Michelle Martin provided a very detailed account of the struggles of African American’s and their ability to see a reflection of themselves in children’s picture books. From illustrators, to authors, to the children who are taught by society that being black is “ugly”. Martin gives summary after summary of both racist books that paint African American’s in a stereotypical light, and of children’s books that uplift and encourage African American readers. She also tackles her struggles of being inclusive of those writers who write positive children’s books about African Americans, who are not African American themselves.

With that struggle she speaks about the many teams that stem from interracial authors, who write groundbreaking children’s books that she would have to exclude if she ONLY wanted to incorporate authors who were African American. For instance, Nina Crews (Black) and Ann Jonas’ (White) children’s book, You Are Here (1998). Ultimately she makes the decision to be inclusive of authors of all types of races who choose to write about African Americans. Within the introduction on page xix, Martin quotes Judith Thompson as an explanation for her decision to be inclusive

Whether a writer is white or black, if he immerses himself in the

history of a period or in the life of a man, he must to some degree

“wear the shoe” to report the experience accurately… The

credentials of a writer who undertakes abook about blacks must

include a black perspective based on an appreciation of lack

experience…

Martin continues on to discuss the racist books that were published prior to the Golden age that she describes for African American’s in literature. Children’s books, such as The Story of Little Black Sambo, that gave white children an image of African Americans, to be dark caricatures, with big, bright red lips, and curly or Afro hair, which in general “demeans and ridicules” black children. All the while obliterating any positive self-image an African American child might have had about themselves.

Without a doubt the most shocking and appalling children’s books Martin mentions in Brown Gold is one the that the publishers, the McLoughlin Brothers produced called The Ten Little Niggers. One by one the human beings are eliminated from the book through acts of violence or carelessness. She quotes the book, which has several different versions, “ Ten Little Nigger Boys went out to dine;/ One choked his little self, and that left nine.” The mockery that is made of African Americans is so blatant, and disrespectful. The McLoughlin Brothers even go on to publish an updated version of the book years latter, where the “boys” now look like men, yet are still referred to as boys. Martin and I agree that this was an intentional and strategic move that black men are viewed as less than men as a sign of disrespect. Some other prejudiced books against African Americans in the late nineteenth century include, A Cook Alphabet, The Sad End of Erica’s Blackamoor, Pickaninny Namesake, to name a few.

However in the 1920’s there was a turning point in picture books. The Brownie’s Book Magazine was the first magazine for black children, of which the creators wanted African American children and young adults to educate them about the accomplishments of other African Americans that have come before them, and to see black people as not ugly individuals who have not contributed anything important to society. They also developed a seven-point objective for their publication. Number 1 is “To make colored children realize that being “colored” is a normal beautiful thing.”

Other Afro-centric books were published as the golden age evolved. Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book (1971), Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alphabet Book (1974), were two extremely important children’s books that connected African American children with their roots in Africa through language and illustration. Later Martin discusses the importance as something that seems minor, but honestly had been a topic of importance for African Americans. How nappy hair is beautiful, is natural, and not something that black children should be ashamed of. In the book Nappy Hair, the protagonist has the most “nappiest hair in the world”, but God has determined it to be beautiful and that one nap on her hair is “the only perfect circle in nature”. How beautiful a statement this is, how uplifting and encouraging it is for little black children to read this, or have it read to them and to understand the significance that every part of them has in the eyes of God.

Martin gives a very thorough account of the good and the bad sides of history in the evolution of children’s picture books for African American children. She undoubtedly captivated my attention with the detailed accounts that are sometimes appalling, and sometimes inspiring. I commend her for writing Brown Gold as she did.

Often hailed as the first of its kind — a book-length treatment of queerness in children’s and YA literature (that will both put the song in your head and blow your mind about the things you never realized were queer… but are… all for the [not] low cost of $45.99!) — Kidd and Abate’s Over the Rainbow offers an interdisciplinary framework for queerness in kid and YA lit. However, the book still retains a damaging structure that operates on a distinctly non-queer platform, and I will spend much of the post discussing why/how that is.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading Over the Rainbow in a quite piecemeal fashion: I first took it out a few summers ago for the sheer pleasure of Tosenberger’s chapter on Harry Potter slash fanfic, and was immediately seduced by the piece on Nancy Drew and, of course, Tribunella’s piece on A Separate Piece (because when has the intersection of queerness and trauma not seduced me?).

That experience, for me, is part of the excellence of this book overall: it’s like a candy shop wrapped up in book binding, there for when you need an article on anything (unless you want a sustained treatment on race, for example, which seems to be a common theme across the cannon).

That expansiveness is, however, also a bit of weakness for me: divided almost awkwardly into “Queering the Cannon” (Part the First), “After Stonewall” (Part the Second), and “Queer Readers and Writers” (Part the Third). Though I won’t go into my gripes about using Stonewall as a violently inaccurate buzzword for “when [white cis] gay history began”, I want to call attention to both the strengths and potential weaknesses of organizing the book into these particular sections.

I absolutely love the idea of the first section: taking purportedly cishet, cannon texts like Harriet the Spy, Little Women, and The Wizard of Oz — which often have large, explicitly queer followings — and excavating them for their queerness is a brilliant way to start this groundbreaking collection. It lets the authors of these chapters proclaim, ‘we do not need to examine books where two women (for example) are making out in order to find queerness.’ This is a phenomenal move, and one that I am perpetually pleased to see right up front in Over the Rainbow.

However, I am constantly perplexed and troubled by the third and last section, as I am constantly perplexed and troubled by the last section of many anthologies (and syllabi, for that matter). These last sections — like this one, which covers not only fan fiction but computer games, and trans issues — are often reserved for more ‘risque’ items, more unconventional material, things that the authors/editors may in fact value quite highly but someone along the way — the anthology editors, the publisher’s editors, etc. — decides that in order to establish credibility for the text, these works must ‘go last’, ‘go speculative.’ A tendency both in academic anthologies and in many, many, many (once more for emphasis) MANY course syllabi — which, for example, include race and/or queer stuff and/or dis/ability stuff last, as almost an afterthought — Over the Rainbow succumbs to this temptation to lump a bunch of ‘suspect’ material in under the vague section heading of “Queer Readers and Writers” (have they not been discussing us the entire time?).

I am most disturbed by this, not only because of the implication that studying fan fiction and computer games is less ‘legitimate’ than studying straight-up (or not!) Harriet the Spy, but because two of the articles here foreground issues of transness. Is transness, then, also ‘suspect’ and somehow less legitimate, like fan fiction and computer games? I’m very nervous about this, though I am not finger pointing because I do not know at what point in the process these essays were relegated to the “last section” which seems, as I said, to be perpetually reserved for things the anthology largely doesn’t want to deal with upfront, like… race! Again, where is that here? It’s not ‘even’ foregrounded in the “last section” section, which is upsetting, to say the least.

Back to the trans stuff for one second: one of these two articles foregrounding trans issues, Battis’s on “Trans Magic” uses transgender-ness, it seems, as more of a metaphor for unlocking gender binaries than on people’s lived experiences of being trans. Much like the over-use of the term ‘queer’ to mean anything that transgresses… anything…. this usage threatens not only to dilute the power of the term, but to metaphorize experiences that are, in actuality, quite immediately real and in need of their own non-metaphorized analyses.

So, my overall take on Over the Rainbow: I’ve been having a love affair with this book and individual articles in it for years, but taking it as a whole? Where is race? Why is transness relegated “to the back” with other “suspect” materials like fan fic and computer games? Shouldn’t a book on queerness be a little bit more… well… queer in its structure??

In “Between Boys: Edward Stevenson’s Left to Themselves and the Birth of Gay Children’s Literature,” Eric Tribunella wants to prove that Left to Themselves is fundamentally different from other homoerotic, homosocial boy’s fiction from the same period (including Stevenson’s own White Cockades), and that the text in fact may constitute the first children’s book with a “openly-gay” storyline. 

As Tribunella points out, there is a long tradition of homoeroticism and homosociality in boy’s fiction in the 19th century, specifically of boys caring emotionally and physically for a younger boy (375). So what distinguishes Left to Themselves, which portrays an older Philip caring for a younger Gerald, from more traditional boy’s fiction?

Tribunella argues that Philip and Gerald’s sexuality is coded into the text’s themes of openness and blackmail. The 19th century long associated blackmail with homosexuality: since homosexuality was stigmatized and homosexual actions were often illegal, gay people were particularly vulnerable to blackmail. While the villain Jennison attempts to blackmail Philip over his father’s crimes (and thus implicate Philip’s own “nature” – another possible link to homosexuality, since 19th century studies of homosexuality saw it as a problem of “human nature” (376)), and over his relationship with Gerald refuses to submit. He instead embraces a sort of radical openness: “When Jennison threatens Philip the second time, the youth ultimately replies, “And you believe you can fight the plain story that Gerald and I can tell? Do your worst! I’m not afraid to face it.” (112)” (Tribunella 383). By engaging in the homosexuality-coded trope of blackmail, while embracing an ethic of openness, Left to Themselves follows “traditional” queer concerns of mystery, fear of disclosure and hiding, while also endorsing a non-traditional path out of “closet” of blackmail. This new path is made more obvious by the novel’s unusual ending. In most boy’s fiction that depicts passionate male attachments, the boys are separated at the end by death or relocation or marriage: the pre-eminence of the homosocial bond always comes to an end, superseded by more adult concerns. In Left To Themselves, however, the boys remain together: “ His ‘old head on young shoulders’ for one moment pictured in flashing succession years to come at Gerald’s side, himself his best friend ever, to companion and care for him” (215).

Part of what fascinates me about Left to Themselves is how easily it passed for regular boy’s fiction. It was reprinted multiple times, and the queer subtext remained subtext until Stevenson, writing under another name, essentially outed his own work, saying his children’s books were “ “homosexual in essence” and Left to Themselves was a depiction of “Uranian adolescence” (375). All of this, I think, points to the vexed relationship between homosociality and homosexuality. The heavy amount of homosociality and homoeroticism in boy’s fiction allowed Left to Themselves to slip under the radar, to achieve mainstream success and to get into the hands of child readers, but it also made the entire storyline so ambiguous that the love story between Philip and Gerald could disappear for readers entirely. Moreover, the homosociality in boy’s fiction prior to Left to Themselves seems predicated on a lack of homosexuality. The boys in those books can only be close because they won’t end up together – a heterosexual relationship (or death, or a job) will eventually supersede the male friendship. So books like Left to Themselves seem to have a deeply complicated relationship with their homosocial predecessors: they rely on those texts to “pass,” to create a context in which the relationships they portray are acceptable, but those same “boy’s fiction” texts rely on pushing away the possibility of homosexuality. Left to Themselves ultimately compromises with boy’s fiction: while it portrays a more openly homosexual relationship than most, it is not as open as Stevenson’s Imre, and it ultimately relies on Stevenson himself to anonymously give away the “secret” of the book.

I see a similar trend in the way Stevenson uses Philip’s devotion to Gerald in order to build up Philip’s masculinity. Tribunella argues that the way Philip cares for Gerald makes him into more of a man: “looking at the vulnerable boy with love matures and masculinizes Philip, and […] desire for and care of a beloved can betoken mature manhood for male youths” (377). Again, Stevenson uses one of the most prominent tropes of boy’s fiction – the growth into manhood – for his own purposes. On one level, this technique is deeply subversive, since it argues that manhood and masculinity are compatible with homosexuality. On another level, however, the fact that Stevenson contrasts the masculine, honest Gerald and Philip with the low-dealing and sexually perverse Jennison, who is also coded gay, indicates that only certain forms of homosexuality are acceptable – the kinds that conform to traditional masculinity (open, honest, direct, adventurous – not blackmailing, lying, sexually perverse). If Left to Themselves previews queer children’s literature trends, is this trend – the division into good and bad gay (or “respectable” and “non-respectable”) something we see happening in more contemporary novels? 

Finally, Tribunella does a good job of arguing that Stevenson’s novel may be the first english-language young adult, openly gay novel. I wonder, though, what the equivalent is for lesbian fiction? To me, the importance of Tribunella’s project isn’t that it finds the “first” gay children’s novel, but that it shows that a queer (gay) children’s text existed in the 19th century. Does the same exist for lesbians? The “traditional” first lesbian novel is Radclyff Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), which is not at all a children or young adult novel (although it does depict Stephen Gordon as a child). Some quick searching indicates that the consensus states that the first young adult lesbian novels seem to emerge in the 1970s. Could there be predecessors in the 19th century? As a non-19th century specialist, I honestly don’t know, but I’m curious. There are certainly novels that portray same-gender love and desire – I’m thinking particularly of Lefanu’s Carmilla (1871). Carmilla certainly portrays young women desiring one another, but, of course, one of them is a vampire trying to drain the other one’s blood – perhaps not the best lesbian predecessor!  Nevertheless, it indicates that lesbian themes did exist in 19th century novels (I’m not sure I would argue that Carmilla is young adult, though). Are there other novels that might serve as young adult lesbian predecessors in the 19th century? Or earlier? And if not, what does that indicate about the genre of queer YA?

Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature does a fantastic job of making imperative arguments affecting a variety of disciplines including History, Literature, and Childhood Studies. I appreciate this text because it persists with its agenda, and the sheer amount of textual evidence only helps to magnify her persistence. They range from the early 19^th century to the mid 20^th century American textual depictions of Black people. Although I only had to read the introduction and Chapter 1 for this assignment, she makes great use of quite a few texts by various writers, particularly Lydia Maria Child in Chapter 1. Moreover, the introduction is, quite frankly, awesome and well-organized. I tend to judge a book by its introduction, and MacCann’s did not disappoint. She starts out her intro by making her focus plainly outlined and compelling, stating:

Literary, political, biographical, and institutional history[ies] are combined in these pages as a way to reveal the scope of the white supremacist ideology. The antislavery cause accelerated the momentum toward war, but then vanished in the regressive milieu of peace—in the romanticized plantation stories, ambivalent protest novels, and prejudiced adventure fiction. (xiii)

This part of her claim (the other part goes on to say similar claims about Postbellum texts) is compelling because I hear this type of white supremacist glamorization everyday. That special group of White people who are fierce in their work as an self-proclaimed ally . . . until someone tells them (or they tell themselves) that they can pat themselves on the back because I have Affirmative Action, a plethora of available “Black people scholarships” just saturating the scholarship market, and a ridiculous number of slave narrative films, all of which supposedly show “racism’s all in the past,” just sitting there, not doing much of anything, chilling on a stoop, drinking a Bud Light, getting up every now and then to tell me that there is something historically substandard about Black people. For one thing, Black identity was definitely “presented as of less value than European American identity. Black people were unequivocally “expected to accept a restricted status and role in the American civil community” (xiii). And you know what? We still are.

Also, she clearly separates her introduction into 7 parts labeled: “social/political focus;” “institutional “gatekeepers”;” “The Aesthetic Focus;” “Young People and Audience Response Theory;” “”White Supremacy” and Related Terms;” “”White Supremacy” and Intellectual History;” and “Applying and Eclectic Approach” (xiv, xviii, xx, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxx). All of these titles are relatively self-explanatory, but I may talk about the labels in class depending on how the class goes because they’re helpful for understanding her arguments throughout her book.

Chapter 1’s argument focuses on the “[a]mbivalent [a]bolitionism” of various Antebellum anti-slavery narratives that, according to MacCann, do push for the abolition of slavery, but aren’t consistent in the “potency” of their agendas/messages. She solidifies her claim by zooming in on the texts’ mixed signals, which often reveal a contradictory binary set up consisting of:

Magnanimous White slave owner/substandard Black slave versus The racial equality the narratives claim to be rooting for.

Ultimately, her close reading of certain texts in this chapter is spot on, particularly her use of Lydia Marie Child’s anti-slavery narratives. Her examination of Child’s works reveals stories that ranged from “vehement exhortations, to antiprejudice parables, to incidental remarks tacked on to narratives,” all of which are ambiguous in their dogmatic forcefulness (4). MacCann notes that Child’s “Jumbo and Zairee is ambiguous in its contradictions; Child notes that the slaves on the narrative’s plantation “were not abused,” but the narrative “is full of instances of abuse” (5). MacCann asserts, “Even though Child emphasizes that the principle of slavery is wrong, she depicts Mr. Harris, the slave owner, as a paragon of virtue” (6). And what’s great is that MacCann just keeps the criticism coming. ^_^

It’s an argument I love because it reminds me to remain vigilant in my own criticism, especially because half of the primary texts I study are as dated as Child’s narratives. Assumptions about abolitionists and Antebellum anti-slavery texts can gloss over hidden prejudices in the same way that children are marginalized by adjectives like “innocent,” “pure,” and inexperienced.” In terms of a criticism of this book, I would say that MacCann is a good close reader, but an even better implicit critic of people and texts who could be (and have been) overpraised. While reading her work, I could see the constant vigilance in her maintenance of her argument throughout her book. She seems to actively place her own vehement criticism against the marginalization of Black people conducted by sometimes-halfhearted White abolitionists movements. I don’t know about you, but I think her writing shows she’s pretty appalled.

MacCann keeps her argumentative fervor going throughout; I never question her objective, and I picture someone speaking while reading MacCann’s work, someone who comes off as invested. Could MacCann have also been more inclusive? Yeah. But I think that when a scholar choses to limit their scope, it means a number of things, one of which being that they don’t want to water down their argument, give readers too many perspectives to read at once, or take more time to “close the deal.” It sort of reminded me of Gubar’s Artful Dodgers. She seemed to try quite a few readings of various “texts;” as a result, she loses me during certain chapters (Carroll and Stevenson) and captivates me during others (the Nesbit). Gubar sort of closes the deal for me by slightly overstretching her arguments at times. MacCann closes the deal by not doing too much, only enough for the space she has given herself.

Katie Trumpner’s “Ten City Scenes: Commerce, Utopia, and the Birth of the Picture Book” is great for a few reasons, but I’m going to stick to explaining a few nuts and bolts before going into my critique of it.

As one of ten book chapters from Richard Maxwell’s The Victorian Illustrated Book, Trumpner’s piece adds a wonderful amount of historical information detailing the rise of the “picture book.” Trumpner’s main argument does not seem to be that picture books existed in the Victorian period. What she does seem to push forward is the significance of the palpable rise in importance of the “picture book” in mid-seventeenth century and Victorian England. Trumpner explicates the “small size[d]” illustrations of Romantic era looking-glass books, moral dialogues, natural histories, and juvenile guidebooks that could and did “offer intense visual and sensory training,” but were also made up of “arbitrary text-picture juxtapositions” (333). Trumpner does slight mid-seventeenth and eighteenth century picture books, but does credit Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789-94) and Jane Taylor’s City Scenes (1801, 1805) as pivotal works connected to the growth and potent ability of late Victorian picture books (334).

As far as 19^th century urban picture books go, Trumpner claims that they were “transitional objects in several senses” because they “grant[ed] considerable autonomy” to both picture and words and “evoke a multisensory world” (334).

What really struck me was an equation that Trumpner uses to make a claim about the formation of a picture book.

She states, “Bookstall +Print Shop + Pickpocket = Picture Book” (335)

The parts of the equation show the importance of the print culture, the working-class citizens of England, and booksellers’ shops in the formation of the picture book during Romantic and Victorian England. Trumpner uses various nineteenth-century texts and shows that the depiction of London shops in children’s books was concurrently used as a didactic device displaying to children the “desire for consumption divorced from need” and prompting middle class parents to teach “shop-struck children to resist” the attraction of shops (336).

Trumpner moves from the nineteenth century childrens books to the early twentieth century children’s books and asserts the urban child’s budding “autonomous agency and curiosity” (366). Giving various examples such as Compton Mackenzie’s Kensington Rhymes, A.A. Milene’s When We Were Very Young, Trumpner makes a great case for the continuing influence of “earlier forms of city life [that] continue to hold a powerful, even magical allure. . .” (374).

I think that Trumpner gives great evidence for her argument of the rise of the picture book as a chronological and anachronistic relationship between children, parents, booksellers, printers, and illustrators. As for the stakes of such a book chapter, her exploration seems to be embedded in her ending sentiment that “children exist between the mundane, greedy, mercantile world, and that another, parallel utopian world that should be there instead” (379). Trumpner seems to want people to understand just how picture books come into being and what that production does for people and to them. I think that she cares for actual children and the figure of the child in the same refreshing breath, since her project deals with both the fictional and lived lives of 17^th, 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th England’s children. But rather than posit a desire for a utopian world that seems to be all to fictional, maybe scholars from various fields can continue to do more interdisciplinary work and make positive changes for the existing world, the world to come, and the children in it.

In “Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History,” Karin E. Westman builds off the work of Eric Hayot’s “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time.” In his essay, Hayot had argued against chronocentrism, calling for a reform of humanities programs to be more self-critical about their pedagogies, curriculums, and hiring practices by investigating the theories of literary history these decisions are based on. Hayot’s claim is that literary periodization leads to the privileging of certain (groupings of) texts, along with their associated geographies. It also leads texts to be dominantly and inaccurately defined by their “period,” which can in turn lead to false assumptions about both the texts and, reflexively, their larger historical contexts.

Westman picks up on Hayot’s remark that the field of children’s literature might serve as a model for a concept of literary history that provides an alternative to those based on periodization. Her own essay goes on to explain how children’s literature’s attention to genre might help literary scholars gain awareness of the pitfalls of periodization and how we might differently conceive of literary history.

Westman begins by tracking the term “genre” over time as its definition becomes more expansive and amorphous. She ultimately settles on “genre” as wrapped up in connections to performativity and audience: “For, like a performance, a text’s generic classification is site specific, contingent upon an audience’s expectations and response as much as on the text’s form and content. The audiences for a text—audiences past, present, and future—establish, maintain, or change generic expectations, which emerge from a negotiation between convention and innovation” (465).

Due to children’s literature’s “intergeneric potential” (465) – stemming from its multiple audiences and ability to evade typical academic or cultural categorization – Westman argues that it becomes these questions of genre that “not only organize responses to individual texts but also determine questions for the field” (465). However, it seems a bit ironic that the first question she lists here is “When did children’s literature begin?” (465), which forces questions of genre to immediately regress back to chronocentrism, bringing into question the true potential for a generic organization to subvert the norm.

And while she does point to specific examples of how a genre-based treatment of literature might differ from that of periodization in practice, such as the Norton anthology of children’s literature, which organizes works into “nineteen genres, including “Alphabets,” “Chapbooks,” “Primers and Readers,” “Fairy Tales,” “Animal Fables,” “Classical Myths,” “Legends,” “Religion: Judeo-Christian Stories,” “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” “Picture Books,” “Comics,” “Verse,” “Plays,” “Books of Instruction,” “Life Writing,” “Adventure Stories,” “School Stories,” and “Domestic Fiction” (“466), she does not explain what the benefit of this type of categorization might be. How exactly does organizing by genre instead of period alter our interpretation of literary works or open up new avenues of inquiry?

Even in her discussion of modernism and Goodnight Moon, while she describes how the text eludes periodization as it is reprinted and reappropriated into other forms, she does not explain how a critical interpretation based on genre instead might become more meaningful.

So although I agree with Westman (and Hayot) that periodization often seems an arbitrary and inadequate means for organizing literary history or for structuring the larger academic institution, I find myself questioning whether or not the example of children’s lit/genre would really solve the problem or just provide an alternative, yet still constricting, labeling system. I find Westman’s two-sentence conclusion a bit vague and insubstantial: “To resolve the ‘inadequacy of the period,’ in Hayot’s words (740), and to recognize the systemic contribution of children’s literature to literary history, we should champion the generic performance and remediation of children’s literature. We will then gain much-needed sightlines through the literary landscapes of the past, present, and future” (467-8). I agree that children’s lit might help deconstruct periodization, but what are these “sightlines” we might gain through examining its “generic performance” and what exactly will they do?

In her article Medieval Children’s literature: Its Possibility and Actuality. Gilliam Adams argues for a new, flexible philological approach towards children’s literature of the Middle Ages, one that is more comfortable with textual instability in its material context (18).

As part of this process Adams suggests that we ‘strip away preconceptions of what children’s literature ought to be’ and instead focus on the fiction actually written and read by children in those times.

In order to do this we must dispose of some commonly held myths about medieval children like the ‘Aries thesis’ (2) that proposes that the concept of childhood was ‘discovered’ in the seventeenth or eighteen century.  Adams maintains that concepts of childhood did exist in earlier ages, but that they were different from present day concepts.

Adams goes on to enumerate other ‘barriers to locating a medieval children’s literature’ such as:

• The assertion that the ‘middle ages made no provision for a separate literature for children apart from pedagogical texts designed to teach them to read, to write, to cipher and to behave civilly”(2)
• The idea that parents’ did not love or were afraid to love their children because infant and child mortality were so high”. (3)
• The idea that in the Middle Ages children were viewed as ‘miniature adults’ (2)
• The idea that a different conception of childhood operated in the past and that conception required no special literature for children. (4)

Adams argues that there is no reason that a culture, even with notions of childhood different from our own, would not develop a special literature for those children, and labels such an attitude a form of ‘cultural imperialism and ideological colonialism’ (4)

She argues that pedagogical works are in fact literature, even if their aim was instructional, and not to entertain.

While I agree with Adam’s points, what I find exciting is not just the expanded view, the reconsideration of historical childhood[s], but of historical literacy that her paper encourages.  For example, the quote taken from Suzanne Reynolds, that ’emphasizes the orality of education’ in the Middle Age – that students ‘do not read (in our sense of the term) the text at all, for it remains at all moments and in all senses in the teacher’s hands…” Just as children might have been thought of in a different way, so were books and ideas of what it was to be literate. Reading was not the internal, silent, solitary process that it is today, but an external, oral, aural and communal one.

Part detective, part archaeologist, her approach is methodical and seems a combination of New Criticism (inferences and deductions based on a close reading of the text) and Historicist, asking for consideration of the texts in the context of their times. ‘If we wish to certify [certain] texts as children’s literature, we must examine their use of language, the local meaning of terms, – the literary and legal evidence for what constituted a child at that time, the location, situation and other possible audiences’ (16) It is by this process that Adams seeks to prove the presence of a child reader and by association, the qualification as a children’s text.

In her search Adams tests a work against specific criteria. She asks: is there a dedication to a child, introductory material indicating a younger reader, is the language simple and direct? Is a child directly addressed or portrayed as a main character? Are there explanatory glosses directed as inexpert readers?

It very much remains for Adam’s to prove whether or not a text was written for a semi-literate adult or a child. Such theories are problematic. How can we ever know with certitude? We can’t, but if we broaden our definition of literature to include those didactic, non-fiction texts that children might have read, then such texts could more safely be ascribed to classification.

Most of the works cited are in Latin, which stands to reason because most of the works are didactic, and ‘most education was conducted in Latin throughout the European Middle Ages,’ (15) Although Adams does reference Chaucer’s Astrolabe as an obvious example of non-fiction for children, she says that ‘neither space nor the limits of my investigation to date permit addressing the possibility of Medieval children’s literature in the vernacular.”  She contends that more work needs to be done in this field to connect vernacular work directly with children. I wonder if similar studies of works in the vernacular might not yield more conclusive evidence, just because language, style and content would make classification both easier and obvious.

In conclusion Adams says that she hopes ‘to counter the current wave of ahistoricism among some scholars – blind to the fact that like readers at the end of the middle ages, we face a radical transformation in both the way that words are transmitted and the way that children are constructed.’

What I think she means by this is that since we in the present are undergoing a ‘radical transformation’ then we should be sensitive to similar transformations in the past, and, rather than let that transformation narrow our definition of children’s literature was, or is, that our awareness of and sensitivity to, a continuum of change, should allow for some inclusion.

Categorizing children’s literature often creates rifts in the way that literature is viewed, especially within the academic community. The three articles this week all deal with a different version of categorizing children’s literature, from its origins, to genres, to what part of children’s texts can be studied as true literature. Mitzi Meyer’s “Socializing Rosamond: Educational Ideology and Fictional Form” does not trying to categorizing children’s literature, instead, she makes a plea to the academic community for the inclusion of a type of children’s literature into revisionist (similar to the new historical/cultural criticism of literary studies) scholarship.

Normally, revisionists have previously concentrated on “fantasy” texts in children’s literature, but Meyers defends the use of more “historical mimetic tales” (Meyers 56). While her article leaves room for a broader interpretation of what historical mimetic tales might mean, her study seems to focus on women writers and educational tales. Often in the article, these educational tales translate into the overarching genre of didactic literature, especially since the primary text Meyers focuses on is Maria Edgeworth’s “The Purple Jar,” a classic (and more well-known) example of didactic children’s fiction.

“The Purple Jar” provides an ideal case-study for Meyers due to Edgeworth’s notable pedagogical background. Edgeworth’s Practical Educataion, a collaboration with her father, was one of the most well received texts on pedagogy “between Locke and the mid-Victorian period,” a time line of over one hundred and thirty years (53). One of the main points of the Edgeworths educational theory was that education was a lifelong journey, and that the texts being used could be informative and entertaining.   This emphasis on didacticism was well-received during Edgeworth’s time, as Meyers notes through various reviews from the period. This praise only highlights the shift to contemporary critics’ dismissal of didactic literature because “[they] usually assume, it must be intellectually unproblematic and literarily uninteresting, especially if it is rationale, realistic, and domestic.” However, Meyers is swift to point out that fault in this statement: “a strong case can be made for the position that juvenile literature is inevitably and rightly ‘didactic’—that adults do, must, and should teach values to their child audience. But we moderns like our teaching camouflaged.” In this, Meyers claims that even the fantasy literature that revisionist scholars favor is didactic in some way.

While I am not going to go in-depth into Meyer’s justification didactic literatures’ historical mimetic nature, I believe she successfully proves her point through aligning points in “The Purple Jar” to the historical and cultural context of the tale. Through this example, Meyers is able to prove that women writers’ educational tales can be used in revisionist studies. However, I think it is wrong to limit “The Purple Jar,” and Meyers study, just to women’s educational tales. By broadening her argument to all of didactic children’s literature, Meyers would provide a vast number of texts to reference in future studies, without the limitation of women writers. Part of her point is that women wrote the majority of educational texts, but there was didactic literature beyond this small sampling.

She also uses an extremely small sample to defend her argument: only one text. While this is an article, it is very short, and there is still plenty of room to include two or three different works that would have aided Meyers in her argument, further validating a revisionist analysis of women’s educational texts.

As much as I wish she had expanded her own call for inclusion, I do appreciate the structure in which Meyers goes about demonstrating her argument.   While my own area of interest is not primarily aligned with the texts Meyers works with, I appreciate the flow of her argument and possibly even go as far as to suggest it as an example for how people can go about arguing for inclusions of genres/subgenres/ /authors/texts/etcetera into their specific literary canon. For someone actually in her specific field of study, this article would serve as an inspiration to expand past fantasy and didactic and possible include even more categories of children’s literature in revisionist studies.

–Kristi Fleetwood

In Jacqueline Rose’s own words about The Case of Peter Pan, she states:  “Instead of asking what children want, or need, from literature, this book has asked what it is that adults, through literature, want or demand of the child.” Roses selects Peter Pan because it is an enduring example of children’s literature and, because of its content, complicated authorship, and history, a useful site to excavate what she sees as the essentially problematic nature of writing for children.

Rose dismantles prevailing models and conventions of children’s literature by employing a psychoanalytic line of reasoning. Freudian childhood is not a fixed state, but rather a constantly shifting amalgam of memory, the unconscious, and the present. Because the adult can only conceive of this image of childhood, Rose asserts that adults are writing for this false child—truly, themselves–when they write children’s literature.  Likewise, Freud (and many linguists who followed) also recognized a distance between what is meant and what is said via language, an essential disconnect magnified by this unbridgeable distance between adult and child. The story of Peter Pan first appeared framed within an adult work called The Little White Bird, which acknowledged these issues by having it pass from an adult narrator to a child character, the complicated relationship between whom is understood by the reader.  Peter Pan, in its transformation into a purely children’s tale, loses this framing.  There is no acknowledgement of the adult/child relationship between the narrator and the child reading the book.

Rose then traces a line from Locke to Rousseau and on to Alan Garner and other writers of children’s literature, and attributes to this lineage a focus on the concrete realism of the natural (or unnatural, in the eventual case of children’s fairy stories and fantasies) world.  Locke and Rousseau originated the idea that the child is pure, should be sequestered from the corrupting influence of society, and should retain their purity through contact with the physical world.  Language is a corrupting force because of the distance it introduces between the word and its meaning, so the best literature for children keeps them in touch with the natural world (as in Robinson Crusoe).  Rose asserts that the prevailing realistic aesthetic of children’s literature, which requires them to believe the narrator and identify with the characters, can be connected to Rousseau’s concept of the child.  Likewise, Rose sees a relationship between this view of the child and Western, particularly British views of “primitive” cultures, which are both more pure and under the colonizing control of the British adult.

Peter and Wendy, J.M. Barrie’s long-awaited 1911 novelization of 1911 the play Peter Pan, flouts all of these traditions.  The narrator shifts from sentence to sentence, which Rose states is “…remarkable for the way that it exposes this problem of identity in language. (p. 72)” But Peter and Wendy is distinct from the beloved stage version of Peter Pan, and previous book versions of the play not written by J.M. Barrie. Exploring the difference between Peter and Wendy and the rest of children’s literature, Rose suggests that children’s literature should not be grouped by content type but by language—and nearly all children’s literature insists on a reliable narrator and realism.

Rose also investigates the troubling relationship between Peter Pan, the child, and money.  While the play is now conceived of as a children’s classic, Rose insists it was produced as much for adults and gave adults the license to look at children—which she connects, obliquely, to child prostitution.  She also connects Peter Pan with the creation of the child book market, and its production at different price points and its sales to children were necessary for the publishing industry to “render innocent (again) the more glaring commercial realities of the trade. (p. 107)”

Finally, Rose uses Peter Pan’s relationship to the British school system to explore how the state uses children as the site of language production.  In 1912, the British Board of Education stressed teaching “natural,” or plain-spoken, language to working-class children.  A few years earlier, however, the same body stressed “training the mind to appreciate English literature” to wealthier children in secondary schools. Rose stresses that both of these forms of language are manufactured by adults—that they are ideologies.  When Peter and Wendy is edited for inclusion in the school curriculum, it becomes apparent that Barrie is in fact speaking to both audiences, though all instances of the shifting narrator identity are edited out. She reflects that current theories of education stress teaching mastery of language to all students.

Rose concludes that she does not intend to suggest “an ideal form of writing which I am wishing to promote for the child. (p. 140)” Instead, she intends to question how language creates identity and how adults recreate that process in children through children’s literature. This is a critical question, and one that should not be taken lightly when considering what adults give children to read.  While I think it would be highly unlikely that that giving a child either the edited version of Peter Pan or Peter and Wendy in all of its identity-shifting glory would cause that child damage, I think that when you zoom out to how this text related to educational policies for different populations of children, there is a very real concern she unearthed about what we teach to which children and why.  I think her argument that adults cannot truly know the mind of the child restores to them some autonomy and power.  I can imagine that, perhaps, a healthy sense of mystery with regard to their inner lives contributes a certain amount of respect from adults.

However, while I think that Rose used Peter Pan to usefully probe the limits and traditions of children’s literature, I found myself constantly repeating to myself and writing in the margins “…but children do exist.” As much as adults may project onto children their current anxieties and their own complicated feelings about their childhood, children are real, and they must learn to read, and adults must communicate with them in ways that are both practical and entertaining.  I understand that it was not Rose’s intention to suggest a framework for children’s literature, but declaring the impossibility of it certainly leaves the reader at a loss with what to read a kid at bedtime.

I also wonder about how necessary it was to use Peter Pan as the basis for her theories about shifting language, identity, and realism in children’s literature—whether the uniqueness of this particular text in its different incarnations is particularly helpful to her and whether the same conclusions could be drawn from other books of its time, or from books that have been published since. I am thinking here of books that explicitly play with language (and image, in the case of Chris Rascha’s  jazz books) or narration/audience (a weird example, but “The Monster at the End of This Book” was a classic in my house).

–Kathy Cacace

What does it mean to be a child? Out of Marah Gubar’s “Risky Business”, three models of childhood, and in effect three models for developing children’s literature theory, emerge.

Borrowing from ideas rooted in psychology, Gubar argues, “viewing children as deficient—as unable to grasp certain concepts or skills—can help produce the very incapacities we claim merely to describe” (451). Gubar refers to the deficit model and explains that this line of thinking breeds questions like, “why share poetry with children if they cannot be expected to comprehend it?” She then contends, “To treat young people in this condescending way is to adhere to a deficit model of childhood, whereby young people are viewed as lacking the abilities, skills, and powers that adults have” (451). This is has an inherent negativity and is understood to be an ineffective model for theorizing children’s literature. If the field of children’s literature employed this model, the work generated would be show overwhelming bias against it being a child.

The second, and equally problematic model introduced is the difference model. Gubar posits that the difference model of childhood “[stresses] the radical alterity or otherness of children, representing them as a separate species, categorically different from adults” (451). This postcolonial (see the use of self and other in Edward Said “Orientalism”) identification system creates an unfair dichotomy between the child and the adult. At this level of theoretical development, the adult will always be the self. The otherness of the child is a product of the model. Being a child is, here, defined as not being an adult. It is an oversimplification of the question and a model that disallows the child to be anything but a not-adult.

From here, Marah Gubar introduces a possible third model for children’s literature theory to aspire to. Gubar reasons for the kinship model in the following excerpt:

“It is my contention that these texts—which young people had a hand in creating—are worth studying not just because they are critically neglected (although they are), or because we need to make our conception of what children’s literature is more flexible and inclusive (although we do), but also because their content often helps us theorize in more nuanced ways about what it means to be a child, to have a voice, and to exercise agency. These texts are serving as an inspiration for me in developing what I call the kinship model of childhood. This model is premised on the idea that children and adults are akin to one another, which means they are neither exactly the same nor radically dissimilar. The concept of kinship indicates relatedness, connection, and similarity without implying homogeneity, uniformity, and equality” (453).

The kinship model is Gubar’s attempt to fray the otherwise finite boundaries between child and adult. The two distinctions overlap. They are in many ways malleable, conforming to a variety of nuanced identifiers. In many ways, it is easy to agree with Gubar’s development of such a model. The lines between child and adult are often constructs of a particular society or culture. To say that a child is a deficit of an adult, different than an adult, means that we must provide a clear definition of the line that exists between the two. This would be an everchanging boundary.

Gubar goes so far as to say, “It is dehumanizing and potentially disabling to say that a human being has no voice, or no agency” (453). While, these types of stances have an air of melodramaticism, there is something to be said of a model that forces superiority of one subgroup over another subgroup of human beings.

Protecting herself from those who understand the semantic necessity of using a word like child, Gubar orients herself with:

“The kinship model, by its very existence as a model of what it means to be a child, accepts the idea that the category “child” is necessary as a result of this original state of dependency. At the same time, however, it holds that children and adults are separated by differences of degree, not of kind, meaning that we should eschew difference-model discourse that depicts children as a separate species in favor of emphasizing that growth is a messy and unpredictable continuum. There is no one moment when we suddenly flip over from being a child to being an adult” (455).

Gubar outlines the distinction between the deficit and kinship models by arguing:

“Whereas the deficit model portrays children as universal novices who must overcome an across-the-board array of incapacities, the kinship model maintains that development is not always linear, meaning children sometimes have abilities that adults lack, such as a greater facility for learning new languages” (455).

We can not abandon the idea of the child. We should not avoid it in our exploration of children’s literature. Rather, we should be aware of the dangers of particular perspectives that we bring to our theories and methods of inquiry.

This approach is familiar for digital humanists. As we continue to define what it is to be a digital humanist, many see value or danger in using such words. The postcolonial self and other attitudes are active in many debates and the categorization/oversimplification of the other has a valuable parallel.