The Sense of the Nineties: Current Assumptions about Children's Literature

Perhaps Reflections of Change is to be valued as much for what it shows about the shared "common sense" of the 1990s about children's literature as for the patterns it traces in that literature. The articles in this selection of twenty-one short papers presented at the twelfth biennial conference of the International Research Society for Children's Literature are a welcome reminder that "children's literature" does not consist solely of writing for children in the English language or from North America. The writers' prose is clear, largely free of academese, and designed neither to dazzle, to intimidate, nor to confuse. A useful body of heterogeneous assumptions and generalizations may be derived from the articles in this volume; that children's literature historically lags behind adult fiction (Dieter Petzold) and that this trait may be a strength rather than a weakness; that narrative conveys social values, images of social harmony and cohesion that sustain human existence (Susan Clancy); that adults use children's literature to convey these socially endorsed values to the young, so that these works are torn between a moral and social vocation and the need to please a target audience (Danielle Thaler); that criticism of children's literature may seek safety in conservative academic practices in disfavor with the academic avant-garde (Deborah Stevenson); and that as (Western) children grow up sooner and face more difficult choices than hitherto (Eva-Maria Metcalf), interpreters of children's literature may have as one objective that "children will not be at the mercy of what they read" because they will learn to "read the ideology in their books" and their lives (Daniel Hade, 121). Perry Nodelman raises the question, "Is the whole enterprise of adults providing texts for children ever anything other than oppressive and repressive," molding child-readers to the ideological patterns of childhood described in and implied by fictions for them (5)? His answer is that "to fear texts because they embed children in ideology is to fear all of the social and communal aspects of human existence—and all the pleasures they offer" (11); he adds that thoughtful critical reflection informed by the insights of contemporary theory may enable children, as it can enable adults, to weigh the implications of the various ideological models that texts offer them (12).

If children's literature is socially constructed as feminine and Other, Hade's focus on multicultural texts considers further instances of Otherness, in the sociopolitical impulses at work in writing about U.S. minorities. His essay "Reading Children's Literature Multiculturally" charts the gradual appearance of such work and of the ensuing arguments about "authenticity of representation" whereby only a member of a disadvantaged minority can write a fiction about it with authority; he contrasts a "managed multiculturalism," which sets out to celebrate sociocultural differences but may succeed only in essentializing them, with a "critical multiculturalism" that challenges and denaturalizes Western cultural assumptions, seeks for ways of collaboration between groups, and unapologetically focuses on race, class, and gender (116). Hade's work is complemented by Asfrid Svensen's account of Scandinavian instances of contemporary counter-stories to imperialist themes and texts and by Jerry Griswold's look at ironic parodies and revisions of classic texts of childhood innocence.

Among the strengths of Reflections of Change are its chronological overviews, its considerations of subgenres and individual works, and its discussions of writing that makes no claim to be "high culture." For example, Stevenson argues that daily life and fictions about it are too often undervalued and subordinated to the more privileged heroic, "weighty" modes. Yet familiarity, predictability, comfort, entertainment, clarity, the ordinary, the uncontroversial, the trivial, the lightly humorous, the parochial—indeed, the "limited and childish"—all deserve a valued place in literature, even a literature that its students still defensively seek to persuade others to take seriously, in part by privileging the scholarship that most resembles the critical mainstream.

Roderick McGillis's discussion of the popular writing known as "teen horror" asserts...