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?

The first thing that struck me about Flynn’s article is that he takes Hunt to task for focusing on denigrating those he disagrees with, rather than stating he disagrees with them and then moving on to a richer and more productive discussion advancing his own views. Hunt claims that children’s books of the past are not worth studying, and that those who do study them are engaged in an act of veneration rather than actual scholarship.

Though Flynn himself says snarky things about Hunt, he does so only after fully acknowledging that it is petty of him and he is doing it anyway. I liked that. Besides, Flynn goes on to actually advance a clear rationalization in favor of his own argument, not merely bashing Hunt as he claims Hunt did to others.

Flynn’s rebuttal of the claim that studying historical childhood is impossible, and that “an understanding of contemporary childhood is relatively unproblematic” is, I think, by now fully accepted by all of us in this class, as is his explanation for why childhood studies is practically applicable to contemporary childhood policies etc. “on the ground.” So I’m going to focus on a different aspect of his article.

On page 144, Flynn talks about the perspective of those outside the field of children’s literature, that scholars of children’s literature know they are putting themselves into a position where they are going to constantly have to defend the scholarly nature of their field to those who view it as childish and indulgent – a discussion we started the semester with. As Carrie pointed out last week, this article is from 1997 and likely does not reflect the exact reality of today’s world of scholarship in children’s literature. But it gave me some interesting ways to see today’s reality.

Flynn ends off with a call for “us” to “build better, more visible, and more inclusive networks to promote the study of childhood.” Looking at the history and trajectory of childhood studies, that does certainly seem to have happened and to be happening. The CUNY MALS program’s new(ish) track in interdisciplinary Childhood Studies is one indication, and many universities (Brooklyn College as an example) have some variation of Childhood Studies as its own major – and it will of necessity be interdisciplinary.

Flynn’s assertion that “exploring the idea of childhood – in history, in society, in literature and culture past and present – is important,” and that “disciplines in the liberal arts and social sciences seem best equipped to conduct the kind of intellectual inquiry required” seems to have been heeded and borne productive interdisciplinary associations and collaborations.

But the fact remains that for a very long while, attitudes such as Hunt’s prevailed. The “continuing condescension toward children’s literature in the academy” has not completely disappeared, even if it has begun to. And when a group of scholars convinced of the worth of their own field bumps up against such condescension time and again, it does seem only natural that they would close ranks in a sense, and form a coterie of like-minded people where they can turn when the discouragement from outside gets to be too much.

(Ironically, as I read Flynn’s article and started thinking about this point, I had an image which I realized I was characterizing in my mind as female – something that denigrators of children’s literature tend to do – to feminize the scholars in the field.)

Flynn’s conceptualization of “more inclusive networks” has, I think, come to be. And yet it seems to me inevitable that after years of encountering so much indulgent “oh, you, you’re so cute, studying children’s literature and thinking it means anything,” an attitude of closing ranks still remains to a certain degree. Certainly every field creates its own little community. But not every community needs to develop the fierceness as of children against an adult world, as they do in so many of the books we study, because their scholarly legitimacy was never questioned.

Of course childhood studies is important. And of course children’s literature is a huge part of that, both past and present. Though there are still academics who maintain an amused affection for scholars of childhood studies and children’s literature, the majority of academics fully recognize children’s literature as a legitimate field.

And still, that doesn’t erase all the years of having to repeatedly assert the legitimacy of the field. None of us in this class actually experienced that constant beating down that resulted in the development of an insular community banding together against the big scary world of literary academia, but we feel the effects still. I don’t think any of our colleagues question the legitimacy of the work we’re doing, so why do we still feel compelled to defend ourselves?

Well, because institutional/cultural memory is a thing, and because the critical texts we read are written by scholars who did experience that. Maybe our students will feel differently about the place of children’s literature scholars within the broader world of academia.

But even for me, when I’ve been convinced for a long while already of the importance of childhood studies, even of the importance of studying childhood in medieval texts, this article was important, as a stark expression of why we do it, as a quick encapsulation of what that importance actually is, and as a reminder of how we got to where we are now in childhood studies and children’s literature.

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?

Gillian Adams sets out a really strong case for the existence of a category of literature for children in the Middle Ages. At some point while I was reading this, I got uncomfortable, but then I double-checked the date and was reassured. This article was published in 1998.

Yes, in 1998 most medievalists who did not study children needed to be convinced that medieval Europe did have a conception of childhood, that they were not just miniature adults or added workforce who were not viewed with love by their parents. By now, even medievalists who don’t work on material involving children usually are aware that our understanding of this has changed significantly. The field of medieval childhood studies is still quite young: the books Adams mentions (Shahar, Schultz, Hanawalt) are still almost the only books devoted entirely to medieval European childhood. (I’m not including some of the others she mentions because they deal with “after 1500,” or with only a specific aspect of childhood, like literacy. Nicholas Orme has a few really important and comprehensive books which were published by then but which she doesn’t mention.)

But medieval childhood studies definitely has progressed beyond simply refuting the Ariès model, and the field of medieval children’s literature has progressed beyond redefining what kinds of texts should be considered children’s literature. Still, this was a really useful article to read because it allowed me to explicitly acknowledge a lot of things I, as one of those “younger scholars” Adams mentions, take for granted as I work on medieval childhood and children’s literature – even as there are many points in her article I think don’t completely hold up.

First, some of the points that now almost go without saying:

Childhood was clearly defined in the Middle Ages, even if it wasn’t what we think of as childhood. Medieval philosophy of the stages of life, which Adams mentions, includes far more than the childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood that we have. And the idea that children were not loved is absurd, as Adams says, though for more reasons than her claim that equating high mortality with absence of love is historically wildly inaccurate. Evidence gathered from inscriptions on infants’ gravestones, for instance, proves that burying these day-old babies was as heartbreaking and anguish-ridden for their mothers as it is for mothers today. Literature itself, like the Pearl poem in which a father mourns his daughter, is evidence enough that there was love. This poem, of course, is highly allegorical, and it is not all that likely that it was written by an actual father mourning his actual daughter. And yet in order for readers to understand and appreciate the allegory, they would have to understand and appreciate the sentiment of a father mourning his beloved daughter.

In this discussion, Adams sets up a kind of strawman argument. She makes her point as a refutation of Perry Noedelman, saying that a different concept of childhood than we have does not automatically mean no children’s literature existed. She quotes Nodelman as saying that “‘a different conception of childhood operated, [and] that conception required no special literature for children’.” Later in that paragraph, she says that Nodelman “assert[s] that only our conception of childhood can result in children’s literature” (4). Nodelman in fact does not assert this, at least not in this quote (I haven’t read the original, so I can’t tell if her reading is based on anything else he says). He simply says that the medieval conception was different and that this particular difference resulted in no special literature for children.

That’s wrong, of course, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that there may well be a concept of childhood that does not require a special literature for children, and that where Nodelman goes wrong is that the medieval concept of childhood was not in that category. The general consensus for a while has been that children’s literature started in the mid-eighteenth century, but no will argue that the concept of childhood in the eighteenth century is the same as ours is now. It’s a different concept of childhood, which calls for a different definition of children’s literature in that time period.

Once we’ve established that there was a concept of childhood, Adams turns to defining which literature can be rightfully called medieval children’s literature. First of all, didactic literature is literature, and allowing that creates a flood of texts in this category. Besides, conduct books (like Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry), while they are absolutely didactic, are not dry moralistic texts but full of imaginative narrative as well. And who are we kidding – “all literature has an agenda,” and defining literature as being pure art without any practical purpose is absurd. So much of the medieval canon has explicit lessons that to apply that distinction to children’s literature makes no sense.

In terms of fiction, there was probably not such a sharp divide between what adults read and what children read in the Middle Ages. Adams calls this “shared literature,” a concept I had never thought to define, but having the term will be useful to me, I think. The problem Adams has with this is that she claims medievalists specializing in children’s literature tend to look at these texts as shared and to ignore the possibility of some of them being exclusively for children. I’m not fully convinced that this is a problem, and I’ll return to that in a moment.

She also claims that medievalists specializing in children’s literature tend to focus on how well contemporary children’s literature portrays the Middle Ages. If that was true then, it most certainly is not true now. I recently presented a paper on Adam of the Road at the medieval conference in Kalamazoo, and while I did talk about the accuracy of medieval life in the novel, that was because I was concerned with how much influence historical fiction could have on young readers to study that historical period later on, and accuracy was one of the factors I considered. The others on my panel barely talked about historical accuracy. They talked instead about “medievalisms,” aspects of contemporary literature (and film, and video games, etc) which are loosely based on “medieval-y” stuff. Scholars look at what medievalisms do for the modern child reader, how they help them understand their own world, why some themes persist and some models of “medieval-y” stuff are useful in representing certain ideas, how adult authors of children’s literature view the Middle Ages and why, and what all of that might mean.

In any case, Adams’ detailed explanation of how one might determine if a medieval text was aimed at children is incredibly thorough. Many of the strategies she mentions are foundational in studying any medieval text (as she points out, philology – but I can’t imagine that was never indispensable to study of medieval literature). I know that my response here sounds like I think most of Adams’ argument has issues, but I don’t. I think that this chunk is the most essential part of her argument, and I take very little issue with it. But I don’t think it’s useful for me to recap it here, so I’m focusing on the parts I did take issue with in some way or another. I’ll briefly run through a few of her points that I think don’t have as much impact in identifying texts as children’s as she claims.

The question of a child possessing a book seems very important to Adams. Her example of Sado’s inscription sounds convincing (the translation, by the way, seems deliberately clumsy – the Latin is pretty standard and doesn’t sound childish at all, but she’s only quoting the translation), and we might think that being able to prove children owned their own grammar books is useful. But she does acknowledge that children were more likely to hear texts read to them than to read them themselves, and I don’t think she differentiates enough between the modern concept of connection between literacy and a child owning a book, and what the medieval concept might have been. Books were expensive, as she notes, and educational material was usually communal and/or familial, not owned by children.

A larger issue is her almost off-hand comment about using the major characters of a text to determine whether it was aimed at children. If the major character is a child, she says, it’s likely the text was meant to be read by or for children. Even in contemporary literature, that’s not a good indication, so I don’t understand why she would say that at all. Especially within the context of highly allegorical medieval literature, the inclusion of children characters is no indication of an intended audience’s age. This is crucial to understanding how and why medieval children’s literature existed, so this bothers me a great deal.

One of her really satisfying points is looking at texts which are referred to in other texts as somehow connected to children. Intertextuality! Actually, there is a medieval text which lists authors starting from the Classical period and classifies what they’ve written, and that has been used to identify some texts as children’s literature. I came across this while I was writing about Robert Henryson’s fables, which are not classified as children’s literature, but which I want to talk about here for a second because they’ll help me make a point, also related to Adams’ point about considering genres of texts included in books which were obviously used in education. If a genre, like fables, is included in educational texts, we could extrapolate to other fable collections and in some cases posit that they were children’s texts.

So Henryson has never been classified as children’s literature (it’s written in Middle Scots, not in Latin). But his fables are the same fables which Marie de France, Lydgate, and Caxton (and others) use in their own collections. Marie de France and Caxton’s collections have been discussed as possibly being used in the classrooms themselves, as memory and recitation exercises and to teach the lessons of the fables. Lydgate’s is argued to have been used in classrooms as well, but for different reasons. His fables are all really long, as opposed to Marie de France and Caxton’s really short fables and morals. Lydgate’s reflects the medieval lesson of expansion, where students were taught to elaborate on texts for various reasons. His fables could be his own exercise in this tradition and/or an example that could have been used in classrooms.

This is what I find so interesting and useful about Adams’ idea of “shared literature.” It never really occurred to me to separate the children from the adults as an audience for most texts. My work on Henryson can’t be applied to children, but children of course came up in a discussion of fables, and it is possible that my interpretation of these fables working through a manipulation of emotion actually relies on adult readers approaching fables with a bit of nostalgia about the content of fables which they read as children.

If we’re arguing for leaving aside our preconceived notions about children’s literature, one of them has to be that for medieval scholars to look at children’s literature, there may be a reason it’s predominantly shared literature we look at (didactic texts of course sidesteps this question, though even those can be and are considered as adult texts in some ways).

That’s another point I had trouble with. Adams says that proof these texts are not dead is “most of the material in the texts that I cite in the last part of this essay is an integral part of the ‘sea of stories’ and continue to be found in the modern period in works now generally agreed to be children’s literature” (17). But aside from her point about shared literature, she very clearly says just before this quote that a lot of these texts she is identifying as children’s literature are actually sometimes “regular” texts modified for children. Ysengrimus, she says, had a “smutty” section taken out for inclusion in a manuscript for a teaching establishment. She says this is one of the stories Grimm “recognize[d as] a fine story when he saw one,” but it existed as an adult story before that. Based on her previous discussion, it’s not material or content but the style which identifies a children’s text, so the continuation of these stories in children’s literature doesn’t say much about medieval children’s literature. As I mentioned before, I think the useful question here is not similarities in material between children’s literature then and now, but tropes and themes that remain.

Final thought: Adams says that “although Hunt claims that ‘different skills’ are required to read books from earlier periods (202), no different skills are needed for the imaginative works that I have mentioned when they are well translated” (17). Actually, methods of reading differ so greatly that translations always obscure the possibilities of the text. Medieval punctuation actually has such tremendous impact on how a text is read that editors of critical editions have a huge task deciding when to sacrifice some of that in order to enable a modern student’s comprehension of the text. For example, some punctuation leaves a text deliberately ambiguous so that the reader has to puzzle it out, and can – and should – read it twice or three times, attempting a different reading each time, and not choosing one over the other but accepting all as part of the text (Gawain and the Green Knight is notorious for this).

Basically, I think her analysis is really great, but still slips into the flattening of comparison of medieval children’s literature to contemporary ideas of children’s literature that she argues so much against. But since she wrote this in 1998 at the beginning of this realization in scholarship, it makes sense that these inconsistencies would sneak in.

— Esther Bernstein

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