Expectations and Experiences: Children, Childhood and Children's Literature

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "Expectations and Experiences: Children, Childhood and Children's Literature", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 8, pp. 634-636. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810899603

Research insights are often conventionally seen as being remote from direct practitioner work, and we see this in fields like education and children's literature very clearly. Yet each one enriches the other, offering understandings and interpretations that benefit everyone. Collections of essays like this one help to bridge the gap. In fact it is a gap that it identifies as the starting point and rationale for the collection in the first place – a perceived gap between the reality of childhood experience on the one hand and the expectations (and literary representations) of childhood (and children and young people when they respond to books) on the other. This gap is one of interest and relevance in the past and present children's reading, and it is also one that is picked up in the work of international researchers, academics and professionals in the field.

Collections and proceedings often have mixed fortunes in the marketplace and stand or fall on their own merits – as a genre they are curate's eggs. This one is one in a series of proceedings from the International Research Society for Children's Literature (see their website www.irscl.ac.uk), a body set up in 1969 which, since 1976, has published proceedings from its conferences or symposia. The current set of 22 essays derives from the 2005 conference held in Dublin. In the preface, the IRSCL president for 2003‐2007, Kimberley Reynolds, notes that “proceedings” rather limit the range and value of such works, and in this case her point is right. Something else extending and deepening the range and value of this collection is its having been published by an imaginative and specialist publisher Pied Piper Publishing (see their website www.piedpiperpublishing.com): their other monograph publications are well worth investigating, as are two journals they produce, the Journal of Children's Literature Studies and the Journal of Reading, Writing and Literacy.

The essays here are organized under theme, helpfully summarized in the introduction to provide an overview before readers get started. Since the conference was held in Dublin, it comes as no surprise that the first essay examines the ways in which, in Irish literature and children's literature, an internalization of colonizer (English) sentiments helped to shape the construction of childhood there. Even so, with writers like Parkinson and Colfer, a distinctive Irish voice (distinct from sentimentalized accounts of childhood from writers like McCourt) has emerged. It is a familiar argument made in Scotland too, and is a theme worth developing in the context of how children's literature, always a Cinderella, often emerges from subaltern cultures beneath the umbrella of that Wal‐mart of discourses, English.

We shift ground then to an interesting set of essays on family – now socially and culturally deconstructed as the complex negotiations and new norms have emerged in real‐life. Authors here tease out such themes with close attention to specific authors (like Jan Mark), sometimes taking a postmodern stance on how families are represented in text and image, at other times analyzing patriarchy and masculinity in how boys are represented in Canadian children's books. The focus on actual books, and on real themes of childhood and reading, enable these contributions to keep their feet on the ground, however much they draw (as they do) on the rich theoretical framework that has increasingly been seen and used as an interpretive vehicle (sometimes opportunistically and pretentiously, so what a relief to see it is not here). Kristeva and Sontag and Althusser are drawn in to enrich the analysis without crudely driving things along. Interested readers will want to read more, perhaps in Family Fictions (London, Continuum, 2001) by Nicholas Tucker and Nikki Gamble.

Readers who also run libraries, work in classrooms or run playgroups will find two other sections both fascinating and challenging. One is on ideology. We know (as perhaps we always have) that meaning is socially constructed and ideologically shaped, and children's literature is no different. Imperialism and racism and moral indoctrination lurk at the edge of children's books and curricula even today, and much of the criticism of children's literature of the past has concentrated on it, often with its own agenda of suggesting how much better we are now. The ideological section, then, is full of good things – Bottigheimer's examination of children's bibles and tacit anti‐semitism, followed later not accidentally I think by an essay on Holocaust literature where the aporetic comes truly into its own in a discussion of what can and should be said when children read about, and how ethics kick in, if they do and should.

The range of the collection comes across well when we read an essay on morality in Erasmus (more influential on what children's read than first appears) and another on ideas about imperialism in the fairy books of Andrew Lang. Casting a backward eye for a moment, earlier in the book (in families) there is an equally subtle study of adoption in the nineteenth‐century children's book in America.

Almost inevitably these days, when ideology (and religion and morality) is discussed, we cannot escape another essay on Philip Pullman and Lewis and their ilk. Source hunters have rightly noted his atheism, his love of Blake and Milton and his interest in Gnosticism. Esoteric though this sounds, Davis's essay on Pullman shows a thoughtful reading of the original and shows how clearly one of the reasons why research matters in children's literature is precisely to take time and trouble to consider issues and themes and sources in children's books as if they merit the same attention as, say, “great novels”. This may be a postmodern heresy, blind to distinctions between high and low art, but the case is now made and such essays, and such collections, need to be self‐deprecating no longer. Bakhtin's heteroglossia and notion of carnival now sit easily enough in the firmament of children's literature criticism once it can be proved (as it is here) that they really apply.

The interplay between children's literature and childhood is of course of equal interest, and brings in social and cultural historians as well as literary professionals. This is the other section which readers will find of particular interest. It starts with an assessment of that well‐known book by Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl (Viking, 2001), where Parsons argues that representation of character in such books shows “enculturation messages addressed to children in the texts they consume” (p. 176), implicating the bystander (the reader). Parsons states that “it is the responsibility of children's literature research to expose and question this weakening of the genre's subversive tradition” (p. 176). Other essays here deconstruct the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, explore the ludic in authors like Sendak and dystopian stereotypes and subjectivity in the face of pain and evil in traditional literary forms and well‐known authors.

New perspectives, then, of fusions of talent from distinct fields (like psychology or critical theory), applied convincingly. Such collections by their very nature raise their sights over their immediate readership to other researchers and academics (like people considering doing masters and doctoral degrees or lecturers eagerly writing for research assessment exercises): two things for them – first, you will want and need to read such things merely in order to keep up, and second, it is often where the best ideas come from, especially if your local environment is indifferent to the idea of children's literature research. At the end of this collection is an informative section giving biographical information on the contributors, something of networking value. There is also a useful index.