The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature Read online

  12. Arthur Szyk, poster for Jewish Book Month (1951). Used with the cooperation of the Arthur Szyk Society, Burlingame, California, www.szyk.com.

  13. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. London: Macmillan, 1867, facing p. 255. ‘Tom’s first defence of Arthur’. Reproduced by permission of the Robert H. Taylor Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

  14–15. Anthony Browne, Gorilla. London: Julia MacRae, 1983. Double-page spread: ‘The gorilla took Hannah to see the orang-utan, and a chimpanzee’ and ‘Chimpanzee’.–5

  Notes on contributors

  Brian Alderson is an independent scholar. He was children’s book editor of The Times from 1967 to 1983, and has held visiting appointments at the University of Southern Mississippi, University of California at Los Angeles and the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University. He has curated exhibitions on aspects of children’s literature at the British Library, British Museum, National Library of Scotland, Pierpont Morgan Library and elsewhere, and was the founder of the Children’s Books History Society and is editor of its Newsletter. His books include revisions of F. J. Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England (1982), Sing a Song for Sixpence (1986), Looking at Picture Books (1993), Ezra Jack Keats (1994) and Be Merry and Wise: The Origins of Children’s Book Publishing in England 1650–1850 (with Felix de Marez Oyens, 2006).

  Julia Briggs was Professor of English Literature and Women’s Studies at De Montfort University until her death in 2007. She had formerly been Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, and Chair of the Oxford University English Faculty, and was awarded an OBE for her services to English literature and education in 2006. Her books include Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625 (1983, revised 1997), A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit (1987), Children and Their Books (1989, edited with Gillian Avery) and Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2006).

  Richard Flynn is Professor of Literature at Georgia Southern University where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary poetry and children’s and adolescent literature. He has been the editor of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly since 2004.

  M. O. Grenby is Reader in Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He has written widely on eighteenth-century culture and the history of children’s literature. His books include The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (2001), Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (edited with Julia Briggs and Dennis Butts, 2008) and Children’s Literature (2008). He is currently working on a study of the child reader in the long eighteenth century.

  Andrea Immel has been Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University since 1995. She has written widely on the history of illustrated children’s books, as well as curated exhibitions, and organised a series of international conferences on various aspects of children’s literature. Her descriptive catalogue of the children’s books published by the house of Newbery will appear in 2010.

  Eric J. Johnson is Assistant Professor and Associate Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of York (UK) and an MLIS from Rutgers University. His research interests encompass a variety of topics, and he has published articles on medieval literature and theology and military propaganda in children’s literature. He is currently working on several projects examining nineteenth-century American story papers and dime novels.

  U. C. Knoepflmacher is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author of seven books on nineteenth-century literature and culture, and the editor or co-editor of ten more. Among the former are Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers (1992) and Ventures Into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales and Femininity (1998).

  Roderick McGillis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Recent publications include Les pieds devant (2007), George Macdonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs (2007) and The Gothic in Children’s Literature (edited with Anna Jackson and Karen Coats, 2007). His next book will be called He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinity in the B Western.

  Lissa Paul is a professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Ontario. She is the author of numerous articles and essays on children’s literature, literary theories and cultural studies, and of several books, including Growing with Books: Children’s Literature in the Formative Years and Beyond (1988) and Reading Otherways (1998). She is an associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and an editor of the journal The Lion and the Unicorn.

  Mavis Reimer is Canada Research Chair in the Culture of Childhood, and Director of the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg, and Associate Professor in the Department of English there. She is the editor of Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada (2008); co-author, with Perry Nodelman, of the third edition of The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (2002); and editor of Such a Simple Little Tale: L. M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1992). Her current project is a study of Victorian children’s literature as a literature of empire.

  Kimberley Reynolds is Professor of Children’s Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. She has been an active figure in children’s literature studies for many years, serving on several national and international boards and committees, including as President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (2003–7). She played a formative role in the creation of the Children’s Laureate, and Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books (www.sevenstories.org.uk). She has written numerous books and articles about children’s literature and childhood, past and present. Her most recent monograph is Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations (2007).

  David Rudd is Professor of Children’s Literature at the University of Bolton, where he runs an MA in Children’s Literature and Culture. He has published some 100 articles on children’s literature and related areas, and is the author of Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature (2000). Most recently, he has edited The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature.

  Judy Simons is Professor of English and Pro Vice Chancellor at De Montfort University, Leicester. She has written widely on gender and women’s writing. Among her publications are Diaries and Journals of Literary Women (1988), What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of ‘Classic’ Stories for Girls (co-authored with Shirley Foster, 1995) and an essay on Angela Brazil and schoolgirl fiction in Popular Children’s Literature in Britain, ed. M. O. Grenby, J. Briggs and D. Butts (2008).

  John Stephens is Emeritus Professor of English in the Department of English at Macquarie University, New South Wales. He is the General Editor of International Research in Children’s Literature and, in 2007, was awarded the International Brothers Grimm Award to mark his contribution to research in children’s literature. His publications include Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (1992), From Picture Book to Literary Theory (edited with Ken Watson, 1994), Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature(with Robyn McCallum, 1998), Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature and Film (2002) and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature (with Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan and Robyn McCallum, 2008).

  Deborah Stevenson is a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, and editor of the Bulletin of The Center For Children’s Books, one of the major children’s literature review periodicals in the USA.

  Katie Trumpener is Professor of Comparative Literature, English and Film Studies at Yale. Her essays on children’s literature have
appeared in The Cambridge History of Romanticism, The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002) and The Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Romantic Period (which she co-edited with Richard Maxwell, 2008). Her Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997) describes Romantic links between childhood and national and imperial memory; her current book project explores the centrality of nursemaids and nursery memories for European modernism.

  Lynne Vallone is Professor and Chair of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University. She is an associate general editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and was the author of Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1995) and Becoming Victoria (2001), and co-editor of The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (with Claudia Nelson, 1994) and Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment (with Mary Ann O’Farrell, 1999). She is currently working on a book on the miniature and the gigantic in children’s literature and culture.

  Preface

  Most of the volumes in the Cambridge Companions series examine one author, one well-defined historical period or one particular genre. The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature is, by necessity, much broader. Although it deals with only one category of literature, it is a category that has developed over at least 300 years into an entire parallel universe. Children’s literature is now almost as large and varied a field as ‘adult literature’, encompassing not only prose, verse and drama, but fact as well as fiction, and ‘texts’ that are composed solely of pictures or digital images. It cuts across almost all genres, from myths to manga, humour to horror, science to self-help and religion to romance. It has its own canon of classics, its own radical and controversial experiments, and genres for which there are no precise equivalents for adults. Children’s literature now receives considerable critical attention from scholars and students as well as discussion across the popular media. It has become as profitable and exportable as any other cultural commodity. Many of its characters – and even some of its authors and illustrators – are amongst the most celebrated and recognisable international icons.

  But in other ways children’s literature differs markedly from literature designed for mature readers. Children’s literature, uniquely, is defined by its intended audience, but neither childhood nor the child is so easy to define. Overlapping and conflicting cultural constructions of childhood have existed since children’s literature began; some persist, while others shift in response to changing values and conditions. Then there are the complications that arise out of the very polymorphous nature of its readership. The ‘child’ for whom ‘children’s literature’ is intended can range from the infant being read to, to the teenager on the threshold of adulthood, not to mention those adults who delight in picture books, fantasy novels or fondly remembered classics. This ‘crossover audience’ is by no means a new phenomenon. It is just one of the reasons that the question of audience presents all sorts of knotty problems. Should we, for instance, regard children’s literature as produced exclusively for its putative intended audience of children? Or are the adults who (generally) write it, assess it and buy it also to be regarded as important consumers? These grown-ups were all also once children and therefore may be very heavily invested emotionally and intellectually and financially in what children read. In this respect, children’s literature is one of the most universal of forms – a truly popular literature – since (unlike most kinds of books for adults) everyone has been part of its target audience. What all this begins to demonstrate is that children’s books may be small, short and apparently straightforward, but the study of children’s literature is far from simple.

  This Cambridge Companion confronts this range and complexity directly. No attempt has been made to restrict the subject by imposing artificial limits, whether chronological, generic, thematic or by the intended age of readers. This is not to say that the entirety of children’s literature could be covered by this book’s sixteen chapters. Some parameters have been inevitable. The focus is on imaginative literature, leaving regrettably little room for the religious, factual and instructive material that has been such an important part of the development of children’s books (one important exception being the alphabets that feature in chapter 8). Also largely absent from this volume is detailed consideration of drama, film and some other new media, because they require specialist critical techniques, and certain genres that already have enormous bodies of criticism devoted to them are omitted: fairy tales and comic books for example (although chapter 6, on adaptation, is an exception to both these rules). Finally, only texts first published in English have been included, and particularly those from Britain and America. Concentrating on these traditions, developing in tandem across the last three centuries, has imposed other limits by stealth. It has resulted in a bias towards books written for children who have been understood as highly individual, naturally playful, innocent and malleable, reflecting the dominant cultural construction of childhood in Britain and America since the mid eighteenth century. And because this literature was written for children who were predominantly white, middle-class and heterosexual, this Cambridge Companion inevitably reflects these norms, even if it is clearly the case that neither all children, nor all children’s literature, can be represented by them. Some discussion of children’s books written for different constituencies or with different needs has been possible here. But this Companion may serve as a foundation for later studies that will treat in greater depth the more inclusive children’s literature of the later twentieth century and today, literature produced for audiences radically different from those of previous generations. To attempt to give multicultural children’s literature the attention it deserves, as well as to include discussion of other national traditions, would have broadened the volume’s scope, but only at the expense of trivialising these important issues.

  What this Companion does try to present is a useful sample of the different critical approaches that have been taken to children’s literature. Some of the essays focus closely on the texts themselves, often including their illustrations. Others take more historical, sociological, theoretical or materialist approaches, while some concentrate on readers’ responses or the contexts of production. This methodological variety is partly a result of the subject itself. Children’s books have a strong utilitarian dimension because they are explicitly designed to achieve some goal (this is often as true today as it was in the past) – and, as a result, formalistic or aesthetic analyses may illuminate books for children less fully than books for adults. Particular physical characteristics of children’s books – size, format, binding, illustration, decoration, style, paper engineering and so on – also demand what might be called ‘extra-literary’ approaches, as do the sorts of non-textual responses that children often have (and indeed are encouraged to have) to their books. This explains why chapters focus on the relationship between text and image, the manufacture of books, their adaptation, their origins, and the makings of canons, as well as questions of age, literacy, gender and the cultural construction of childhood.

  This critical heterogeneity is one of the most appealing aspects of the study of children’s literature, and, it is to be hoped, of this Companion. The volume is characterised also by its historical range. Some children’s literature criticism has a strong presentist streak, with a tendency to be hostile to works that no longer conform to current models of childhood or judgments about children’s capabilities, concerns or best interests. One of the chief goals of this Companion is to erase these distinctions, and to offer historical and conceptual frameworks that enable long views of the genre. Even if it is no longer read by its original intended audience, an appreciation of older children’s literature is surely essential to our understanding of the children’s books of today, and of the future.

  M. O. Grenby

  Andrea Immel

  Chronology

  Eric J. Johnson

  This chronolog
y includes a selection of ‘classic’ titles, broadly defined as those that have had a significant and lasting effect on the development of children’s literature in Britain and North America. The majority of these titles are discussed in this Companion. Many of them have had a considerable impact on other media besides the printed book. Other important events in the history of children’s literature have been added, with an emphasis on those technological developments that have had a major effect on the appearance, distribution and consumption of books for children.

  1475

  The Babees Book, or a ‘Lytyl Reporte’ of How Young People Should Behave, an early courtesy book

  1484

  Aesop’s Fables, translated and published by William Caxton, an early example of woodcut illustrations

  1659

  Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus . . . Visible World, or Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief things in the world, translated by Charles Hoole, an early use of intaglio engraving alongside a letterpress text

  1671–2

  James Janeway, A Token for Children

  1686

  John Bunyan, A Book for Boys and Girls, subsequently retitled Divine Emblems

  c. 1690

  The New England Primer

  1693

  John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education

  1694

  J. G., A Play-Book for Children to Allure Them to Read Assoon [sic] As They Can Speak Plain

  1715

  Isaac Watts, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children, advertised as a reward book for virtuous children

  1719

  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

  1722

  Samuel Croxall, Fables of Aesop and others, an early use of relief metal engravings