The Transformative Energy of Children's Literature
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Notes 1 Breaking Bounds: The Transformative Energy of Children’s Literature 1. I do not recognise Karin Lesnik-Oberstein’s insistence that the majority of academics who write about children’s literature are primarily concerned with finding the right book for the right child (Children’s Literature: New Approaches, 2004: 1–24). 2. Although publishing for children includes many innovative and important non- fictional works, my concern is specifically with narrative fictions for children. 3. See Rumer Godden’s entertaining ‘An Imaginary Correspondence’ featuring invented letters between Mr V. Andal, an American publisher working for the De Base Publishing Company, and Beatrix Potter for an entertaining insight into this process. The piece appeared in Horn Book Magazine 38 (August 1963), 197–206. 4. Peter Hunt raises questions about the regard accorded to Hughes’s writing for children suggesting that it derives more from the insecurity of children’s literature critics than the quality of the work: ‘It is almost as if, with no faith in their own judgements, such critics are glad to accept the acceptance of an accepted poet’ (2001: 79–81). 5. See Reynolds and Tucker, 1998; Trites, 2000 and Lunden, 2004. 6. Although writing in advance of Higonnet, Rose would have been familiar with many of the examples on which Pictures of Innocence is based. 7. By the time she reaches her conclusion, Rose has modified her position to empha- sise that ‘children’s literature is just one of the areas in which this fantasy is played out’ (138), undermining her claims that the child-audience is key to the work of children’s literature in culture. 8. A useful comparison of what Rose has in mind can be found in Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin (1967). Fish suggests that Milton recreates the Fall in the reader, who as a post-lapsarian user of language, anticipates the events because Milton describes Eve in words such as ‘wanton’ that now have ‘sinful’ connotations which they could not have had before the Fall. 9. According to James Bartholomew, two of five robberies are committed by ten to sixteen-year olds during school hours as are a quarter of all burglaries and a third of all car thefts (see ‘Academies of Crime’ at www.Telegraph.co filed on 14 May 2006). 10. Pullman in fact quotes Singer (‘events never grow stale’) at the start of his speech. 11. Peter Hollindale discusses the differences and similarities of writing for adults and children and having pointed to particular requirements for writers addressing young audiences he concludes, ‘Some of our greatest novelists work within the narrative constraints of children’s literature [that is, they are alert to and work with the same issues and requirements that inform how successful children’s writers work]; the difference is that they do not have to’ (1997: 41). 12. It is important to keep in mind the fact that memory and influence are complex phenomena: memory is not always accurate and influence can operate at many levels. The importance attributed to certain texts by those who subsequently became writers may not have been recognised at the time of reading; nevertheless, it is interesting to observe how often writers credit childhood reading with shaping their own literary practice and how specific they are about individual books they regard as formative. 184 Notes 185 13. Carpenter identifies the source as The Tale of Ginger and Pickles in which the dog and cat shopkeepers are sorely tempted to eat their mouse-customers (272). 14. See Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak’s ‘A Writer on the Yellow Brick Road: Salman Rushdie’s Ozian Inspirations’ in Greenway (pp. 51–68). 15. The page numbers referring to Nelson’s chapter were taken from an incomplete manuscript and will inevitably be different when the book is published. To indicate that they are provisional they have been set in bold. Many of the same anxieties are being expressed in relation to today’s crossover books – again because it seems only to involve adults reading works written for children rather than children annexing works of adult fiction. Of course, when children read adult texts a whole new set of concerns based on the need to preserve childhood innocence comes into play. 16. Smiles specifically addresses young men, ‘some perhaps still in their teens, most in their twenties’ (Nelson, 179). 17. I conducted an informal survey through the pages of the Society of Authors’ newsletter, the findings from which suggest that Victorian and Edwardian writers continue to influence the current generation of writers for children. The authors mentioned most frequently as influences on their own work were Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Kenneth Grahame, Charles Kingsley, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Some volunteered specific titles: the Alice books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Little Women. Influential genres were myths, legends, hero stories and fantasy. Comics were mentioned as both a genre and a format by several respondents. The author and texts to be mentioned most fre- quently were C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles; however, one respondent provided the following interesting information on the basis of research he did for a possi- ble programme to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Anthony Buckeridge’s first Jennings book: I conclude that a whole generation of comedy writers (aged between 40 and 60 – Alan Ayckbourn, Jonathan Coe, Robert Leeson, Susan Hill, Stephen Fry, Griff Rhys Jone, Victoria Wood) were influenced by the … surreal humour of Linbury Court School and its pupils. (e-mail correspondence with Lee Pressman, 21 March 2005) 18. It strikes me as significant that the only equally focused response on this scale in children’s literature has been to the possibility of a nuclear (or similar) holocaust. Currently, environmental threats and developments in robotics are stimulating a new generation of dystopian fiction. 19. This has been well documented in relation to Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson who regularly draw on the stylistic and narrative conventions of popu- lar childhood narratives (from toy theatres to penny dreadfuls) but who have gained and sustained the respect of the cultural establishment. 20. Although technically Magic(al) Realism and Carpentier’s ‘Marvelous Real’ are separate terms, the first referring primarily to the mode of narration and the second to its subject, this description of the marvellous captures the essence of the transformative power at the heart of Magic(al) Realism. 21. Similar and related terms (‘Magischer Realismus’ [Magical realism] and ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ [New Objectivity]) had been applied by art critics and historians since the 1920s. 22. In other ways, Bowers’s reading of the relationship between children’s literature and magic(al) realism is rather simplistic, not least her suggestion that ‘we should ques- tion the extent to which readers of magical realism are simply reluctant to give up 186 Notes their childhood approach to stories’ (108–9). It should be noted that some scholars of children’s literature are seeking to establish a specific vocabulary and tradition of this kind of writing as it developed in children’s literature. Eva Kaum’s unpublished MA dissertation, For All of Us Can be Transformed: A Study of the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Worlds in David Almond’s Teenage Novels (Roehampton University, 2001), for instance, proposes the term ‘fantastic realism’ which she suggests stresses not just an interaction between a real-world setting and fantastic experiences but also the change which takes place in the characters as a result of their experiences. 2 Breaking the Frame: Picturebooks, Modernism, and New Media 1. The account is contained in a brief correspondence between Hildick and Leonard Woolf in January 1965; Hildick suggests publishing the story in picturebook form, possibly with illustrations by Brian Wildsmith. Woolf acted on the suggestion but had Duncan Grant provide the artwork. The result is a book that looks very much of a piece with the Bloomsbury-Charlesworth-Hogarth Press productions of the time, but which makes a less creative use of the picturebook format than perhaps an experienced picturebookmaker such as Wildsmith would have done. Julie Vivas’s 1991 illustrations have proved more successful. 2. My attention was drawn to Stein’s story by Roni Natov’s discussion of it in The Poetics of Childhood (2003), pp. 103–10. Natov’s interest is in the way the story explores gender, identity formation and socialisation, and the way even a child, once having taken on – or entered into – language, is compelled at some level to impose her identity on the pastoral world. 3. The site for ‘Yesterday and Today: Children’s Books of the Soviet Era’, organised by the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of McGill University, notes that there was an overall increase in book production during this period and that ‘Children’s books naturally followed the mass trend and a first printing of 100,000 and up was common’. See http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/russian/intro.htm, accessed 20/02/2006. 4. Günter Berghaus makes the point that to be effective in their challenge to pre- vailing aesthetic, social, and political forces, avant-garde artists ‘need to possess a reflective consciousness and be aware of the conceptual framework within which they are operating’ (xxi). In other words, they must be fully versed in the rules before they can dismiss them or anticipate what will take their place. 5. Belsey discusses this in Chapter 8 of Culture and the Real. 6. Eugene Ostashevsky discusses the circumstances of the deaths of the members of OBERIU. 7. The books were created by Harlin Quist. Originally the stories stood as codas to sections of Ionesco’s memoir. 8.