New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism (review)

For some Quarterly readers, the most intriguing aspect of Sebastien Chapleau's collection New Voices in Children's Literature Criticism will be its title. The adjective "new" evokes its opposite, inviting the supposition that children's literature criticism has become somewhat ossified, but that Chapleau's volume will provide a glimpse of the future of the field, a future that presumably can be differentiated from the present. And while it takes a considerable stretch to describe some of the anthology's contributors as "new voices"—Peter Hunt? David Rudd, author of two books and "some 65 articles" on children's literature (130)? Perry Nodelman, who provides the preface?—we do see here the work of a number of graduate students or newly minted Ph.D.'s, many of them British-trained and others working in Belgium, France, and Germany. For North American readers, then, one function of this collection may be to provide insight into current academic trends in northern European children's literature circles.

Readers who opt to approach the volume in this way may experience some dismay. I don't refer to the careless production values on display here, although they are distracting; one wonders, for instance, why no one noticed in time that some computer quirk had caused all the apostrophes to vanish from the introduction. More alarming, if we agree to take the collection as indicative of the future of the field, is the essential sameness of outlook of many of the essays—ironic in a work whose first chapter consists of Hunt's plea that approaches to children's literature be both varied and respectful of variety. First, the bibliographies overlap to a surprising degree: in a total thirteen essays (I exclude the introduction and preface), the names of Hunt and John Stephens appear in four bibliographies each, while five cite at least one work by Nodelman and five cite Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan. Indeed, Rose's notion of the child as colonized Other permeates the collection, although Rudd's chapter, "Border Crossings: Carrie's War, Children's Literature and Hybridity," which shows how children's literature may question this way of defining children, makes more interesting use of the point than do the chapters that take it for granted. One brief mention of Little Women aside, moreover, none of the essays contemplates a text written before the twentieth century, Anglophone texts receive more attention than texts originally published in languages other than English, and theory and advocacy overwhelmingly dominate over historicism.

Next, because the essays are all quite short (more like conference papers than like full-fledged articles), the authors' tendency is often to leave arguments underdeveloped and/or oversimplified. Ann Alston's essay on constructions of home in children's books, for instance, asserts that depictions of cozy homes "control the child" by "immersing [him or her] into an adult ideal" of family (59), but fails to address the less obvious question of why so many of her examples deal with nonstandard "families" such as the bachelor animals of The Wind in the Willows, C. S. Lewis's Mr. Tumnus, or Roald Dahl's eponymous Matilda and her single adoptive mother. Somewhat similarly, in discussing the important subject of publishers' role in shaping children's books, former Lee & Low editor Laura Atkins contents herself with pointing out (several times) that publishers package children's books with parents and librarians in mind, and with describing how she used to commission texts whose authors shared her own "construction of childhood and what is appropriate for children to read" (51), even while the concerns of the marketing department privileged a different set of constructions. It would be possible to do more with this material. One option: since, as Atkins notes, the editorial process cuts children out of the loop, perhaps her critical enterprise could have included them by contemplating the response of actual child readers to the products she discusses, had she the room to expand her examination. But easily the...