Children's Literature, II ed. by Francelia Butler, Samuel Pickering, Jr., and Compton Rees (review)

266ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW If there is any difficulty with Barnett's method it is that her fascination with the voice in the poems occasionally has the effect of transferring her focus from Swift's art to Swift's life, at which point she begins to waste words on the too-familiar terrain of the poet's frustrations with his literary and clerical careers. When this happens, Swift's Poetic Worlds begins to eddy and to lose sight of its thesis. Such slips remind us that one problem in trying to talk about poetry is that, because of the elusiveness of its essence, we frequently end up talking about something else. As Susanne Langer says in her Feeling and Form, "The reason why literature is a standard academic pursuit lies in the very fact that one can treat it assomethingelse than art" (N.Y.: 1953, p. 208). But it should be emphasized that most ofBarnett's study keeps on the track of the poetry itself, often with results that significantly increase our appreciation of the Dean as artist. PETER THORPE University of Colorado at Denver Francelia Butler, Samuel Pickering, Jr., and Compton Rees (eds.). Children's Literature, II. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983. 233p. The Children's Literature annual has been produced for more than a decade now by the Modern Language Association Division on Children's Literature and the Children's Literature Association. In addition to articles, the book contains reviews of six scholarly books in the field ofchildren'sliterature and three books ofpoetry for children. Paragraph-length descriptions are given of 22 Ph.D. dissertations, and 21 others are listed by title. An advisory board helps in selecting the articles which apparentlycan be on any aspect of children's literature. However, more than half of the twelve essays in this volume seemed to be grouped, leading one to wonder if they were presented at thematically arranged meetings. Only Lois R. Kuznet's "The Fresh-Air Kids, or Some Contemporary Versions of Pastoral" was so identified. It was given at the December 1980 MLA meeting in Houston where there was a session on pastoral elements in children's books. It was one of the most original papers in the collection, especially in relation to its discussion ofFeliceHolman'sSlake's Limbo, thestory of a rejected teenager who lives for 120 daysina left-over construction tunnel in the New York Subway. Kuznets writes We have tended recently to associate the underground with death, hell, or insanity from which modern heroes are rarely able to emerge. Holman disassociates the underground from its hellish finality and reassociates it with the cyclical wintering place of Persephone from which she is annually reborn, albeit with struggle, into the arms of her earth mother. Her essay went on to show several more "deep-structure" relationships between what is traditionally considered pastoral and modern big city settings. Related papers included Hamida Bosmajian's "Vastness and Contraction of Space in Little House on the Prairie" and Jon C. Stott's "From Here to Eternity: Aspects ofPastoral in the Green Knowe Series." The one-hundredth anniversary of Pinocchio prompted Thomas J. Morrissey and Richard Wunderlich to take a close look at Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio and write "Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio." The fiftieth anniversary of Book Reviews267 the first Babar book must have been what inspired Harry C. Payne to write "The Reign ofKing Babar" and Ann M. Hildebrand to write "Jean de Brunhoffs Advice to Youth: The Babar Books as Books of Courtesy." A continuing interest in sex roles is reflected in Elizabeth Lennox Keyser's '"Quite Contrary': Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden" and U.C. Knoepflmacher's "Little Girls without Their Curls: Female Aggression in Victorian Children's Literature." The first few issues of Children's Literature were called Children's Literature: The Great Excluded. The name was a protest on the part of editor Francelia Butler, who resented the fact that children's literature was not considered worthy of criticism and study by "scholars." Thanks to her efforts and those of many others, the name change to simply Children's Literature is entirely appropriate. The only wish I...