Children's Literature and Culture at PCA/ACA: A Conference Report

The 1981 Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association meeting was held in Cincinnati, Ohio, March 25-29. Five sessions, organized by Gila Reinstein (Rhode Island College), were presented by members concerned with children's literature and culture.

Grim Reality: Naturalistic Influences in Children's Literature

A small but convivial group met to confront grim reality on Wednesday evening. Gila Reinstein was not able to present her paper, "Childhood's End vs. The Golden Age: to Shelter or not to Shelter the Young Reader," but it was distributed to those in attendance. In it she suggested that the use of children's fiction in the last quarter century as a sober warning of life's difficulties, a departure from the previous century's tendency to picture childhood as a sheltered garden, was in fact a harking back to the viewpoint of juvenile authors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who "conspired to teach children that life is earnest, and the sooner they grow up to deal with it, the better." Rebecca Lukens' (Miami University) paper, "Despair: the Latest American Export," concerned the image of a culture conveyed by books in translation, and was occasioned by the German translation of Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War. Lukens was dismayed that European children's conception of life in an American high school might be formed by Cormier's bleak novel. She sees no easy solution to the problem, but raised important questions which provoked lively discussion. Silvia Patterson's (University of Southwestern Louisiana) "The Supernatural in the World of Isaac Singer's Children's Literature" convincingly demonstrated that the extensive range of supernatural beings and events in Singer's tales is a major factor in their appeal to children. (Segal—Chair)

Survivors: Archetypes and Stereotypes in Juvenile Fiction

David Sadler's (Western Michigan University) paper surveyed portraits of grandparents in a substantial number of children's books published in the mid- and late-1970's. In contrast to the stereotypical frail, passive, and often crabby grandparent that had been common, he found largely "Tough and Feisty Grandparents." These wise, energetic; and assertive old people provide a welcome broadening of images of the elderly in children's books, though there is a certain sameness to the characterization that threatens to become a new stereotype. Kathy Piehl (Michigan Technical University) offered "Noah as Survivor: A Study of Picture Books." She compared the story of the flood as depicted in about eighteen picture books, pointing out fascinating differences in emphasis, style and interpretation. In "Beastly Boys" A Century of Mischief," Elizabeth Segel (University of Pittsburgh) explored changing attitudes towards naughty little boys in children's literature of the last century. Focusing on the archetypal figures of Pinocchio, Peter Rabbit, Curious George, and Max, the Wild Thing, she suggested that the contrasting views of misbehaving children rest on strikingly different attitudes toward the animal side of human nature. (Segal—Chair)

Focus on the Wizard of Oz

In "Baum and Bunyan: The Wizard of Oz as a Pilgrim's Progress," Paul Witkowsky (Radford University) traced parallels of theme and content between Bunyan's novel and the Oz story to reveal similar motifs of personal growth and transcendence. Paul Verden (University of Santa Clara) explored "The Oz Whiz: An American Parable as Inflected through Three Decades" in a multi-image fugue using audio and pictorial excerpts from pre-1940, 1967 (The Wizard of Oz) and the 1970's, The Wiz, to demonstrate how different eras use similar story lines to reflect specific social concerns. In "Are the Oz Books Populist Propaganda?" Fred Krebs (Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas) extended Henry M. Littlefield's hypothesis that the original Baum story represented a political allegory of the populist movement to the more general speculation that the total corpus of Oz books influenced the political predispositions of an entire generation paving the way for acceptance of the "New Deal." (Verden—Chair)

Tomahawks and Teeter-Totters

Mark West's (Bowling Green State University) paper, "Controlling Street Urchins: Urbanization and the Development of Playgrounds in America," examines the playground movement's "subtle" means of...