Language and Control in Children's Literature by Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer (review)

94Rocky Mountain Review first prominent Persian literati appeared. Most of the nazm system was created and its identification with she'r was established in Xorasan. The literati became both masters and guardians of a literary heritage and tradition which was destined to be challenged by the values of the modern Western world at the end of the nineteenth century. To a writer who has been trained within the confinements of the Xorasani traditions, the legitimacy of all innovations is only guaranteed through their degree of affinity to the literary tradition rather than the extent of their distance from it. You can hardly find a Xorasani writer, recognized as a poet, who has abandoned nazm for a more free system ofwriting; and there is hardly any Xorasani critic who has accepted the fact that poetry could be completely free of nazm. (Though Xorasani critics have recently shown a preference to talk about the music of poetry [musiqiye she'r or ahang e she'r] rather than nazm). It is within these limitations that Hakkak's book tries to recast the process of creation of modern Persian poetry into the story of a literary mainstream which has some unimportant fringes. His criterion for distinguishing the foreground from the rest of the scene is the Xorasani literary tradition. In doing so, the book pushes some major literary figures to the fringes of its narrative only to bring to the foreground some minor figures who have tried to modify the literary tradition rather than abandoning it for some free and more organic forms of literary expression. Thus, it is no wonder that among the literary figures named and praised as poets and critics in this book, the most prominent ones come from Xorasan. To me, this localized and narrow literary nationalism deprives this book of a prominent place amongst the few books rendered in English which deal with modern Persian literature. ESMAIL NOORIALA Denver, Colorado MURRAY KNOWLES and KIRSTEN MALMKJAER. Language and Control in Children's Literature. London: Routledge. 1996. 284 p. When I posted a call for papers on my door for a children's literature conference , a colleague glanced at it and said something to the effect that children 's literature was a developing field. "You mean in the sense of a developing country?" I queried, and he grinned and said, "Well, you've got to admit there isn't much theory." Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer's book is an attempt to correct both the perception and the situation. As they explain in chapter 7, "Last Thoughts," they draw "on work in critical linguistics, in stylistics and in contemporary theory of ideology." They are scholars in applied linguistics: Knowles at the University of Birmingham and Malmkjaer at the University of Cambridge Research Centre. Book Reviews95 All of us in children's literature are happy to welcome researchers from other fields because children's literature is truly interdisciplinary in nature. However, I would have appreciated an explanation early in the book about whether Knowles and Malmkjaer's goal was simply to illustrate that linguists have worthwhile things to say about various kinds of literature, or if they chose to look at children's literature because something about it is especially worthy of analysis. They hinted at this latter point, but never spelled it out. Not only linguists, but artists, sociologists, historians, psychologists , teachers, librarians, publishers, book sellers, and writers all have interesting things to say about children's books. But there's a paradox in that the children themselves are not interested in scholarly analyses of "their" books. Because of this, people assume a parental interest, as did the publishers who on the back cover advertised the book as "invaluable ... for anyone concerned with children and what they read, be they parents, teachers or students of language and literature." Actually, typical parents and teachers will have a hard time getting into this book; it's much more appropriate for students of language and literature. And even here, students might quibble with such quick and easy literary observations as their statement that Judy Blume provided "the first explicit description of a heterosexual encounter." And surely readers unfamiliar with the terms theme and rheme...