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Reviewed by:
  • Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970 ed. by Ute Frevert et al.
  • Thomas Dodman
Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970. Edited by Ute Frevert, Pascal Eitler, Stephanie Olsen, Uffa Jensen, Margrit Pernau, Daniel Brückenhaus, Magdalena Beljan, Benno Gammerl, Anja Laukötter, Bettina Hitzer, Jan Plamper, Juliane Brauer, and Joachim C. Häberlen. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii plus 308 pp. $110.00).

This edited volume, the second of its kind after Emotional Lexicons (OUP 2014), is the product of a collaborative research project sponsored by the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin. It explores changing emotions and affective relationships in children’s stories and educational advice manuals from the mid 1800s to the late Twentieth century. The focus is on the German and Anglophone worlds, but the authors make important forays into Indian, French, and Russian traditions as well, giving the book a timely transnational reach. They have also worked collectively to devise a common methodology and corpus of texts centered around some 100 children’s books, making this an example of rigorous collaborative work.

The authors’ guiding assumptions, well spelled out in the book’s introduction, are that emotions are not given at birth, but learnt in childhood, and that the act of reading is an active practice, as opposed to a passive exercise. Children’s books, they argue, do not simply prescribe normative emotions and codes of behavior (as the research agenda of “emotionology” might have once had it); rather, their young readers must be viewed as autonomous subjects, capable of participating in the production of both the text’s meaning(s) and feeling(s). Central to this process is the idea that children learn in a more mimetic way than adults, and that their emotional socialization depends upon the incorporation, adaptation, and reproduction of ways of feeling (that are therefore both structured and generative, in a clear nod to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of Habitus). This hypothesis is by and large untested, for as the introduction’s authors readily note, there is no satisfactory way of gauging the reception and “success” of these books in “teaching” children how to feel. Yet readers unsatisfied with the claim that identifying [End Page 746] open-ended emotional “repertoires” and privileging the “trying” of emotions over their “doing” may make up for empirical verification, would do well to turn straight to Jan Plamper’s case study of a 1920s Russian story of bravery, which illustrates how “emotional recall” and other “cogaffective practices” (part cognitive, part corporeal) may function thanks to a careful semantic and phonetic analysis supplemented by the insights of Extended Mind Theory and “tactile telepresence” (Paul Virilio).

The volume as a whole studies twelve discrete emotions or pairs of opposite ones in as many discrete essays. Each contribution is nicely illustrated with an opening vignette featuring a fictional character (such as Heidi, from Johanna Spyri’s eponymous classic, in the case of homesickness). How these emotions were selected is not immediately clear; they range from the obvious (fear, shame, love) to the unexpected (pity, compassion), passing over some other plausible candidates (such as anger, sadness, or honor, which nevertheless do feature in passing throughout). The authors highlight six major trends that span the so-called “golden age” of children’s literature (1860s-1920s): pluralization of emotions; decline of moralizing discourse; democratization and emotional empowerment of children; growing importance of juvenile peer-group relations; gradual decline of gender and other identity-based differences; and the contradictions of emotional liberation. It is impossible, in the limited space of this review, to do justice to each article individually; nonetheless some aggregate points may be underscored.

Parallel trends towards de-moralized and democratized expressions of children’s emotional lives are particularly visible in Uffa Jensen’s rich contribution on the naturalization of “motherly love” by twentieth-century child psychologists, and in Ute Frevert’s one on the vicissitudes of shaming from Victorian childrearing to postwar peer-pressure. Several other articles highlight this shift from vertical to horizontal emotional bonds among equals, including Stephanie Olsen’s on relationships...

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