The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations of Childhood by Christopher (Kit) Kelen and Bjorn Sundmark, eds. (review)

Contrary to the wisdom expressed in one chapter’s epigram—“Little consideration has been given to what it means for a child to be a citizen”—the contributors to The Nation in Children’s Literature have thought a great deal about the complicated and contentious ways in which notions of childhood and citizenship intersect. Editors Christopher Kelen and Bjorn Sundmark, both of whom also contribute essays to the volume, assemble seventeen diverse pieces that focus on almost as many nations. Although British Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, Bengal, and England itself) and northern European (Norway, Sweden, and Iceland) nations account for a substantial block of essays, they are well balanced by pieces focused on Asia (Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea) and southern Europe (Italy and Greece). Mirroring this regional variety, the contributors work with primary materials from medieval rune stones to twenty-first century young adult fiction, although the bulk of the source material dates to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the age of nation-states and colonial empires. This startling diversity, however, turns out to be more of a liability than an asset to the collection as a whole, leaving readers, like members of a whirlwind package tour, with the unsettled feeling of having done rather too much globe-trotting in far too little time.

The collection is divided into five parts: The Child and the Nation—Lessons in Citizenship; Subversive Tales—Critiquing the Nation; Nations Before and Within; Empire, Globalization, and Cosmopolitan Consciousness; and Childhood as Nation Imagined—Once Upon a Time to Be. Although Kelen and Sundmark open the volume by pointing out the etymological links between “nation” and “being born,” and indeed go so far as to argue that the “emergence of modern nation-states” and the “rise of children’s literature” are “not coincidental,” they also, wisely, make room for texts that subvert treasured national myths and complicate tales of national hegemony (1). This is fortunate, for some of the collection’s finest contributions engage these ideas.

It is difficult to resist cracking open the volume to the second section, Subversive Tales, especially since it contains an essay titled “The World Is a Confused Pink Sheep.” In this fine chapter, Olga Holownia revisits the poetry of Þórarinn Eldjárn, famous for its use of heroic Icelandic mythology and folklore, and argues that the work might be more usefully read for its elements of sabotage. Holownia shows how Eldjárn employs a curious juxtaposition of “elaborate poetic form” and “banal content.” This “indecorous mismatch,” Holownia writes, creates a sense of “carnivalesque merriment and chaos,” teasing children while teaching them about the myths and sagas central to Icelandic identity (70–71). Subversive themes are next picked up by Helen Kilpatrick and Orie Muta who locate a destabilizing of contemporary Japanese cultural authority in Uehashi Nahoko’s Moribito (Guardian) young adult fantasy series. Set in a “fantastic medieval world,” Moribito uses a “feisty female bodyguard,” honorable commoners, and corrupt nobles to disrupt classical Japanese notions of the sacred and the profane. More importantly, the authors argue, Moribito calls past and present discriminatory practices into question, by spotlighting unjust treatment of the burakumin, an outcast group in feudal Japan whose troubled status enables an indirect critique of contemporary Japanese politics (83). (Oddly, Kilpatrick and Muta leave burakumin undefined in their essay.) This pairing of Icelandic and Japanese examples shows the volume at its best—highlighting similar lessons, from disparate island nations, that reveal how treasured national mythologies fundamental to a nation’s sense of itself, and whose existence continue to underpin very real social policies, can be upended within children’s literature.

Two of the collections’ best essays also pay careful attention to subtly subversive reinventions of previously dominant nationalist discourse. Essays by Jan Keane and Gargi Gangopadhyay appear in Part Three, Nations Before and Within, and examine the creation of affective national bonds and nationalist identities in two former British colonies, Australia and Bengal...