Sometime in the month before the Comps, something inside me starting having a very visceral response to the word “period” (read: it makes me twinge on the inside now). So when Westman titled her article “Beyond Periodization,” and then – within a paragraph – referred to children’s lit as “the disempowered stepchild of literary history” (so deliciously campy, and thus so deliciously children’s lit… meta), I was in love (464).

Interested not only in tickling my anti-period sensibilities and affinity for all things campy, Westman wants readers to come to understand “the viability of children’s literature for rethinking our narratives of literary history” (464). Just from the start, I have great respect for this mission: not only is Westman here establishing her interest in elevating children’s literature to the (masculinized) “seriousness” that it has been denied through its erasure in periodization (*internal twinge activates*), but she is also making it her mission to use children’s lit not to join the ranks of literary canon per se (an arguably conservative move), but as a way to fundamentally restructure how all of us think about what we study.

Bold moves, Karin. Bold moves.

Building into the perpetual scholarly conversations on whether or not children’s literature even exists (and if so, how and how do we know when something’s children’s lit, anyway?), Westman argues that thinking through the genres (and “intergeneric potential”) of children’s literature is extremely productive in helping us delineate histories of the field, target audiences of the field, and when individual works are worthy of receiving accolades in the field (465). In doing so, Westman cross-sections her work with the deconstruction of periodization as the dominant mode of classifying literary history.

Using the example of Hurd’s Goodnight Moon, she argues that this text (and by extension, other works of children’s literature) “repeatedly and frequently exceeds its initial generic performance of ‘picture book’” (467). Tracing the renewed iterations of this book (Goodnight iPad comes to her mind) since its original publication in 1947, she asserts that this work fundamentally “challenges periodization as a defining method of literary history” (467).

Reading this, I couldn’t help but persistently wonder how this framework of analysis could have fundamentally changed/contributed to Adams’s article on medieval children’s lit. If she’d traced the moralistic educational works, for example (or the Bible, for that matter), out of the medieval period and into their manifestations throughout more recent history, could her argument have been even more readily apparent to the ‘non-experts’ she kept referencing?

I also can’t help but wonder whether, had Westman more explicitly elaborated on the importance of performance theories in “instances of generic performance across established periods” (which she referenced several times), her own analysis could have been more complex (467, emphasis added). Do the texts we classify as children’s literature perform differently as their expected audiences change? As their medium of re-production changes (picture books, chapter books, YA, interactive ipad books, ‘you choose’ books, books that children get to read to themselves rather than having a live-and-in-person adult read to them, etc.), how does the performative power of these works change? What does it mean, anyway, for a work of literature to engage in performative action? Had Westman explicated some of these thoughts, all of which are held within her repeated references to texts’ performativities, perhaps the analysis would have been able to reach further into the intergeneric potentials of children’s lit.