(Re)imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times ed. by Yan Wu, Kerry Mallan, and Roderick McGillis (review)

This thin and expensive collection of essays operates under the premise that children’s literature reimagines the world in ways that “enable young people to think beyond limits, to realize the options, and to imagine the kind of life that a prosperous future could hold” (xi). While well-theorized studies of just how literature written for children does those things are both welcome and useful, (Re)imagining the World hangs its chapters together under a series of words “that are not specifically associated with literary or cultural studies” (xii). The editors invited a dozen scholars, many of them leading voices in the field, to structure their contributions around these words: reading, knowledge, consumption, discovery, childhoods, imagination, migrancy, food, empathy, monsters, memory, and future. The Introduction gives the word “Privacy” a cursory reading, in addition to offering brief, if disjointed, abstracts of the chapters. After describing Xu Xu’s reading of imagination in modern Chinese children’s literature, the editors baldly state, “The example of China should prove heuristic. A recent study of national identity through children’s books is Miriam Verena Richter [sic], Creating the National Mosaic…” (xv). I am left wondering what the example of China will enable me or Chinese children or children more generally to discover. If the reader is meant to link this highly general claim back to “the correlation between childhood and nationhood at three historical moments in modern China,” then I am also left wondering how the specific example of nationhood in modern China can have much of anything to do with childhood and national identity in the literatures of any number of other countries (xv). Xu’s chapter, which “explores the cultural roots of a particular nation, China,” offers a detailed and specific, if too brief, reading of that particularity, rather than any kind of heuristic pattern (69). That brevity is, to my mind, the chief problem with this collection. A disjointed introduction does not make or break an anthology of scholarly essays, but not giving scholars enough freedom and space to fully explore their assigned words just might, and several of the chapters could have benefitted from expanded and more detailed readings.

Even so, many of the chapters in (Re)imagining the World offer particularly useful ways of thinking about children’s literature from a variety of countries. The lead essay, Erica Hateley’s “Reading: From Turning the Page to Touching the Screen,” analyzes a number of picturebooks to consider how children’s literature today depicts reading as an act of subjectivity and agency. Her turn to how new technologies are now shaping reading shows how digital texts or accompanying apps can fall short in stimulating children’s imaginations, even as she suggests they have the potential to re-imagine reading “as a technology of the self” (11). In the following chapter, Alice Curry similarly looks at the digital landscape, in this case analyzing two YA novels, Veronica Roth’s Divergent and Bertagna’s Exodus, as examples of how contemporary fiction responds to burgeoning digital “knowledgescapes” (18). Curry ably demonstrates how both of these dystopian texts show information literacy as “a combination of mastering the technical apparatus through which knowledge is communicated and spatially navigating the visual ecology” (21).

Equally impressive are Margaret Mackey’s reading of consumerism and consumption in early North American texts and Ingrid Johnston’s consideration of migration in Canadian books for children. The detailed analyses in these chapters, and their solid grounding in theory and criticism, make them both interesting and useful scholarship. I would have liked to see more diversity in the chapters; nine of the twelve focus only on Anglo-American/ANZAC texts for children. The remaining three are on Chinese children’s literature, unsurprising given that Beijing Normal University sponsors the book and its series, New Frontiers of Educational Research. Of those three, “Childhoods...