“Forsaken Spots”: At the Intersection of Children’s Literature and Modern War

The key terms of this special issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly—children’s literature and war—acquired a companion term during the publication review process: modern. In doing so, this issue contributes to a growing body of scholarship that explores representations of war in children’s literature since 1890, with particular emphasis on World War II. In pursuing “representations of war,” this issue also takes to heart the observation of contributor David Henry that “we cannot judge the meaning of a piece of children’s literature—or indeed any literature—solely by how it appears on the page; we must also consider the performative practices by which it was embedded within the community.”

With these “performative practices” in mind, our definition of modern wartime texts must adjust accordingly. Certainly, the moment of a text’s production—whether before, during, or following war—may signal its status as a wartime text, with the consequence that, as Paul Fussell claims, all literature written since World War I is war literature. More conventionally, however, we tend to use the dates of writing or publication to establish a text’s link to war. Given the many wars waged since 1890, much of the work of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries could fall along this historical timeline. An extension of this first view leads to a second: a text might be considered a war text if its author’s experiences in war contributed to the composition in some way, regardless of when the writing occurred or the writer’s stated intent. Readings of Tolkien’s work alongside his experiences of combat in World War I and of living through World War II, offered in books by John Garth and Janet Croft, illustrate this approach, as does a recent essay by Mark Heberle. “While the Second World War may or may not have been [the Trilogy’s] figurative subject,” Heberle claims, “the war was on Tolkien’s mind throughout the composition, reawakening, yet also helping to revise, the trauma of the Great War imaginatively and, in turn, his earlier mythology” (130). A third way that modern war could inflect a text might be through setting. Noel Streatfeild situates the narrative action of Curtain Up (1944) during the Blitz, for instance, but so, too, do Susan Cooper in Dawn of Fear (1970) and Edward Bloor in London Calling (2006). This range of publication dates may push the conventional definition of “modern war text” beyond its usual bounds, but productively so: we are reminded how one modern war can reflect past, present, and future in its iterations through time.

The recent essay collection edited by Elizabeth Goodenough and Andrea Immel, entitled Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War (2008), recognizes this kind of performative complexity surrounding children (as historical subjects, protagonists, or interlocutors), literature, and war. Under Fire follows on a number of resources for mapping representations of war in children’s literary and cultural texts and the recovery of child experiences during war, including works such as Kate Agnew and Geoff Fox’s Children at War: From the First World War to the Gulf (2001), Emmy E. Werner’s Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children Witness World War II (2000), Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig’s Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (1978), and annotated bibliographies such as M. Paul Holsinger’s The Ways of War: The Era of World War II in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction (1995) and Desmond Taylor’s The Juvenile Novels of World War II: An Annotated Bibliography (1994). Such work in the field of children’s literature serves as an important complement to literary scholarship on “adult” war literature, represented by essays like Elizabeth Goodenough’s “‘We Haven’t the Words’: The Silence of Children in the Novels of Virginia Woolf” (1994), or the type of historical research represented by Sue Wheatcroft’s “Children’s Experiences of War: Handicapped Children in England During the Second World War” (2008).

In the collection Under Fire, war is read first as an historical event translated...