Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations (review)

If the child represents "vacancy," as James Kincaid suggests (15-17), then we can make pretty much whatever we want of this small and as yet undeveloped human. So six-year-old Elian Gonzales is a young innocent who needs and deserves the comfort and nurturing of his natural father, while at the same time he is a person who deserves the right to choose where and with whom he wants to live. He is both incapable of making decisions concerning his own welfare and expected to make such decisions. As Kincaid again notes: the modern child "was deployed as a political and philosophical agent" (15). For "was," read "is," and for "modern," read "Romantic," and you have a good introductory note to Literature and the Child, James McGavran's sequel to his Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (1991). As its subtitle suggests, this second collection of essays under McGavran's capable and judicious editorship contains internal discontinuities. These discontinuities are instructive and remind us just how conflicted our attitudes to the child continue to be. Yes, we inherit from the late eighteenth century both the idealization of the child (the innocent, pure, and sage-like creature) and the exploitation of the child (both directly in political and economic terms and indirectly in theoretical terms). Despite the intervention of Freud, we cling to the belief that the child not only represents but also is happiness (see Kincaid 281-82), even as we shrink from the shock of Columbine or of Lake Worth, Florida, and other reminders of childhood's dark side.

The discontinuities in Literature and the Child are perhaps signaled by the book's four sections. These four sections—containing a total of nine chapters—move from a consideration of Romanticism's changing relationship with the present ("Romanticism Continuing and Contested") to an investigation of the developing edge of Romantic irony from the Schlegels and others to writers of the so-called postmodern ("Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts") to the connection between Romanticism and the marketplace ("Romanticism and the Commerce of Children's Books") to a strangely reactionary section called "Romantic Ideas in Cultural Confrontations." In other words, the chapters progress in a retrograde manner, beginning with impressive studies of the contraries inherent in the study of Romanticism today and shifting in the later chapters to a more familiar resetting of what Jerome McGann once identified as Romantic ideology.

And so the chapters in the last third of the book sit uneasily with those in the first half. Having said this, I should also point out that what connects all the chapters is a decidedly Romantic cross-writing. The familiar canonical figures of the Romantic period—Blake and Wordsworth, and now add Edgeworth and Wollstonecraft—wrote for and about children. Perhaps even more influential for the later development of writing for children are the writers of the German künstmarchen: Goethe, Novalis, Tieck, de la Motte Fouqué, Hoffmann, and others. The child constructed in Romantic writing, as McGavran and Alan Richardson in Literature and the Child point out, is both idealized and colonized, gathered in, even exploited. Plus ça change.... Contraries are the stuff of Romantic writing and Romantic thought. And so it is appropriate that Literature and the Child takes both writing for children and writing about children as its subject. As another recent collection of essays, Transcending Boundaries, edited by Sandra Beckett, nicely chronicles, the boundaries between child and adult and between the writing for children and for adults are ambiguous at best and non-existent at the most extreme. So in this collection of essays we have discussions of writers and illustrators as diverse as Wordsworth, Edgeworth, Peter Beagle, Michael Ende, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Kate Greenaway, A. A. Milne, Maurice Sendak, Mary Austin, Ruth Nichols, and even Bill Watterson, creator of "Calvin and Hobbes."

We have come a long way since Peter Coveney wrote his study of the Romantic child, The Image of Childhood (1967). Coveney writes about the...