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Reviewed by:
  • Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde ed. by Elina Druker, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
  • Katja Wiebe
    Translated by Nikola von Merveldt
Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde.
Ed. by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer.
Series: Children’s literature, culture, and cognition; 5.
Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015, 295pages.
ISBN: 978-90-272-0159-1

These conference proceedings look at the artistic avant-garde and its impact on the development of children’s literature. Divided into three thematically and chronologically ordered sections, the authors explore the activities of avant-garde artists in the field of children’s literature, the relevance of avant-garde views of art and of the world for children’s literature, as well as children’s literature about avant-garde art. Given the broad transnational influence of avant-garde movements, which the contributions convincingly document, it may seem surprising [End Page 58] that this topic has been little studied so far.

Most contributions focus on the visual influences, while only a few address textual and literary avant-garde concepts. In their introduction, editors Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer point out that the term avant-garde itself proves to be heterogeneous and difficult to define. “Avant-garde” is used as epithet to many cutting-edge artistic movements of the twentieth century and covers various art concepts in different countries (for this volume: France, Germany, Russia, USA, GB, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark). At the core is “the idea of the vanguard as ahead of their time, advanced and progressive” (1), a new, revolutionary esthetic, future-bound and programmatically transgressing the rules of established, elitist art by subverting and recasting them, often with a political agenda and international outlook.

Not limited to analyzing the influence of esthetic concepts on children’s literature, this seminal collection of essays also explores constructions of childhood, children’s reading experiences, and perception. Such an open understanding of avant-garde helps demonstrate the scholarly potential of this field of inquiry. But it does bear the danger of subsuming nearly every artistic movement of the twentieth century under the avant-garde label, even the rather nostalgic romantic modernism of the 1920s-1940s (cf. Kimberley Reynold’s essay).It nevertheless is fascinating to trace the multiple developments and cross-fertilizations between art and childhood culture; it also helps to identify stylistic references, such as the affinity of avant-garde artists to primitivism or infantilism instead of mislabeling these artistic concepts as imitations of infantile perception or reading.

The volume opens with Marilynn Olson’s essay on the nineteenth-century British art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, who early on recognized connections between children’s literature and art defying academic standards. This chapter prepares the ground for the other explorations of avant-garde in children’s literature. Two case studies – one on the Swedish artist Einar Nerman (1910s–1920s) and one on the Hungarian Sándor Bortnyik (1920s) – present artists whose contribution to children’s literature have not been recognized before. The whole middle section is devoted to the impact of the prominent Russian avant-garde. It comprises insightful contributions on the influence of the Russian avant-garde on Danish children’s books around 1933 or a big exhibition in Amsterdam on Soviet avant-garde children’s literature in the 1920s. Sara Pankenier Weld‘s and Evgeny Steiner’s chapters are of special interest: Pankenier Weld analyses the connections between the avant-garde infantile and children’s drawings and observes that both share a predilection for fundamental concepts, such as simple geometric shapes. Steiner reveals the avant-garde movements of the USSR and the USA in the 1920s and 1930s to be mirror images of one another (New Man/Soviet Man, technology and space), both reflected in their respective avant-garde picture books.

The edited volume closes with three reflections on the postmodern avant-garde movements in post-bellum France, the USA, and Germany (especially 1960s/1970s): They underscore the important role that the French-American publishing company Harlin Quist played by opening up children’s literature to avant-garde texts (Ionesco) and to art movements such as Pop Art and surrealism, hereby causing a pedagogic revolt in the...

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