Children's Literature Grows Up

Children's Literature Grows Up The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Mattson, Christina Phillips. 2015. Children's Literature Grows Up. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467335 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Children’s Literature Grows Up A dissertation presented by Christina Phillips Mattson to The Department of Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Comparative Literature Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May, 2015 © 2015 Christina Phillips Mattson All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Maria Tatar Christina Phillips Mattson Abstract Children’s Literature Grows Up proposes that there is a revolution occurring in contemporary children’s fiction that challenges the divide that has long existed between literature for children and literature for adults. Children’s literature, though it has long been considered worthy of critical inquiry, has never enjoyed the same kind of extensive intellectual attention as adult literature because children’s literature has not been considered to be serious literature or “high art.” Children’s Literature Grows Up draws upon recent scholarship about the thematic transformations occurring in the category, but demonstrates that there is also an emerging aesthetic and stylistic sophistication in recent works for children that confirms the existence of children’s narratives that are equally complex, multifaceted, and worthy of the same kind of academic inquiry that is afforded to adult literature. This project investigates the history of children’s literature in order to demonstrate the way that children’s literature and adult literature have, at different points in history, grown closer or farther apart, explores the reasons for this ebb and flow, and explains why contemporary children’s literature marks a reunification of the two categories. Employing J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as a its primary example, Children’s Literature Grows Up demonstrates that this new kind of contemporary children’s fiction is a culmination of two traditions: the tradition of the readerly children’s book and the tradition of the writerly adult novel. With the fairy tales, mythologies, legends, and histories that contemporary writers weave into their texts, contemporary fictions for children incorporate previous defining characteristics of children’s fantasy literature and tap into our cultural memory; with their iii sophisticated style, complex narrative strategies, and focus on characterization, these new fictions display the realism and seriousness of purpose which have become the adult novel’s defining features. Children’s Literature Grows Up thus concludes that contemporary children’s fiction’s power comes from the way in which it combines story and art by bringing together both the children’s literature tradition and the tradition of the adult novel, as well as the values to which they are allied. Contemporary writers for children therefore raise the stakes of their narratives and change the tradition by moving beyond the expected conventions of their category. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction. 1 Chapter One. 17 The Future of the (Children’s) Novel Or Can Harold Bloom Be Wrong? Yes. Chapter Two. 43 There and Back Again: Children’s Literature, A Journey Chapter Three. 121 Marauding the House of Fiction Or Rowling Breaks Through Chapter Four. 142 Say the Magic Word: Spellwork and the Legacy of Nonsense Chapter Five. 190 Brave New (Wizarding) World Chapter Six. 225 Forming An Old Acquaintance Chapter Seven. 301 “Till This Moment, I Never Knew Myself” Conclusion. 363 Opening at the Close Bibliography. 370 v Acknowledgements My first thanks must go to my advisors: Maria Tatar, Karen Thornber, and Marc Shell. The opportunity of working with such extraordinary scholars and such kind and generous people has been a true gift. It is thanks to their painstaking readings, insightful suggestions, and enduring encouragement that this project matured from a fractious and unruly mass of ideas into a comprehensible and “grown up” dissertation. Marc, thank you for the exhilarating conversations and for your unwavering support from the very first days of my graduate school experience. You are the very wise Cheshire Cat to my disoriented Alice. Karen, thank you for your amazingly meticulous and penetrating comments, your encouraging and cheerful solidarity, and your sincere enthusiasm for my project. You are the impeccable Professor McGonagall to my acquisitive Hermione. Maria, thank you for your endless generosity, your brilliant suggestions (and inestimable knowledge of all things faerie), and your incredible friendship. You are truly and in every sense the fairest woman in all the land, who deftly wields both the Alethiometer and the Elder Wand, graciously navigating me through magical worlds for the past eight years. Harry had Dumbledore for his Mentor, but I am infinitely more fortunate because I have you. If you could see me now, I’d be flicking my hand toward you in Katniss’s salute. Thank you also to my amazing cohort (and honorary cohort) who have become my academic family. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the faculty and administrators in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Folkore and Mythology, especially Luis Girón Negrón, Deborah Foster, Wanda di Bernardo, Isaure Mignotte, and Holly Hutchinson, whose help has been invaluable in getting me from G1 to PhD and who have made me feel vi so welcome and supported. Thank you to my students, past and present, who have taught me so much and who continue to inspire me as they become the heroes of their own stories. And a huge thank you to my friends and extended family who have been so wonderfully supportive and caring (and understanding of my children’s literature obsession). Thank you to my fantastic siblings, Andrew and Kelly, who are my dearest confidantes and my truest friends, and whom I love enormously. Thank you for introducing me to and sharing my love for Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I couldn’t ask for two kinder or more brilliant Companions in my life’s journey. Thank you to my dearest and most wonderful parents who have believed in me, supported me, and loved me from my first forays into Neverland and straight on ‘til morning. I am immeasurably blessed to be your daughter. Thank you for being so generous, encouraging, and caring, and for always adoring your imaginative, strong-willed child (even when she pretended to be an onion as an homage to Harriet, left the window open for Peter, committed to building a working planetary model of Le Petit Prince without knowing anything about physics (or hammers), and insisted upon bringing all thirty-one L.M. Montgomery novels with her in a hatbox on vacation). And finally, thank you to my incredible husband, Eric Mattson, who has read every word of this dissertation, who has been the one to build me up, make me laugh, and cheer me on, and who has been my hero from the very beginning of our “once upon a time.” You make every day of my life magical and I am so blessed to have you as my partner, my champion, and my best friend. Thank you for your never-ending patience, your wizard-like editing abilities, your kindness, your encouragement, your love, and your enduring faith in me. I love and admire you so very, very much. This dissertation is dedicated to you. vii Introduction “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “I won’t” said Alice. “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved. “Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” -Lewis Carroll1 I’d like to start by playing a little game of comparisons. A dissertation on children’s literature in the guise of a Comparative Literature dissertation (or vice versa) that attempts to tether together the past and the present, the adult and the child, the real and the marvelous, the sacred and the profane, will doubtless not proceed in the normal way, so why not begin with an unorthodox introduction? After all, in the first book of the Harry Potter series, when a tall, silver-haired, high-heeled wizard arrives at Number 4 Privet Drive, where dwell the mugglest of muggles, J. K. Rowling writes: “Albus Dumbledore didn’t seem to realise that he had just arrived in a street where everything from his name to his boots was unwelcome.”2 And yet this wizard, so unwelcome and disparaged in one world, is incredibly eminent and admired in another. It is always, as we learn from a foray into Severus Snape’s memories, a matter of perspective. For example, in 1899, in an effort to save the novel, one critic argued passionately that we put away childish things when we read. A century later, with the same goal, another critic exhorted us all to read like “extremely intelligent children.” From one perspective the art of fiction and the aspects of the adult novel have nothing to do with the materials and method of children’s literature; 1 Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice. Martin Gardner, ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, 124. 2 J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 12. 1 from another point of view, the two become one and the same, their futures intimately intertwined, like two rivers bound for the same sea.

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