Critical Cross-overs

The subject of adult investment in children’s literature and culture has been pivotal to critical discussions in our field. From Beverly Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003) and Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult (2008), to Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers (2009) and Mike Cadden’s collection Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (2009), scholars have considered the adult presence in children’s literature through categories including narrative structure, collaborations, voice, marketing, reception, and canonicity. Familiar critical terms such as cross-writing, cross-reading, and cross-over literature address the variety of adult engagements with children’s books and signal a contemporary reading practice that often eschews borders between constituencies. Regarding cross-reading, Rachel Falconer argues that this approach “demonstrates how our attitudes to childhood, adulthood, and the in-between space of adolescence are all shifting, becoming more flexible and porous, as we adapt to changing social conditions in the developed world” (4). While critics acknowledge that intersections between adults and children (as readers and as shapers of narrative) have been present throughout literary history, Falconer and others bring the current moment into relief, emphasizing the adult interest in authors like Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling as well as the media outcry regarding the infantilization of adult culture. Perhaps such cultural awareness stems from our current moment’s tendency toward self-reflection, for while adults may have always been invested in childhood reading, our culture at present conspicuously interrogates and sustains adult political and aesthetic investments in childhood.

The essays in this issue all take some dimension of adult experience as a critical lens through which to examine children’s books and culture. While each essay may not employ terms like cross-writing or cross-over literature—and certainly the subjects addressed are quite disparate—the critics here share similar methodologies, for adulthood becomes a major location for analysis. David Kieran’s “‘What Young Men and Women Do When Their Country is Attacked’: Interventionist Discourse and the Rewriting of Violence in Adolescent Literature of the Iraq War,” analyzes political rhetoric around the Iraq War in order to unpack the implications of three contemporary young adult texts. In examining Ryan Smithson’s Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI, Walter Dean Myers’s Sunrise Over Fallujah, and Patricia McCormick’s Purple Heart, Kieran hears in the texts echoes of the Bush administration’s rhetorical justifications for the war, as well as reverberations of conservative media constructions of violence in Abu Ghraib prison, sexual assault, and the murder of Iraqi civilians. According to Kieran, “in voicing neoconservative rhetoric that portrays the invasion as simultaneously an appropriate response to the threat of terrorism and as humanitarian in intent, while systematically obscuring the violence, disruption, and trauma that the war has wrought on both Iraqis and Americans, these texts insistently buttress a discourse that validates the Iraq War as necessary, uncritically valorizes the soldiers who fight in it, and condemns Iraqis as threatening others who require an aggressive, violent response.” Kieran’s bold argument challenges us to consider the way in which contemporary young adult literature might further the interests of powerful adult social and political structures.

Anne Morey’s “Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Film-making” places the children’s prison film within the landscape of adult genres, such as the gangster movie and the “forgotten man” film. Morey also examines the child prison film’s indebtedness to a nineteenth-century religious discourse that often relied on adult male authority figures rather than on children’s innate virtuousness. The child prison narrative, according to Morey, uses Christianity in order to resolve political contradictions—such as between an attraction to the elite and to the populist—as well as to resolve representational and social oppositions, “such as the contest between admiring and condemning criminality; understandings of criminality as inborn and as environmental; and understandings of the film industry as perverter of the morals of youth and as youth’s guide and preceptor.” Like Morey, Michelle Ann Abate is concerned with the children...