“The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature”

I’ve written a few posts over the last year discussing various children’s books and authors, but I don’t know a lot about the history of children’s literature or what criticism of the genre looks like. So, I decided to start looking for a general overview and began with The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel. It was published in 2009 so it’s not the leading edge of criticism, but for a general overview that seems plenty recent enough.

Now, the risk of reading anything that comes out of academia is that you never know if you’re about to get genuine scholarship or pseudointellectual blather. This collection’s sixteen chapters do have a few examples of the latter, especially in the second half, but usually one can tell within a couple paragraphs or even just by the title if the essay is going to be nonsense. Several chapters, though, are in fact interesting and informative, and the rest are at least inoffensive.

The first of three parts, “Contexts and Genres,” includes the first seven chapters and is by far the strongest. In the first chapter, “The origins of children’s literature,” M. O. Grenby points to John Newbery’s 1744 A Pretty Little Pocket Book as the most commonly accepted origin of children’s books as we think of them. It included “a mixture of pictures, rhymes, riddles, stories, alphabets and lessons on moral conduct,” which certainly sounds like a prototypical children’s book, but of course Newbery did have models and predecessors even among his contemporaries and near-contemporaries. Going back farther, we can find things like Mediaeval abridged versions of The Canterbury Tales produced for children, and stories have been told for children for as far back in human history as one cares to go. Complicating matters further is how strictly one defines “children’s literature.” For example, children have always enjoyed stories written for adults or mixed-age audiences.

Grenby also provides some interesting context for early children’s books. The genre has always been closely associated with education, and John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education was especially influential for Locke’s insistence that learning should be made enjoyable as much as possible. Grenby also discusses the professionalisation of literature in the Eighteenth Century. At one time authors, to a large extent, worked with a patronage system, but gradually shifted to an open market. This, and improved printing technologies that reduced the cost of publishing, made it easier to write and publish relatively “low-status, potentially mass-market products such as children’s books.”

Andrea Immel’s chapter, “Children’s books and constructions of childhood,” covers some aspects of children’s literature that seem obvious but have important implications. For example, children are the rare consumer who has little or no say in the products purchased on his behalf, so marketing and production is often targeted not to end-user but to his parents or other adults (e.g., teachers or older relatives). Books are often purchased as gifts, and as Immel says, this gift “may represent the necessity of acquiring cultural capital,” and isn’t so much a gift as a “pledge.”

She also briefly discusses how baby books in particular are not a solitary literary experience as books typically are for adults, but a social one. I make the same point in my article on board books, and it’s key to understanding that particular genre.

Brian Alderson’s chapter, “The making of children’s books,” is an interesting one for those who’d like to see the process of writing, illustrating, and publishing these books. The most important point here is that children’s books are rarely the work of the author alone, but very much a collaborative process between the author, illustrator, publisher, and printer. In fact, the author often doesn’t have a final say over the illustrations, nor the illustrator over how his work appears in print, despite occasional exceptions. For example, John Tenniel was unhappy with how his illustrations appeared in the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, so Lewis Carroll was able to have that edition pulled and the books reprinted to Tenniel’s satisfaction.

In “Picture-book worlds and ways of seeing,” Katie Trumpener discusses what she calls the “cosmopolitan” nature of picture books, particularly how illustrations serve as a bridge to languages. For example, Johann Amos Comenius’ 1658 Orbis sensualium pictus used illustrations to teach children German and Latin, and it was soon translated into other languages as well. The English edition, for instance, was published in 1659 as Visible World, or Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief things of the world.

She also discusses some more experimental picture books. For example, The Noisy Book, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Leonard Wisegard, in which a blindfolded dog imagines the world around him based on what he hears, or Crockett Johnson’s fairly abstract Harold and the Purple Crayon. As art, these are of more interest to adults than children, though when well done can still entertain their intended audience. My children enjoy Harold, for instance, even if they couldn’t write an essay on its ideas of constructed realities or whatever.

Richard Flynn’s chapter, “The fear of poetry,” may be the strongest in the book. Until relatively recently, children’s poetry was quite popular, and it was a broad field that included everything from nursery rhymes to authors ostensibly writing for adults (e.g., Robert Frost), and covered a wide range of themes, styles, and emotions. Flynn points to a few prominent reasons for the severe narrowing of children’s poetry over the last several decades, in both content and audience.

First is the sense that poetry is the domain of literary elites rather than for anyone. This is obviously true of adult’s poetry, and the attitude has filtered down to children’s verse as well aside from goofy, lightweight poems. Second, he puts some blame on Robert Louis Stevenson and his A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson, he says, was certainly talented (and for what it’s worth, I gave this book a positive review a while back), but it began the trends of focusing too much on trying to write from the child’s perspective, and of writing explicitly for children rather than for a general audience.

Finally, he puts some blame on Lewis Carroll’s parodies of didactic poems. Like Stevenson’s poems these are very good in themselves, but they started an unfortunate trend, in this case the idea that didactic poetry is bad in itself. As Flynn says, though, “poetry really isn’t an either/or game.” Partly as a result of this attitude, children’s verse has been dominated by comic verse, which is fine as a genre when done well (see, for instance, Edward Lear, Roald Dahl, or Shel Silverstein), but children need a much more varies literary diet.

The next chapter is “Retelling stories across time and cultures,” by John Stephens. One must have a good grasp of this topic to understand children’s media generally, given the number of new stories that are adaptations or retellings of folklore or other old classics. As Stephens says:

Retellings of old tales are thus shaped by interaction amongst three elements: first, the already-known story, in whatever versions are circulating at the time of production, together with other stories of similar type or including similar motifs; second, the current social preoccupations and values (that is, metanarratives, or the larger cultural accounts which order and explain individual narratives) which constitute its top-down framing and ideology (and these may be mediated by current interpretations of the known story); and third, the textual forms through which the story is expressed (narrative modes, genres and so on).

The canon of stories can evolve over time. In the Robin Hood mythology, for example, Maid Marian has become more prominent over time. Recent versions often include a Muslim companion, but such a character was first introduced in the TV series Robin of Sherwood in 1984.

There’s another point that we should address from this chapter before moving on. As part of his discussion of how stories are reframed over time, in their emphases or point-of-view characters, for example, Stephens says:

Donna Jo Napoli’s multifocalised Zel (1996), for example, not only represents Rapunzel and her aristocratic lover as focalising characters, but frames the novel as the Witch’s first-person narration. The capacity to present other or multiple perspectives dismantles simplistic good-evil dichotomies and foregrounds the conflicting desires of the characters. Such narrative strategies enable a text to rework relationships grounded on gendered or other hierarchies and to renegotiate the ideologies and values inherent in those hierarchies.

First, reframing like that described in Zel is only meaningful for adults. I’m certainly not the first to point this out, but children haven’t seen these traditional stories played straight yet, so authors aren’t subverting expectations or doing anything surprising for the target audience. They’re just setting up a new norm, which might be okay if the new norm is an improvement, but it often isn’t. Simple moral dichotomies in children’s stories are beneficial to children. They’re still learning right and wrong, and need to know that good and evil exist before they can navigate the ambiguous cases that often arise in daily life and reflected in literature for adults. Nuance needs to be introduced only gradually.

The second and third parts of the book, “Audiences” and “Forms and Themes,” are more of a mixed bag than the first part, but there are a couple chapters worthy of attention.

One is Kimberley Reynolds’ “Changing families in children’s fiction,” which gives an interesting overview of how families have generally been portrayed in children’s literature. Historically, though depictions of bad families have always been present, authors’ attitudes towards traditional family structures have generally been positive and presented as at least an ideal. Beginning in, of course, the 1960’s, though, portrayals of dysfunctional families and even criticism of the family as such have become much more common.

Finally, Mavis Reimer, in “Traditions of the school story,” traces the history and themes of this popular sub-genre. One might expect a lot of negative portrayals of schools, but:

Criticism of schools as places of injustice, unhappiness and coercion have featured in narratives from the beginning of the genre, but such critiques have been a comparatively thin thread through the tradition. More typical is the story in which the new scholar learns first to understand, then to accept, and finally to excel at, the ways of the strange world he or she is entering.

Also interesting is Reimer’s distinction between boys’ and girls’ school stories. In general, for boys the school is a microcosm of the wider world, and a place to master the social and practical skills necessary to succeed in it. For girls, the school is more often a “world apart,” and is more internally focused. There also seems to be more commitment from the audience, as these books are more likely to turn into long-running series and to inspire the creation of fan clubs.

So, overall, The Cambridge Companion seems to work well as an introduction to the genre. For those wanting to go farther, each chapter has a short list of recommended reading, which I’ll be taking advantage of in the months ahead.