child dyad that is often absent from the reality experienced by children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds (Scherer 17; Davis and Magee 4). At the same time, because reading is shaped by class and gender rather than being a neutral pastime, reading children’s literature is not always or only an equalizing process. Given the correlation between poor reading skills and disadvantaged socioeconomic background, children’s reading performance in class underlines and maintains social differences. Access to literature can also become a disciplinary tool, as when teachers allow students extra time for independent reading as a reward for completing a task in a timely manner or withhold reading aloud as a form of punishment (Popp 63). When such practices are employed, literature ceases to be an indulgent, liberating, and nonjudgmental pastime, a leisurely or private entertainment propelled by boredom, curiosity, and a host of other discrete motives. Instead, it is inevitably implicated in a power mechanism that does not affect everyone equally. Whereas for some schooling is “a vast engine of democracy,” for others “it is seen as a form of social control, or, perhaps, as the embodiment of cultural dangers, institutions whose curricula and teaching practices threaten the moral universe of the students who attend them” (Apple 169).

Literacy Acquisition Given these classroom dynamics, it is significant that children largely encounter literature in the context of literacy instruction and reading practice, where their attention is likely to be directed from their subjective interactions and emotional experiences with texts to their performance and achievements as readers (Scherer 25).6 Reading is not, for them, an impartial, intimate activity, but part of an assessment mechanism that has the power to define the reading child as an achiever or a failure (Zipes 6). And since being a good reader is often equated with intelligence, children who are considered bad readers may avoid reading and books, which are for them linked to negative personal assessments (Scherer 50). In American elementary schools, this disposition towards reading as a skill (as opposed to a holistic, emotional, and/​or aesthetic experience) has been reinforced by the dominance of the phonics 485

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method of instruction. While use of this approach is justified by ample evidence of its overall efficacy (Report of the National Reading Panel), it has also drawn criticism for its narrow, technical character, measuring skill through standardized tests while ignoring the effect of contextual factors such as “access to engaging and culturally relevant texts, individualized instruction, and school climate” on students’ reading outcomes (Gabriel 192). However, similar issues also permeate whole-​text reading practices (which focus on overall comprehension and the ability to summarize what one has read), including all three of the key strategies comprising the routine of daily literacy sessions in primary education: shared, guided, and independent reading.7 Under this system, even enjoying a book in the course of independent reading is framed in terms of reading objectives: “[A]‌Year 1 class might be reading a big book of narrative tale in which their purpose is to enjoy the story” (Winch et al. 127; emphasis mine). All three whole-​language strategies further imply, and in fact effect, a manner of reading that is linear and complete. Shared and guided readings require students to start and finish a book within a given timeframe, and texts are approached with the assumption that there is a “correct” way of reading them. Students are expected to explain texts, answer questions about them, memorize parts, or learn to spell vocabulary words. As part of this practice, they are taught to look for a message (or to impose one if none seems to arise from the text) that is in line with what they have learned is school-​appropriate, and as is often the case, they will eventually find what they are looking for. In other words, by indoctrinating children to identify the “correct” meaning and rewarding them when they succeed, favored classroom approaches not only teach misreading instead of important critical reading skills, but also teach students to identify texts as representatives of the dominant culture and its institutional collaborators instead of as their best allies. Indeed, when I taught a course on nonsense poetry (in Hebrew) to student teachers in Israel, the most frequent question I was asked was, “So, what is the moral?” The students struggled to find meaning in poems that were not only defined as nonsense but were in essence sophisticated and playful word games. Similarly, I remember a student teacher’s interpretation of Paul Kor’s Ha-​ Pil She-​Ratsa Lihyot Hachi (1993, The Elephant Who Wanted to Be the Best), a popular Hebrew picturebook about a young male elephant who, after achieving his goal of becoming colorful, gives up his new look in order to rejoin the larger elephant community. The student read this tale as a coming-​of-​age story about making peace with one’s “natural,” collective identity, in accordance with the Israeli ethos, prevalent in children’s literature until the 1980s, of giving up individual whims for the greater good. While this interpretation “constituted a reasonable didactic and satisfactory ending” (Gordon Ginzburg 135), it ignores essential pictorial aspects in order to satisfy the student’s need for didactic closure. The teaching practices that encourage such thinking do not correspond with processes that occur in the brain while reading literature, as brain research has shown reading to be neither “straightforward or automatic” nor “serial and sequential process[es], left to right, word by word” (Davis and Magee 10). Whereas private independent reading allows no-​understanding, partial understanding, or even misunderstanding, and is not bound by time or a demand for linearity, reading in school does not usually enable such a degree of vagueness. No wonder Alberto Manguel described his elementary school reading practices as utterly mechanical (68). Indeed, it is a rare experience for children’s literature to be involved in the classroom in a manner that is confined neither by time nor by any learning objective. Scherer’s description of such unstructured reading at a K-​2 class in England, referred to as part of another rarity, an “ ‘off curriculum’ day,” suggests as much: As I read, I explained to the children that they could stop me and comment or ask questions about the book. An hour later, the children still leant forward and begged me not to turn the page, saying they had “seen something else” and “noticed something.” I reflected afterwards 486

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on reading in this way –​with time and where the children’s concerns were allowed to be paramount and flow freely –​ about what I learnt of their perspectives, and how they built on each other’s ideas in complex ways. (6) While an exclusive focus on texts’ instrumental aspects and informative role may allow the children who are educated in this manner to become skillful readers, they will not be introduced to literature’s emotive qualities and polysemic potential. Yet Northrop Frye has argued that “we don’t go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland; we go to find out what it is like to gain the whole and lose our own souls” (24). If schools ever wish to make the emotional and aesthetic experience of literature a priority in addition to ensuring that children are acquiring practical and necessary reading skills, another approach to texts will have to be considered. Even so, reading experts might protest that literacy acquisition should indeed be schools’ main concern, since illiterate children cannot read. Certainly, reading scientists such as Mark Seidenberg and Maryanne Wolf argue that a child first needs the skill of reading to be able to reach the holistic, emotional, and/​or aesthetic experience that children’s literature and literature offer. Moreover, according to Schaeffer, “[i]‌t has been noted that readers who pay only scant attention to phonetics coding in language processing and advance quickly to the level of semantic synthesis are not sensitive also to rhymes and rhythms (and therefore also to poetry)” (280). Seen from this angle, the problem is not only that “whole language programs have negligible effects on learning to read […]. [and] that strategies of reading need to be deliberately taught, especially to students struggling to read” (Hattie 138). Rather, as in the case of teaching literature, current approaches to teaching literacy, including the phonics method, are not adequately preparing children for all aspects of the reading experience.

The Teacher as Mediator Ultimately, a child’s experience of literature in school will be negotiated by the teacher, a “feature of the classroom environment the experts too often overlook” (Aitken 220). Teachers’ approaches to teaching literature are contingent on a variety of factors, spanning their education and personality, exposure to books, and reading habits. More specifically, these perceptions are often shaped by teachers’ experiences with literature in the school system as students, or later on during their teacher training, if children’s literature was part of their studies at all. Such factors can in turn determine their enthusiasm for or indifference to incorporating literature as an element in their own classrooms. Varying and uneven levels of professional development may also account for uneven levels of instruction (Gabriel 191). Sally Yates mentions lack of training as a major setback, as in both the United States and Britain teachers are not necessarily educated in “the way texts are constructed, and the linguistic and literary knowledge necessary to analyse and work creatively with children” (164). Aside from lack of training and lack of personal inclination, the subordination of literature to literacy and language often leads teachers to focus on linguistic aspects of a literary text and its overt, explicit meanings rather than on its more subtle subtexts. Teachers commonly, but not universally, favor such structured, schematic instruction over more open and engaged learning (Yates 164). In the context of English as a Second Language (ESL), Janice Bland maintains that “few primary English teachers are fully aware of the literary potential of picturebooks, and secondary-​school teachers are even less familiar with children’s literature” (1). In Israel, due to the interdisciplinary use of literature throughout the curriculum, literature is everywhere. Language arts teachers and homeroom teachers in particular use literature in the classroom mainly to teach literacy and values, but not to teach literature as a distinct academic subject, an area 487

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of study for which they do not have the relevant qualifications or disciplinary knowledge. The Israeli Ministry of Education does lay claim to vaguely phrased aims of developing sophisticated readers who enjoy reading literature and instilling an appreciation for a variety of literary genres (Israeli Ministry). However, since teachers do not always understand the complexities of literary texts, they find it difficult to implement these goals (Porat et al. 178), ultimately resulting in a discrepancy between the stated intentions of the course material and its implementation in practice. Thus, it often happens that “once the students finish studying a poem, they start conjugating its verbs” (De-​Malach 33; my translation). Sometimes, even learning objectives that encourage acquainting the child with current literature or with a variety of literary genres require a set of skills and personality traits that not every teacher has. To execute this approach, elementary school teachers must be avid readers themselves, at least somewhat informed in literary theory, and possessed of read-​aloud, critical, and analytical skills. The capacity to view a book as open to various interpretations likewise depends on traits such as openmindedness and the ability to tolerate interpretations that may clash with prevailing readings or specific curricular goals. This is a rare and highly advanced personality, likely associated with experience, self-​confidence, and a measure of humility. In the hands of a less confident novice teacher, literature is more likely to find its meaning confined to one or few didactic interpretations, repeatedly taught. While there are teachers who teach children’s literature creatively and expansively, many others still mainly use schematic textbooks and worksheets. As a result, some children are still learning to read on structured basal readers accompanied by decontextualized exercises. However, as I have stressed throughout this chapter, teachers’ knowledge or actions are in no way the only factor affecting the use of children’s literature in school.

Conclusion The ancient Greek word σχολή was used to describe “leisure, employment of leisure, but also [...] learned discussion, disputation, lecture, group to whom lectures were given” (OED). In Latin, this became the root of the word schola, which referred to an exposition made by a teacher of his or her views on a subject (OED), putting the focus on the teacher rather than on the learner/​child. Literature in ancient Greek was also understood broadly to include what today encompasses the humanities. In contrast, the Hebrew word for school, Bet Sefer –​literally, the house of the book –​turns the text into the focus of attention. It is easy to see how these notions can converge. School is indispensable for the existence and dissemination of children’s literature; it is where children can be certain to engage with such literature, whether willingly or under coercion, and regardless of method or context. It is where they learn to read, and every text used or devised for this purpose, be it a graded reader or an authentic classic, is in fact children’s literature. Indeed, Dorena Caroli and Alla Salnikova observe that “the multi-​ functionality of a primer cannot be boiled down to its role as a basic literacy tool” (12). Primers are a part of children’s culture and as such of children’s literature: “School textbooks, including primers, have always been a crucial element of childhood culture and an all-​important tool for shaping the idea of the Self and the Other, as well as of the world in general” (Caroli and Salnikova 12). Writing about the whole-​language approach, Christine Rubie-​Davies asserts that “[c]‌hildren can learn phonics but they learn it in the context of reading and writing” (41). The fact that this is not quite what children’s literature scholars have in mind when they think about children’s literature is largely the cause for the literary-​didactic divide, underlined by a further misunderstanding about how literature is defined when studied as a separate discipline. But as Schaeffer maintains: “Literature is first and above all a scholarly notion, and it is through the system of education that it is implanted and maintained” (269).

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Notes 1 By literacy I refer to linguistic literacy in its traditional sense rather than to a plurality of literacies (invoked, for example, by Len Unsworth) arising from technological developments. 2 Interestingly, children’s literature itself recognizes these power relations in children’s books where “the exercise of power through the institution of schooling may well be a reality which is recognized by children [… and that p]ower permeates the way that they inhabit their everyday school world” (Thomson 382). 3 See the following definition by David Rudd: “Children’s literature consists of texts that consciously or unconsciously address particular constructions of the child [… and] display an awareness of children’s disempowered status” (25–​26). 4 Scherer points out that at least in Britain, “[p]‌olicy on the use of specific children’s books in English schools is vague, and on multicultural books it is effectively nonexistent. The only guidance about the sorts of texts children should be engaging with is that children should be ‘increasing their familiarity with a wide range of books, including fairy stories, myths and legends, and retelling some of these orally in Key Stage One (age 5–​7 years) and Key Stage Two (7–​11 years)’ ” (11). 5 More even than social class or parents’ level of education. 6 For example, their ability to decode, pronounce, read aloud, remember, or spell words. 7 In shared or modeled reading, the teacher chooses a book for the whole class to experience together across several lessons. The teacher reads the book aloud to demonstrate (model) proper reading and guides discussions about content, possible meanings, and linguistic (grammatical and syntactic) elements in the text. Guided reading, which is done with individual students or in small groups, aims to help students apply knowledge acquired during shared reading. Often used to support weaker readers, it inevitably prompts classification between strong and weak readers, resulting in a class taxonomy of intelligence that may parallel the socioeconomic division in the class. The only time students can choose their books and enjoy uninterrupted, unsurveilled reading is during independent reading, but even this activity can be subject to assessment, as when teachers create assignments based on the texts read by students independently (Winch et al. 125–​48).

Works Cited Aitken, Johan Lyall. “Children’s Literature and the Sociology of School Knowledge: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 1988, pp. 195–​216. Apple, Michael W. “Cultural Politics and the Text.” Knowledge, Power, and Education: The Selected Works of Michael W. Apple, edited by Michael W. Apple, Routledge, 2013, pp. 168–​85. Bland, Janice. Children’s Literature and Learner Empowerment: Children and Teenagers in English Language Education. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Caroli, Dorena, and Alla Salnikova. “Primers, Culture(s) of Childhood and Educational Models in Europe (16–​ 20th Centuries).” History of Education and Children’s Literature, vol. 9, no. 2, January 2014, pp. 11–​17. Cunningham, Hugh. Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005. Davis, Philip, and Fiona Magee. Reading. Emerald, 2020. De-​Malach, Naomi. “A Survey of Literature Curricula in Israel.” Literature Beyond the Classroom Walls: Teaching and Learning Literature in Israeli Schools, edited by Ilana Elkad-​Lehman and Yael Poyas, Mofet, 2022, pp. 23–​61. [Hebrew] Fanetti, Susan. “A Case for Cultivating Controversy: Teaching Challenged Books in K-​12 Classrooms.” The ALAN Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2012, pp. 6–​17. Frye, Northrop. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. Harcourt Brace, 1963. Gabriel, Rachael. How Education Policy Shapes Literacy Instruction: Understanding the Persistent Problems of Policy and Practice. Springer International, 2022. Gordon Ginzburg, Etti. “The Beautiful, the Impossible, and the Queer: Three Novel Readings of Paul Kor’s The Elephant Who Wanted to Be the Best.” Childhood, vol. 3, 2019, pp. 133–​41. Hartsfield, Danielle, E., and Sue C. Kimmel. “Supporting the Right to Read: Principles for Selecting Children’s Books.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 74, no. 4, December 2020, pp. 419–​27. Hattie, John. Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-​Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge, 2009. Hunt, Peter. Introduction. Understanding Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2010, pp. 1–​14. Immel, Andrea. “Children’s Books and Constructions of Childhood.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 19–​34. International Literacy Association [ILA]. “Children’s Rights to Read.” Literacy Worldwide, www.literacyworldwide. org/​docs/​defa​ult-​sou​rce/​resou​rce-​docume​nts/​ila-​childr​ens-​rig​hts-​to-​read.pdf, accessed 9 February 2023.

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Etti Gordon Ginzburg Israeli Ministry of Education. “Hanakhot Yesod” (Foundational Principles). https://​meyda.educat​ion.gov.il/​files/​ Maz​kiru​t_​Pe​dago​git/​Hebrew​Prim​ary/​prog​ram/​yesod.pdf, accessed 9 February 2023. Kiris, Ayten, Catherine Butler, Elizabeth Newman, Guðmundur Engilbertsson, Jane Carter, Nihan Erol, Penelope Harnett, and Purificación Sánchez. Learning and Teaching Children’s Literature in Europe: Final Report. Education and Culture DG: Lifelong Learning Programme, 2011, doi:10.13140/​RG.2.2.19317.42720. Kutzer, M. Daphne. “Children’s Literature in the College Classroom.” College English, vol. 43, no. 7, 1981, pp. 716–​23. Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Viking, 1996. Nikolajeva, Maria. Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. John Benjamins, 2014. Nodelman, Perry. “Children’s Literature as Women’s Writing.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1, 1988, pp. 31–​34. Popp, Marcia S. Teaching Language and Literature in Elementary Classrooms: A Resource Book for Professional Development. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005. Porat, Idit, Miri Miller, and Michal Ganz-​Meishar. “ ‘Duet Le’Yalda Mazleg Ve’yalda Kaf’: Literary Discourse in a Dyadic Model of Teaching in Elementary School.” Literature Beyond the Classroom Walls: Teaching and Learning Literature in Israeli Schools, edited by Ilana Elkad-​Lehman and Yael Poyas, Mofet 2022, pp. 176–​201. [Hebrew] Rubie-​Davies, Christine M., ed. Educational Psychology: Concepts, Research and Challenges. Taylor and Francis, 2010. Rudd, David. “Theorizing and Theories: How Does Children’s Literature Exist?” Understanding Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, Routledge, 2010, pp. 15–​29. Schaeffer, Jean-​Marie. “Literary Studies and Literary Experience,” translated by Kathleen Antonioli. New Literary History, vol. 44, no. 2, 2013, pp. 267–​83. Scherer, Lexie. Children, Literacy and Ethnicity Reading Identities in the Primary School. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Schwebel, Sara L., and Jocelyn Van Tuyl. Introduction. Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial, edited by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, Routledge, 2022, pp. 1–​15. Spiegelman, Willard. The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry. Princeton University Press, 1989. Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children’s Literature. Longman, 1992. Stewig, John W. Children and Literature. Rand McNally, 1980. Thomson, Pat. “The Uses and Abuses of Power: Teaching School Leadership Through Children’s Literature.” Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol. 46, no. 4, 2014, pp. 367–​86. Unsworth, Len. Teaching Multiliteracies across the Curriculum: Changing Contexts of Text and Image in the Classroom Practice. Open University Press, 2001. Winch, Gordon, Rosemary Ross Johnston, Marcelle Holliday, Lesley Ljundgahl, and Paul March. Literacy: Reading, Writing and Children’s Literature. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2001. Wolf, Maryanne, and Stephanie Gottwald. Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century. Oxford University Press, 2016. Yates, Sally. “Understanding Reading and Literacy.” Understanding Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010, pp. 159–​67. Zipes, Jack D. Relentless Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children’s Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling. Routledge, 2009.

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40 LIBRARIES Margaret Mackey

Libraries have played a constitutive role in the history and ongoing development of children’s literature over many decades. After briefly acknowledging how libraries support the scholarly field, this chapter explores the social and cultural roles of public and school libraries, and the place of the home library as curated and protected on purely personal terms. The conditions that enable children’s literature manifest themselves through private purchases featuring in-​home libraries as well as by more robustly articulated decisions of the public and school institutions. In turn, a library may make available materials not supported in the home. Questions of access to reading resources are vital to any history of literacy or literature. The institutional weight of public and school libraries is measured both by their significant spending power and by their moral authority. The domestic library plays a surprisingly potent role in confirming or counteracting priorities of civic institutions. Accounting for the impact of decisions made in all three kinds of libraries expands and enriches any history of children’s literature. Analyzing how children’s literature is addressed through its three home disciplines, Patricia Enciso, Karen Coats, Christine Jenkins, and Shelby Wolf explore the role of English studies, education, and library science. Jenkins describes what librarianship offers: From the beginning, librarians have evaluated children’s books, both on their own merits as individual works and as compared with other books of the same genre, by the same author, published in the same year, written for the same age group, and so on. When librarians analyze and evaluate a children’s book, they ask: What can we say about this book when we place it alongside the other books on our shelves? (224) Librarians house books systematically. They develop classification systems so books can be purposefully located with other relevant titles and catalog books so they can be retrieved. They supply book reviews and create lists of best books for particular contexts. Organizations such as the American Library Association (ALA) sponsor prizes. Critical librarians investigate terms of selection to assess what kinds of materials are being left out and for what reasons. Librarians also work hard to connect books to individual readers. Jenkins says, One of the key professional responsibilities of youth services librarians is facilitating young people’s engagement in reading. Choice in reading is an essential element in the development

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-46

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of lifelong readers. In order to ensure genuine child-​directed reading choice, librarians are continually evaluating books in the context of potential readers. Who will find this book engaging? Entertaining? Intriguing? Informative? And finally, if a child enjoys this book, what other books could it lead them to? What else might we recommend? (224) A third responsibility of librarians is the task of creating and then protecting access to reading materials that may matter to a young reader. Challenges may come through policy and budget changes or through censorship demands and battles over reader privacy. There is ample contemporary evidence of both forms of attack. Devising and defending policies and procedures to deal with challenges in principled (rather than purely reactive and defensive) ways is essential. An institution whose priorities include selecting and organizing suitable titles for young readers, making connections between individual readers and books they may value, and protecting the rights of those young readers will heavily influence how youth literature develops, and how it is curated and preserved and made available to young people. Material issues of content and format have long affected child readers via library decisions and policies. In this chapter, I address the direct relationship between libraries and child readers, but, before discussing the vital mediation of libraries between children and books, I want to nod briefly and parenthetically to the important role of archives and special collections in providing essential support to scholars of children’s literature. Suzan Alteri acknowledges the early collectors of children’s reading materials, exploring how these pioneers’ deliberate and situational choices affected the fledgling academic discipline of children’s literature. Both acquisition and curation of authorial papers and manuscripts continue to play a significant role in the purposeful study of children’s literature. As Katharine Capshaw reflects, “objects permit moments from the past to break the surface of the present. [...] These objects survive –​ when they do survive –​ because of the care of the child and of adults, their desire to preserve the fact and shape of the young person’s engagement with the world” (313). For reasons of space, this fleeting reference to one crucial kind of library must stand in for a broader consideration, but we should not overlook its significance. We understand children’s literature as we do partly because of how academic libraries and archives preserve and protect their collections –​which were often originally assembled by private individuals. Alteri observes, “Use of materials in archives plays a crucial role in the enterprise of the scholarly endeavor” (88). Because the raw materials of children’s texts are frequently read and discarded, the choices of book collectors, professional and amateur alike, play a generative role in the academic enterprise. But in this chapter, I focus mainly on a more direct relationship between libraries and child readers. No library is a passive and neutral container for bookshelves. Librarians influence the development of children’s literature in a variety of ways, and how they respond to challenges affects how children read. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen offer an “uncomfortable truth about libraries throughout the ages: no society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations” (2). Certainly, the history of libraries for children records many changing priorities over the decades. This chapter addresses some of these shifts. It explores the relationship between libraries and literature for young people and looks briefly at some global implications of book availability or famine. Subsequent discussion focuses on domestic, public, and school libraries in turn, returning at the conclusion to the home collection and evaluating the role of the gatekeeper. For young readers, access to books is crucial. Many children own no books at all. Public and school libraries fill significant gaps, and, perhaps just as importantly, they offer an environment in which choosing something to read is a low-​stakes action. A mistaken library selection is easily rectified; you simply return the book you don’t like and choose another. As children settle into the role of reader, they need to develop as personal experts in selecting texts that will appeal to them and invite them to read more. The easy sampling offered by a library is vital. The relationship with the bookstore 492

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works differently, especially for children with little disposable income of their own. Yet many children do not have ready access to a library collection. From early in the history of each, institutions of children’s literature and children’s libraries have been enmeshed. A library needs materials to provide for its users; a literature needs routes to a reading public. These factors work differently in different countries; national considerations affect child access to libraries. I briefly address this issue before turning to the issues raised by distinct organizational frameworks for libraries. The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) provides relatively up-​to-​date national and global information about the state of libraries in the world, necessarily excluding unrecoverable statistics concerning domestic libraries. Their fascinating website of international statistics perhaps ought to come with a health warning like a package of cigarettes; it is addictively easy to spend extended time exploring the compelling data it presents. According to IFLA, there were 2.6 million libraries worldwide as of early 2022. As of 2021, they cite 406,689 public libraries and 2,100,000 school libraries. Public libraries make up 15.5 percent of the world total; school libraries, 78.4 percent. Arrayed on a different scale, in 2021 the world had 64.2 public libraries and 494.8 school libraries per million people. These numbers are not completely reliable; 134 countries are represented, but there are gaps in data collection in large areas of Africa and smaller areas in Latin America and South Asia, as well as idiosyncrasies in the reporting. IFLA offers diverse international comparisons, but in this chapter, like most scholars working in English, I skew Anglophone. The United States and the United Kingdom have three advantages for my purposes here. They provide a convenient sample in English, so no translation is needed; their history of interactions between children’s literature and children’s libraries is long and informative; most importantly, their contemporary condition raises provocative and necessary questions about how libraries are affected by government policy making, particularly evident in Britain, and by citizen pressure groups and related legislative initiatives promoting censorship in classrooms and libraries, especially in the contemporary United States. Space precludes a global survey, but the issues of funding, policymaking, and censorship raised in these English-​speaking jurisdictions are of universal concern. Learning readers will find themselves being very differently supported, depending on where they live –​ and the IFLA statistics remind us that the library is not purely a phenomenon of Western democracies, as some people carelessly assume. The categories of domestic, public, and school libraries will be differentially supported, depending on location. Nevertheless, this tripartite framework offers a useful way to explore connections with the development of children’s literature.

The Presence and Absence of a Home Library IFLA, of course, makes no attempt to catalog children’s domestic access to reading material; such information eludes their data-​gathering capacities. Nevertheless, this largely uncounted resource is hugely important for children, an assumption that is corroborated by international research into the impact of its absence. A widely cited study surveys domestic book ownership in twenty-​seven countries (later thirty-​one), with differing social and political regimes and of varying wealth. M. D. R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and Donald Treiman, and subsequently, Sikora, Evans, and Kelley, investigate the implications for children’s education of growing up with no books in the home, a few books, or a large number: Pooling people from all the countries together, children who grew up without books completed around 7 years of education on average. [...] Those growing up with a couple of dozen books completed 11 years, and offspring of the most bookish parents completed 14 years of education, 493

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about the level of an American junior college degree. [...] Each additional book is associated with greater gains in educational attainment in families with few books than in families where there are already many books. (Evans et al. 179) These distinctions weigh more heavily than other factors that might be presumed to make a difference, such as parents’ educational level or family income. Alexander Manu, Fernanda Ewerling, Aluisio J. D. Barros, and Cesar G. Victora, in a survey of data from thirty-​five countries, confirm the association between domestic availability of children’s books and the literacy and numeracy skills of children between three and five years old: “[I]‌rrespective of maternal education, wealth index quintile, children’s age (in months) and area of residence, having at least one children’s book to a child almost doubles their likelihood of being on track for literacy-​numeracy” (n. pg.). The National Literacy Trust (NLT) in the United Kingdom occasionally surveys book ownership among children. Its 2022 figures make sobering reading: “Nearly 1 in 5 (18.6%) children aged 5 to 8 [...] don’t have a book of their own at home. Of those who had a book of their own, 1 in 7 (14.4%) said they had fewer than 10 books at home” (Cole, Brown, and Clark 1). The NLT says the impact of home ownership is significant: “[C]‌hildren who reported that they have a book of their own are not only more engaged with reading but also six times more likely to read above the level expected for their age than children who don’t own a book (22% vs. 3.6%)” (Cole, Brown, and Clark 3–​4). To a large degree, access to a library can make up for a lack of ownership in a household that values reading. A broader problem is summed up in the devastating term “book desert,” a neighborhood or region where there is no ready access to books to borrow or buy (Neuman and Moland), or in the yearning implications of “book hunger,” the drive to expand reading options for children (Shaver). Book deserts and book hunger are not confined to the developing world; income segregation in wealthy countries means there are large regions in the West where any kind of access to books or magazines, to buy or to borrow, is minimal or nonexistent, and bandwidth limitations restrict online access to reading material. Supporting child book ownership is a project that engages many charities and NGOs, frequently linked to libraries. My own municipal public library in Canada teams with the charitable organization Imagination Library to reach local children in bookless homes. Established by singer Dolly Parton, this charity delivers millions of books internationally. Registered children receive a book mailed to them every month from birth to age five. Edmonton Public Library draws interesting organizational lines between library and home, selecting thirteen of the city’s poorer neighborhoods as initially eligible to participate in the project. At least in the early stages of this rollout, the burgeoning domestic library of an Edmonton child enrolled with Imagination Library will be framed by the library’s institutional priorities in order to determine who qualifies. Lea Shaver describes an innovative African project, highlighting the linkage between libraries and the domestic space where children can read and reread as much as they like: The African Storybook Project formats the books it creates as digital slide shows. This allows them to be opened on standard-​issue software, such as Microsoft PowerPoint or any of the free alternatives. These can be digitally projected for reading in a large group. [...] African Storybook Project is also experimenting with on-​demand printing technologies to avoid distribution hurdles typically associated with print books. ASP’s Tessa Welch explains, “I think it is important for children to have books in their hands, but maybe not distributed so far. Maybe if the library has a printer, a child can take home a particular book on loan.” (82–​83)

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This ingenious arrangement circumvents one of the biggest hurdles in book circulation: the cost of shipping large numbers of relatively heavy and bulky individual items. Distribution costs are a barrier to getting a book to a child’s door; print-​on-​demand reduces the priceload. Imagination Library and the African Storybook Project offer examples of libraries paying explicit attention to children’s domestic access to books –​ and they demonstrate that book hunger is not simply a problem of the developing world. At the end of this chapter, I revisit the shifting significance of the domestic library for children’s literature.

Public Libraries Although booksellers have always been attentive to the marketing potential entailed in children’s private home libraries, a major economic driver of publishing for children is undoubtedly the large-​scale purchaser. In the early days of public libraries, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, publishers and librarians worked together to promote quality books for children; both fields were relatively new and more open to women than some of the more traditional territories. These women supported each other in a variety of ways; as Kay Vandergrift writes, “[T]‌he complex interplay of institutional and interpersonal relationships among women librarians and women in children’s publishing helped to establish a body of quality materials for children” (684). These women promulgated their standards of good literature with booklists of recommended titles, beginning as early as 1882 with Caroline M. Hewins’s Books for the Young: A Guide for Parents and Children, “the first venture of the Publishing Section of the American Library Association (ALA)” (Clark 69). Such lists have persisted for more than a century; they provide insights into changing definitions of what constitutes “quality,” and its links to whiteness, straightness, and/​or middle-​class values in different eras. No early librarian was more influential than Anne Carroll Moore. Beverly Lyon Clark, analyzing the institutions that shape American children’s literature, describes Moore’s enormous role: In the 1920s through the 1950s, a single librarian, the Superintendent of Work with Children for the New York Public Library, exerted considerable influence on the development of children’s literature. Thanks to her position in the New York Public Library (1906–​41), her leadership in the ALA (she was the first chair of the Children’s Services Section), her annual lists of recommended books (1918–​41), and her columns in the Bookman and then in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday supplement, Anne Carroll Moore assumed a position that has been called “olympian” and “magisterial.” [...] Such was her reputation nationally that inclusion on the list [the annual list of recommended new books] all but assured a book a respectable sale; omission might just as easily mean oblivion. (70) Moore was committed to literary standards and to forms of active citizenship; in a 1908 article in The Library Journal, she discusses “Library Membership as a Civic Force.” Moore’s article raises many items of continuing contemporary concern: ● the design and editing of books to make them appealing to young readers; ● the need to acquire a collection that will “put foreign children and their parents in touch and in sympathy with the countries from which they come” in order to “aid in making and keeping the impressions of their country vivid and lasting” (271); ● the importance of moving the newest readers on from “primers and ‘easy’ books” since “too free a use of them may be one of the influences responsible for that lack of power of sustained attention

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and limitation in vocabulary which is frequently shown by boys and girls from twelve to fourteen years old” (271); ● the vital necessity for the organization and its staff to sustain a connection with young patrons, rather than merely stamping their books; ● the role of the library as a civic institution, working in concert with other institutions that address the needs of young people; Moore lists schools, churches, social settlements, civic clubs, and courts, and more (274). Moore clearly sees a vital role for literature as well as for the civic virtues of libraries in developing young citizens. The guiding principle of her selection criteria is that “the boys and girls who go out from the children’s room may know what good novels are.” She sanctions providing “so much of modern fiction as shall serve to give the collection the appearance of being interesting and up to date without lowering the standard of that taste for good reading which is the chief purpose in shelving such a collection in a children’s room” (270). As Moore indicates, one crucial role taken up by any library is that of selecting titles its librarians deem appropriate for its users. No collection exists in a void; a library is assembled for a community of users. It reflects the values of that community and sometimes makes active efforts to shape and change them. Those values are not necessarily benevolent. For example, Shane Hand explores the history of newly developing public libraries in the American South in the early twentieth century, and looks at the kinds of titles they selected for their child users: Southern librarians developed collections peculiar to their user populations, maintained segregated spaces, and aligned themselves ideologically with community activists to ferment a cultural revolution of literacy, readership, and open access to information for children. However, in doing so, they fostered the transmission of a stubborn, yet aggressive, racial ideology of white superiority, privilege, and black subservience. (36) This example shows libraries in a reactive light, reflecting a particular (in this case, white) community’s priorities back to it. But librarians may also perceive gaps in the literature available for selection and use their powers of persuasion and their capacity for pressure to effect change. Since 1970, for example, the ALA has sponsored a special interest group on sexual and gender identity. In 1976, they drew up a set of guidelines for better representation of gay and lesbian identities and issues in children’s and young adult literature. They supplied specific advice on the importance of central characters, minor roles, illustrations, degrees of explicitness, impact on readers, and authorial attitudes (Hanckel and Cunningham 532–​33). These categories were presented as aids to selection, but there is little doubt that publishers paid attention. Librarians select; they also weed their collections to remove outdated, underused, and otherwise inappropriate material. Some would-​be censors attack old, even “classic” materials for attitudes towards race and gender that are seen as inappropriate today. Kenneth Kidd perceives connections between processes of selection and deselection and issues of censorship, in that they are all part of “a larger process of evaluation and sorting” (198). As community values shift, these conversations ebb and flow, and become more or less acrimonious. The United States is currently in the throes of a very active debate about censorship. The year 2021, according to the New York Times, saw a spike in challenges, mostly to books by and/​or about people of color or members of the LGBTQ2S community. Some state governments have joined the call for censorship, and the ALA says that social media is also a factor in the surge (Harris and Alter). The United States is approximately ten times the size of Canada, a comparable society in many ways. The publicly available figures are not exactly equivalent in terms of timespans, but a rough calculation shows that between 2017 and 2021, there were 496

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two and a half times as many challenges per capita in the United States (the Canadian figures include challenges to French titles).1 The issue of censorship is too large to be addressed adequately here (see Andrew Zalot’s chapter in this volume for additional discussion of this topic), but it is worth considering the role of libraries in addressing it. Ideally, a library has established procedures for challenging a title, rather than responding in ad hoc ways. The book may be retained, moved to another part of the collection, or removed, but it is a considered and regulated process. The current American situation illuminates many complex ways in which the innocuous-​sounding topic of book selection raises important social questions. Sean Connors and Roberta Seelinger Trites observe, “We have witnessed a disturbing increase in threats against teachers, administrators, and school board members, alongside an effort nationwide to purge schools of multicultural books that address racism and LGBTQ+​ topics” (64). The grassroots organization We Need Diverse Books (https://​diver​sebo​oks.org) is committed to creating a counterforce, aiming for a world in which all children can see their own lives reflected in books. Their target is not merely the censors, but also the complacency and blind spots of the major institutions of children’s literature. In a new ALA analysis of the overwhelming whiteness of the library community, authors Tracey Overbey and Amanda Folk contend that “our profession has not directly confronted the racialized histories of libraries, including the educational institutions with which they are associated, to explore and uncover how race continues to shape the experiences of our contemporary library users. This evasion is likely a result of the overwhelming Whiteness of the profession” (3). In another part of the children’s literature universe, the most recent volume of the Children’s Literature Association’s annual journal investigates inclusion and exclusion in the academic study of children’s materials. Michelle Martin observes that “librarianship was where a lot of the early activism around diversifying the genre happened” (45) and suggests that excluding people who worked with children rather than books (namely librarians and teachers) from the scholarly conversation prolonged the journal’s “steadfast commitment to analysis of the white Western canon” (45–​46). The interconnections among those who work with children’s literature are complex, but broader discussion has great potential to be productive of change. Issues of material selection are only part of the story; libraries are focal points for access, and how materials are classified may also involve decisions based on racist assumptions. Currently the American Library of Congress and Library and Archives Canada are jointly revising the outdated classification terms that index Indigenous peoples. The label “Indians of North America” is being replaced by “more accurate and respectful language” (Bullard n. pg.) For Indigenous children searching the library catalog, such changes can be transformative. Yet socially conservative resistance to this kind of change is mounting, especially in the United States, and is increasingly organized. In August 2022, an activist group in Michigan successfully defunded their local public library in protest against the presence of LGBTQ2S materials on the shelves (Valle n. pg.) This campaign represents an extreme stance, but disputes over what should be collected are not rare, though they change over time. The topics mutate, but vehement concern about corrupting children is an ongoing theme. The scale of one particular disagreement between librarians and their young patrons was highlighted in 1926. As an indicator of shifting times, today it seems like a relatively minor issue, but it was an enormous controversy in its day. As Leonard Marcus reports, in 1926, the ALA, conducting a survey of children’s reading preferences, questioned thirty-​six thousand children in thirty-​four cities about their favorite books. Fully 98 percent of those responding named a book by a single author, Edward Stratemeyer, the author-​entrepreneur responsible for the lion’s share of the formulaic, sometimes sensationalistic series books –​the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, and other series –​that librarians reviled as subliterary. [...] In 1906 Anne Carroll Moore had made it one of her first orders of business as the New York Public Library’s director 497

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of work with children to purge the library’s collection of series fiction –​books she considered trash. (105) While librarians dismissed these books as without value, children thought differently. Wayne Wiegand, in his history of public libraries in the United States, tells a compelling story of a child who became a Supreme Court Justice, and of why her home library was important to her when her public library failed to cater to a particular need: Children obviously saw series fiction differently from adults. Months after her father died in 1963, nine-​year-​old Sonia Sotomayor buried herself in reading at her branch library and in the Bronx apartment she shared with her mother and brother. “Nancy Drew had a powerful hold on my imagination,” she recalled. “Every night, when I’d finished reading and got into bed and closed my eyes, I would continue the story, with me in Nancy’s shoes until I fell asleep. [...] I loved the clear focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out.” Her reading that summer, she later admitted, got her through this troubled time in her life. But she got the Nancy Drew books as gifts from her mother; her NYPL branch library did not stock them. (Part 184) Sotomayor’s story of the value of a Stratemeyer Syndicate series to a grieving child helpfully delineates two different kinds of autonomy in reading, both important to any history of children’s literature and literacy. Child readers benefit from both the breadth and scope of choice made possible by a carefully curated and defended library collection, and the intimate significance of books personally selected for a home library, chosen for their vivid personal salience rather than according to some broader standard of literary improvement. Brian Alderson tells a similar tale from the British perspective, summarizing how publishers first attended to the domestic market, then switched their priorities to the demands created by librarians, and then moved back to a greater focus on sales to private readers as library budgets diminished: For well over 150 years, the print-​runs of children’s books were governed by expectations of sales to a largely middle-​class public, or to schools and Sunday schools, where unthreatening convention prevailed. In the twentieth century, however, beginning in the United States, the public library movement brought children’s librarians to the fore as wielders of corporate budgets, and many publishers trimmed their production to tastes and fashions espoused by professional readers of children’s books who were inclined to encourage experiment and leave popular appeal to look after itself. (The drastic cutting of library book-​budgets in recent decades has had the effect of driving publishers back to fostering popular sales and exploiting the potential of such non-​literary ploys as “character” merchandising.) (39) For many years, librarians banned series books, dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics. Over the decades, however, their attitudes gradually shifted, under the pressure of public demand and in the circumstances of changing market forces. The impact of mutating priorities in the relationship between a children’s library and its readers is woven into the history of children’s literature, in terms of both what is included and promoted and also what is not considered worthy of consideration, and for what reasons. Such questions play out over and over again; only the details change. In the 1970s and 1980s, librarians began to question their previously steadfast objections to paperbacks. Their resistance to 498

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the softcover format was based on logical arguments: paperbacks would not stand up to the wear and tear caused by multiple users; they would not offer an effective return on the expense of cataloging them; and, uncatalogued, they would be untraceable on the shelves. Paperbacks were cheap; children should buy their own if they wanted them. Additionally, an ongoing reflex, sometimes articulated and sometimes tacit, frequently associated paperbacks –​like series books before them –​with the dreaded specter of “trashiness.” Even as the durability of paperback volumes improved and the nature of their contents became more uplifting, librarians held out for a long time; and by the time they began to consider the advantages of acquiring paperbacks for their collections, little was novel about the paperbacks themselves. What changed were the priorities placed on how collections were to be selected and used, and how librarians should respond to the wishes of their users. Paperbacks eventually arrived in the library because of strong patron demand, and they altered the conventions of what was collectible. When librarians yielded on paperback collections, for example, one side effect was that they reduced the barriers to acquiring and lending series fiction. Comics are undoubtedly challenging for libraries to manage; their mutation into (usually softcover) graphic novels similarly changed the terms of the argument. Greater length and, in some cases, greater sophistication provided an aura of respectability for the graphic novel. Patron demand shifted many librarians’ standards, and graphic novels now occupy a place of honor in numerous library collections for the young. We see similar shifts in the publishing world; in mid-​2022, Penguin promoted comics to a certain kind of canon when they released the three-​volume Penguin Classics Marvel Collection. These books, now part of a prestigious literary series, feature comic-​book stories of three Marvel superheroes: Spider-​Man, Captain America, and Black Panther (Dauber n. pg.) Changing priorities also occur at an institutional scale. Public libraries now take their place in a branded world, and the library brand itself is developed and marketed. Summer reading programs are one way that librarians support children without rich domestic access to books throughout the long holidays –​ and summer reading programs are now often sponsored by commercial entities (see the Canadian example at https://​tdsu​mmer​read​ingc​lub.ca, developed by the Toronto Public Library in partnership with Library and Archives Canada and underwritten by the Toronto Dominion Bank). The social framework of the public library has altered, and the library is shifting with it. Branding is one way of defending the concept of the library in a world of diverse priorities. In some cases, however, rather than changing, the library is disappearing as a public institution. A decade of spending cuts in Britain has put enormous pressure on its public libraries. Adele Walton writes, [I]‌n an austerity climate, libraries have been targeted as a disposable resource. Spending on libraries in 2009 was at £1 billion, but by 2019 this had declined by a quarter. The same decade saw 773 libraries close –​ one fifth of all in the UK. The Conservatives’ assault on public libraries is a deep injustice to all community members, but it’s one that disproportionately affects underprivileged children. (n. pg.) In some cases, the libraries have been saved but the librarians have been lost, and those services that survive are provided by volunteers. Both the status and the utility of the library are undermined in this scenario, even if the shell of the original institution remains. The impact of these ongoing cuts on literature for children will almost certainly contribute to some sad case studies in the research of the future.

School Libraries In similar ways, the fortunes of school libraries ebb and flow according to the educational priorities and policies of the different levels of government that fund them, and also in response to pressures 499

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from parents and other concerned citizens. In the early days, public and school libraries often operated jointly, a system that still prevails in some small communities. The primary role of the school library, however, is now more distinctive: its main responsibility is to support the instructional mandate of its organization. What constitutes a school library varies widely in terms of scope and scale. IFLA has published a set of School Library Guidelines (Shultz-​Jones and Oberg), but these are aspirational rather than descriptive of the diverse scene on the ground, even in a single country. In the 2020s, even in wealthy countries, the range is enormous. A school library may feature a dedicated site that houses a thoughtful and up-​to-​date collection of print, audiovisual, and electronic materials; an imaginative assemblage of technological tools and support systems; a makerspace where digital and analogue creativity is enabled and equipped; any number of gathering spaces and work cubicles; and a strong staff of professionals. Or it may merely offer a motley collection of uncurated materials and some cast-​off computers, with no staff member truly taking responsibility for managing it. Every library, even that sad final example that sometimes seems to exist by accident, comes into being through a process of decisions and choices. In the 1960s, in the United States, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives brought new sources of money to school libraries. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s cutbacks to all kinds of social provision jeopardized many such institutions (Wiegand, Librarianship 151–​52, 207–​208). Schools lost their librarians, and the early stages of a public relations campaign to replace books with computers could be detected. Publishers saw a threat to a hitherto reliable market and began to explore alternative and more direct ways to sell to the end consumer, the young reader. This highly simplified account leads us back to the paperback (often in series format) and to publishers’ efforts in the 1980s to market extensive series directly to individual readers. As this kind of immediate marketing to the home consumer increased, young readers developed and strengthened a taste for softcover reading. But the shift to paperback represented other important changes in school culture. A 1972 publication, Dominic Salvatore’s The Paperback Goes to School, illuminates the revolutionary impact of the cheap trade softcover on how instructional mandates are conceived and executed. Chapters about teaching social studies and science, for example, address the significance of breaking away from the monolithic hold of the single “authoritative” textbook. A chapter about teaching world literature opens the door to a much greater variety. Salvatore’s contributors discuss technical questions about stocking a school or classroom library with paperbacks, and their chapters highlight questions about the material discovery, acquisition, identification, and storage of reading material. Initially, librarians must establish what materials exist and what constitutes the most efficient and economical way to acquire them. They do not have the resources to deal with every book in the world, so they need reviews and selected lists. Wiegand notes that “[i]‌n 1965, for example, the H. W. Wilson Company issued its first edition of the Junior High School Library Catalog, consisting of 3,278 citations. It also identified highly recommended titles with stars; 395 received single stars, 204 double stars” (Librarianship 157). Other lists offered a structure of basic collections and recommendations for different grade levels. The complex institutionalization of a settled canon of what school libraries should contain was hampered by the extreme variability of school library budgets, but the homogenizing impulse, with its many race, class, and gender implications, is clear. A collection of disparate titles, particularly a set of contemporary paperbacks, cheaply acquired and swiftly shelved, makes more room for dissenting perspectives and allows the students to select information on a more autonomous basis than is permitted by the single textbook or the more orthodox kind of recommended booklist. School libraries also have problems with inclusiveness. Poor neighborhoods are less able to support adequate school libraries. In the United Kingdom, studies establish significant gaps between favored libraries in more affluent areas and more limited facilities in poorer regions (Great School Libraries; Wood et al.). Britain’s Children’s Laureates launched a campaign for the government to 500

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devote £100 million per year to creating new school libraries, restoring neglected ones, and funding qualified librarians to work in them (Cain). The scale of the goal of this project gives some sense of the shortfall in appropriate funding. When the school library reinforces rather than combats broader social inequities, it represents institutional failure on a significant scale. School libraries are often starved for resources; they can be stifled in other ways. PEN America was founded a century ago to protect freedom to write. Its 2022 report on “America’s Censored Classrooms” reports a 250 percent increase in “educational gag orders” compared to just twelve months earlier. The main targets, according to PEN, involve issues of race and gender and sexual identities (Young and Friedman n. pg.) School libraries fall under these increasingly restrictive and punitive regimes, and individual calls for censorship are now reflected in and/​or replaced by repressive state legislation in many parts of the United States. Governments have usurped the role of creating those orthodox lists.

Back Home Again For lucky children, the books they own at home offer a refuge from assaults on their other libraries. At home, they can cater to their own needs and tastes. But even children with capacious domestic bookshelves may need to negotiate around what their parents are prepared to pay for. Librarians who defend the rights of children to read broadly and freely offer a significant service both to the books under fire and to the children who struggle to find ways to read them. And, of course, very many children live in homes where there is no money to spare for books. But in assessing the various levels of privilege that shape different children’s different bookshelves, we address only one aspect of how contemporary conditions of literature are shifting. Today, more than simple collecting is happening at home. Some of the librarian’s traditional gatekeeping role has also been domesticated. The phenomenon of social media has moved the goalposts of discovery and access. Readers trade titles on sites such as Goodreads; they form online reading groups; they create fanfiction together; they assess family values on sites such as Common Sense Media; and, on TikTok, book recommendations push sales in radical ways. Literature for the young, in particular, is promoted and discovered on #BookTok. Elisabeth Buchwald quotes Kristen McLean, a books industry analyst, as saying, “This is the first time we’ve seen an organic, social-​media phenomenon push backlist books spontaneously back onto the bestseller lists without any kind of marketing or sales push from publishers” (n. pg.). The implications for book publishing and marketing, for library selection and programming, and for the development of literature itself are all far-​reaching and potentially radical (Martens et al.; Merga). The institution of the library offers many forms of support to the related institution of publishing for children: a (reasonably) reliable stream of money, of course, but also a locus of critique and judgment, as well as an assortment of thoughtful methodologies for organizing access and for uniting individuals with titles they enjoy, through individual readers’ advisory work and through larger-​scale forms of display and programming. In hard times, the library’s value system may also serve as a bulwark against censorship and oppression. The home library escapes the protection and also defies some of the rigidities of the institution. Together, public, school, and domestic libraries contribute to an ecology in which children may read for comfort, for adventure, for intellectual expansion, for aesthetic delight, and for many other reasons. Library support for children and their literature is essential. Much work remains to be done. Libraries are part of both the problem and the solution in terms of broadening representation of different demographics, and their budget clout gives them power to nudge publishers towards greater diversity, if they choose to assert it. Librarians also need to look critically at their own systems, addressing their current limitations and finding innovative ways to move outwards into different communities of young readers and nonreaders. 501

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As institutions, libraries foster certain kinds of publishing decisions through their selection criteria and their budget lines. They work to place appealing books into the hands of young people and defend their rights to access such materials. They both shape and respond to young readers’ tastes. For a century and a half, libraries have provided a home for children’s books and a refuge for child readers; the world of children’s literature would be very different if they had never existed.

Note 1 This rough comparison was developed from the Canadian list at http://​cfla-​fcab.ca/​en/​progr​ams/​intel​lect​ualfree​dom-​cha​llen​ges-​sur​vey/​ and the American list at www.ala.org/​advoc​acy/​bbo​oks/​frequently challengedbooks/​top10.

Works Cited Alderson, Brian. “The Making of Children’s Books.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 35–​54. Alteri, Suzan. “Mediating the Archives: Child Readers and Their Books in Special Collections.” Mediation and Children’s Reading: Relationships, Intervention, and Organization from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Anne Marie Hagen, Lehigh University Press, 2022, pp. 75–​93. Buchwald, Elisabeth. “ ‘An Organic, Social Media Phenomenon’: TikTok Is Driving a Surge in Demand for Young-​Adult Fiction Novels.” MarketWatch, 30 May 2021, www.mark​etwa​tch.com/​story/​an-​orga​nic-​soc​ial-​ media-​phe​nome​non-​tik​tok-​is-​driv​ing-​a-​surge-​in-​dem​and-​for-​young-​adult-​fict​ion-​nov​els-​1162​2049​742. Bullard, Julia. “Libraries in the U.S. and Canada Are Changing How They Refer to Indigenous Peoples.” The Conversation, 4 August 2022, https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​librar​ies-​in-​the-​u-​s-​and-​can​ada-​are-​chang​ing-​ how-​they-​refer-​to-​ind​igen​ous-​peop​les-​185​106?fbc​lid=​IwAR​3zwo​bKAn​UZJ-​DxYnR​nZ3E​KNwi​hyGZ​bs84​ OUq-​coPm7​9XMX​K2GC​N3bd​moA. Cain, Sian. “Children’s Laureates Campaign for £100 Million a Year to Fix Primary School Libraries.” The Guardian, 13 April 2021, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2021/​apr/​13/​childr​ens-​laurea​tes-​campa​ign-​for-​ 100m-​a-​year-​to-​fix-​prim​ary-​sch​ool-​librar​ies. Capshaw, Katharine. “Archives and Magic Lanterns.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, Fall 2014, pp. 313–​15. Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Cole, Aimee, Ariadne Brown, and Christina Clark. “Young (Aged 5 to 8) Children’s Reading in 2022.” National Literacy Trust Research Report, August 2022. Connors, Sean P., and Roberta Seelinger Trites. “What Happens to Knowledge Deferred? Defending Books from Conservative, White Censors.” English Journal, vol. 111, no. 5, 2022, pp. 64–​70. Dauber, Jeremy. “Melville. Faulkner. Spider-​Man.” The Atlantic, 27 July 2022, www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​books/​ archive/​2022/​07/​peng​uin-​class​ics-​mar​vel-​col​lect​ion-​books/​670​965/​. Edmonton Public Library. “Ready. Set. READ!” Edmonton Public Library, www.epl.ca/​ready-​set-​read/​#free-​ books, accessed 9 April 2022. 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, 2008, pp. 219–​30. Evans, M.D.R., Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and Donald J. Treiman. “Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, vol. 28, 2010, pp.171–​97. Great School Libraries. Great School Libraries Survey Findings and Update on Phase 1. 2019, https://​d8243​97c-​ 0ce2-​4fc6-​b5c4-​8d2e4​de5b​242.files​usr.com/​ugd/​8d6dfb_​a1949​ea01​1cd4​15fb​d57a​7a0c​4471​469.pdf. Hanckel, Frances, and John Cunningham. “Can Young Gays Find Happiness in YA Books?” Wilson Library Bulletin, vol. 50, March 1976, pp. 528–​34. Hand, Shane. “Transmitting Whiteness: Librarians, Children, and Race 1900–​1930s.” Progressive Librarian, vol. 38/​39, Spring 2012, pp. 34–​63.

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Libraries Harris, Elizabeth A., and Alexandra Alter. “Book Banning Efforts Surged in 2021. These Titles Were the Most Targeted.” New York Times, 4 April 2022, www.nyti​mes.com/​2022/​04/​04/​books/​ban​ned-​books-​librar​ies.html. International Federation of Library Associations. Library Map of the World. https://​lib​rary​map.ifla.org, accessed 25 February 2022. Kidd, Kenneth. “ ‘Not Censorship But Selection’: Censorship and/​as Prizing.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 40, no. 3, 2009, pp. 197–​216. Manu, Alexander, Fernanda Ewerling, Aluisio J.D. Barros, and Cesar G. Victora. “Association between Availability of Children’s Book [sic] and the Literacy-​Numeracy Skills of Children Aged 36 to 59 Months: Secondary Analysis of the UNICEF Multiple-​Indicator Cluster Surveys Covering 35 Countries.” Journal of Global Health, vol. 9, no. 1, 2019, doi:10.7189/​jogh.09.010403. Marcus, Leonard S. Minders of Make-​Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Martens, Marianne, Gitte Balling, and Kristen A. Higgason. “#BookTokMadeMeReadIt: Young Adult Reading Communities across an International Sociotechnical Landscape.” Information and Learning Sciences, vol. 123, no. 11/​12, 2022, pp. 706–​22. Martin, Michelle H. “Of Publications, Pickaninnies, and Literary Soup Lines: Reflections on Diversity in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature, vol. 50, 2022, pp. 32–​48. Merga, Margaret K. “How Can Booktok on TikTok Inform Readers’ Advisory Services for Young People?” Library and Information Science Research, vol. 43, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–​10. Moore, Anne Carroll. “Library Membership as a Civic Force.” Library Journal, vol. 44, July 1908, pp. 269–​75. Neuman, Susan B., and Naomi Moland. “Book Deserts: The Consequences of Income Segregation on Children’s Access to Print.” Urban Education, vol. 45, no. 1, 2019, pp. 126–​47. Overbey, Tracey, and Amanda L. Folk. Narratives of (Dis)Enfranchisement: Reckoning with the History of Libraries and the Black and African American Experience. ALA, 2022. Pettegree, Andrew, and Arthur der Weduwen. The Library: A Fragile History. Basic Books, 2021. Salvatore, Dominic, ed. The Paperback Goes to School: A Basic Resource Paperback Guide for Teachers, Librarians and School Administrators. BIPAD (Bureau of Independent Publishers and Distributors), 1972. Schultz-​Jones, Barbara, and Dianne Oberg. IFLA School Library Guidelines. 2nd rev. ed., International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 2015, www.ifla.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​05/​ass​ets/​ sch​ool-​librar​ies-​resou​rce-​cent​ers/​publi​cati​ons/​ifla-​sch​ool-​libr​ary-​gui​deli​nes.pdf. Shaver, Lea. Ending Book Hunger: Access to Print across Barriers of Class and Culture. Yale University Press, 2019. Sikora, Joanna, M.D.R. Evans, and Jonathan Kelley. “Scholarly Culture: How Books in Adolescence Enhance Adult Literacy, Numeracy, and Technology Skills in 31 Societies.” Social Science Research, vol. 77, January 2019, pp. 1–​15. Valle, Jay. “Residents Raise Almost $100,000 for Michigan Library Defunded over LGBTQ Books.” NBC News, 11 August 2022, www.nbcn​ews.com/​nbc-​out/​out-​news/​reside​nts-​raise-​alm​ost-​100​000-​michi​gan-​libr​ary-​ defun​ded-​lgbtq-​books-​rcna42​035. Vandergrift, Kay E. “Female Advocacy and Harmonious Voices: A History of Public Library Services and Publishing for Children in the United States.” Library Trends, vol. 44, no. 4, 1996, pp. 683–​718. Walton, Adele. “The Quiet Disappearance of Britain’s Public Libraries.” Tribune, 17 January 2021, https://​ tribunemag.co.uk/​2021/​01/​the-​quiet-​disapp​eara​nce-​of-​brita​ins-​pub​lic-​librar​ies. Wiegand, Wayne A. American Public School Librarianship: A History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. —​—​—​. Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library. Oxford University Press, 2015. Wood, Clare, Christina Clark, Anne Teravainen-​Goff, Georgina Rudkin, and Emma Vardy. “Exploring the Literacy-​Related Behaviors and Feelings of Pupils Eligible for Free School Meals in Relation to Their Use of and Access to School Libraries.” School Library Research, vol. 23, 2020, pp. 1–​22, https://​eds-​p-​ebscohost-​ com.login.ezpr​oxy.libr​ary.ualbe​rta.ca/​eds/​pdfvie​wer/​pdfvie​wer?vid=​4&sid=​c8fd9​3e0-​b0c5-​44f5-​b123-​ 7193a​90c2​f3d%40re​dis. Young, Jeremy C., and Jonathan Friedman. “America’s Censored Classrooms.” PEN America Report, 17 August 2022, https://​pen.org/​rep​ort/​ameri​cas-​censo​red-​cla​ssro​oms/​.

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41 BOOK CLUBS Julie Fette and Anne Morey

Introduction Children’s book clubs are above all commercial enterprises, but they merit examination separate from analyses of children’s book publishing because their institutional structures and imperatives are not identical to those of publishers. Precisely because children’s book clubs appear even more nakedly commercial than publishers due to their focus on sales rather than on the more genteel labor of commissioning, editing, or design, they have developed rhetorical strategies and institutional relationships meant to emphasize their capacity to mediate between children and parents, children and schools, and children and libraries. These rhetorical strategies, which present the club as a guide valuable to both children and adults, tend to hide the commercial imperatives behind those of taste formation, readers’ ease of access, and, above all, the professional expertise embedded in the club selection process. Nonetheless, as this chapter will demonstrate, commercial imperatives do not prevent book clubs from supplying modestly situated children with affordable literature, expanding the types of texts available, and permitting children to recognize themselves as parts of a reading community. That book clubs often masterfully manipulate rhetorics of social concern does not mean that social concerns are in fact neglected or undermined. There are, of course, many book clubs meriting examination, each with its own business model. For example, in the United States in 1948, Scholastic (founded in 1920) began transforming its primary focus from publishing magazines for school use to distributing books, with its book club program enabling schoolchildren to make their own selections from monthly catalogs while teachers receive free books and classroom resources in proportion to their classes’ sales figures. Meanwhile, Scholastic Book Fairs, beloved by American students for two generations,1 continue to dominate school book fair events. Book clubs have also flourished outside North America. In her study of mid-​twentieth-​century British children’s publishing and criticism, Lucy Pearson discusses the Puffin Book Club, founded by Kaye Webb in the 1960s (83–​85, 109–​14, 118). “Puffineers” received a club magazine, club badges, and club merchandise. More elaborately, they attended events at which they might meet authors as notable as Noel Streatfeild and Roald Dahl; they even took part in vacations such as the five-​day sailing and camping trip awarded in July 1967 to the lucky victors in the “Founder Members Competition,” who won a puffin-​viewing excursion to Lundy Island (“Puffin”). At about the same time that Puffin was engaging in these eye-​catching activities, the comparatively small book market in Sweden sustained several book clubs, affiliated with different publishers. Svensk Läraretidnings Förlag AB, 504

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-47

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which had published children’s books since the nineteenth century, developed the Saga Book Club, which in addition to books offered readers free brainteasers (such as an encoded “secret message” for deciphering) and premiums ranging from the ubiquitous club pin to bookmarks, personalized bookplates, and a small hanging bookshelf; these rewards could be earned by buying books and writing book reports. Meanwhile, another Stockholm firm, A.-​B. Lindqvists Förlag, established the Ungdomens Bokklubb (Young People’s Book Club) in the 1940s to provide a uniform edition of popular fiction ranging from translations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow and Alice Rogers Hager’s Janice, Air Line Hostess to homegrown products such as Per Westerlund’s Utstött i Djungeln (Outcast in the Jungle). And as Shih-​Wen Sue Chen notes elsewhere in this volume, book clubs in Asia include one established by the Japanese publisher Kodansha around its popular middle-​ grade Aoitori book series; about two percent of club members are designated “junior editors” who participate in proofreading and content checking. In all these instances the club distributed only the works of the parent publisher, although in the case of the Swedish book clubs, the publishers offered a significant number of foreign titles originating in other markets. Full coverage of children’s book clubs worldwide is not feasible here, and neither is analysis –​ or even listing –​ of the books they marketed. Accordingly, we provide two case studies: a historical example (the Junior Literary Guild [JLG], which flourished in the United States from 1929 to 1955) and a contemporary example (L’Ecole des loisirs’ Max book club, which has operated in France from 1981 onward). Looking at these clubs side by side permits identification of institutional continuities, such as publisher interest in an additional channel of distribution, and discontinuities, such as relations among publishers, libraries, and schools. We find, for example, that book clubs for children tend to colonize educational institutions –​libraries and schools in the JLG’s case and schools in Max’s –​ in a fashion designed to maximize their reach and bolster their prestige. To achieve this end, book clubs necessarily adopt rhetoric in keeping with the missions of libraries and schools.

The Junior Literary Guild The existence of a well-​funded American children’s book club with national reach as of 1929 highlights not only complex marketing issues arising from the state of children’s book publishing and distribution but also philosophical concerns related to the child’s status as citizen and understandings of good parenting. The JLG came into being in June 1929 through the consolidation and absorption of smaller rivals, three years after the founding of the first successful adult book club (the Book-​ of-​the-​Month Club2) and with sponsorship and funding from another adult club, the BOMC’s more popular and arguably more lowbrow rival the Literary Guild, founded in 1927. Like the BOMC, the JLG represented a new mode of book distribution, one that had the potential to shake up children’s book publishing, distribution, and sales. Owing to the clubs’ ability to demand significant discounts from publishers and to compete with retail stores (see Stokes), publishers and booksellers reacted with alarm to the advent of book clubs for adults. Economic concerns were yoked to philosophical and even moral objections to the clubs’ ability to “dictate” literary taste or to define literary success through their control of selections. But despite Robert Rogers’s 1929 diatribe against the standardization of American reading via book clubs,3 which embraced even the nascent JLG, worries associated with the control of adult reading were not generally thought to apply to children, whose reading was expected to receive shaping and guidance from adults. Indeed, the JLG’s advertising rhetoric represented its remit as allaying the anxiety of middle-​ class parents who understood their responsibilities to include guiding their child’s reading and who wanted help with the task: the club, then, would still control adult taste or judgment but would do so on behalf of children. The JLG promised to steer concerned parents past the shoals of their children’s inadequate or poorly chosen reading, offering affordable books in lieu of popular “trash” represented by syndicate series fiction, movies, and, after the mid-​1930s, comic books. Subscribers paid $18.50 505

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per year to receive twelve books. Each volume cost about three times as much as a volume of series fiction; Stratemeyer Syndicate books, for instance, were typically priced at fifty cents, which John Tebbel reports was considered the maximum that could be charged for a book that children might buy for themselves (27). An illustrated hardcover for children otherwise retailed for between $1.50 and $3. By this measure, the JLG offered both quantity and quality at an attractive price, and children evinced willingness to earn the subscription money either individually or as part of a class or scout troop. Once the Great Depression of the 1930s began to reduce the budgets of smaller public and school libraries, the discounts on prices and cataloguing, as well as the purchasing advice represented by the JLG’s monthly magazine, Young Wings, were especially welcome to institutional subscribers who might have dismissed staff or whose orders were too small to place with wholesale distributors. Ultimately, the passage of time diminished concern about the perniciousness of the economic effects of even adult book clubs. As matters turned out, the clubs probably increased sales and enlarged the cadre of book buyers within the general public. The JLG’s effects on book buying for young readers were almost certainly even more substantial inasmuch as the majority of adult book buying for children previously took place between Children’s Book Week (an annual event in the late fall begun in 1919) and Christmas. The JLG created a structure for year-​round book acquisition by children, and it addressed the most underdeveloped aspect of the children’s book market, namely distribution. Even librarians considered home collections necessary for driving reading more generally (Marcus 75), and the club was praised for habituating more children to the pleasures of owning books. Whatever their concerns about adult book clubs, then, librarians did not view the JLG as undermining their ability to serve child readers. While, as Jacalyn Eddy has ably demonstrated, children’s librarians (overwhelmingly female) were jealous of their professional prerogatives, having won with real effort their status as trained professionals, they saw the JLG as complementary to their work. The JLG courted the approval of both school and public librarians, who shared parents’ concerns about poorly chosen or inadequate reading. Helen Ferris, who became the JLG’s guiding spirit when she took over as managing editor in 1930, worked tirelessly giving speeches to the American Library Association and producing works of outreach such as To Enrich Young Life: Ten Years with the Junior Literary Guild in the Schools of Our Country (1939) to present the JLG as an adjunct to the mission of libraries’ children’s departments. Indeed, after the mid-​1950s the club eventually morphed into a library selection service, moving its focus away from individual subscribers.4 In addition to the advantageous book pricing that JLG subscriptions offered to both individuals and libraries, Young Wings was prized by librarians as much as by young readers for its accounts of authors’ and illustrators’ childhoods and of how the selected books came to be. The economic exigencies of the Depression notwithstanding, then, it is not surprising that the JLG flourished. It had the additional advantage of being founded after a decade of astonishing expansion of children’s publishing. Measured by individual titles, the annual list of children’s books in the United States doubled from 433 in 1919 to 931 in 1929; measured by unit of sales, the volume of children’s books increased from 12 million in 1919 to 31 million in 1929 (Marcus 104). This expansion necessarily resulted from an enlargement and diversification of publishing’s administrative structures. As Leonard Marcus notes, The decade of the 1920s unfolded like the early scenes of a play as, one by one, new editors [of children’s books] took their places on stage, joining their counterparts from other houses and the allied realms of librarianship, bookselling, and criticism. (104) Not only were children’s departments established at virtually every major publishing house in this decade, but new publishing houses such as Coward-​McCann, Farrar and Rinehart, Platt and Munk, Simon and Schuster, and Viking also came into being in the 1920s. The expansion in numbers and 506

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sophistication of children’s departments (many headed by women) in American publishing houses made the underdevelopment of book distribution an increasingly urgent problem. The JLG must have seemed a heaven-​sent means of pushing books to children located in remote parts of the United States (for example, 200 Texas counties had no listed bookstores at all in the early 1930s [Cheney 242]), as well as to the children of American missionaries, engineers, and executives employed abroad. The sheer increase in titles and publishers represented a challenge for adult guidance of children’s book selection. Faced with this abundance of new material, toward what should child readers and their adult guides turn their attention? The JLG thus not only addressed a structural weakness in the political economy of publishing by offering another avenue for distribution but also promised to impose coherence and selectivity on the welter of new titles. This promised solution to a problem in the economy of children’s publishing chimes with the addressing of a philosophical concern associated with children’s reading. The training of juvenile taste in popular culture and leisure activities was a major educational project in the 1930s. Significant effort was expended on shaping children’s use of film via instruction in public schools, for example (see Morey, Outsiders, Chapter 5). The JLG presented a similar training of taste for the child reader even in the context of a structure that offered few alternatives to the age-​graded (and, for readers aged twelve through sixteen, gender-​segregated) monthly selection. The books offered to older girls were the most generically varied and the most sophisticated, reflecting the selectors’ awareness that older boys, then as now, were less committed readers and less likely to read anything not specifically addressed to them. At its peak, the JLG offered books for five different categories of reader. While children could theoretically return an unwanted book for a selection offered in another category, the JLG offered less elasticity in selection than did adult book clubs, which generally demanded that only four books a year be purchased. As Anne Morey has noted elsewhere (“Guild”), that children couldn’t exercise their taste directly inasmuch as one book went to all members of a particular cohort may appear to diminish autonomy, but in recompense, children were offered membership in a community of readers (credentials such as pins were distributed) before whom they could demonstrate engagement in reading or other club-​ related activities. Such demonstrations ranged from spontaneous accounts of what one might do to acquire or maintain a subscription (build bookshelves for sale, for example, or sell chocolate bars to preserve a subscription for a Girl Scout troop) to letters published in Young Wings about favored or disfavored books. A particularly striking manifestation of participation in the JLG community was children’s impersonation of the club selectors in a 1937 pageant (Ferris 79). There they assumed the mantle of the authority of the adults who controlled their reading, a performance simultaneously signaling cooperation with the project of taste formation and prefiguring their progress toward adult autonomy. Over the twenty-​six years (1929–​55) that the JLG operated as an individual subscription service, it distributed more than 1300 titles at the rate of three to five a month, depending on the number of reader categories extant in a given year. This accumulation of books represents a cross-​section of the projects and concerns of American children’s literature in this period. While many works were forgettable or topical (especially during the Second World War), the aggregate list nonetheless indicates that the club was invested in quality. Significantly, its selections often dovetailed with those of the Newbery and Caldecott award committees. Of the 148 Newbery winners and honor books in this twenty-​six-​year span, the club selected fifty-​five before the committee’s choices were known; of the eighteen Caldecott awardees (the Caldecott Medal for distinguished American picturebooks was not established until 1938), the club selected seven. Such was its prestige that the club itself was occasionally mistaken for an award-​granting entity. While the JLG shared the Newbery’s attachment to historical fiction that reflected the European American experience (see Kidd 175–​77), there were nonetheless many books devoted to treatments of ethnic groups, especially Native Americans, and nationality, particularly China before 1949; 507

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these works often dramatized the plight of the child caught between the past and a rapidly modernizing world. Indeed, the club’s progressive leadership (Eleanor Roosevelt and child-​study doyenne Sidonie Gruenberg were among the selectors) and interest in developing good citizens placed information about and understanding of other people of whatever race and nationality at the center of its program during the years it served individual subscribers. Individual books might or might not provide enlightened treatments of race or ethnicity, but over the life of the club, the range and volume of works concerned with race and ethnicity was considerable. Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), with its multicultural Americans fighting Nazis on the Moon, was as characteristic of the club’s interest in diversity as was Laura Adams Armer’s Navajo-​focused Waterless Mountain (1932) or Elizabeth Foreman Lewis’s Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1932). Exposure to ethnic difference was clearly seen as essential to the creation of the technically and socially adept child citizen.

L’Ecole des loisirs’ Max The contemporary French children’s book club Max contrasts with the JLG inasmuch as its business model depends heavily upon the school system, and, in particular, upon the presence and prestige of the instructor in the classroom. In addition, the JLG, while owned in part or entirely by Doubleday (depending on the period) distributed the publications of ninety-​one publishers, whereas Max distributes only the books of its publisher-​owner, L’Ecole des loisirs. This French example thus conforms more to the model established in the United States by Scholastic than to that established by the JLG. L’Ecole des loisirs is a large publishing house dedicated solely to children’s literature. Its predecessor, Les Editions de l’Ecole, began in 1922 as a publisher of textbooks and pedagogical materials for private schools, until a 1959 education law upset the schoolbook market. At the 1963 Frankfurt Book Fair, the owner’s son-​in-​law Jean Fabre, grandson Jean Delas, and young employee Arthur Hubschmid all realized that France was far behind other countries in the development of children’s literature. At first as an experimental division of the original publisher and by 1965 as a separate entity, L’Ecole des loisirs set out to publish children’s fiction, emphasizing picturebooks for preliterate children. Given the paucity of French children’s authors and illustrators in the mid-​1960s, the company initially published translations from abroad, especially from the United States, thereby introducing figures such as Tomi Ungerer, Maurice Sendak, and Arnold Lobel to French readers. The publishing house shortly began to develop French talent.5 L’Ecole des loisirs’ pivot to picturebooks contributed so substantially to the redevelopment of children’s publishing in France that some historians see this decision as giving rise to modern French children’s literature. The new publishing house’s name, which translates to “The School of Leisure,” vividly illustrates the reorientation. But L’Ecole des loisirs never left the schools, even after Les Editions de l’Ecole stopped publishing. In fact, schools have remained a key distribution point for L’Ecole des loisirs’ profitable book club, Max. L’Ecole des loisirs is a family business, still run by members of the Fabre and Delas families, fourth-​generation male descendants of the founder. While many publishers in France have been acquired by conglomerates such as Hachette, L’Ecole des loisirs manages to remain independent. This ownership model constitutes a source of pride for the house and the basis of how it perceives its mission. In 2006, Director-​General Jean Delas explained that because the company did not have to answer to quarterly bottom lines and because its editors were not operating on “ejector seats,”6 its editorial decision-​making could sustain a more long-​term vision, for example by giving unknown authors multiple chances or greenlighting manuscripts likely to have limited commercial success. Today L’Ecole des loisirs has expanded to become an umbrella to nearly twenty subcollections of children’s literature such as Pastel, Mouche, and Kaléidoscope, and to graphic novel and theatre divisions. The publisher is unique in two ways. First, it employs over a hundred people and produces 508

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around 500 books a year (Brisac), whereas most French children’s publishers are run by a handful of employees and produce fewer than two dozen books annually. Second, unlike Gallimard, another long-​lived family firm, and many of the larger children’s publishing houses such as Albin Michel, L’Ecole des loisirs has no adult division. In 1981, just over fifteen years after its turn to picturebooks, L’Ecole des loisirs created a book club on the Scholastic model. The first club or subscription was called kilimax, a pun on “qui lit Max?” (“who reads Max?”), inspired by Sendak’s popular picturebook Where the Wild Things Are (1963). The club addressed children aged four to seven. The following year, L’Ecole des loisirs launched a second club for two-​to four-​year-​olds called minimax. Over the course of the next two decades, the publisher added more subscriptions, gradually increasing the total age range and settling on eight clubs by the early 2010s.7 The segmentation by age group serves to generate a sense of literacy progression for readers and uses the anticipation that derives from such progression to stoke continuous demand. The eight Max subscriptions each offer eight monthly books per year. From November to June, books are distributed to members, typically in classrooms, across metropolitan France and in a hundred countries abroad. Although individuals can purchase subscriptions, Max’s discounted group subscriptions have always favored distribution through the schools. Capitalizing on the publisher’s historical relationship with the school system, the book-​a-​month club emerged out of frustration that bookstores were not attracting enough children and the conviction that L’Ecole des loisirs had to meet child readers “where they are, and where they are is in the schools” (Brisac).8 Director of Communications Nathalie Brisac explains, “We always planned to go through teachers and schools so that parents would feel secure, so that the books were still considered objects for learning, not school learning but life learning.”9 In addition to numerous pedagogical materials offered to teachers –​ originally printed, now online –​ the publisher has for over four decades developed a “relationship of trust”10 with teachers to promote the book club. The lion’s share of Max subscriptions is distributed through the schools, again because the publisher structures that sales model to be most attractive, thanks in part to the cost savings of shipping to a single address. Unlike most L’Ecole des loisirs picturebooks sold in the retail market, the club books are paperback and cost €4 to €5 each (€6 to €7 for individual subscriptions); their hardcover equivalents retail for around €13 and more. The principle, as Hubschmid articulates it, is “new books at low prices.”11 The rewards structure again resembles Scholastic’s. For every six subscriptions in a group order, the class receives a free book. For every twelve subscriptions, the class receives a free subscription. On a dedicated Max website, teacher subscribers receive bonuses such as online games, video books, and downloadable pedagogical dossiers (“L’Ecole des loisirs à l’école!”). Although Max forms no part of the official curriculum, its inducements to students and teachers have for decades implied an imprimatur on the publisher’s products by the educational establishment. The school distribution model was developed by Delas in 1981: He gathered his cousins, his aunts, all the women around him and his family, telling them, ‘You, you cover all the schools in northern France,’ ‘You, you take western France or eastern,’ and he created the first network of an occupational trade that did not yet exist, which was to showcase books in schools in order to get teachers to encourage families to subscribe.12 (Brisac) Today this sales force is still largely feminized but no longer composed of family members. Very often, local mothers of schoolchildren work part-​time as representatives of L’Ecole des loisirs. Max readers’ lack of book choice sets the club apart from others around the world. Brisac used a restaurant metaphor: “It’s prix fixe, not à la carte.”13 When asked whether it would be better to give 509

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children or parents the freedom to choose any eight books from a pre-​selection of twenty-​five or a hundred, Hubschmid responded without hesitation, “Non.” The annual decision-​making over which books from the publisher’s list are chosen for the clubs is high stakes. In Max’s early years, Hubschmid alone decided. Today a committee of four editors and directors makes the decisions over the course of a dozen meetings. With eight books in each collection, they claim to seek variety of topic, style, narration, illustration, and creator (Brisac; Hubschmid). Hubschmid admits that commercial strategies have occasionally influenced book choices, for example in order to promote an author on the verge of fame or one who needs a nudge. A generation younger than Hubschmid, Brisac is keenly aware of the challenges presented by selection. While she favors daring stories, she laments how hard it is to please a large constituency of club members’ parents “who reproach us for everything and its opposite,”14 from subject matter to the difficulty of particular vocabulary words. Similarly, although among teachers and librarians L’Ecole des loisirs books have a reputation for being of generally high quality, some educators have been disappointed with some selections in the Max clubs, considering them repetitive, unimaginative, and not necessarily the best sample of L’Ecole des loisirs’ editorial production (Poirier and Jourdeuil). Whereas Brisac insists, “We give our best books to the clubs,”15 Hubschmid acknowledges that in the past the Max clubs have included “some mediocre books but not bad ones.”16 Most books in each subscription have been published in the previous year’s cycle (the catalogue), but there are usually a handful from the backlist (the fonds). A scan of the four youngest clubs in 2019–​20 reveals that only four of thirty-​two books had been published prior to the latest publishing cycle, two of which were just a few years old. However new the books in the subscription may be, they nonetheless do not embrace racial or gender diversity in an intentional way: a hundred percent of the protagonists in the stories were white in this sample, and in three of the four clubs, male protagonists outnumbered females by three to one. Socioeconomic diversity among subscribers is another issue. Even though Max books cost much less than retail and subscribers can pay in two installments, not every child can afford the €36 to €43 to join the club at school. The monthly classroom delivery can leave less fortunate children feeling empty-​handed. Because schools benefit from the number of subscriptions paid by families, inequalities can be measured not only individually but also institutionally, and one might reasonably surmise that underprivileged students have fewer L’Ecole des loisirs books at their disposal. Yet the publisher claims that for various reasons, rural and underprivileged suburban schools subscribe to Max more per capita than do wealthier schools in city centers. In Paris intra muros as well as Marseille and Lyon, the generally higher standard of living permits families to buy full-​priced hardcover books, precluding the attraction of the discounted club paperbacks. In areas across France where children are poorly served by bookstores, libraries, and other cultural institutions, Max is more popular. Teachers there tend to value the club more than do teachers in better-​off school districts. In addition, some municipalities (for example, Brest) and parent-​school cooperative associations subsidize subscriptions for less fortunate students (Brisac). For decades, L’Ecole des loisirs has been able to maintain a quasi-​monopoly on the picturebook market inside French schools. Within France’s highly nationalized educational system where learning objectives are centrally dictated by the State, teachers, administrators, and parents of schoolchildren enthusiastically collaborate in the subscription program. Receiving a monthly L’Ecole des loisirs book is a classroom tradition. The club’s influence arguably outweighs that of both the Ministry of Education’s recommended picturebook lists for teachers and the classroom libraries that teachers sustain (often on personal budgets in the absence of a widespread network of primary school libraries). Max’s success in getting particular books from a single publisher into schoolchildren’s hands is underwritten by teachers’ trust in the brand’s quality and heritage. Although sales figures are not public, club membership has experienced constant annual growth since its founding, and the majority of French schools sell subscriptions today (Brisac). 510

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Accordingly, other children’s publishers have long been envious of L’Ecole des loisirs’ occupancy of French schools. Many deplore that Max bypasses the chaîne du livre, the “book chain” or standard distribution network that goes through retail bookstores. Several publishers have tried to launch competing book clubs over the decades, without success. The 2021 rentrée (back-​to-​school season), however, witnessed something of a market disruption. A collaboration of Gallimard and three other children’s publishers –​ Flammarion, Casterman, and Sarbacane –​ who share the same parent company launched a book club called Le livreur d’histoires (The Story Deliverer) that followed the Max model closely: a book a month for the nine months of the school year, with separate clubs for various age ranges. Publicized as an endeavor “born of a collaboration with bookstores”17 (“Le livreur d’histoires”), this club aimed to compete with Max on different terrain: in retail shops rather than schools. Books would be delivered either to one’s home or to one of 160 partner bookstores, the latter offering free delivery. The newborn club was only available in metropolitan France but announced plans to expand globally. It cost more than Max at nearly €70 a year plus €20 for at-​home delivery (a likely surcharge given the limited number of partner bookstores in year one). Launched late in the COVID-​19 pandemic when schools, libraries, and bookstores had been shut down on and off for a year and a half, Le livreur d’histoires brought subscribers into bookstores, thereby respecting the sacrosanct chaîne du livre. In its inaugural year, Le livreur d’histoires differed from Max in other significant ways as well. According to the club’s website, bookstore owners participated with publishing houses in making book selections. Annual subscriptions came with three free gifts such as a coloring project or stickers, a marketing strategy that reinvented the free gadget that marked generations of readers of the French children’s magazine Pif Gadget. Finally, Le livreur d’histoires took a different tactic than L’Ecole des loisirs in the ostensible collaboration of four publishers. A scan of the first year’s selections, however, reveals that the participants were not on equal ground: of the thirty-​six books, twenty were published by Gallimard, eleven by Flammarion, four by Casterman, and one by the much smaller Sarbacane. That Le livreur d’histoires will constitute a threat to Max seems unlikely; year two of the subscription was never launched, a surprising halt –​ if it is definitive –​ given the publishers’ cultural capital and financial means. In any case, because this competitor was distributed in bookstores, L’Ecole des loisirs was not at risk of diminished dominance in the schools. With its peerless access to young students, the Max book club will surely remain commercially profitable while projecting its vision of providing cultural products to schools, students, and parents demanding pedagogical uplift.

Conclusion Despite the time and space that separate the JLG and Max, the two share several important characteristics. Both have been the most successful and longest-​running children’s book clubs of their day in their respective countries. Both have offered quality literature at relatively low prices. They have organized subscriptions for children by age group and sold to both individuals and institutions. The two clubs have given members little to no choice in book selection, yet both have provided ancillary benefits, such as the subscription to Young Wings in the case of the JLG. Twenty-​first-​century Max readers, for their part, have special access to a website with videotaped books and activities. Like publishers and retailers, the two clubs have marketed their books to both children and parents. The JLG and Max have also had similar effects on children’s literature, reading habits, and taste. Both entities have disrupted the children’s literature market in at least three important ways: promoting particular books and authors, bypassing the conventional structures of book distribution, and acquiring shares of the book market at both ends of the spectrum, individual subscribers on the one hand and institutions such as schools and libraries on the other. Both have positioned themselves as para-​educational organizations purveying quality literature, thereby mitigating the risk of appearing profit-​oriented. Both have appealed to social mobility via reading, even though working-​class families 511

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might struggle to afford subscriptions. Through their monthly deliveries, the clubs have stimulated children’s desire to consume and own books. They have also enabled expatriate children to access new books in their own language. Yet the entities also differ in several critical ways. First and foremost, the JLG offered books from multiple publishers, while Max only distributes L’Ecole des loisirs titles. The JLG offered both nonfiction and fiction, while with few exceptions, Max includes only fiction. While the JLG segregated subscriptions for older readers by gender, based on the belief that boys required explicit appeals –​a policy not universally supported by its own selectors –​ L’Ecole des loisirs steadfastly resists this marketing strategy. Although the JLG attracted readers with a carefully balanced selection of edifying and pleasurable books, Max choices emphasize pure enjoyment. The monthly magazine Young Wings offered JLG members various para-​reading activities such as making plays about the books, creating school projects, fundraising for more subscriptions, and producing evaluations of books. In contrast, Max competes head-​to-​head with a vast market of other publishers’ children’s magazines that also advertise subscriptions in classrooms. Finally, the JLG selectors were hired for their celebrity as experts in child welfare or literacy or as seasoned publishing professionals;18 their identities and interests were publicized in Young Wings to members who formed a sort of fan club around them, whereas Max books were chosen by a single employee for decades and more recently by an anonymous committee of in-​house editors. Of course, historical and national contexts have contributed to other differences between the JLG and Max. Whereas the American market in the 1920s was already experiencing robust literary production, there were few retail outlets for children’s books, especially in rural areas, and almost no advertising. As a result, the JLG was the only way some children could access books at all, and its selections typically sold well. The Max subscription, launched more than half a century later, had less impact on the French children’s book market, which had already been in full expansion since the 1960s, but it unquestionably cornered a piece of it. Titles chosen for Max clubs typically experience a significant sales boost, but some are already well known. Another difference concerns book format: Max books are only paperbacks, a clear distinction from other L’Ecole des loisirs books, which are almost always published in hardcover. For its part, the JLG’s books were affordable but handsome volumes; in fact, the expansion of the paperback market after the Second World War likely diminished the club’s appeal to individual subscribers, who could now choose cheap books without the club apparatus. The two case studies in this chapter illuminate issues central to any analysis of book clubs as a critical institution of children’s literature. Inserting themselves as a key intermediary between publishers and readers (just as libraries, schools, and prizes do), book clubs also occupy a liminal position between family and educational spaces. Through their curation and promotion of particular titles, these clubs relieve parents of the need to navigate a too abundant or challenging book market, all while acting as para-​pedagogical institutions. Whereas the JLG’s legitimacy, as noted above, was founded on selectors’ expertise in psychology and literacy, Max benefits from the de facto imprimatur of teachers and school authorities. Our two case studies illustrate that a book club’s creation is typically enabled by the conjunction of institutional pressures arising from the separate imperatives of children’s literature, the publishing world, and the book market. Both the JLG and Max were founded after a significant increase in the number of children’s books and during a moment when sales and distribution paths could not keep up with production (in the case of the JLG) or when new circuits such as school classrooms were seized (in the case of Max). The clubs were able to yoke themselves to the prestige of children’s literature as a form calculated to edify and instruct, shaping future citizens by developing their taste for quality literature. Significantly, these book clubs flourished in eras when other media for children, such as magazines, comics, or television, were either waning in popularity, not yet available, socially discouraged, or not occupying mutually exclusive sales territory. In the United States, these factors 512

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aligned for the JLG’s success from the 1920s until the 1950s, and in France for Max from the 1980s until at least the 2020s. Finally, the term “club,” with all its attendant associations, deserves attention, for it does not apply in the same way to the two entities under examination in this chapter. The JLG was a true club: like Britain’s later Puffineers, its subscribers were “members” who received a lapel pin and were urged to participate in an active community of readers, especially via the monthly magazine Young Wings (or the Puffin Post for the British club) reserved for them. That Young Wings ceased publication in 1955 likely led to more solitary and atomized book consumption in a landscape with many more claims on children’s attention. The JLG’s closest emulator in the United States was Scholastic, which resembles Max through the implied imprimatur of school approval, but Scholastic lacks the JLG’s mechanisms for helping young people to see themselves as a community of readers. In contrast, although Max is a book club to most intents and purposes, it never refers to itself as one, nor does it identify its subscribers as members. L’Ecole des loisirs calls Max an abonnement (subscription) and does not offer collective activities to be shared among subscribers, apart from classroom activities suggested on the Max website for teachers. In fact, it is French children’s magazines produced by other publishers that currently create the kind of clubby community that the JLG achieved in its time, such as the opportunity for readers to mail in letters, react to stories, and send submissions for contests, activities that enable engaged young readers to connect with each other despite reading’s solitary nature. Although these two book clubs have dominated their respective markets, this chapter also examined rival book clubs that posed real threats to their preeminence. Just when several competitor clubs were emerging in 1955, the JLG renounced individual subscriptions to focus on libraries. The development of low-​cost paperbacks made JLG discounts less attractive, and when Scholastic’s first book club (Teen Age Book Club, launched in partnership with Pocket Books) moved into American schools in the 1940s, it did so with paperbacks. When Max subscription deliveries were suspended because of school closures owing to the COVID-​19 pandemic, Le livreur d’histoires seized the opportunity to launch itself in 2021. In so doing, Gallimard and its partner-​publishers re-​embraced an earlier strategy, namely a return to bookstores as the site of distribution. Ultimately, these competitive initiatives demonstrate that all book clubs are fundamentally parasitic on other institutions’ infrastructures, whether schools, libraries, or bookstores. Yet the enthusiasm with which entities such as the clubs discussed in this chapter have been met and the fondness with which they are remembered suggest that this parasitism is benevolent, a pleasurable and perhaps even improving enhancement to the unadorned efforts of publishers and the institutions that work with them.

Acknowledgments Anne Morey thanks Svenska Barnboksinstitutet for supporting her research; archivist Simon Springare provided guidance to the Saga Archives. Julie Fette thanks Nathalie Brisac, Arthur Hubschmid, Ludmilla Jourdeuil, and Céline Poirier for graciously allowing her to interview them. All quotations from interviews are used with the subject’s permission.

Notes 1 Scholastic’s webpage dates its first in-​school book fair to 1981 (“Our History”), but it was not a pioneer in this regard. Many Americans now in their sixties recall pop-​up bookstores brought annually to their elementary and middle schools to supply low-​cost paperbacks to book-​hungry children in the 1970s. 2 In its mid-​twentieth-​century heyday, the BOMC included a Children’s Book-​of-​the-​Month Club alongside other specialty book clubs such as the Quality Paperback Book Club, the Fortune Book Club (for business-​ oriented titles), and Book-​of-​the-​Month Club Science. More recently, both BOMC and its children’s division have flickered in and out of existence as the company has moved from owner to owner.

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Julie Fette and Anne Morey 3 Rogers observes, “I find that the spread of the book clubs in the past few years is without any question narrowing the interest in the knowledge of current books” (2324). 4 The revised JLG (whose initials now stand for Junior Library Guild) has absorbed the important children’s literature review outlets The Horn Book and School Library Journal, among other titles. The service now provides “the subscription box solution for the modern librarian [...] curated by our renowned editorial team” (“About Us”). Interestingly, shortly before the JLG changed direction, it selected at least one title –​Louise Rankin’s Daughter of the Mountains –​that also turned up on the Saga Bokklubb’s list in Sweden. Other authors promoted by both clubs included not only British classics such as E. Nesbit and Rudyard Kipling but also well-regarded twentieth-​century American authors Caroline Dale Snedeker and Elizabeth Janet Gray, which may suggest that the JLG wielded some transatlantic influence at a time of significant expansion of the Swedish juvenile book market. 5 Twenty-​two percent of the offerings of four L’Ecole des loisirs book clubs in 2019–​20 were translations, a close reflection of the publisher’s current production. 6 “Sièges éjectables.” All translations from the French are by Julie Fette. 7 Today, the eight age groups of the subscriptions are bébémax (“up to 3 years old”), titoumax (ages two to four), minimax (ages three to five), kilimax (ages five to seven), animax (ages seven to nine), maximax (ages nine to eleven), supermax (ages eleven to thirteen), and médium max (ages thirteen and up). 8 “Là où il est. Et là où il est, c’est où? C’est à l’école.” 9 “Toujours l’idée de passer par l’enseignant et par l’école pour que les parents soient d’abord en sécurité, pour que le livre soit considéré aussi comme un objet d’apprentissage quand même, mais pas d’apprentissage scolaire, d’apprentissage humain.” 10 “Une relation de confiance.” 11 “Livres nouveaux à bas prix.” 12 “Il a pris ses cousines, ses tantes, toutes les femmes autour de lui, de la famille… . en leur disant, ‘Alors toi tu vas aller dans toutes les écoles du nord de la France, toi dans l’ouest ou dans l’est.’ Et il a créé un premier réseaux d’un métier qui n’existait pas à ce moment là, qui était d’aller présenter des livres dans les écoles pour essayer de faire en sorte que les enseignants proposent aux familles de s’abonner.” 13 “C’est le menu, ce n’est pas la carte.” 14 “Qui nous reproche tout et le contraire.” 15 “Il faut leur donner le meilleur.” 16 “Quelques livres médiocres mais pas mauvais.” 17 “Conçue avec la complicité des libraires.” 18 Thus, Gruenberg was not merely one child-​study expert among many but the director of the Child Study Association of America; Angelo Patri, a school principal, wrote the syndicated child-​psychology column “Our Children,” which appeared in newspapers and magazines across the United States; and Roosevelt, of course, was initially wife of the governor of New York State and subsequently First Lady.

Works Cited “About Us: Your Partner for Collection Development.” Junior Library Guild, www.jun​iorl​ibra​rygu​ild.com/​ about-​us, accessed 5 September 2022. Brisac, Nathalie. Personal interview with Julie Fette, 2 December 2019. Cheney, O. H. Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930–​1931: Final Report. National Association of Book Publishers, 1931. Delas, Jean. “En 2006, Jean Delas raconte sa maison d’édition, L’Ecole des loisirs.” Interview with Patricia Delahaie, YouTube, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​G7OF​B89n​9kM, 23 January 2014. Eddy, Jacalyn. Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919–​1939. University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. [Ferris, Helen]. To Enrich Young Life: Ten Years with the Junior Literary Guild in the Schools of Our Country. The Junior Literary Guild, 1939. Hubschmid, Arthur. Personal interview with Julie Fette, 12 September 2019. Kidd, Kenneth. “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of Newbery Gold.” Children’s Literature, vol. 35, 2007, pp. 166–​90. “L’Ecole des loisirs à l’école!” L’Ecole des loisirs, www.eco​lede​sloi​sirs​alec​ole.fr/​edle/​accu​eil, accessed 8 June 2022. “Le livreur d’histoires: Offrez une année de lecture et les trésors de la littérature de jeunesse.” Le livreur d’histoires, www.leli​vreu​rdhi​stoi​res.com/​blog/​post/​ouvert​ure-​des-​comman​des-​le-​12-​aout.html, accessed 8 December 2022.

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Book Clubs Marcus, Leonard S. Minders of Make-​Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Morey, Anne. Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–​1934. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. —​—​—​. “The Junior Literary Guild and the Child Reader as Citizen.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 3, September 2014, pp. 279–​302. “Our History.” Scholastic, www.sch​olas​tic.com/​abou​tsch​olas​tic/​hist​ory/​, accessed 5 September 2022. Pearson, Lucy. The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Ashgate, 2013. Poirier, Céline, and Ludmilla Jourdeuil. Personal interview with Julie Fette, 3 October 2019. “Puffin Club Lundy Sailing and Camping Holiday.” Seven Stories Archive, https://​arch​ives​hub.jisc.ac.uk/​sea​rch/​ archi​ves/​d6274​bfe-​9dea-​3908-​8144-​47f47​67ad​2f1?compon​ent=​2da32​b52-​9043-​3e39-​95d5-​309af​1d71​ba6. Rogers, Robert E. “Book Clubs: One Man’s Book Is Another Man’s Poison.” The Publishers’ Weekly, 18 May 1929, pp. 2323–​27. Stokes, Frederick A. “The Case Against the Book Clubs.” North American Review, July 1929, pp. 47–​56. Tebbel, John. “For Children, with Love and Profit: Two Decades of Book Publishing for Children.” Stepping Away from Tradition: Children’s Books of the Twenties and Thirties, Papers from a Symposium, edited by Sybille A. Jagusch, Library of Congress, 1988, pp. 13–​35.

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42 PROMOTING CHILDREN’S READING INTERNATIONALLY Valerie Coghlan

Today children and adults live in a multimedia, multimodal world, and the world of children’s book promotion reflects this fact. Definitions of book promotion often focus on functional or commercial aspects of literature, while definitions of reading promotion tend to reflect the encouragement of reading for enjoyment and personal development, although the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes in conjunction with literacy development. This chapter focuses on how book and/​or reading promotion may benefit children and have lifelong effects. This focus constitutes a nebulous subject, one that is difficult to measure once it is taken away from the more quantifiable aspects of book sales, library loans, or participation in activities. Nevertheless, there are countless informal research accounts of how promotional activities encourage reading for enjoyment and of mature readers attributing their love of books to childhood activities where books and reading were promoted. While it is generally not possible to measure with any degree of precision the overall impact of reading promotion activities or the institutions that inform or develop promotional activities, this chapter presents the qualitative influence of the international promotion of children’s books and children’s reading in the light of the activities of the various international organizations and events discussed below. In a bibliodiverse world, book festivals, book fairs, conferences, author-​illustrator events, national and international book awards, world book days, and exhibitions, all focused on children’s books, are held across continents in venues that include libraries, museums, bookshops, schools, town halls, open-​air centers, and many more places where readers might gather. Many of these activities are presented and often sponsored by an increasing number of organizations involved with children’s books. These organizations may be philanthropic or commercial and have aims that range from the pedagogical, to selling books, to the development of a love of reading and an enthusiasm for books. In many cases these aims are mixed: in addition to their desire to sell books, publishers and booksellers may have a genuine desire to present worthwhile books to young readers, and many national and international associations, while aiming to promote reading for enjoyment, may also promote literacy –​after all, being able to read encourages participation in reading and reading-​related activities. Reading activities may additionally focus on a specific aim of reaching readers who have particular needs –​physically, mentally, emotionally –​or who are members of groups marginalized in the societies in which they live. To this end, many organizations produce bibliographies listing recommended titles in the above and other categories. Or, without specifically engaging in bibliotherapy, they may provide or suggest activities for specific groups of young readers.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003214953-48

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To these varied ends, organizations, authors, illustrators, publishers, even book characters all have websites and engage with social media. YouTube videos of children’s book creators and promoters reading and talking about their books abound. Book creators are personalized in such promotions, and children often know a great deal about their favorite illustrator or author. In some parts of the world, children participate as never before in a book world aimed specifically at them. Spinoffs from popular children’s books are ubiquitous, be they movies, television programs, toys, T-​shirts, mugs and plates, games, or much, much more, all imparting materiality to books and book characters. Even if some of this proliferation is commercially driven, it creates awareness and excitement about children’s books, encouraging children to feel part of an activity that has both a local and an international reach as well as being fun. At the same time, it is important to remember that such activity is all predicated on the assumption that children can access books, whether through purchasing them, through libraries and schools, or through families and friends. Yet millions of children are unaware of the hype surrounding children’s books and reading, and at best books are functional in their lives –​only there for the development of literacy. This lack of engagement with reading may be circumstantial, due to poverty or geographical location, or indeed to cultural background. In some cases it is even purposeful. The impact of literature on children’s lives is understood by those who recognize books as empowering, and therefore as possibly subversive. Adult concerns, prejudices, and fears are evidenced in restrictions, whether imposed nationally or by societal groups, on writing and publishing books for children. Some books may be banned in libraries and schools, and in some societies access to books, for example by girls and women, is limited or excluded. Ironically, political or cultural restrictions imposed by adults may have a greater influence than efforts to promote the moments of literary jouissance so eloquently expressed by the English playwright Alan Bennett: The best moments in reading are when you come across something –​a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things –​which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours. (qtd. in Sieghart xvi) Happily, while there are those who, for one reason or another, would shield or exclude children from reading, there are many more individuals who well understand the value of encouraging children to find these complicit moments of understanding and delight in reading. These individuals are often active in organizations around the world, and it is at least arguable that the most remarkable of these organizations is the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and its founder, Jella Lepman.

The International Board on Books for Young People When Lepman (b. Stuttgart 1891; d. Zurich 1970) returned to Germany in 1945, she was moved by the plight of so many homeless and often orphaned children on the streets of postwar German cities. Thinking of what she could do to help them, she decided that access to books and art were the best means of bringing joy –​and even understanding across national barriers –​to these children. In effect, she sought to provide the hand that “come[s]‌out and take[s] yours” envisioned by Bennett. Lepman had left Germany for Italy with her children in 1936, fearing the consequences for them as a Jewish family if they stayed after the rise of National Socialism. In 1939 she moved to London, where she followed her former profession as a journalist, working for the British Foreign Office and the BBC, and later for the United States Embassy on a women’s magazine circulated throughout 517

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Europe. After the war ended she initially refused the request to return to Germany as an advisor on the cultural and educational needs of women and children in the American Zone. However, the thought of so many children left destitute caused her to change her mind. On returning to Germany, she was given the rank of major in the United States Army, awarding her extra authority as an adjunct to her already well developed skills of persuasion. These skills she turned to organizing an exhibition of children’s books from around Europe. Letters were sent to publishers across the continent, asking for donations of books for the devastated children of Germany, and further persuasion secured a former Nazi stronghold in Munich as a space for the exhibition. The Internationale Jugendbuch-​Austellung (the International Exhibition of Children’s Books) opened on 3 July 1946. This was the first international event held in postwar Germany, and finishing its three-​month stint in Munich, it toured Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and other German cities. The traveling exhibition attracted huge crowds, revealing a hunger for books not only on the part of children but also on the part of the many adults who visited the exhibitions. To find a permanent home for so many books was the task Lepman set herself next. In Germany she had garnered support from Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and when Lepman visited the United States in 1948, Roosevelt invited her to dinner and introduced her to people who could assist her. This imprimatur ensured publicity for Lepman and her cause, and the resulting lecture tour was followed by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled the establishment of the International Youth Library (IYL) in Munich. It also resulted in other practical help for Lepman’s plans; a supporting committee was formed, and the American Library Association became a sponsor of the library, sending a professional librarian to assist with the organization of the growing collection of children’s books. After some tussles with local authorities, Lepman’s determination again won out, and the library found a home in an old mansion belonging to the Bavarian Ministry of Culture on Kaulbachstrasse in Munich. Throughout all of these successes, Lepman’s overarching goal of promoting a love of books and reading among young people remained predominant. This priority sometimes resulted in stormy scenes, such as those that ensued when efforts were made by visiting American librarians and others to bring cataloging rules to bear on a collection that was becoming increasingly unruly, or to allow access to the collection by researchers. As far as Lepman was concerned, bringing books and children together mattered above all, and her subsequent activities continued to demonstrate this focus.1 At a conference held at the IYL in 1951, the possible influence of the violence depicted in some of Germany’s famous Grimms’ fairy tales on the emergence of Nazism was discussed. Neither Lepman nor her friends and colleagues Erich Kästner and Richard Bamberger, who had all attended the conference, agreed with this theory. Rather, they argued for a more international perspective on children’s literature discussions, reflecting the ethos of the IYL, its supporters, and its collections. With this goal in view, an international conference was held in Prinz Karl Palais in Munich in November 1951 with the aim of fostering “International Understanding through Children’s Books.” This event led to another conference in Zurich in October 1953, at which IBBY was established. Many of the leading activists for the promotion of children’s books were present among the 200 attendees from fourteen nations and all walks of children’s books, including Swedish author Astrid Lindgren and a representative from UNESCO. Following this, regular biennial IBBY congresses have been prominent on the children’s book landscape, and the establishment of IBBY sections worldwide grew apace. The founding of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards followed,2 and a few years later IBBY’s journal, Bookbird, was first published. When Lepman stepped down from her role as director of the IYL in 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation invited her to institute a program for the promotion of children’s books, libraries, and reading in countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Bookbird was at first conceived as a newsletter to spread information about these programs and was subtitled an “international children’s book bulletin.” Initially it was a slight publication of twelve pages, but Lepman 518

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nevertheless applied to it the high standards she brought to all her ventures; she recruited staff and students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg to the design team, and former Bauhaus artist Gerhard Marcks designed the “bookbird” logo, which, in a somewhat different form, still adorns the cover of the journal. Not only was news from countries involved in the international projects featured, but also information about book awards, international book exhibitions, and children’s reading centers; book reviews; and recommendations for reading and for books that would warrant translation. In fact, the early Bookbird contained much of the sort of information contained in the articles and features in Bookbird today, giving IBBY’s journal then and now a unique status as an independent publication promoting children’s books within an international forum. Its independence stems from its editors and management board, which are separate from IBBY’s management, while observing IBBY’s principles in its contents. Currently produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in the United States, Bookbird is now a quarterly journal of more than eighty pages in each issue, featuring academically peer-​reviewed articles as well as information about reading promotion activities, and it is listed on major international databases, including Scopus. As well as the more academic articles, a wide range of features about reading projects, interviews with children’s book people, and news of IBBY’s book promotion activities are also carried in each issue, giving Bookbird a wide appeal to readers from all sections of the children’s books world. Bookbird also serves as a journal of record for IBBY and for the wider children’s book community, providing a bank of information about children’s book creators across the globe. This bank is particularly noteworthy in the recurring special issue that features all the authors and illustrators nominated for the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Awards; a subsequent issue carries articles on the winners and shortlisted nominees. Another special issue is devoted to the children’s literature of the region where the biennial IBBY Congress will be held. Currently Bookbird is published in hard copy in English, but recently an online Spanish issue with identical content has begun to be produced in Argentina.3 Today IBBY is a worldwide nonprofit organization “committed to bringing books and children together” (www.ibby.org). With headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, IBBY now has over eighty national sections on five continents. The national sections are constructed in different ways. Some are incorporated into a national children’s book organization, while others are completely independent of state support. Members of IBBY sections are widely representative of the international children’s book community as well as of more local interests. Writers and illustrators, translators, editors, publishers, journalists, educators and students, librarians, booksellers, and parents all meet at IBBY national, regional, and international conferences, at book fairs and festivals, and at many other events in which IBBY participates. All sections pay annual dues to the parent organization in return for being recognized as part of IBBY, nominating for IBBY awards, participating in IBBY activities, and if required, receiving information and advice about potential reading promotion projects from IBBY headquarters. IBBY is managed by an executive director and a very small support staff from its office in Basel. It is governed according to its statutes by an executive committee and president, all elected every two years, and most decisions are taken at meetings of the executive committee. While the mission of IBBY has been redefined somewhat over the years since its foundation, it still strongly adheres to the basic principles established in Zurich in 1953, aiming ● to promote international understanding through children’s books; ● to give children everywhere the opportunity to have access to books with high literary and artistic standards; ● to encourage the publication and distribution of quality children’s books, especially in developing countries; ● to provide support and training for those involved with children and children’s literature; 519

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● to stimulate research and scholarly works in the field of children’s literature; ● to protect and uphold the Rights of the Child according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (www.ibby.org) Today IBBY’s reach is extraordinary, and for many of its activities it works with partner organizations that provide financial support and sponsorship of various kinds. These activities include the IBBY-​Asahi Reading Promotion Award, the IBBY-​iRead Outstanding Reading Promotor Award, the IBBY-​Yamada Fund, and IBBY’s Children in Crisis Fund. While some of these awards and projects focus on areas where there are high levels of illiteracy, the underlying motivation is always to develop a love of books and reading; for example, a lasting influence on a reading promotion program is the overarching criterion for the IBBY-​Asahi Award, sponsored by the Japanese Asahi Shimbun newspaper group, whose recognition goes to organizations or individuals that often work at local levels. Past recipients of the award include a program training older people to read to children from very disadvantaged backgrounds in a large city in Argentina, and another program providing access to high-​quality tactile illustrated books (TiBs) for visually impaired children in France and further afield. As its name implies, the IBBY-​iRead Outstanding Reading Promotor Award, sponsored by the Shenzhen iRead Foundation in China, goes to individuals involved with reading promotion activities deemed to help develop children’s reading and a love of books. Sponsorship may also be in kind, such as Toronto Public Library’s housing and promotion of the IBBY collection for Young People with Disabilities. This collection features a large international selection of books in over forty languages for and about young people with disabilities of all sorts, and includes books in Braille, tactile books, and other special formats. Reminiscent of Lepman’s traveling exhibitions of children’s books in Germany, the collection is available for loan as a traveling exhibition and as a print catalog. So too is the IBBY Silent Books Collection, initiated on the Italian island of Lampedusa by IBBY Italia, where trained facilitators work with the books and refugee children who arrive at the island. The IBBY Honour Books Collections, featuring titles of note nominated by most of IBBY’s national sections, are displayed and discussed at conferences, thereby introducing books to international audiences through these exhibitions and through a colorful annotated catalog. It is also possible for IBBY national sections and other organizations to purchase or borrow the titles in these collections for access by children and adults in their region. The demand for the collections is high, and reports from the teachers and librarians who mediate them with children are very positive. In addition, two virtual online collections –​ Books for Africa/​Books from Africa and Children’s Books in Europe –​ reinforce in accessible ways IBBY’s role in promoting children’s books internationally. The Honor List is also available through a downloadable pdf. All of these resources are made available to young people by educators globally, and in many cases to build local collections of international books in schools and libraries. With its wide network of national sections, IBBY also offers the possibility of targeted support to those countries where assistance for children in need of books and reading development are crucial, through the IBBY-​Yamada Fund and its Children in Crisis Fund. In recent years the IBBY-​Yamada Fund has supported the establishment of reading corners for children and young adults in frontier rural areas of Armenia and the development of creative capacities of mothers and children in Peru, as well as many workshops for refugee children and seminars and workshops for teachers, librarians, and parents across continents. In these projects, as with its Children in Crisis Fund, IBBY works with local professionals and volunteers, often focusing on indigenous literature, as in its reading and wildlife camps in Uganda and the folktale collection program in Nepal, “Stories from My Village.” It also helps at times of crisis: for example, restoring school libraries in countries where these resources have been destroyed in conflicts or by earthquakes (www.ibby.org). International Children’s Book Day is celebrated on 2 April, Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday. Each year an IBBY section sponsors the occasion with a specially designed poster featuring words 520

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and images from an author and illustrator from their country. The poster is widely distributed through IBBY sections and libraries internationally and is used to spread information about children’s books from around the world; many countries host events promoting children’s books on the day itself.

The International Youth Library The IYL now operates as a separate entity from IBBY, but also adhering to the principles determined by Lepman. Lodged in the medieval Blutenburg Castle in Munich since 1983, from 1996 onward the library has operated under the patronage of a public trust: the International Youth Library Foundation. Its avowed intent is to “promote global children’s and youth literature of high aesthetic and literary quality and of significance for cultural literacy” (www.ijb.de). It is the largest collection of international children’s literature in the world; it cooperates with other research institutions, is available to scholars for research purposes, and carries out book promotion activities with children and young adults. A children’s library also stands on the grounds of Blutenburg Castle, and here and in the Youth Library itself children take part in book-​related activities of all sorts, facilitated by specialist members of the library’s staff. Many of these activities are focused on the international exhibitions regularly mounted by the library’s language specialists. These exhibitions are accompanied by relevant talks for teachers and parents by authors and illustrators, panel discussions, workshops for young readers, and educational programs for schools. Some are offered as traveling exhibitions, such as “From Marrakesh to Bagdad: Illustrations from the Arab World,” “Around the World in 70 Maps,” and the very popular “Hello Dear Enemy! Picturebooks for Peace and Tolerance,” which has visited many countries. It is now in its second iteration, reflecting recent wars and conflicts. The biennial International White Ravens Festival is a central feature of the IYL’s program of promotional activities. For this event, international and interdisciplinary children’s book creators and promoters take part in a celebration of children’s books, in Blutenburg Castle and throughout Bavaria. The festival is accompanied by an annotated catalog of books from around sixty countries and in approximately thirty languages, selected for White Ravens accolades by experts who nominate on the basis of innovative qualities and international appeal to young readers. While IBBY is the nonprofit children’s books organization with the broadest reach internationally, other international NGOs (non-​governmental organizations), while aiming at a more targeted audience, also extensively promote children’s books. Sometimes their work overlaps –​usually resulting in friendly exchanges of information. Sometimes these associations carve out particular niches for themselves, globally or thematically, but all demonstrating the need for activism when it comes to children and reading, and encouragingly, the generally warmhearted and well-​informed approaches taken by those involved.

The Biennial of Illustration Bratislava (BIB) The Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava (BIB) first opened its doors in December 1965 when a group of children’s book experts in Bratislava met to form the BIB International Committee.4 At the time Bratislava, now in Slovakia, was behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, and access to children’s literature from the West was restricted. Equally, local publishers, illustrators, and authors had little opportunity to learn about what was happening outside the eastern bloc or to spread word of what they were producing. The first biennial was held in 1967 with support from UNESCO and IBBY. As part of a symposium, a series of awards for illustration, judged by an international jury, was instituted. Illustrators from over twenty countries were represented at that first BIB, and today illustrators, publishers, and others from children’s book communities in five continents are participants in BIB. As well as the Grand Prix BIB, other awards are also made. Five BIB Golden Apples, BIB plaques, 521

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and BIB diplomas are presented, and the work of nominees is on view in accompanying exhibitions. From its inception BIB has had a close working relationship with IBBY, and IBBY national sections are nominators for BIB Awards. BIB was an advisor on design to Bookbird in the journal’s early days. The Slovak section of IBBY is housed in BIBIANA. In 1987 BIBIANA, International House of Art for Children, was established with the aim of fostering a culture of children reading in Slovakia. Reading and art activities for younger children are a regular part of BIBIANA’s program. It houses BIB’s archive and a library of international and Slovak children’s books. Since 1985 the Biennial of Animation, an international film festival of films for children, has been part of the biennale program.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA, www.ifla.org) is an umbrella organization, most of whose members are library associations, but which also includes other cognate affiliates. It was established in 1927 with headquarters in the Hague in the Netherlands, and has members and affiliates in some 150 countries around the globe. Much of its remit is concerned with advocacy and improving professional practice and capacity building. It adheres to the principles of universal access to information embodied in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, through exemplary information and library services that are available to all regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, gender, or any other markers that sometimes represent barriers to universal access. IFLA has a wide range of professional committees (sections) that members may join, three of these being the Children and Young Adults Section, which was founded in 1955; the School Library Section; and the Literacy and Reading Section. IFLA provides a useful role in assisting library services for children and school libraries to help each other by means of information exchange and professional support. This initiative includes book-​related promotional activities such as the World Through Picture Books project started in 2011, which provides a multilingual catalog of picturebooks from thirty countries, and an exhibition that is available for loan. The Sisters Library project assists public and school libraries in developing partnerships by means of which children can recommend books and staff can set up information exchanges for book selection, among other activities related to good library practice, often online. IFLA’s former Books for All project in developing countries, funded by UNESCO, was an early prototype of later reading promotion projects such as the nonprofit Room to Read, which supports literacy for girls in Asia and Africa (www.roo​mtoread.org).

The International Research Society for Children’s Literature While its remit does not include working directly with children, the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (www.irscl.com) is a major participant in global children’s literature. It was founded in 1969 at the Frankfurt Colloquium organized by members of the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung (Institute for Children’s Literature Research) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Membership is on an individual basis, and by the time of the first IRSCL Symposium in 1971 in Frankfurt, the organization had a membership of fifty scholars from eighteen countries. IRSCL hosts a biennial congress, makes awards for research, and publishes a journal, International Research in Children’s Literature (IRCL). At the time of its foundation, children’s literature as an academic discipline tended to be lodged in education departments in universities, and a majority of researchers were studying children’s literature in terms of children’s reading and research into various aspects of reading development. While the founding aims of IRSCL were then based on scholarly study and research into children’s literature as literature to be taken seriously in its own right, in recent years its ambit has widened to include research into activities involving children and reading, 522

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and many members are actively involved in promoting children’s books and reading, often incorporating this endeavor into their scholarly research.

Further Organizations Some of the participants involved in the organizations discussed here may be encountered in more than one children’s book organization, creating a cross-​fertilization of professions and skills; for example, the Austrian scholar and teacher Richard Bamberger was one of the founders both of IBBY and of IRSCL, and the German scholar Klaus Doderer, one of the principal founders of IRSCL, also had close links to IBBY. Other cognate organizations include the International Literacy Association, formerly the International Reading Association, which describes itself as a “global advocacy and membership organization dedicated to advancing literacy” (www.litera​cywo​rldw​ide.org). Members are mainly educators and researchers working for literacy development through English, but their sphere of interest also leads many into reading promotion and encouraging an enjoyment of reading alongside purely functional aspects of literacy. The International Publishers Association (IPA, www.inte​rnat​iona​lpub​lish​ers.org) is a federation of publishers’ associations that makes space for those involved with books for young people. Founded in Paris in 1896, it now has its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Comprising eighty-​six associations from seventy-​one countries across the globe, IPA has a wide reach, involving consultative status and regular meetings with international organizations including the UN and the World Trade Organization. Similarly, the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL, www.iasl-​onl​ine.org) was founded in 1971 and has members in fifty-​two countries, many of whom are involved with national school library associations. With a strong focus on encouraging best practice in school libraries, the association deems encouraging and promoting reading through school libraries to be a valuable part of its remit.

Book Fairs Publishers are major participants in international book fairs. While, not unexpectedly, there is a commercial aspect to these fairs, their influence usually extends well beyond sales figures. International and local book fairs provide a common meeting ground for book people, and transnationally, book fairs have been growing during the twenty-​first century. Book fairs are influential on what eventually percolates down to the reader: coming trends may be observed as many of the titles on display tend to be some time away from reaching the bookshops, and it is often at book fairs that authors and illustrators meet the publishers or agents who will bring their work to the marketplace for the first time, or who through the sales of rights will bring their work to international audiences. Major international fairs at which children’s books have a noticeable presence include fairs in Frankfurt, Lagos, London, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, and Guadalajara, Mexico, but the fair with most impact for children’s books is the annual book fair devoted entirely to children’s books held in Bologna each spring.5 When talk of an international children’s book fair to be held in Italy began over fifty years ago, Florence was the suggested venue since the city was home to a flourishing research center with a large children’s literature division and to the Italian section of IBBY. One of the early IBBY congresses had been held in Florence in 1958, but it was Bologna that hosted the congress in 1970. Prior to that meeting, it had already become evident that Florence would not be a suitable venue, and so the first edition of the Bologna Book Fair (BCBF) was launched in the Palazzo Re Enzo from 4 to 12 April 1964. The city of Bologna was well placed to provide a good infrastructure for the fair, with support from the university as well as positive commercial and civic amenities (including a range of excellent restaurants). The first fair was enthusiastically supported by publishers, among them those from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, and in 523

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1965 other publishing houses from Europe and further afield were represented, including firms from Germany, Austria, and Japan. In the following years the success of the fair grew rapidly, necessitating its removal at the end of the 1960s to the newly built trade fair complex on the outskirts of the city. The general run of trade fairs sited in the Bologna complex at the time reflected the rich farmland of Emilia-​Romagna surrounding the city –​farm machinery, agricultural products, and food specialties all featured. Since then the fairground has expanded, and the surrounding area is known as the Fiera District. The status accorded to the Bologna Book Fair internationally and by the city itself is evidence of the significance attached to children’s books. The fair is thronged with publishers selling rights and doing deals and with emerging and established writers and illustrators, and the role of major international children’s book organizations is also evident at the fair. IBBY, the IYL, BIB, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA), and other national and international children’s book organizations all have stands here. They interact with publishers, authors, illustrators, children’s literature scholars and promoters, teachers, and librarians, all of whom visit the fair and use the opportunities presented by it to promote children’s reading, for example by means of the biennial International Children’s Laureate Summit discussed below. A visitor to the Bologna fair is immediately struck by the varying characteristics of the exhibition halls. Major international publishers are concealed behind enormous palisades that may only be breached by appointment, while small publishers or countries struggling to establish a publishing industry warmly welcome passers-​by, sometimes with prosecco and indigenous food specialties. Meanwhile, noise levels vary according to the verbosity of different nationalities in the halls where countries are grouped by region. It seems as if everything connected to children’s books is in Bologna, from the latest trends in garish novelty publications to gloriously illustrated titles that undoubtedly qualify as high art. There is an emphasis on picturebooks and illustration; the fair’s walkways are thronged with illustrators toting their artwork in large portfolios, hopeful of finding a publisher or a place in future Illustrators Exhibitions. The illustrations for the exhibitions are chosen by an international jury and are regarded as a means for new illustrators to make their mark. Not only do they have a place in the exhibition, but they are also included in the lavish Bologna Annual. While the fairground is outside the immediate city precincts, location does not stop attendees from enjoying the city’s amenities, and the city itself is an enthusiastic participant in the book fair. Not only do bookshops have displays relating to children’s books, but allusions to Italian and international folktales and popular storybook characters are seen in displays in the windows of shops selling all manner of merchandise. Around Bologna, exhibitions and cultural activities featuring children’s books take place. The university plays a part in organizing these events. Each year a country is chosen as the Guest of Honor at the fair, often giving prominence to the children’s books of a country or region that may not be as well known as they should be. Bologna’s role as a showplace for children’s books is especially important in this respect. For example, books from the global south tend to be overshadowed by the predominance of titles from Anglophone nations with longer publishing traditions. The book fair in this way also acts as a means of promoting these books, the rights to which may be sold following their success in Bologna, thus bringing stories from different cultures to a wider audience of young readers. As well as book trade professionals, adult visitors to the fair include teachers, librarians, and others who work with young people. Visits by authors and illustrators to local schools and libraries take place, all creating a culture of reading in Bologna, and throughout Italy. The BolognaRagazzi (sic) Award was first presented in 1964. This prestigious award has since been joined by other awards, including the Best Children’s Publisher of the Year Award and the Bologna Licensing Award, reminding us that the Bologna Book Fair is a trade fair and giving recognition to its commercial aspects while honoring excellence. In 2018 the fair received the international 524

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Eric Carle Honor in the “Bridge” category, for having “successfully brought together books and publishers from around the world, creating a global audience and strengthening international bonds across cultures” (www.carl​emus​eum.org). Every two years the Bologna Book Fair hosts an international “laureates’ summit,” enabling the transnational exchange of information about promotional activities and publicizing the role of the children’s books laureates. The post of a laureate for children’s books was first instituted in the United Kingdom in 1999, and the first British Children’s Laureate was veteran illustrator and author Quentin Blake. Other countries followed suit, sometimes using the term Ambassador rather than Laureate. The main role of the holders of the post is to promote children’s books and reading, in particular books from their own regions. This responsibility usually involves attending and initiating events, and many laureates develop special promotional projects for their terms in office. As well as working with young readers, laureates may attend conferences and book fairs mainly aimed at adults, where they speak about the importance of bringing children and quality literature together. Across the world from Bologna, the Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair (CCBF) has grown in popularity and status since its establishment in 2003. A growing emphasis on children’s reading for pleasure as well as for pedagogy drives the fair. Links with the Bologna Book Fair have been established, and exhibitors include publishers from overseas as well as the growing number of indigenous Chinese publishers. Outreach to those unable to attend is an important part of the fair, and includes live streaming and short videos highlighting the books on show and talks by authors, illustrators, publishers, and other children’s book people. Links are also made with over twenty Chinese cities, allowing wider participation in reading activities.

Awards Children’s book awards stimulate interest in children’s books, and the sticker on a book jacket proclaiming that the title has won an award is often a means of increasing sales –​and possible readership. This practice is now recognized widely, and awards abound at local and national levels. IBBY’s Hans Christian Andersen Award, sometimes referred to as the “little Nobel Prize,” is the highest international recognition given to creators of children’s books. The biennial Andersen Medals are presented to an author and to an illustrator whose complete works have made an important and lasting contribution to children’s literature. Nominees are proposed by IBBY sections, and winners are selected by a jury of international experts in children’s literature. The award for writing was first presented in 1956 to the British author Eleanor Farjeon, and the award for illustration was first presented in 1966 to the Swiss illustrator Alois Carigiet. A gold medal is presented to each winner at the biennial IBBY congress. The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA, www.alma.se) was created in 2002 by the Swedish government to promote every child’s right to great stories. This global award is given annually to a person or organization for their outstanding contribution to children’s and young adult literature. With a prize of five million Swedish kronor, financially it is the largest award of its kind. Many children’s book awards are constructed with the aim of promoting books written, illustrated, or published in the country where the award originates. However, the James Krüss Prize for International Children’s and Youth Literature, organized by the IYL and first presented in 2013, is an exception. If the work is not originally written in German, the translator is also honored by the award (www.ijb.de). The Arbeitskreis für Jugendliteratur (www.juge​ndli​tera​tur.org) is responsible for another German award, which also recognizes books from outside Germany, with the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Youth Literature Award). The awards are presented in five categories and are financed by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. 525

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Nami Island is a small island near Seoul, South Korea. Designated a UNICEF Child Friendly Park, it is a popular ecotourism destination for families. Every two years an international children’s book festival, the Nambook Festival (www.namb​ookf​esti​val.com), takes place on the island. The announcement of the winner of the International Illustrators Concours, or Nami Concours, is a feature of the event, and exhibitions and activities for young readers are run in conjunction with the awards, which are made to picturebooks of outstanding quality in the estimation of the panel of international judges. The Grand Prix is the major award, and subsidiary awards are also presented. Nami Island is the current sponsor of IBBY’s Hans Christian Andersen Award. As Ramona Caponegro and Kenneth Kidd discuss at greater length in their chapter in this volume, sometimes children are directly involved in these awards, sitting on junior juries or participating in shadowing schemes. The organizers or sponsors of most of the awards cited here also provide workshops, exhibitions, lectures, seminars, and other activities around the award for both adults and children, thereby promoting quality in writing and illustration and encouraging young people to see children’s books in the context of excellence. Part of the interest in awards involves the conversation around who the winner(s) will be. Sometimes the results are controversial, creating heated discussions about who has won and increasing the promotional opportunities for the book. Lists of winners of these awards provide important insights into the history and development of children’s literature over the years and are an ongoing basis for research.

Conclusion Book promotion and children’s reading is an evasive topic, hard to measure and even difficult to qualify at times. But judging by the amount of activity that surrounds the bringing together of books and children, there is no lack of belief in its importance and its success. Countries around the world support national organizations promoting children’s books and reading, and museums and libraries are exclusively devoted to collecting and promoting children’s books, frequently linking with each other to exchange information and work cooperatively. The number of international and national book fairs and festivals is constantly increasing. Two major international children’s book fairs in Bologna and Shanghai are growing each year in conjunction with reading promotion activities in their wider communities, and much of the space at the Rio de Janeiro fair, and at other international fairs, is increasingly dedicated to children’s books. Both Brazil’s large publishing industry and overseas publishers support reading promotion events throughout Rio during the fair, including activities with disadvantaged children in the city. As well as the major fairs, more local children’s book fairs and festivals, such as the International Children’s Book Day Festival in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, offer increasing opportunities for the promotion of aesthetic quality in children’s books, and of leisure time reading as a worthwhile activity. In countries such as Cambodia where economics or history have led to low literacy levels, the emphasis is often on acquiring skills rather than providing enrichment and enjoyment through reading. Here, as elsewhere, teachers, librarians, publishers, and NGOs are working hard to establish greater access to quality children’s books across all societal levels. Children in crisis situations are concerns of many children’s book activists involved with the organizations discussed in this chapter. Read with Me is one of the many international projects supported by IBBY and other international donors. Implemented by the Institute for Research on the History of Children’s Literature in Iran, for over ten years it has promoted the improvement of language and literacy skills, critical thinking abilities, and a lifelong love of reading in seriously deprived children. To date, over 10,000 volunteers have been trained to work with close to one million children by means of workshops, mostly in remote rural areas of Iran and in some areas of Farsi-​speaking 526

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Afghanistan, using only books of high quality. The workshops are closely monitored, and written reports supply evidence of outstanding success with the children (www.keta​bak.org, www.ibby.org). Most of the international organizations discussed here, as well as themselves directly promoting reading, are conduits and advisors for more local organizations and activities, creating a trickle-​down influence from global to local and from adults to children. While their influence may not always be measurable, there can be no doubt that the organizations discussed above, and many, many others working at a local level, provide access to the invaluable gift for a child that Bennett calls that mysterious hand that comes out of a book to take yours.

Notes 1 For more information on Lepman’s life, see Becchi; Lepman, Bridge and Kinderbuchbrücke. 2 The Author’s Award has been presented since 1956 and the Illustrator’s Award since 1966. The Award consists of a gold medal and a diploma, presented at a ceremony during the IBBY Congress. 3 For more information on Bookbird, see Coghlan and Freeman. 4 A detailed account of BIB appears in Story. 5 Giorgia Grilli’s Bologna: Fifty Years of Children’s Books from Around the World is a book-​length account of this fair.

Works Cited Becchi, Anna. “The Many Lives of Jella Lepman.” Bookbird, vol. 60, no. 1, 2022, pp. 105–​109. Coghlan, Valerie, and Evelyn Freeman. Bookbird: A Flight Through Time. Basel: Bookbird, Inc., 2021. Grilli, Giorgia. Bologna: Fifty Years of Children’s Books from Around the World. Bononia University Press, 2013. Lepman, Jella. A Bridge of Children’s Books. 1969. Translated by Edith McCormick, O’Brien Press, 2002. —​—​—​. Die Kinderbuchbrücke. Edited by the International Youth Library in collaboration with Anna Becchi, Antje Kunstmann, Verlag, 2020. Sieghart, William. The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried-​and-​True Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul, Penguin Books/​Particular Books, 2017. Story of BIB. Half-​a-​Century of Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava in Memoirs. Bratislava: BIBIANA, 2015.

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43 CENSORSHIP AND SHIFTING CONTEXTS IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Andrew Zalot

Censorship is often considered a singular act, but as Emily Knox outlines in her book Foundations of Intellectual Freedom, in fact it “can be understood as a constellation of practices” (5). Censorship practices are not separate from censorship; rather, they encompass a number of different actions relating to censorship and illustrate the broad nature of the subject. Nor does censorship fall within a specific space on the political spectrum, as both conservatives and liberals engage in censorship practices, though with differing motivations. For both sides, at the center of censorship is the status quo: traditional values, sexual norms, and other ideals that have persisted in society over the years. Conservative censorship practices are grounded in the preservation of the status quo by limiting access to literature that threatens to change it. Conversely, those who censor from a progressive perspective do so with the intention of doing away with the status quo to achieve a more equitable world. A major censorship practice affecting children’s literature is the book challenge. Book challenges occur when an individual expresses concern (either formally or informally) over the content or messages of a title and issues a complaint to the library or school where it was found. While the focus of this chapter is on the intersection of children’s literature, publishing, and censorship practices, book challenges merit mention due to their prevalence in spaces where children’s literature is consumed. The primary case study through which this chapter discusses this intersection consists of an examination of the 2021 removal from publication of six titles by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel). The Seuss case illustrates many of the issues at play in censorship in children’s literature and some of its potential implications. It should be noted that while this chapter concentrates on censorship in the global north, specifically the United States, censorship has persisted across regions and through millennia. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a definition of the term in relation to the office of the ancient Roman censor, which dealt with the monitoring of morality; to this day, censorship as an institutional practice is frequently deployed as a means of control beyond literature. One should be aware as well that perceptions and deployments of censorship differ from region to region. Policies relating to freedom of expression vary by country (see China’s filtering policies, for example), and while this chapter focuses on censorship within an American context, issues relating to freedom of expression are by no means unique to the United States.1 The influence of reading on children is of particular interest when discussing the intersection of censorship and children’s literature. J. A. Appleyard’s Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood points out that child readers are exposed to a multitude of titles

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growing up, with adults typically providing access and guidance to new books (22). Appleyard goes on to describe the child reader between the ages of seven and twelve as one who seeks out books that provide information about the world. For adults, where children are getting their information is important because of the potential it could have in shaping their perception of the world around them. As such, significant attention is often paid toward curating the books children have access to, most notably in schools and libraries. These sites can be sources of concern for some adults because they leave the choice of books, and by extension the dissemination of information, in the hands of other adults. Accordingly, some engaged parents turn to challenging the material their children find in libraries or schools if they find that the ideas in the books their children read conflict with their values. The child reader Appleyard describes is one whose view of the world is shaped by books, and so it is unsurprising that adults may attempt to control how this worldview is developed.

History and Motives: Who Censors and Why? The motivations around censorship in children’s literature have shifted over the years, but what has remained within the discourse is a desire to maintain control over what ideas children take away from reading. An examination of Victorian America offers a look at how social status played a significant role in monitoring what children were reading. Concern over children’s reading material in the nineteenth century was based on the notion that literate children were meant to inherit the values of their parents, with the intention of advancing or maintaining their social class. Nicola Beisel constructs an image of late nineteenth-​century censors as concerned adults aiming to protect children from material they deemed harmful (8). She describes adults of the middle and working classes, in particular, as seeking to ensure better futures for their children by teaching them good values in hopes that they would be able to rise socially. As such, the desire to pass down values led to an emphasis on instilling morality in children and to a push for censorship during the late nineteenth century. Anthony Comstock’s morality crusades in the later part of the nineteenth century are also worth noting here, as his rhetoric in pushing for censorship frequently appealed to fears of children being “corrupted.” Comstock, a United States Postal Inspector, was a major figure in the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; Beisel argues that he followed much of the rhetoric of censors at the time by engaging in censorship practices with the goal of curating family reproduction among the middle and upper classes (53).2 Beisel’s assessment of nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century American censorship as a variety of moral reform illuminates the intentions of censors today. Across time, censors view their efforts to control what children read as a way to ensure the preservation of values or to enact change. Cases of book challenges in the present suggest that many are motivated by the former desire. Loretta Gaffney’s Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism offers a profile of conservative censors, and while her monograph focuses on young adult literature, it is useful in considering how censorship is discussed in children’s literature. For conservative censors, children’s engagement with texts advocating changes in the status quo can be a source of distress; for progressive censors, the aim is rather to diminish children’s encounters with texts that seem overly attached to values deemed outmoded. In both cases, one may discern a twenty-​first-​century version of the “moral reform” described by Beisel, since the assumption is that when a child reads books dealing with contentious social issues in a way that the gatekeeper approves, that child is developing an “improved” perspective on the world, whereas children (and society) should be shielded against absorbing a less desired perspective. Knox offers an examination of the history behind book banning and explores how books are challenged in library spaces. She finds that people who challenge books perceive those books as containing a singular meaning, making anyone who reads an offending title vulnerable to harmful ideas (Foundations 57).3 The prospect of children absorbing what they perceive to be progressive indoctrination is a disturbing one for conservative censors, often resulting in pushes 529

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for books to be removed from school or public library shelves or curricula; conversely, progressive censors may be moved to similar action by the perception that a text is patriarchal, colonialist, and/​or racist. The motivation of censors in the present day thus resembles that of censors in the past, in that both are focused on the social status quo. Daniel Haack’s Prince & Knight (2018) stands as one example of a challenged title that touches on a topic that many conservatives deem inappropriate for children: LGBTQ relationships. A work of children’s fantasy, Haack’s book follows a prince who falls in love with a knight, with the two marrying and receiving support from the rest of the kingdom. The book met a warm reception in progressive circles due to its positive depiction of a gay romance for a young audience. However, the book received pushback from other adults who claimed that it espoused problematic values. In 2019, the book was challenged in West Virginia after a pastor found a copy of it in a county library, writing in a now-​deleted Facebook post after a meeting with the library’s director that “[t]‌his book [is] a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children, especially boys, into the LGBTQA lifestyle” (Milton). Following the complaint, the book was removed from the library in question, after which further pushback from LGBTQ groups and the community led to its eventual return to shelves. The pastor’s language when challenging Prince & Knight clearly reflects the notion that the book functions as a corrupting influence on children. His use of the term “indoctrinate” merits attention, as it reflects a common thread among challenges to contemporary children’s books. As Beisel’s evaluation of censors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates, and as noted above, censorship of children’s literature has often been guided by a desire to ensure the persistence or acquisition of values deemed moral by adults. In the case of the challenge against Haack’s book, the perception that children shouldn’t be exposed to relationships that are not heterosexual in nature was the guiding motivation when the pastor complained to the library. This issue has become a recurring theme in cases of censorship in contemporary children’s literature, as a greater willingness from publishers to distribute LGBTQ children’s books has led to an increase in LGBTQ literature in school and public libraries and in turn resistance from conservatives. The American Library Association (ALA)’s 2019 list of the most challenged titles includes eight titles containing LGBTQ characters or themes (Hauser); in 2021, the figure was six out of ten. Press coverage of a school board hearing in Virginia on the inclusion of LGBTQ literature in the curriculum provides further illustration of how censors respond to themes in literature they deem problematic. Prince & Knight (also appearing on the ALA’s 2019 list) was one of several LGBTQ titles challenged after the district included the texts in its classroom libraries program (Van Slooten). A parent at the board meeting contended that while many of the books chosen for the program were appropriate in their representation of diverse voices, several LGBTQ titles “go beyond highlighting the diversity in our world, they instruct on a value system of gender and sexuality that go[es] directly against our family’s biblical beliefs.” The parent’s mention of a “value system” recalls the pastor’s claims in the previously mentioned challenge to Haack’s book in West Virginia and serves as a reminder that many adults aim to pass on their values to younger generations. While those pushing for the censorship of texts might argue that they are doing so in order to protect children from harmful material, censorship also operates as a means of protecting their values. The flip side of resistance to titles deemed too progressive for youth among conservatives is a desire to protect certain authors and their works from being “cancelled.” While a full discussion of “cancel culture” is beyond the scope of this chapter, the term merits examination, as it is often used in combination with censorship in describing authors whose works or character come under scrutiny from the public.4 This point is particularly relevant in children’s literature, as pushes for more diverse works have led to discourse around how legacy authors are understood in modern social contexts. Famed children’s book author Dr. Seuss is one such case, and as the following section discusses, the discourse around Seuss’s works illustrates the many reactions that can arise when an author’s works are reappraised. 530

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Academic Discourse: A Call for Change While the public discourse around Seuss and censorship is a relatively new issue, occurring most prominently in 2021, critiques of problematic elements of Seuss’s works have been an ongoing subject in academia, with the mid-​2000s to 2010s serving as a period of particular scrutiny. Philip Nel’s Was The Cat in the Hat Black? explores depictions of racism in children’s literature and provides a thorough look at the complicated history of Seuss. In the first chapter, “The Strange Career of the Cat in the Hat,” Nel focuses on illustrations in several Seuss books that stereotype Asians and African Americans. Nel observes that despite Seuss’s progressive leanings, the use of racist caricatures complicates perceptions of the author, with many of them appearing in his works even after he condemned prejudice in other pieces (37). Discussing the significance of Seuss in popular culture, Nel writes that “Racial caricature’s overt and covert presence in Seuss’s work is key to understanding not just his moral and artistic legacies but the ways in which America’s past persists in the present” (64). Nel’s observation is particularly important considering the tension that can take place when historically popular authors are found to have included problematic content in their works. As I detail below, Seuss’s popularity across multiple generations of readers is often cited as a reason to resist critiques against him. Nel concludes his chapter on Seuss by describing his somewhat tense interactions with the publishing arm of the Seuss estate, Dr. Seuss Enterprises. Nel describes a biography he wrote on Seuss for an official website, whose publisher asked him to remove from his draft mention of Seuss’s use of Asian or African American stereotypes. Given the history detailed in his book, Nel theorizes that much of the resistance he encountered from Seuss Enterprises reveals “the desire to ignore the complicated legacy of race in Seuss’s work” (65). Nel goes on to consider the financial motivations at play in the publisher’s efforts to draw attention away from discourse around Seuss and race, as public perception of a beloved author could suffer as a result of too many complaints. Nel is not the only scholar whose work has commented on Seuss’s problematic history; a 2019 article by Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens offers a further look at the author’s works. “The Cat IS Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-​Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books” examines the racist imagery that the authors find across Seuss’s works and the implications of keeping Seuss in the literary canon. Ishizuka and Stephens argue that while some of Seuss’s works, such as The Sneetches (1953/​1961), are often referenced as exemplars in promoting antiracism, the racist imagery found in other Seuss texts complicates this perspective (1). Despite Seuss Enterprises’ efforts to preserve Seuss’s image in the eyes of the public, scholars’ highlighting of hitherto overlooked content in his works arguably drew sufficient attention that the company would eventually have to address these critiques. Nel’s speculation as to whether or not Seuss Enterprises would ever be willing to confront the author’s problematic history ultimately came to a head just a few years after his book appeared, when Seuss’s publisher decided to pull six titles from circulation. In a statement issued on 2 March 2021, Seuss Enterprises wrote that with counsel from a number of experts and educators, they had “reviewed [their] catalog of titles and made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of the following titles: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer.” Having concluded that “[t]‌hese books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” the company announced that taking the six titles out of print would serve as a step toward promoting inclusivity in children’s literature. Seuss Enterprises’s statement makes no mention of scholarly discourse in discussing the reasons for removing the titles, but it is very possible that critiques from Nel, Ishizuka, Stephens, and others played a role in the decision. As one of the leading Seuss scholars, Nel was asked to provide his perspective on the announcement, commenting in an article for The Guardian that “Dr. Seuss Enterprises has made a moral decision of choosing not to profit from work with racist caricatures in it and they have taken responsibility for the art they are putting into the world” (Helmore). 531

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Nel’s previous speculation that the publisher was initially reluctant to address Seuss’s more problematic illustrations merits discussion here, as one must consider shifting social contexts and the increased discourse around diversity in children’s literature. Beyond his interactions with the Seuss estate, Nel describes in his book cases where Seuss Enterprises used copyright law to protect the image of the late author against parody and satire (65). Nel’s discussion of this legal protection doesn’t connect to any of the six recalled titles, but I mention it because it contextualizes Seuss Enterprises’s decision. The Seuss estate is clearly adamant about preserving the author’s image in order to sell books, and distancing themselves from the six titles is one way of doing this. Critiques from scholars extend beyond the six titles and often include more popular works such as The Cat in the Hat, suggesting that Seuss Enterprises’s aim might have been to direct attention away from the author’s more profitable titles. The statement from Seuss Enterprises emphasizes inclusivity in children’s literature as one of the guiding principles behind their decision, a belief echoed by many in the field. Carol Doll and Kasey Garrison note in their article “Creating Culturally Relevant Collections to Support the Common Core” the importance of providing children with literature that provides accurate representations of other cultures and avoids stereotypes (14). As this discourse has carried over to the public consciousness, publishers have seemingly taken notice of it as well. Seuss Enterprises does not say outright that public perception of Seuss was one of the motivations behind the decision to remove the six titles from publication. However, the increased push for culturally conscious children’s literature offers a potential answer for the publisher’s eventual willingness to address the critiques.

Public Discourse One of the first questions that arose following the announcement from Seuss Enterprises was what would happen to copies of the six titles held by the public. As Knox writes, active censorship takes many forms,5 with removal from a specific venue (usually by some entity such as a library or school board) a type commonly associated with the term (Book 6). By some definitions, pressuring a publisher to halt production of offending books does not qualify as censorship because currently available copies were not recalled or destroyed. However, some may disagree with this assessment since there will not be any future copies available for purchase; a library wanting to replace a worn copy, say, will not be able to do so. While the Seuss case does not necessarily constitute a case of censorship as the term is commonly defined (books fall out of print on a regular basis, though not always for ideological reasons), it is undeniable that the discourse around the books’ removal is representative of adult interest across the political spectrum in controlling what children are reading. In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, the auction site eBay noted that its terms and conditions forbid the sale of offensive material, resulting in listings for the six titles being pulled (Werth) –​ which could qualify as an example of “removal” censorship. Conversely, online retailer Amazon has allowed the sale of the books to continue, with copies being accessible through third-​party sellers. The secondary market has necessarily become the venue through which copies of the book are most commonly obtained, with the six titles’ taboo nature sending them to the top of the Amazon bestseller list in the week following the Seuss Enterprises announcement (Spangler). Amid the rush to purchase remaining copies of the titles, some have made efforts to preserve the books online. BannedSeuss. com was created by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism to preserve the texts and protect the titles from censorship (Garrett). While the website is now defunct, presumably to avoid copyright issues with Seuss Enterprises, the surge in purchases of the six books points to a desire for preservation as one common reaction from the public in the aftermath of the Seuss Enterprises announcement. For librarians, the Seuss announcement creates a question of whether or not to engage in self-​ censorship. In the wake of the high-​profile decision from Seuss Enterprises, many libraries had to decide quickly whether or not to remove the titles from their collections. In the case of a Chicago 532

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library, for example, the decision was made almost immediately to pull the books from shelves, with a statement from the library noting that this move would be a temporary solution until a long-​term decision on the books could be made (ABC Chicago Digital Team). Libraries in Denver and New York City, however, chose to keep the titles on shelves, citing beliefs in protecting intellectual freedom (O’Kane). The decision to pull or retain the titles is a complex one, as an interview with the ALA’s Deborah Stone notes; Stone points out that it is often very difficult to outright remove problematic titles and that a more common approach is to place them in less prominent spaces with no promotion (Pratt). The complexity of the issue is made apparent in the statements produced by libraries asked to weigh in on the topic, with many noting that upholding intellectual freedom must be balanced with ensuring that children are exposed to diverse and socially beneficial titles. As Eliza Dresang writes in an article on intellectual freedom, the subject carries a number of tensions for libraries (170). The Denver Public Library’s statement references the ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement, specifically that “it is contrary to the public interest for publishers or librarians to bar access to writings on the basis of the personal history or political affiliations of the author” (ALA). The ALA’s A History of ALA Policy on Intellectual Freedom describes the Freedom to Read Statement as a document developed by the ALA in 1953 to provide broader guidance on how libraries address intellectual freedom (Magi et al.). Toni Samek’s monograph on the history of intellectual freedom in the mid-​1900s provides further context to the development of intellectual freedom policies in libraries, noting that tension can come between intellectual freedom and professional neutrality (5). Stone contends that addressing the Seuss controversy while considering the Freedom to Read Statement is a matter for individual libraries and often depends on the demands of the local community (Schwartz). This decentralized approach also explains the differing responses from librarians interviewed by news media. Despite assertions from various experts on intellectual freedom that the removal of the six titles was not a case of censorship, conservatives did not see the matter in that light. While Knox observes in an interview with The Washington Post that even as authors fall out of public favor their books tend to remain in circulation, several prominent conservative figures in the United States found that the Seuss case directly affected the circulation of the works involved (Haupt). Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr., for instance, responded to the Seuss Enterprises announcement with claims that Seuss was being “canceled” by liberals in the media and government (Shalvey). The use of the term “cancel” is of particular significance, as it is frequently deployed alongside “censorship” in cases where a work or its creator is reassessed. Following the announcement, Pennsylvania congressman John Joyce condemned the decision, introducing the GRINCH Act intended to “prohibit taxpayer dollars from funding bureaucrats’ attempts to censor children’s literature and determine what our kids are permitted to read” (Joyce). Joyce’s initiative is rather ironic, given the history of conservative politics driving the removal of books from schools or libraries in many cases, but it is his deployment of the term “censorship” to describe what Seuss Enterprises did that merits further examination. Given that the publisher’s authority extended only to halting publication of the works and that even had it wanted to, it could hardly issue a directive to institutions to remove all copies from their sites, some scholars were quick to deny the applicability of the term “censorship” to this case. In an interview with The Washington Post, for instance, Nel responds to the claims of censorship by pointing out that while the books are no longer being printed, “No government agent has yet appeared at my door demanding that I surrender my copies” (Strauss). While he notes correctly that the six Seuss books are still present in the world, Nel provides an exaggerated version of what a book banning in the United States would look like, although there are indeed many documented cases worldwide of literature being destroyed en masse as a means of censorship.6 Moreover, libraries, for example, can engage in censorship practices depending on how they choose to address the controversy surrounding the Seuss books.7 While progressives vigorously reject conservatives’ claims that the Seuss books 533

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were censored (just as conservatives reject similar claims about challenges to titles such as Prince & Knight), the use of the term does provide an opportunity to discuss how to define the removal of the six books, as the terms many have used to describe the situation are not entirely compatible. Furthering of the claims of cancellation after the six titles were removed from publication came from the perception that the United States government was distancing itself from Seuss. Conservative political figures proclaiming Seuss’s “cancellation” by liberals directed criticism toward the White House during Read Across America Day (READ), the same day as the announcement from Seuss Enterprises. Founded in 1998 by the National Education Association (NEA), READ is celebrated on 2 March, Seuss’s birthday, although the author is not directly connected to the event. As part of the Day, the President will typically make a proclamation. Seuss’s name was absent from President Joe Biden’s proclamation during READ in 2021, providing conservatives with ammunition for the claim that Seuss had been “canceled” by liberals, although as journalist Seren Morris pointed out in Newsweek, the tradition of mentioning Seuss dated back only to Barack Obama’s presidency and was always “unofficial.” It also merits mention that in his 2022 proclamation for READ, Biden specifically mentions Seuss, referring to several of his works as “children’s classics.” Moreover, the NEA had not partnered with Seuss Enterprises since 2019 after shifting READ’s focus toward elevating diverse voices in children’s literature (Long). The attention given to Biden’s proclamation speaks to the political tensions inflecting the larger conversation on censorship and “cancellation.”

The Discourse of “Censorship” and Alternative Terms Looking at the timeline of events leading up to the announcement from Seuss Enterprises in 2021, it is clear that the removal of the six Seuss titles should be seen in the context of the campaign urging a greater emphasis on diverse voices in children’s literature.8 Evaluating an author’s works in new social contexts can raise complex issues, which can in turn give rise to new terminology designed to clarify and shape the discourse around censorship. The first term that merits examination is “self-​censorship,” which is sometimes deployed within librarianship to describe a restriction of information in anticipation of how patrons might react to material. Linda Jacobson writes that many librarians begin to self-​censor after experiencing a challenge from a patron, as the experience can leave them shaken and worried that their collection decisions might receive further pushback. Self-​ censorship is not a new issue for librarianship, as Marjorie Fiske’s Book Selection and Censorship (1959) shows that many librarians have struggled with addressing controversial materials for some time now. Writing on Fiske’s findings and other studies on self-​censorship, Ellie Collier writes that “our private practice still struggles with the same issues of social and community pressures, personal values and professional purpose” (Collier). It is evident that a number of factors can influence one’s decision to self-​censor, and as coverage of library responses to the Seuss announcement show, every library will address controversial materials in its own way. Like librarians determining what titles are kept in a collection, anxiety over potential reactions from the public is certainly something that publishers contend with during the prepublication stage. Titles can be pulled from publication for a multitude of reasons, with content and the contexts surrounding the work being some of the most common issues. David Díaz, a Caldecott Medal winner, was set to be the illustrator for Mario and the Hole in the Sky: How a Chemist Saved Our Planet, which was originally scheduled to be released in early 2018. After allegations of sexual harassment at a conference came to light, Díaz was dropped from the American edition and replaced by Teresa Martinez, with publisher Charlesbridge writing in a statement that “Our hope is that the decision to re-​illustrate will give the book every opportunity to find readers and make a difference” (Yorio). Based on the publisher’s reaction, it would appear that Diaz was dropped not over fears that readers would emulate his actions but rather as a gesture from the publisher to show that sexual harassers would not be tolerated in its space. While one could label the publisher’s decision self-​censorship because of 534

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the anticipation of consumer pushback, the term does not adequately describe it because Diaz was not dropped wholly from the project; in some instances outside the American market, the title was released with his illustrations. There is value, however, in considering the term because its emphasis on self-​monitoring reflects something publishers are increasingly engaged in. Another term to consider in examining the Seuss case is “recall.” Used by a few news publications to describe what happened to the books, the term is typically associated with the idea of a product that has some defect, leading to an announcement from its maker to halt the product’s sale (Gatluak). To some extent, “recall” is useful in describing what the publisher did, as when Seuss Enterprises issued their statement, they distanced themselves from the books by declaring that the six titles were not in line with the messages they wanted Seuss’s books to promote, in effect issuing a “recall” of the messaging found in the books’ illustrations. But unlike what happens in a product recall, consumers are not being asked to return the book to stores for a full refund or some other form of compensation. As an added layer to the suitability of using “recall” as a term, one must also note that the books have been in publication for several decades now, whereas typically a product recall takes place within a relatively short period of time after the product’s release. With that being said, it is useful to consider the implications of a publisher recall, as it suggests that the company is concerned that a title may be damaging to consumers, connecting back to Appleyard’s writing on the influence of literature on children. In the case of Seuss, a more accurate way of describing the situation might be to understand it as a symbolic rather than literal recall. A discussion on censorship in our era would not be complete without further considering the deployment of the term “cancel culture.” As noted above, when the Seuss books were taken out of print, conservative commentators often invoked “cancel culture” to describe what had happened, arguing that liberal pressure had effectively resulted in the “canceling” of Dr. Seuss. As Benjamin Wallace-​Wells puts it in an article for The New Yorker, the idea of cancel culture reflects the “fear that even ordinary people who express ideas that are politically incorrect will be publicly shamed –​ that social media has enabled universal speech surveillance, and that people and institutions are now self-​policing” (Wallace-​Wells). An important thing to consider with regard to the Seuss case is that although scholarly discourse had already demonstrated an interest in addressing the problematic aspects of Seuss’s legacy, discussion by the public was largely absent until Seuss Enterprises issued their announcement. At that point, indeed, sales of the author’s titles actually saw an increase among collectors scenting future scarcity and Seuss aficionados rallying to his defense (Berg), so the notion that the author (as opposed to the titles) has been “canceled” because of the announcement is difficult to justify. It may also be productive to consider a different term: “reappraisal.” Like several of the other terms discussed, it is not a perfect word to describe the Seuss situation, but it does take into account the importance of shifting social contexts as an influence on publishers. For Seuss Enterprises, an increasing awareness of historical contexts surrounding authors in the public sphere appears to have become something they realized that they needed to develop in order to maintain Seuss’s positive image. As Nel outlines in his chapter on The Cat in the Hat, there was intentionality in the publisher’s whitewashing of the author’s legacy prior to the announcement in 2021. Seuss Enterprises has not attributed their decision to scholarly or public pressure, but their shift away from endorsing the six works shows that some form of reflection took place over the curation of Seuss’s oeuvre. As more publishers begin to evaluate their authors’ social and historical contexts, it may be productive to consider reappraisal as a way to understand how public influence affects a publisher’s willingness to make changes. Reappraisal may not be the term scholarship settles on to describe this new emphasis by publishers, but it is useful to think about how society understands retroactive evaluations of works with nostalgic appeal. Children’s literature has continued to grapple with issues of censorship over the years, with the contexts and motivators continuing to shift but with a continual focus on the perceived protection 535

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of children. As the Seuss case demonstrates, discourse around the need for more diverse children’s books has pushed publishers to reconsider their willingness to stand behind works or authors seen as promulgating racist messages. Sarah Park Dahlen’s article “ ‘We Need Diverse Books’: Diversity, Activism, and Children’s Literature” details the push for diversity in children’s literature against a history of books written predominantly by white authors (83–​85). Seuss Enterprises and others aim to maintain good faith with their customers, particularly in children’s literature, since children tend to read far more than their adult and adolescent counterparts and are also considered more likely to be influenced by the texts they consume (Appleyard 33). Ultimately, children’s literature will always feel the presence of censorship as the reading habits of children are monitored by concerned parents and other adults. What scholarship must continue to consider is the role adult influence plays in the child reader’s experience, whether it is at the parent or the publisher level.

Notes 1 Resources relating to censorship beyond the United States can be found through Freedom House and the Index of Censorship. 2 For a deeper look into the history of censors and their motivations in the past few decades, see Paul Boyer’s Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age. 3 Additional writings on the history of censorship can be found in Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva’s Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression. 4 Eve Ng’s Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis offers a more thorough examination of the subject. 5 Knox refers here to the “4 Rs” of censorship practices: redaction, restriction, relocation, and removal. 6 Freedom to Read offers a timeline illustrating notable cases of burnings and bannings throughout history. In addition, Mateusz Świetlicki’s chapter in the present volume provides further information on legal limitations governing LGBTQ+​literature in Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. 7 A more thorough discussion of censorship practices appears in Knox’s Foundations of Intellectual Freedom. 8 Additional reading on publishing and children’s literature can be found in Michelle Abate’s The Big Smallness.

Works Cited Abate, Michelle Ann. The Big Smallness: Niche Marketing, the American Culture Wars, and the New Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2016. ABC 7 Chicago Digital Team. “Dr. Seuss Controversy Reaches Local Shelves as Chicago Public Library Pulls 6 Books over Racist, Insensitive Imagery.” ABC7 Chicago, 10 March 2021, https://​abc7​chic​ago.com/​ 10403​192/​. Alter, Alexandra, and Elizabeth A. Harris. “Dr. Seuss Books Are Pulled, and a ‘Cancel Culture’ Controversy Erupts.” The New York Times, 4 March 2021, www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​03/​04/​books/​dr-​seuss-​books.html. American Library Association. “The Freedom to Read Statement.” American Library Association, 26 July 2006, www.ala.org/​advoc​acy/​int​free​dom/​freed​omre​adst​atem​ent. —​—​—​. “Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists.” Advocacy, Legislation and Issues, 26 March 2013, www.ala. org/​advoc​acy/​bbo​oks/​freque​ntly​chal​leng​edbo​oks/​top10. American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom, et al. Intellectual Freedom Manual. 10th ed., ALA Editions, 2021. Appleyard, J. A. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Atkins, Robert, and Svetlana Mintcheva, eds. Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression. New Press, 2006. Beisel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton University Press, 1997. Berg, Madeline. “The Dr. Seuss Empire Is Only Getting Bigger After Discontinued Books Send Sales Soaring.” Forbes, www.forbes.com/​sites/​mad​dieb​erg/​2021/​03/​03/​the-​dr-​seuss-​emp​ire-​is-​only-​gett​ing-​big​ger-​after-​ discontinued-​books-​send-​sales-​soar​ing/​.

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Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View. Bloomsbury, 2015. Morris, Seren. “Fact Check: Did Joe Biden Break a Dr. Seuss Tradition on ReadAcrossAmerica Day 2021?” Newsweek, www.newsw​eek.com/​fact-​check-​joe-​biden-​break-​dr-​seuss-​tradit​ion-​read-​across-america-day-1573202. Naidoo, Jamie Campbell, and Sarah Park Dahlen. Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors through Reading. American Library Association, 2013. Nel, Philip. “Can Censoring a Children’s Book Remove Its Prejudices?” Nine Kinds of Pie, https://​phil​nel.com/​ 2010/​09/​19/​censor​ing-​ideol​ogy/​, accessed 12 October 2021. —​—​—​. “Seuss, Racism, and Resources for Anti-​Racist Children’s Literature.” Nine Kinds of Pie, https://​phil​nel. com/​2021/​03/​09/​seuss-​rac​ism-​resour​ces/​, accessed 11 October 2021. —​—​—​. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford University Press, 2017. Ng, Eve. Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. O’Kane, Caitlin. “New York and Denver Public Libraries Aren’t Removing Dr. Seuss Books over Racist Imagery.” CBS News, 4 March 2021, www.cbsn​ews.com/​news/​dr-​seuss-​books-​pub​lic-​librar​ies-​remo​val/​. Pekoll, Kristin. “Bookmarks and Reading Lists.” Beyond Banned Books: Defending Intellectual Freedom throughout Your Library, American Library Association, 2019. Pratt, Mark. “6 Dr. Seuss Books Won’t Be Published for Racist Images.” AP News, 2 March 2021, https://​ apnews.com/​arti​cle/​dr-​seuss-​books-​rac​ist-​ima​ges-​d8ed1​8335​c033​19d7​2f44​3594​c174​513. Reichman, Henry. Censorship and Selection: Issues and Answers for Schools. 3rd ed., American Library Association, 2001. Romano, Aja. “Kicking People off Social Media Isn’t about Free Speech.” Vox, 21 January 2021, www.vox.com/​ cult​ure/​22230​847/​deplat​form​ing-​free-​spe​ech-​cont​rove​rsy-​trump. Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. 3rd ed., Noble and Noble, 1976. Samek, Toni. “The Ethos of Intellectual Freedom.” Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967–​1974, McFarland, 2001, pp. 29–​45. Schwartz, Sarah. “The Dr. Seuss Controversy: What Educators Need to Know.” Education Week, 2 March 2021, www.edw​eek.org/​teach​ing-​learn​ing/​the-​dr-​seuss-​cont​rove​rsy-​what-​educat​ors-​need-​to-​know/​2021/​03. Shalvey, Kevin. “How Much Did Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr.’s Claims of ‘Cancel Culture’ Help Drive Sales of Dr. Seuss Books? Insider Takes a Closer Look.” Business Insider, www.busi​ness​insi​der.com/​ted-​cruz-​ donald-​trump-​jrcan​cel-​cult​ure-​dr-​seuss-​week-​2021-​3. Spangler, Todd. “Dr. Seuss Books Rocket Up Amazon Best-​Selling Books Chart.” Variety, 2 March 2021, https://​ vari​ety.com/​2021/​digi​tal/​news/​dr-​seuss-​books-​ama​zon-​best-​sell​ers-​123​4919​873/​. Strauss, Valerie. “Perspective | Breaking up with Your Favorite Racist Childhood Classic Books.” Washington Post, www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​educat​ion/​2021/​05/​16/​break​ing-​up-​with-​rac​ist-​childr​ens-​books/​. Suleiman, Susan Rubin, and Inge Crosman Wimmers. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton University Press, 1980. Tamez-​Robledo, Nadia. “Librarians Fight Book Bans With Twitter Takeover: EdSurge News.” EdSurge, 18 November 2021, www.edsu​rge.com/​news/​2021-​11-​18-​lib​rari​ans-​fight-​book-​bans-​with-​twit​ter-​takeo​ver. Van Slooten, Philip. “Loudoun County Schools Debate LGBTQ Books in Classroom Libraries.” Washington Blade, 16 November 2019, www.wash​ingt​onbl​ade.com/​2019/​11/​16/​loud​oun-​cou​nty-​scho​ols-​deb​ate-​lgbtq-​ books-​in-​classr​oom-​librar​ies/​. Wallace-​Wells, Benjamin. “Cancel Culture Is Not a Movement.” The New Yorker, 11 March 2021, www. newyorker.com/​news/​ann​als-​of-​popul​ism/​who-​is-​in-​cha​rge-​of-​can​cel-​cult​ure. Watts, Amanda, and Leah Asmelash. “Dr. Seuss: 6 Books Won’t Be Published Anymore Because They Portray People in “Hurtful and Wrong” Ways.” CNN, www.cnn.com/​2021/​03/​02/​us/​dr-​seuss-​books-​cease-​publication-​ trnd/​index.html.

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539

INDEX

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by ‘n’ and the endnote number e.g., 20n1 refers to endnote 1 on page 20. Abate, Michelle 38, 108, 130, 233 Abbott, Jacob 107, 432 academic study of children’s literature: emergence/​ encouragement of 2, 22, 33, 38, 480–​1, 520; parameters of 1, 3, 10, 21, 40, 61, 522 academic writing with children 80–​7 access: to authority 258, 263; to digital content 211, 216–​17, 418, 420, 449, 501; and libraries 491–​3, 495, 497, 529; limitations to 360, 456, 463, 494, 517; and social control 432, 485, 521; widening of 75, 118, 458, 461, 517, 519–​20, 522, 526; see also participation; selection of texts; social media Adams, Gillian 23–​4, 37, 442 adaptation: age-​specific 107, 345, 347, 352, 354–​5, 361; in apps 408; in comics 134, 136; critical potential of 55, 353, 358, 361; cultural function of 30, 354–​5, 359–​61; fidelity in 326, 331, 347, 348, 352, 357; in film 194–​8, 344, 357–​9, 361, 406, 409; ideological 183, 188, 330, 355–6; and moralization 188, 354; rationalization 354; of religious material 271–​2, 331, 394; in theatre 178–​83, 185, 188; thematic amplification in 358–​9; in translation 327–​30, 332, 340–​1, 343, 345–​6, 348, 394, 430, 436 address: to adults 26, 102, 233, 414; to children 25, 27, 97, 118, 121, 123, 191, 327–​8, 345, 509; to different ages 97, 101, 130, 198, 346–​7, 462; racialized 18, 381, 430; see also audience; reader adolescent literature 285, 287–​8, 304, 380 adventure tales 143–​4, 150–​1, 283, 379–​80 aesthetics: children’s response to 157–​8, 162, 204; as criterion in children’s literature 21, 23, 155–​6, 166, 362, 469, 483; gendered 248; pleasure 66, 348; and

taste 15, 29, 64–​6, 397, 481, 507; visual 161, 199, 408 aetonormativity 142, 194, 236, 258, 359; see also ageism African American children’s literature: awards for 467; development of 38–​9, 125, 147, 293, 295; early readers 113, 115; poetry 170, 172–​3; scope of 145, 150 African Storybook Project, the 494–​5 age see adaptation; address; agency; fantasy; old age; relationality; Snow White age norms 231–​6 age studies 229, 231, 235, 237, 246 ageism 83, 230, 234–​7 agency: of children 3, 14, 48, 61–​2, 67, 80–​2, 173, 258, 436, 483; of fictional characters 195, 243, 261–​2, 320–​1; and marginalization 82, 236, 282, 295, 299n5, 436; and media 206, 211, 214, 219, 223; and new materialism 60, 62–​7, 82, 85; of readers 88, 98, 142, 171, 214; see also citizenship; voice Aggleton, Jen 86–​7 Alcott, Louisa May 144, 162n1, 243, 343 Alice books see Dodgson alphabet books 159, 172, 270, 431, 443 American Library Association (ALA): and guidelines 495–​6, 533; and ideology 496–​7, 533; and prizing 467–​8, 470–​1, 475, 491; and professional connections 495, 506, 518; and statistics 497, 530 Andersen, Hans Christian 342, 365–​6, 409; see also Hans Christian Andersen Award Anderson, Benedict 121, 255–​6, 259–​60 animal stories 149, 188, 435, 457, 459 animation see films; television

540

Index appropriation (in translation or adaptation) 342, 346, 353, 357, 374n3 apps for children see story apps archives: digital 42, 70–​4, 420; research in 39, 42, 89, 492 Ariès, Philippe 11, 37, 442 Asian American children’s literature 113, 115, 148, 150, 295, 382–​6 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 261, 524, 525 At Home and Abroad see Wesleyan Juvenile Offering audience: for children’s books 2, 11, 107–​9, 141, 143, 154, 233, 329, 355–​8; for children’s films 191–​4, 198; for children’s theatre 17–​80, 183, 187; for comics 130–​7; and diversity 114, 170, 279, 287, 299, 431–​5; dual 101, 166, 191–​4, 198–​9, 328, 346, 399n11, 462; redefined 107, 354–​7; for television 203–​7, 209; for websites 410, 414, 416–​17; see also address augmented reality (AR) 408, 458, 463 Aunt Judy’s Magazine 119–​20, 123 Australian children’s literature 73, 144, 377, 380–​4; see also individual authors authority 231, 258, 262–​4, 316, 436, 507; see also agency authorship: and authority 12–​14, 169, 407, 420, 446; and gender 36–​7, 72, 166, 243; and marketing 167, 410, 470 autism, representations of 314, 316–​17, 320 Barad, Karen 62, 82, 215, 218 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 29, 166, 403 Baum, L. Frank 314–​15, 323, 325, 416 Beauvais, Clémentine 233, 258, 262, 264 Belpré, Pura 295–​6, 470, 476; see also Pura Belpré Award Berg, Leila 285–​6 Berman, Antoine 341, 347 Bernstein, Robin 38, 69, 196, 230, 299n3, 402 Bialik, Haim Nahmun 390–​7 Bibles/​Bible stories for children 270–​2, 443 Biennial of Illustration Bratislava (BIB) 521–​2 biographies and memoirs 150, 159–​60, 378–​9, 445 Blackman, Malorie 235–​7 Bontemps, Arna 170, 172, 295 book assemblage see rhizome book book clubs: Aoitori 459, 505; Junior Literary Guild (JLG) 505–​8, 511–​13; Le livreur d’histoires 511, 513; Max (L’Ecole des loisir) 505, 508–​13; online 414, 420, 422–3; Puffin 504, 513; Scholastic 504, 508–​9, 513; in Sweden 504–​5, 514n4 book fairs/​festivals: in Asia 457, 460–​1, 525–​6; and book promotion 516, 523, 526; in Europe 523–​5; Scholastic 299, 419, 504 book review sites 410, 420 Bookbird 518–​19, 522 bookstores see distribution BookTok 299, 410, 501

boyhood studies 243, 245, 249, 251 Boy’s Own Paper, The 123 Bradford, Clare 245, 250, 294, 385 branding: and books 405, 454, 499, 510; and consumerism 413, 422; historical 403–​4; and television 210; transmedia 406–​8 Brisac, Nathalie 509–10 Brown, Margaret Wise 41, 102; see also Margaret Wise Brown Board Book Award Brown, Penny 444–​5, 448 Browne, Anthony 158, 243, 250, 348 Brownies’ Book, The 18, 125, 170, 227, 293 Bunyan, John 29, 164, 430, 432, 434 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 315–​16, 323, 349n10 Bustan Arifin 437 Byars, Betsy 318–​19 Caldecott, Randolph 168, 437; see also Randolph Caldecott Medal Campe, Joachim Heinrich 270, 327, 444 Canadian children’s literature: comics and magazines 126, 135; fiction 47, 49, 144, 379; libraries 494, 497, 499, 520; publishers 334, 410; television 207, 218; see also individual authors cancel culture 355, 530, 533–​5 canon: and adaptation/​translation 196–​7, 342, 355, 368; and citizenship 261, 263, 399n26; expansion of 36, 43, 291, 373, 409, 414, 474; formation/​ ratification of 172, 342, 416, 468–​9; in history 33–​4, 165, 168; and libraries 39, 500; and publishing 438, 455, 499 Capshaw Smith, Katharine 38–​9, 172, 293, 492 Caribbean children’s literature 173, 175, 429–30, 432–​5 Carle, Eric 98, 408, 417, 525 Carroll, Lewis see Dodgson, Charles censorship: and authoritarianism 183, 335n4, 347, 395, 444; and cancel culture 24, 347, 530, 534–​5; justifications for 454, 528–​9; and LGBTQ texts 303, 305–​6, 496, 530; and libraries 475, 492–​3, 496–​7, 501, 528, 532, 534; and morality 166, 194, 303, 528–​30; and schools 482, 484, 493, 496, 501, 528; terminology for 534–​5; in translations 330, 345; see also Geisel Ch’oe, Namsŏn 391–​7 Chambers, Aidan 10, 13, 172, 285–​8 chapbooks 143, 167, 281, 355, 443 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory see Dahl Chen, Shih-​Wen Sue 430, 435, 437 childhood studies 3, 80, 229, 231 childhood, discovery of 11–​12 Children’s Literature Legacy/​Laura Ingalls Wilder Award 295, 298 children’s rights 80, 84, 215, 224, 520 China: and production of works for children 436–​7, 454–​8, 525; as subject for English-​language children’s literature 101, 113, 380, 507; and translated texts for children 174, 331, 333, 349n8,

541

Index 430, 433, 436, 438, 459; see also individual authors Christianity: classification of 267, 274; contemporary 272, 274–​6; critiques in 262, 435; nineteenth century 118–​19, 121, 272–​3, 280–​3, 331, 343, 430, 432, 435; pre-​nineteenth century 25, 28–​9, 143, 158, 164–​5, 268–​71, 443–​4, 480; twentieth century 125, 170; see also Bibles for children; missionary work chronotope 47–​8, 51 Cinderella 195, 369–​72 citizenship: children’s education in 89, 204, 255, 257, 260–​1, 263–​4, 495–​6, 508, 512; children’s status in 255, 257–​8, 262, 264, 505; cultural mechanisms in 259–​60, 262–​3, 432; defined 256, 259; see also nation civil rights movement (in United States) 38, 316 Clark, Beverly Lyon 34–​5, 38, 142, 495 classics see canon Collodi, Carlo 195–​8, 448 colonialism: and Anglocentrism 42, 294, 296, 378, 429, 432, 435; and Indigeneity 297, 379–​80; see also empire; imperialism Comenius, Johann Amos 24–​9, 31, 157, 442–​3, 481 comics: and picturebooks 101, 138n4, 356, 408; in the Americas 132–​6; in Asia 136–​7, 461; defining 129–​30; in Europe 134; LGBTQ 306; in libraries 131, 498–​9; see also adaptation; audience; distribution; graphic novels; humor; manga communism 183, 335n4, 344, 372–​3, 374n3; see also socialism consumerism: and digital spaces 418, 421–​3; and franchising 359, 406, 408, 454; participatory 215, 219, 406, 409, 411, 469, 507, 513; and reading 119, 403, 405–​6, 447, 500; see also franchising; marketing convergence culture 334, 403, 411, 422 copyright: expiration of 73, 175, 344; protection 13, 42, 72, 442, 446–​7, 532 Coretta Scott King Award 467, 475–​6 Cottrell-​Boyce, Frank 233–​4 COVID-​19 pandemic: and citizenship 255, 264; and Internet 410, 415, 461, 472; and publishing 455, 511, 513 Cullen, Countee 170, 172 cultural materialism 36–​7

developmental psychology: and children’s literature 143, 157, 244; and stage theories 15–​16, 25, 61, 230 didacticism: as anti-​literary 31, 168, 180, 362, 479–​81, 488; and identity formation 18, 30, 292; and poetics 66, 158, 170; reception of 11, 29–​30, 33, 35, 143, 145, 306, 481; and transmission of values 23–​4, 166–​7, 268–​70, 283, 345, 347, 480–​1 digital scholarship: and critical making 74–​6; and edited texts 72, 75; mapping in 72, 77; and play 69–​71, 74, 76; and 3D printing 75; see also archives; websites disability: agency and 286, 320–​1; as alternative way of being 316, 321–​2; institutionalization and 319–​20; metaphor and 314, 316; representations of 144, 283, 313, 315–​16, 318–​23, 520; rights 313, 319; social model of 313, 317, 321–​2 disambiguation 354, 361 Disney Company, Walt: and broadcast media 191, 209–​10; and films 191, 193, 197, 365, 374, 406, 458; and franchising 404, 406, 409; and print texts 332, 336n10 distribution: beyond bookstores 405, 505–​9, 512–​13, 519; by bookstores 110, 306, 511; challenges to 334, 454–​6, 459, 461, 494; of comics 129, 131, 134; historical 431, 433; of media 209–​10, 405, 422; of periodicals 120; see also marketing; publishing industry diversity: in Australian and New Zealand texts, 377, 380–​1, 383–​4; of authors 43, 113–​15, 295–​8, 378–​9, 382, 384, 437; of characters in North American texts 72, 113–​15, 150, 292–​4, 379–​80, 382–​3, 385–​7, 508; in colonial texts 436–​7; encouragement of 3, 288, 334, 461–​3, 473, 501, 532, 536; in European texts 185, 251, 431, 437–​8, 510; see also audience; individual groups; multiculturalism Dodgson, Charles: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 247, 331, 345–​6, 436, 438n5; digital responses to 74, 102; film adaptations of 195, 361, 406; photographs by 247; Through the Looking-​Glass 169, 172, 232, 345–​6 domestic fiction 107, 143–​4, 147, 284 domestication 81, 330–​2, 341, 343, 346–​7, 394 Dowd, Siobhan 320–​2 Drew, Nancy see Keene; Stratemeyer Syndicate Dunbar, Paul Laurence 170, 172–​3

Dahl, Roald 204, 233, 325, 342, 413–​14, 420–​1 Damrosch, David 365–​6 Danziger, Paula 111 Darr, Yael 256, 259–​60 Darton, F. J. Harvey 35–​7, 143, 446 Day, Thomas 143, 430, 436 de la Mare, Walter 170–​1 Defoe, Daniel 150, 343 Delas, Jean 508–​9 Deszcz-​Tryhubczak, Justyna 61–​2, 244, 483

early modern children’s literature: examples of 24–​5, 143, 158, 160, 164, 431, 442–​3, 481; rediscovery of 37, 449; religion and 28, 164, 268–​9, 271, 443, 480; see also German-​language children’s literature Edgeworth, Maria 29, 36, 143, 433 edubrow culture 469, 475 education: and acculturation 24, 30, 285–​7, 395; and children’s literature 34, 87–​8, 109–​12, 415, 469, 475, 479–​88, 499–​501, 509, 512–​13; and

542

Index children’s literature studies 40, 171, 194, 480, 483; historical 28–​30, 268–​72, 288, 432, 442, 480; and literacy 15, 28, 108, 415, 480, 486; and television 203, 207–​9; and theatre 179, 182; and theories of childhood 11, 234, 257; see also didacticism; schools; textbooks eighteenth-​century children’s literature: address 354, 445–​6; developments shaping 11, 13, 157, 165, 255, 257, 269–​70, 444; didacticism in 38, 118, 141, 270–​1, 432, 444; innovations in 97, 137, 143, 160, 269, 340, 403, 445; marketing of 143, 355, 411; online 42, 73; rediscovery of 36, 443, 449 Eisner, Will 130, 137n1; see also Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards emigration 124, 381, 384; see also immigration; refugees empathy 16–​18, 66, 131, 171 empire 38, 315, 430, 432, 436, 448; see also colonialism; imperialism Enlightenment: attitudes toward education 28, 444; and children’s texts 97, 165–​6, 269–​72, 276, 446; understandings of childhood in 256–​8, 264, 444 Erickson, Erik 25, 230–​1 Ewers, Hans-​Heino 30, 270, 355–6 Ezra Jack Keats Award 472 fables 34, 269, 433, 438, 446 fairy tales: circulation of 364–​7, 409, 443, 446, 448; distrust of 355; and diversity 293, 305; and film 195–​6, 198; as meme 365, 373; metafictional 368–​9; in Poland 366, 371, 373; scholarship on 37, 364, 449n6; as source 178–​9, 367, 371; translation of 331, 342, 344, 346, 348, 365–​6, 393, 395; tropes in 234, 272; as vehicle for ideology 37, 183, 235, 243, 260, 325, 355, 369–​70, 372; see also folktales; theatre family stories see domestic fiction fandom: academic study of 407, 409, 414, 418, 421; and agency 61, 222, 406, 420, 423; authors’ engagement with 410; and community 221–​2, 409, 414–​15, 419–​21, 423; and engagement with text 357, 418–​19, 423; and marketing 406, 409 fanfiction: and identity 309, 409; and marketing 406, 418; and pedagogy 414, 419, 424n6, 424n8; scholarship on 410, 414–​15, 418; and websites 420, 424n7, 501 fantasy: age in 234; development of 148–​9; distrust of 28–​9, 148, 205, 355; and diversity 115, 148, 150, 530; domestic vs. high 148–​9; in film 196, 199; Golden Age 143–​4, 148; serious meanings in 150, 275, 288; timeslip 149, 283, 380; worldbuilding in 47, 54, 344; see also fairy tales; magical realism Faruqi, Saadia 114, 384, 386–7 femininity: and reading 27, 405, 443; representations of in children’s texts 159–​60, 200, 243, 247–​8, 262, 306–​7, 318, 320–​1, 370–​1; and writing 36–​7, 166, 243; see also gender; girlhood studies

feminism: backlash against 243–​4; as critical method 37, 242–​5, 251–​2; manifestations of 243–​5, 264, 318 fiction: anxieties over 119, 141, 145, 355; and engagement 25, 76; functions of 142, 152, 155, 214, 260, 281–​2, 332; genres of 143–​8, 150; history of 143–​5; in periodicals 118–​20; setting as important in 45, 47, 55–​6; see also individual authors and genres Field, E. M. 34–​5, 42 films: animated 102, 195, 197–​9; crossover 191–​2, 198–​9; definition 191–​2, 194; history 191, 195, 418; and pedagogy 194, 198, 507; and picturebooks 101–​2; promotion of 198, 522; scholarship on 192–​3, 196, 199; see also adaptation; audience; Disney; franchising; television Fisher, Margery 155–​6 Flanagan, Victoria 241, 244, 258 folktales: circulation of 392–​3, 461; defined 374n1; as source 148, 178, 296–​7, 393, 395, 460, 462; and transculturality 391–​2, 394; as vehicle for ideology 37, 183, 187–​8, 274, 372, 393–​4, 461; see also fairy tales; oral tradition; theatre Fox, Mem 381–​2 franchising: and audience 193, 359, 361, 405; global appeal of 137, 334; history of 403–​5; and media consumption 61, 360, 406–​8, 417; research on 406–​7; snowball effect in 196, 360; and textual meaning 409, 411; tween 405–​6; see also Disney; Potter; Rowling; transmedia French children’s literature: and book clubs 509–​13; fairy tales 355, 443; picturebooks 158, 161–​2, 508–​10; and publishing 468, 508–​9; scholarship on, 443–​4, 448; and translation 304, 329, 333, 342–​8, 508 García-​González, Macarena 61–​2, 88–​90, 244 Garner, Alan 285, 288 Garnett, Eve 284 Geisel, Theodor (Dr. Seuss): The Cat in the Hat 109, 174, 532; criticism of 531; and Read Across America Day 534; website 416–​17; withdrawn books by 528, 531–​6; see also Theodor Seuss Geisel Award gender: changing visions of 142, 159–​60, 347, 370–​1; and the gaze 246–​7; increased scholarly emphasis on 24, 241, 243; performativity of 244, 248; portrayals of 187, 232, 243, 250–​1, 262–​4, 307, 318, 409, 510; and readership 33, 124, 142–​5, 150, 160, 444–​5, 448, 458, 507, 512; theorizing of 18, 37, 241–​4, 246, 249; see also femininity; gender studies; LGBQT+​children’s literature; masculinity gender studies 241–​6, 251–​2; see also boyhood studies; girlhood studies genre: children’s literature as 21, 142, 394; gendering of 241; and poetics 192, 199; and space 48; see also individual genres

543

Index German-​language children’s literature: early modern 25, 157, 268, 442–​3; eighteenth-​century 270–​1, 444–​5; and film 198; nineteenth-​century 30, 272–​3, 446–​8; postwar 162, 232, 272, 274, 517; and translation 284, 330–​3, 335, 345, 347, 433; see also individual authors girlhood studies 243, 245–​9, 251, 347 Girl’s Own Paper, The 123–​4 globalization 42, 341, 344, 349, 370, 454 Goldberg, Leah 391–​3, 395–​8 Golden Age, the 29–​30, 35, 143, 437, 446–​8, 481; see also nineteenth-​century children’s literature Good Words for the Young 119–​20 graphic novels 129, 138n4, 377, 379–​80, 461, 499 Graves, Robert 171 Gravett, Emily 100 Grenby, Matthew O. 27, 35–​6, 42, 431, 434 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: backlash against 374n3, 518; canonicity of 365–​6, 446; translation of 342, 392, 394 Gubar, Marah 15, 22, 38, 40, 231, 237 Hans Christian Andersen Award 518–​19, 525–​6 Hazard, Paul 35, 332 Hebrew children’s literature: examples 209, 270–​2, 394, 486; and language 391–​2, 395–​6, 398; and translation 331–​2, 347, 393–​5; see also Bialik; Goldberg; Jewish children’s literature Heidi see Spyri Hereaka, Whiti 380–​1 heritage literature 86, 295, 342, 355, 366, 461 Herrington, John 378–​9 Hewins, Caroline 34, 495 Higashida, Naoki 320, 322–​3 Hilman and Boim 49–​50 Hispanic children’s literature (in United States) 113–​14, 180, 295–​8; see also individual authors; Pura Belpré Award historical fiction 72, 146–​7, 275, 284, 319, 507 Hoffmann, Heinrich 446–​7 Hoopmann, Kathy 314, 316, 321 Hubschmid, Arthur 508–​10 Hughes, Langston 170, 172, 295 Hughes, Ted 171–​2 humor: and comics 131–​2, 135–​6; and fiction 54, 111, 133, 457; and religion 448; see also nonsense; parody Hunt, Peter 10, 16, 37, 229, 415 Hutcheon, Linda 331, 353–​5, 357, 360, 362n1 hybridity: and picturebooks 99, 101, 103, 162, 170; and play 99, 221, 403, 405; and poetry 170, 174; and religious texts 271, 276; and television 210; and transnationalism 378, 382–​4, 430–​1, 434–​5 Ianovskaia, Genrietta 184–​5 identification: and empathy 16–​18, 287, 303; and group membership 259, 308, 381, 409

illustrations: analysis of 26, 66; in books for older children 75, 87, 236, 269; in early readers 108, 114; and ideology 25, 65, 297, 436, 444, 531, 534–​5; in periodicals 120, 126; and poetry 165, 168; and publishing 3, 404–​5, 447, 524; and reader 158, 271, 442–​3; and relationship to text 49–​50, 54–​5, 66, 156–​7, 197, 232, 246; see also maps; nonfiction; photographs; picturebooks; prizing Imagination Library 494–​5 immersion: and reading 50, 101, 218, 354, 390; and television 205, 211; and theatre 182; and transmedia storyworlds 56, 214–​15, 353, 358, 360, 407–​8, 411, 419 immigration 48, 296–​7, 381–​3, 393, 396; see also emigration; refugees imperialism 257, 273, 395, 398; see also colonialism; empire India: children’s television in 203, 209–​10; and production of works for children 385, 430, 433, 438, 460–​3; as subject for English-​language children’s literature 384–​5; and translated texts for children 174, 430, 435–​6, 438 Indigeneity: Australian 73, 148, 377, 380; Māori 380–​1; Native American 72, 114, 147, 175, 294, 297, 378, 420, 431, 497, 507; Native Canadian 144; publishers specializing in 335; see also colonialism; nation intergenerational dialogue: and children’s literature 229, 236–​7; and scholarship 39, 82, 84, 86, 88–​9, 221, 237; see also academic writing with children; age International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) 334, 518–​26 International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) 493, 500, 522 International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 522–​3 International Youth Library 334, 518, 521, 524–​5 intersectionality: and feminism 243, 251; and girlhood studies 76, 246–​7; and study of children’s literature 38, 237, 245, 251, 281, 323 intertextuality: and metafiction 243, 366–​8; as method 196, 249, 367; theorized 352–​3, 364, 407; see also metafiction; postmodernism Jane Addams Children’s Book Award 403, 476 Jansson, Tove 51–​2, 54, 149, 247, 348, 408 Japan: and children’s literature prizes 460, 520; and digital archives 73; and production of works for children 136–​7, 197, 322–​3, 344, 362n3, 394, 458–​60, 463; as subject for English-​language children’s literature 101, 379; and translated texts for children 210, 333, 345, 408 Jaques, Zoe 58, 65, 67 Jeffers, Oliver 102, 408–​9 Jenkins, Henry 194, 359, 407, 418, 469 Jewish children’s literature 267–​76, 448, 475; see also Hebrew children’s literature

544

Index John Newbery Medal 467, 470–​3, 475, 507 Joosen, Vanessa 70, 87–​8, 194, 243

494, 496, 509, 516, 522–​3, 526; and religious instruction 118, 268, 432, 443; threats to 357, 432; see also education; materiality; participation; textbooks Little Golden Books 59, 404 Little Red Riding Hood 182, 365, 369–​72 Locke, John 11, 28–​9, 34, 143, 157 Look, Lenore 113–​14 Lowry, Lois 112, 320–​1 lullabies 164–​5, 441 Lundin, Anne 34, 46

Kästner, Erich 151, 263, 329, 331, 342, 518 Keene, Carolyn 151, 405, 498 Kelen, Kit 48, 255, 258–​60 Kidd, Kenneth 38, 302–​3, 469, 496 Korea: and diasporic authors/​illustrators 65, 148; and language 391–​2, 395; and production of works for children 244, 394–​5, 397–​8; see also Ch’oe; Pang; theatre for children Kuijer, Guus 232, 261–​4 L’Ecole des loisirs 508–​13, 514n5 Lagerlöf, Selma 47, 448 Laguna, Ingrid 382–​4 Lathey, Gillian 260, 328, 332, 336n16 Lear, Edward 169, 172 Leeson, Robert 285, 287–​8 Leeuwen, Joke van 232, 234 Lepman, Jella 334, 517–​18, 520–​1 Lester, Jasmine 302, 307–​8 Lewis, C. S. 45–​7, 51, 54, 344, 406 LGBQT+​children’s literature: academic study of 243, 302–​3, 308–​9; challenges to 303, 484, 497, 530; homonormativity in 302–​3, 306–​7; in Hungary 305; laws governing 303, 305–​6; in North America 146, 302, 410, 497, 530; in Poland 303, 307–​8; in Russia 304, 306; in Ukraine 305–​6; see also censorship; queerness librarians: and book clubs 506, 510; and book recommendations 87, 334, 472, 483, 491–​2, 495–​6, 498–​501, 520; and children’s literature studies 34, 38, 518; and ideology 39, 496, 501, 533; and prizing 468–​70, 472–​4; and race 295–​7; and social class 288; rejection of texts by 132, 496–​9, 532, 534 libraries: budget cuts affecting 498–​500; domestic 491, 493–​5, 498, 501; mobile 463; public 296, 410, 491–​9, 501, 522, 530; school 88, 334, 491–​3, 499–​501, 506, 510, 520, 522–​3; selection practices 87, 468, 475, 491, 496–​7, 501–​2, 522; see also access; American Library Association; archives; Canadian children’s literature; censorship; comics; International Federation of Library Associations; International Youth Library library and information science 1, 3, 40–​1, 491 licensing 208, 403–​4, 407, 524 Lindgren, Astrid 399n21, 518: and place 55–​6; Karlson on the Roof trilogy 251; Pippi Longstocking 246, 330, 342, 345, 362n7; website 416; see also Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award literacy: children’s literature as tool in 15, 107–​10, 113, 208, 293, 295, 479–​87; cultural 298, 355, 521; in digital environments 103, 217, 223–​4, 414–​15, 417, 420–​1; functional vs. complex 481–​2, 487, 517, 523; multisensory pedagogy in 26, 28, 103; rates 42, 444, 485; and reading promotion 444,

Mackey, Margaret 25, 361, 404 magical realism 148–​9, 358 Malaysian children’s literature 49, 433–​4, 436–​7 Mallan, Kerry 244–​5, 251–​2 manga 101, 136–​7, 362n6, 458–​60; see also comics manipulation of texts 327, 329, 331–​2, 347 Mann, Sally 246 Mao, Bei 455–​6 maps in children’s books 51–​2, 54, 276 Marcus, Leonard 38, 110, 404, 506 Margaret Wise Brown Board Book Award 468 marginality: and address 516; and disability 231, 320, 323; and Eastern Europe 305, 374; and ethnicity 295–​6; and old age 31, 231; and social class 283, 286; see also agency marketing: design as important to 129, 403–​5; in digital environments 402, 406, 409–​10, 422, 455, 463, 501; international elements of 63, 436; objects of 134, 143, 406, 500, 505, 517; and tie-​ins 97, 403–​8, 411, 444, 511; see also branding; distribution; franchising; licensing Marshak, Samuil 184–​5 Martin, Michelle 38, 43n2, 245, 497 Martin Lawrence (publishing company) 284–​5 masculinity: representations of in children’s texts 37, 249–​51, 307, 315–​16, 323, 346, 370; studies 249, 251; see also boyhood studies; gender material culture of childhood 69, 196, 402, 409 materiality: of bodies 244, 246; of books 26, 64, 96–​101, 103, 218, 348, 409, 517; of literacy practices 217; of things 67, 96; see also new materialism Mavor, William Fordyce 431, 435 McKenna, Brenton E 377, 380 medieval children’s literature 37, 268–​9, 441–​2, 449 Medina, Meg 114–​15, 296, 298 Meek, Margaret 25, 155, 259 Meeusen, Meghann 358, 361, 362n9, 362n12 Meltzer, Milton 155–​6 “Mermaid, The [Little]” 364, 368, 370, 409 Merveldt, Nikola von 155, 160–​1 metafiction: and fairy tales 367–​9, 373; and films 195; and picturebooks 63, 100, 247, 368; and postmodernism 100, 368; see also intertextuality Michael L. Printz Award 472, 474 Miéville, China 84–​5

545

Index Miller, Jennifer 302–​3, 307 Milne, A. A. 54, 171, 330, 404 missionary work: and adaptation 331, 429, 436; and book circulation 433; and education 432, 435; and establishment of canon 42, 430; periodicals 118, 120, 123, 437 mock prizes 470–​6 monsters 59–​61, 67, 98, 199, 297, 358 Montgomery, L. M. 144, 246, 343, 408 Monthly Packet, The 118, 123, 127n1 Moore, Anne Carroll 495–​7 Moretti, Franco 48, 365–​6 Mother Goose 167–​8, 171, 174; see also nursery rhymes multiculturalism: and education 208, 423n2, 489n4, 497; growth of 154, 173–​4, 207; in picturebooks 64, 174, 382; see also diversity multimodality: and franchising 349, 407; and pedagogy 25–​6, 28, 30–​1, 224; and picturebooks 95–​9, 102–​4, 161, 248; and playful reading 217, 219; and poetry 172, 175 Murphy, Emily 89 Murris, Karin 83, 234–​5 mysteries 150–​2, 321–​2, 331 Narnia see Lewis nation: as category for organizing texts 36, 389, 391; defined 256–​7, 259, 380; emotional resonances of 259; family as mirror of 262, 384; and Indigeneity 378–​9, 381; and setting 47, 49; texts’ role in constructing 143–​4, 208–​10, 255–​60, 264, 390–​6, 398, 468, 479–​80; as theme 133, 367, 381–​2, 384, 387, 391, 507; and transnationalism 377; threats to 206, 305, 393; see also citizenship; nationalism nationalism: and education 209, 260; response to 168, 245, 273; and symbols of nation 168; and texts 86, 168–​9, 260, 303–​4, 329–​31, 436, 446, 461, 468 Native Americans see Indigeneity Nel, Philip 138n4, 174, 531–​3, 535 Nelson, Claudia 18, 37, 233 Ness, Patrick 358–​9 new historicism 2, 36–​7 new materialism 60–​4, 67, 82, 231, 244; see also agency; materiality; posthumanism Newbery, John 34, 97, 143, 355, 403, 431; see also John Newbery Medal Nières-​Chevrel, Isabelle 340, 343, 345–​6, 348 Nikolajeva, Maria 142, 236–​7, 258, 366–​7 nineteenth-​century children’s literature: in Britain 18, 37–​8, 72–​3, 143–​4, 151, 169–​70, 233, 279–​82, 325, 437–​8; colonial 144, 429–​33, 435–​8; German-​language 30, 272–​4, 446–​8; ideologies in 30, 159, 273, 279, 429, 431, 433, 448, 529; and marketing 403, 444; periodicals 117–​26; picturebooks 96, 101; poetry 165–​70; research into 34, 37–​9, 293, 443; and translation 331, 340, 342–​3, 346, 430, 433, 435–​6; in the United States 69, 72–​3, 107, 120–​2, 133, 144, 249, 293;

see also Golden Age; individual authors and genres; publishing industry Nodelman, Perry 10, 21, 37, 61–​2 nonfiction: functions of 153–​6, 320, 378; illustrations in 157–​8, 160, 275–​6; melding of with fiction 46, 101, 141, 159, 268, 275–​6, 431; picturebooks 101, 158, 160–​2, 276; poetics of 25, 155–​7; prizing 468, 472; and reader 156–​8, 162; scope of 154, 275; see also alphabet books; biographies and memoirs; Comenius; science books; textbooks nonsense 63, 169, 346, 486 Norwegian children’s literature 47, 99, 103, 274 nursery rhymes 165, 167–​9, 171; see also Mother Goose O’Dell, Scott 72, 147 O’Sullivan, Emer 42, 261, 344, 431 old age: illustrations of 232, 236, 244; and intergenerational friendships 186, 263; and magic 186, 234; and marginalization 31, 231; and representations of grandparents 115, 121, 235–​7, 273, 359, 379, 385–​6; stereotypes of 235–​6, 308; see also ageism Olsen, Mary-​Kate and Ashley 405–​6 onomatopoeia 26, 109, 394, 459 oral tradition: and folktale 11, 353, 393, 441, 446, 448, 461; and poetry 165, 175; see also fairy tales; folktales orality 346, 348, 374n1 Osborne, Mary Pope 111, 417, 419, 423n6 Outcault, R. F. 130, 133, 136 Pang, Chŏnghwan 390–​7 paperbacks 498–​500, 509–​10, 512, 513n1 Park, Barbara 106, 111, 233, 419, 424n6 parody: examples of 102, 133–​4, 165, 169, 184–​5, 233, 368, 407, 446; theorized 249, 367; and translation 345–​6 participation: by child readers 64, 80–​2, 123–​6, 157, 216, 437, 476, 507, 516; children’s engagement with culture 39, 80–​2, 86–​8, 257; by community 81–​2, 86, 90, 221–​2, 411, 431, 471, 473; and consumerism 406, 408; by fictional children 84; and literacy 516; online 418, 421, 423; see also agency; reader; voice participatory culture 360, 418, 421, 469 participatory research: challenges in 83, 85–​6; examples of 75, 85–​9; innovativeness of 3, 483; utility of 80–​1, 86, 89, 235; see also academic writing with children Pascar, Henriette 183–​4 Patel, Meenal 384–​6 Paterson, Katherine 145, 319–​20 Paul, Lissa 38, 173, 175, 244 pedagogy see education; literacy; schools; textbooks periodicals: American 18, 120–​2, 125–​6, 170; Asian 395, 397, 399n26, 437–​8, 459; and book clubs 504, 506–​7, 511–​13; competitions in 124–​6; contents

546

Index 118–​22, 124–​6, 293; correspondence columns in 122–​4, 126; cost 119; European 117–​20, 123–​5, 134, 170, 327, 444–​5, 447, 511–​13; functions of 118–​19, 121, 260; fundraising by 118, 125; poetry in 165, 170; readership of 117, 119–​22, 126; and social class 118–​19, 126, 284; South American 136; and understandings of childhood 117, 121, 124; see also fiction; illustrations; individual titles; photographs; poetry; serialization periodization 41 Perrault, Charles 327, 365–​6, 443 Peter Rabbit see Potter Phi, Bao, and Thi Bui 382–​4 Phoenix Awards (Children’s Literature Association) 469 photographs: of children 246–​7; in novels 284, 406; in periodicals 125–​6, 293; in picturebooks 103, 160, 379, 393 picturebooks: for adults 102; artists’ books 97, 101; in Asia 457–​63; on autism 313–​14; baby (board) books 96–​7, 99, 306–​8, 468; and book promotion 521–​2, 524, 526; complexity of 95, 100–​1, 107, 158, 161–​2, 356, 396–​7; crossover 96, 101, 133, 235, 462; digital 96, 102–​3, 408, 458; and racial/​ ethnic diversity 64–​7, 174, 293, 296–​8, 378–​9, 381–​6; and franchising 404, 408–​9; and gender 243–​8, 250; LGBTQ+​ 302–​3, 306–​8, 410; loop books 98; movable 96–​9, 103, 161, 403, 448, 458; nonfiction 101, 158–​62, 276, 297, 378–​9; and poetry 168, 170, 174, 381; postmodern 63; scholarship on 21, 47, 62, 88, 95, 235; text-​picture relationship in 95–​6, 98, 101, 387; and translation 329–​30, 332, 335, 346–​8, 508; wimmelbooks 54–​5, 95, 98; wordless 54, 99, 101; see also alphabet books; comics; French children’s literature; Hebrew children’s literature; hybridity; illustrations; individual authors; materiality; metafiction; multimodality; posthumanism; postmodernism; prizing; setting; translation Pilkey, Dav 106, 133–​4, 416 Pinocchio see Collodi Pippi Longstocking see Lindgren play: competitive 124–​5, 170, 418, 504; digital 216, 218–​21, 224; and reading 99, 111, 196, 214–​19, 221–​4; representations of 149, 234, 249–​50; textual 353, 397; with toys 69, 75, 99, 218–​19, 314, 360, 403, 405, 409, 422; see also digital scholarship; hybridity; periodicals; prizing; wordplay playworlds see storyworlds; worldbuilding podcasts 408, 414, 420, 422–​3 poetry: anthologies 166–​7, 170, 172, 175; and concept of child 12, 28–​9, 166, 171, 174, 398; contemporary 175; nineteenth-​century 165–​70; in pedagogy 486, 488; in periodicals 122, 170, 260, 293; pre-​nineteenth-​century 164–​5; religious 29, 170, 269–​70, 432, 436; schoolroom 168–​9; twentieth-​century 170–​4, 184–​5, 204; Urchin 173–​5; see also Hebrew children’s literature;

individual poets; Korea; lullabies; Mother Goose; nursery rhymes; picturebooks; prizing; translation; verse novels Polish children’s literature: and fairy tales 365–​72, 374; and LGBTQ+​texts 303–​4, 307–​8; and national identity 371, 373; and participatory research 85–​6; and response to Communism 367, 372–​3; and translation 308, 333, 343–​4, 374, 446; see also fairy tales, LGBTQ+​children’s literature postcolonialism 12, 173, 377–​8, 389 postfeminism 242, 244 posthumanism: as theoretical approach 58–​62, 64, 67, 82, 215, 218, 231, 244; and works for children 60–​1, 64–​7; see also new materialism postmodernism 100, 243, 366–​9; see also metafiction Potter, Beatrix 403, 404, 437 Pottermore/​Wizarding World 360, 407, 419–​21; see also Rowling poverty: and book purchasing 432, 510; and marginalization 33, 279, 285, 319; representations of 65–​6, 126, 197, 280–​4, 319, 384, 386, 463; and socialization 118, 280–​2, 480; see also social class printing technologies: and book design 97, 160, 434, 442, 447, 462; and book distribution 13, 268; and children’s labor 436; and costs 34, 404, 444, 494 prize (reward) books 403 prize prediction blogs 473–​5 prizing: awards committees 469–​72, 474, 525; and book promotion 457–​61, 468–​70, 516, 520, 524–​5; and comics 130; and films 468; and illustration 458, 467, 471–​2, 519, 521, 525–​6; international range of 467–​8, 525; participants in 14, 469, 472, 476, 526; participatory 469–​71, 473–​6; and poetry 172, 175; proliferation in 467–​8, 475; and taste management 458, 467–​8, 470, 476, 483; and translation 332, 334; see also individual awards; mock prizes; prize prediction blogs Prodigal Daughter, The 165, 174 publishing industry: in China 437, 454–​8; digital dimensions of 298, 410–​11, 417, 458, 501, 517; in Europe 30, 273, 442, 444, 447, 504, 508, 511–​12, 521; in India 460–​3; international dimensions of 334–​5, 402, 405, 407, 429–​31, 433–​6, 438, 454, 523–​4; in Japan 458–​60, 505; in United Kingdom 119, 143, 279, 284–​6, 288, 403, 437, 498; in United States 109–​14, 120, 405, 505–​7, 534–​5; see also individual publishers; marketing Pura Belpré Award 113, 467, 470 queer studies 38, 231, 242, 244, 251, 302 queerness 251, 302–​4, 306, 308, 409–​10; see also LGBTQ+​children’s literature quest narratives 27–​9, 149, 315 Quigley, Dawn 114–​15 Randolph Caldecott Medal 471–​2, 474–​5, 507 reader, the: influences on 2, 24, 167, 523; interaction with text 59–​60, 63–​4, 96–​100, 153–​62, 328, 357,

547

Index 458, 462–​3; participatory 97–​8, 123–​4, 155, 215–​16, 222, 445; rights of 214–​15, 223–​4; theorizing of 14–​15, 18, 22, 41, 51, 62, 397; see also address; audience; immersion; translation; worldbuilding realism 47, 111, 144–​5, 150, 284, 287; see also magical realism; socialist realism recuperation 36–​8, 40, 43, 378 Red Riding Hood see Little Red Riding Hood refugees 208, 306, 381–​3, 387, 520; see also emigration; immigration Reimer, Mavis 49, 61, 199, 245 relationality: and age 82–​3, 88, 231, 246; and environment 46, 259; and texts 85, 360, 390 Religious Tract Society 123, 281, 432–​3, 435–​6 remediation 41, 197, 408 representation: and empathy/​identification 16–​17; importance of 282, 306, 415, 474–​5, 501, 530; linguistic 24, 28, 82; and race/​ethnicity 126, 145, 147, 150, 291–​3, 295, 377, 379, 382, 474; and sexuality 302, 304, 307–​8, 496 retranslation see translation rhizome book 60–​1, 63, 65–​7 Robinson, Joan 316–​18 Romanticism: and children’s literature 34, 166–​7, 272, 276, 394, 398n5; understandings of childhood in 12, 29, 34, 37, 166, 171, 174, 197, 257–​8, 264, 272, 481, 483 Roosevelt, Eleanor 508, 514n18, 518 Rose, Jacqueline 12, 19n5, 36, 40 Rossetti, Christina 166, 169–​71 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 12, 34, 143, 157, 269, 444 Rowling, J. K.: franchising of works by 56, 193, 334, 360–​1, 407, 410, 421; Harry Potter series 52, 56, 148, 233, 250, 341, 357, 407, 409, 455; see also authorship; Pottermore/​Wizarding World Rudd, David 35–6​, 84, 489n3 Russian/​Soviet children’s literature: fairy tales 448; LGBTQ 303–​6; theatre 178, 182–​6; and translation/​adaptation 325, 336n10, 343, 345 Saint-​Exupéry, Antoine de 181, 342–​4 Sats, Natalia 178, 182–​4 Schär, Kathrin 100 Schimel, Lawrence, and Elīna Brasliņa 306–​8 Schmid, Christoph von 273 Scholastic Publishing 113, 294, 419, 504; see also book clubs; book fairs school stories: contemporary 114, 147, 287–​8, 456–​7; premodern 23, 143, 437 schools: access to 288, 386, 432, 445; and book distribution 299, 306, 405, 504–​5, 508–​13; and controversial texts 484, 497, 528–​30, 532; and didactic approach to reading 479–​83, 485–​6, 488; and digital activity 220, 224, 420, 424n6; and literature instruction 66, 85–​6, 88, 146, 169, 479, 480–​2, 485–​8, 500, 521; and mock prizes 471–​3; and pleasure reading 26, 30, 107–​8, 217, 273,

486; and prize books 403, 447; and protest 255, 258, 298; and race 18, 125, 379, 432; and reading instruction 109–​10, 437, 480–​7; and religion 268–​73, 432, 443, 480; and theatre 178, 180, 182–​3, 268; see also education; libraries; selection of texts; textbooks Schwebel, Sara 71–​2, 471, 481 science books 154, 156, 160, 455 science fiction 149 Sea Beast, The 199–​200 secondary world see storyworlds; worldbuilding selection of texts: by book clubs 504–​8, 510–​12; by children 87, 206, 211, 442, 491–​2, 509–​10; by IBBY 520–​1; by librarians 87, 468, 491–​2, 496, 499, 501–​2, 522, 529, 534; in prizing 14, 469–​76; in religious contexts 272, 429; in schools 294, 479, 482–​4, 529; in theatres or cinemas 179, 198; for translation 329, 334, 343–​4 Sendak, Maurice 108–​9, 168, 174, 416 seriality 192, 195, 349 serialization 118, 120, 445 series books: in China 455–​8; contemporary 54, 76, 149, 152, 309; early readers 106–​7, 109–​13, 286; and franchising 149, 198, 404–​5; in India 438, 462–​3; in Japan 459–​60; low status of 106, 150, 199, 497–​9, 505; marketing of 110, 112, 454, 500; and metafiction 369, 406; nineteenth-​ century 107, 144, 430, 437–​8; and race/​ethnicity 113–​15, 145, 147, 150, 295, 297; and technology 76; and translation 330, 332, 347, 461; twentieth-​ century 133, 151, 287, 294, 325, 399n21, 405, 475; websites for 416–​17, 419, 420; see also individual authors; Stratemeyer Syndicate Sesame Street 59, 61, 67n2, 207–​8 setting: defined 46; effect of on reader 45, 47–​8, 50–​1, 55, 217; in films 197; and nation 47, 49, 260, 331, 436, 438; and realism 55, 147; strategic uses of 146, 151, 334; see also fiction Seuss, Dr. see Geisel Shavit, Zohar 22, 328, 331–2 Shen, Shixi 457 Sherwood, Mary Martha 143, 145, 430, 434, 438n4 Silverstein, Shel 173, 175 Siu, Oriel María 297–​8 slavery: and children 429–​30, 432, 434; in children’s literature 293, 319–​20, 432, 436 Snow White: and age 232; feminist readings of 243; retellings of 368, 370–​1, 373; in theatre and film 187, 191 social class: maintenance or improvement of 126, 249, 529; middle 143, 204, 355, 444, 446, 485, 529; middle-​class representations of working classes 279–​85, 289; working 287–​9, 444, 510–​11, 529; working-​class representations of working classes 279, 282–​8; see also audience; poverty; voice social media: and agency 211, 245; and censorship 496, 535; and children’s literature criticism 30,

548

Index 298, 410, 501; children’s presence on 211, 216, 406, 409–​10, 418, 420; and marketing 406, 409–​11, 455, 463, 517; see also access; BookTok; websites; YouTube socialism 282–​3, 289, 335n4, 372–​3; see also communism socialist realism 183, 349n10, 372 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 281, 432–​3 songs: for children 270, 272, 397, 445; and identity groups 285, 393; and play 220 spy stories 76, 150, 152 Spyri, Johanna 197, 273, 344, 348 Spyrou, Spyros 81–​3 St. Nicholas 120–​2, 170 Stephens, John 37, 241, 245, 249, 329 Stevenson, Robert Louis 52, 143, 150–​1, 170 Stone, Jon, and Michael Smollin 59–​61 story apps 102–​3, 218–​19, 405, 408, 458; see also picturebooks storyworlds: and play 214–​15, 218–​21, 223; transmedia 194–​5, 199, 222, 360, 407–​8, 411; see also worldbuilding Stratemeyer Syndicate 150–​1, 405, 497–​8, 506 street arab novels 280–​2 Sumerian children’s literature 23–​4 Sundin, David 63–​4 Sundmark, Björn 47, 255, 258–​60, 346 superheroes 133–​4, 135, 499 Superle, Michelle 88, 469 supernatural fiction 149, 236–​7, 296–7, 317, 354 survival stories 150–​1 Swedish children’s literature: academic study of 73; book clubs 504; examples of 63, 180, 243, 246, 248–​9, 330, 346; and identity 47, 243; see also Jansson Lagerlöf Lindgren Sydney Taylor Book Award 475 Syria 209, 329, 331, 336n10 Tale of Haruk, The 186–​7 Tashima, Seizo 459–​60 taste see aesthetics television: and adaptations 195, 198, 294, 344, 404–​5; animations 198, 206, 209–​10, 218, 344; in Asia 209, 344; child viewer of 203–​7, 209–​11, 218, 413, 418; and franchising 61, 288, 360, 404–​5, 454, 456; global flow of 206–​11; history of 203–​4; and ideology 204–​5, 208–​10; multiculturalism in 207–​8; programming 203–​5, 207, 209–​10, 405; scholarship on 207, 209; and theatrical performances 186; in United States 204, 207; see also refugees; Sesame Street textbooks: authority of 481, 488, 500; historical 73, 268, 271–​2, 429, 431–​2, 435, 442–​5; and reading instruction 109, 482, 488; see also education; literacy; schools theatre: in Africa 187–​8; in Argentina 186; emancipatory 180–​2; and fairy/​folktales 178–​9,

182–​4, 186–​8; ideology behind 178–​81, 183–​5; in northwest Europe 180–​2, 445; in Russia/​USSR 178, 182–​5; and schools 179–​80, 182–​3; in South Korea 186–​7; in United States 178–​80 Theatre for Young Audiences 178–​82, 186 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award 112–​13 Three Little Pigs 369–​70 Tolkien, J. R. R. 51–​52, 361 Töpffer, Rodolphe 130, 132, 447 Torseter, Øyvind 99–​100 Townsend, John Rowe 16, 31, 173 transgenderism 146, 307, 309 translation: academic study of 329, 340–​1, 347; commercial factors in 329, 332–​3, 344; domestication in 3, 261, 331–​2, 394, 430, 435–​6; foreignization in 331, 345, 349; and functions of children’s literature 328, 334–​5, 345; geopolitical factors in 332–​5, 341–​2, 395, 430, 433; implied reader of 328–​9, 346, 348; of LGBTQ+​texts 304–​7, 309; and picturebooks 25, 63, 332, 348; proportions of 333–​5, 341–​2, 394, 438; reception of 87, 328, 445; and religious texts 271, 273, 276, 430, 432, 434; and retranslation 340–​4; source-​ oriented vs. target-​oriented 341, 345–​6; and status 332, 342, 347, 447; strategies in 329–​32, 345, 390, 394–​5, 398, 436; see also adaptation; domestication; fairy tales; individual authors and linguistic areas transmedia: adaptation 25, 55, 361; and engagement 217, 408, 413; franchising 67n2, 196–​7, 326, 359–​60, 405–​8; storytelling 193–​200, 407–​9, 411, 419–​20 transnationalism: and belief 276, 434; and children’s publishing 3, 446, 525; in children’s texts 379–​81, 383–​7; scope of 377–​8, 382, 389; and television 207, 210, 344; and translation 87, 274 travel narratives 46, 144, 159, 443, 462 Trease, Geoffrey 147, 284 Trites, Roberta Seelinger 244, 251, 497 Twain, Mark 144, 344, 348, 349n8, 362n7 Van Camp, Richard, and Scott Henderson 379–​80 verse novels 147, 175 voice: and agency 14–​15, 66, 80, 82, 230, 244, 320; of children 81–​2, 88–​9, 122, 247, 330, 392, 398, 483, 485; and identity 287–​8, 297, 305, 319–​20, 348, 393; poetic 170, 172, 285, 394; see also agency; participation; social class Vyse, Charles 431 Warne, Frederick 404, 430, 437 Warner, Gertrude Chandler 108, 151 Warner, William 429, 431, 434–​5 Watts, Isaac 29, 164–​5, 430, 432, 434 We Need Diverse Books 114, 298, 497 websites: for adults 18, 73, 75, 298, 414, 493; author 413–​14, 416–​17, 422, 531; for children 70, 415, 417, 419–​20, 422–​3, 511; hosted by children 221,

549

Index 222; see also audience; BookTok; social media; YouTube Wertham, Fredric 131, 138n7 Wesleyan Juvenile Offering/​At Home and Abroad 118, 123, 125 Wesseling, Elisabeth 69, 256, 259–​60 Westall, Robert 147, 149, 285–​8 Westin, Boel 242, 245, 247, 251 White Ravens 305, 334, 521 Wiesner, David 101, 368 Wilder, Laura Ingalls 147, 294; see also Children’s Literature Legacy/​Laura Ingalls Wilder Award Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards 130, 132 Willems, Mo 102, 410, 417, 421 Williams, Marcia 356–​7 Winnie-​the-​Pooh see Milne

Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The see Baum wordplay 135, 154, 345 world literature (Weltliteratur) 261, 365–​6, 374, 430–​1, 437 worldbuilding 47–​9, 54, 218, 360; see also immersion; storyworlds Wyeth, Sharon Dennis, and Chris Soentpiet 64–​7 Xiong, Liang 457 Yang, Hongying 456–​7 Yonge, Charlotte 33–​5, 118–​19, 123 YouTube 203, 211, 414, 420–​3, 517 Zipes, Jack 37, 195, 243, 365, 449n6, 481

550