PROOF Contents List of figures viii List of plates x Acknowledgements xii Introduction Janet Maybin and Nicola J. Watson 1 1 Purposes and Histories 8 Introduction Heather Montgomery 8 Instruction and Delight Peter Hunt 12 Origins: Fairy Tales and Folk Tales Jack Zipes 26 Children’s Literature: Birth, Infancy, Maturity Matthew Grenby 39 The First Golden Age Humphrey Carpenter 56 The Same but Different: Conservatism and Revolution in Children’s Fiction Peter Hunt 70 Multicultural Agendas Lissa Paul 84 Transformative Energies Kimberley Reynolds 99 2 Publishing, Prizes and Popularity 115 Introduction Janet Maybin 115 Boys’ and Girls’ Reading, 1884 Edward Salmon 119 v 99780230_227132_01_prexvi.indd780230_227132_01_prexvi.indd v 77/15/2009/15/2009 55:06:48:06:48 PPMM PROOF vi Contents Empire Boys Joseph Bristow 130 Twentieth-Century British Publishing Nicholas Tucker 143 Prizes! Prizes! Newbery Gold Kenneth Kidd 156 In Defence of the Indefensible? Some Grounds for Enid Blyton’s Appeal David Rudd 168 Marketing at the Millennium Claire Squires 183 3 Poetry 199 Introduction Nicola J. Watson 199 ‘From the Garden to the Street’: The History of Poetry for Children Morag Styles 202 The Language of Poems for Children: A Stylistic Case Study Lesley Jeffries 218 ‘From the Best Poets’? Anthologies for Children Morag Styles 235 4 Story-telling, Stage and Screen 246 Introduction Nicola J. Watson 246 Stories in Performance Joan Swann 249 Drama Susanne Greenhalgh 267 Screen Classics Deborah Cartmell 281 5 Words and Pictures 296 Introduction Sharon Goodman 296 9780230_227132_01_prexvi.indd vi 7/15/2009 5:06:48 PM PROOF Contents vii Texts and Pictures: A History Joyce Irene Whalley 299 Picturebook Codes William Moebius 311 Postmodern Experiments Bette Goldstone 320 6 Contemporary Transformations 330 Introduction Ann Hewings 330 In Praise of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon 333 Harry Potter goes to China Suman Gupta, with assistance from Cheng Xiao 338 Reading Transformations Rosie Flewitt 352 Cross-reading and Crossover Books Rachel Falconer 366 Index 380 99780230_227132_01_prexvi.indd780230_227132_01_prexvi.indd vviiii 77/15/2009/15/2009 55:06:48:06:48 PPMM PROOF 1 Purposes and Histories Introduction Heather Montgomery The scholarly study of children’s literature is a relatively new endeavour and it is only recently that a large body of critical literature has grown up around children’s books. The folklorists Peter and Iona Opie laid import- ant groundwork for the study of children’s cultural worlds in producing compilations of nursery rhymes (1951) and fairy tales (1974), and Harvey Darton’s early study Children’s Books in England (1932) remains an import- ant authoritative point of reference on children’s literature. The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading edited by Margaret Meek and colleagues (1977) provided a further landmark but, on the whole, children’s books were long excluded from more general literary criticism. One of the earliest works of criticism, John Rowe Townsend’s Written for Children, was fi rst published in 1965, has gone through six editions since then, and stands out as a pioneering volume. Similarly Humphrey Carpenter’s landmark Secret Gardens (1985), which came out of Carpenter and Prichard’s work on writ- ing The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (1984), a project they took over from the Opies, is another important achievement in the fi eld. Despite this slow start, the study of children’s literature is now a thriving and dynamic fi eld and, as the essays below will show, children’s books are much theorised and analysed. The fi rst section of this reader contains seven essays which raise questions about the nature, signifi cance and purposes of children’s literature and the import of it as a fi eld of academic study, as well as supplying its history in outline. Taken together, they make claims for the importance of children’s literature. They challenge the notion that children’s literature is simplistic 8 9780230_227132_03_cha01.indd 8 7/15/2009 12:14:52 PM PROOF Introduction 9 or marginal, show how children’s literature is shaped by wider sociocul- tural changes and indeed contributes to those changes, and examine how the study of children’s books can reveal the way they refl ect and construct social attitudes towards children as well as pointing to adult anxieties about contemporary childhoods. The essays Peter Hunt’s ‘Instruction and Delight’ provides a starting point for the study of children’s literature, challenging typical assumptions made about writ- ing for children: that it is trivial, easy, often ephemeral and fundamentally ‘childish’; that it is marginal to literature for adults; that it is intrinsically conservative and that reading it constitutes merely an escape from the harsh realities of adult life. He tackles the specifi c question of what children’s lit- erature is for, what its appropriate subject matter is, and discusses the per- ennial question of whether its role is primarily to entertain or to instruct. Hunt additionally asks whether children’s literature is inevitably something imposed on children by adults to refl ect their own politicised conceptualisa- tions of childhood. The next three essays together supply the outline of a history of Brit- ish children’s literature from its origins in oral culture to the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and the inauguration of the so-called First Golden Age. Jack Zipes’s ‘Fairy Tales and Folktales’ explores how fairy tales became associated with literature specifi ed to children. Fairy tales are often seen as the epitome of stories for children in that they are simple and repetitive, based on standard characters and stock phrases. Andrew Lang’s series of coloured fairy-story books, starting with The Blue Fairy Book (1889), introduced many children to the formula in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while in the later twentieth century, it was Walt Disney’s fi lm interpretations on fi lm that were most infl uential. Disney adapted many fairy tales for the cinema specifi cally as wholesome family entertainment, with the result that in the twentieth century the fairy tale became fi rmly identifi ed with both children and childishness. From a historical perspective, however, fairy tales have not always been identifi ed with children; as Zipes argues, fairy tales were oral tales told by adults, which children may have heard but which were not designed for them. Zipes goes on to discuss the longevity of fairy tales within print culture. Matthew Grenby’s essay, ‘Children’s Literature: Birth, Infancy, Maturity’ analyses the rise of children’s literature in the eighteenth century through to the great explosion of British children’s literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, and provides a revisionary take on received histories. 99780230_227132_03_cha01.indd780230_227132_03_cha01.indd 9 77/15/2009/15/2009 112:14:532:14:53 PPMM PROOF 10 Purposes and Histories Grenby agrees with the customary location of the beginnings of anglophone children’s literature proper in the eighteenth century, with the fi rst publica- tion of novels and books written especially for children in which other chil- dren were the heroes and heroines. He warns, however, against espousing too uncritically a comfortable and teleological narrative in which children’s literature has got better, less moralistic, and increasingly child-focused. He writes of the wide variety of literature for children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discussing the ways that both child-readers and the authors who wrote for them subverted and resisted didacticism. Humphrey Carpenter’s landmark essay, extracted from Secret Gardens (Carpenter, 1985), picks up the historical narrative from Grenby and focuses on the nineteenth century in more detail, examining in particular a rise in the quality and quantity of children’s literature from the 1860s onwards. He discusses how the changing roles of children, the expansion of empire and the demographics of the period all had an impact on imagina- tive writing for children. He analyses how changing constructions of the child, inspired by Romantic sensibilities, led to new ideas about both what they should read and how they should be portrayed in literature. Kim Reynolds’s ‘Transformative Energies’ picks up from Hunt’s medita- tions upon the ideological leanings of children’s literature and makes the case for regarding it as ‘radical’. She refutes the claim that children’s lit- erature is innately conservative in terms of style, content and in the way it frames the adult–child relationship. Some commentators, such as Jacque- line Rose (1984), have argued that children’s literature is reactionary and nostalgic, inventing a culture of childhood which has no true relation to the lives of real children but which is calculated instead to provide comfort and reassurance to adults. Reynolds disputes this, arguing that the children’s books of one generation prepare the way for adult books of the next, and, further, that children’s literature is both a ‘safe house’ for literary modes temporarily out of fashion and a breeding ground and incubator for future innovation. She argues that children’s literature has had a direct, signifi - cant and measurable infl uence on adult writing, and that some of the most innovative children’s writers of recent years, such as Philip Pullman, have had important and far-reaching effects on all literature, not simply that for children. Reynolds argues that children’s literature does not simply refl ect cultural change, but prefi gures and sets this change in motion and therefore properly lies at the vanguard of social and literary study. Reynolds’s sense of children’s literature as formally avant-garde is tested and contested in Hunt’s second essay for this volume, ‘The Same but Dif- ferent: Conservation and Revolution in Children’s Fiction’.