Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers (review)

In his discussion of the evaluation of children's literature, Jack Zipes acknowledges the wide range of people involved in the enterprise, from publishers to bookstore owners to parents. However, he notes that "university professors and librarians are pivotal in the field, especially when it comes to determining evaluative processes in associated fields and institutions" (72).

Looking at the ways in which university professors and librarians attempted to construct a canon of children's literature during the twentieth century, Anne Lundin draws upon her professional experiences, wide-ranging research, and personal encounters with children's books. She first turns her attention to the influence of children's librarians in the early part of the century. This chapter is the most cogent and insightful of the book. Lundin traces the origins of children's librarianship from the 1880s, noting the marginal status held by that branch of the profession in the American Library Association, founded in 1876.

She articulates the importance of librarians such as Caroline Hewins and Anne Carroll Moore, not only to the direction of library work with children but to the books produced by publishers for the library market. The emphasis on critical appraisal of books in terms of literary merit, creation of book lists, and designation of awards all served to produce a professional culture devoted to identifying, selecting, and promoting the "best books" available for children.

Lundin identifies the underlying cultural assumptions shared by many of the "matriarchs" of children's librarianship. She outlines the shifts from preoccupation with "bad books" in the early 1900s to a "reexamination by some of their traditional role as guardians of middle-class values" during the censorship debates of the 1920s (35). She discusses interrelationships among librarians, authors, illustrators, and publishers and notes the challenges that arose to the librarians' influence, especially from those who asked whether selections of Newbery winners reflected outmoded and romanticized views of childhood. By mid-century, voices of the white, middle-class females who had been so influential in championing "classics" of children's literature had been joined by others with different perspectives.

This chapter about the role of librarians might prove particularly instructive for the group of adults who joined the children's literature arena later in the century: professors from English departments. In her second chapter, Lundin considers the role of the literary scholar and the growth of academic interest in children's literature. She echoes Beverly Lyon Clark's observation that one "reason for critical condescension is that children's literature is associated with librarians, a group the professoriate generally treats more as handmaidens than as fellow scholars and teachers" (74).

Yet, librarians working as curators of special collections often facilitated the research of professors seeking books and manuscripts they needed for their literary studies. Many of those academics whose work related to children's books founded the Children's Literature Association in the 1970s. Lundin focuses her attention on one of that organization's early preoccupations: the creation of a canon of children's literature. A panel discussion at the 1980 ChLA conference ultimately led to the publication of a three-volume set of 63 essays called Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature.

Lundin then devotes 39 pages, more than one-fourth of her text, to summarizing 60 of the 63 essays in the Touchstones volumes.Although these condensations are essentially accurate, the voices of the original essayists are undeniably muted. Lundin makes no comment on the lack of consistency in the essays about what attributes render a particular choice worthy of inclusion on the list. Sometimes she doesn't even include the justification for the book's selection offered by the critic in the Touchstones essay. Nor does she question why an essayist seems less than enthusiastic about the book under discussion as in the case of William Blackburn, who spends most of the space devoted to A Wrinkle in Time elaborating on "the...