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  • Children's Literature and the Posthuman by Zoe Jaques
  • Jen Harrison (bio)
Children's Literature and the Posthuman. By Zoe Jaques. New York: Routledge, 2015.

A concern with "otherness" has long been central to children's literature and its theorists, with both texts and critics often engaging with questions about what it means to be different, excluded, divided, or even simply defined. These fundamental concerns lie at the heart of Zoe Jaques's study, in which posthuman theory is deployed with great skill to reveal the increasing importance of children's literature as a medium for understanding what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

In a 2016 article for International Research in Children's Literature, Maria Nikolajeva describes what she refers to as a recent "material turn" in children's literature theory, with many critics emphasizing the importance of conceptions of the body and its environment in fiction for children (132). This turn toward the material has been exemplified by an explosion of studies of children's literature in recent years that take a variety of ecocritical standpoints as their starting point. To name just a few examples, Layla AbdelRahim's Children's Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Phillip Payne, and Alan Reid's Experiencing Environment and Place through Children's Literature have been seminal contributions to a modern understanding of environment and place in children's literature, while Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd's Wild Things, published in 2004, not only is one of the first full-length critical applications of ecocriticism in children's literature but also contains groundbreaking examinations of human/nonhuman dichotomies in children's fiction.

In his 2014 survey of ecocritical approaches to children's literature, Lawrence Buell laments that so much of such theory tends to focus on pedagogical concerns, either deploring "the containment of ecocritique [End Page 493] within normalizing constraints" (418) or celebrating the contributions of children's literature to ecopedagogical agendas. What is particularly valuable about Jaques's volume, therefore, is that although it engages with such agendas, they are not its sole focus. Instead, Jaques makes a convincing argument for the "imaginative and boundary-blurring nature of children's fiction as a location for shaping posthuman and proto-posthuman philosophy as much as a location for exploring the tensions occasioned by it" (6).

Jaques begins by providing a comprehensive overview of posthuman theory and its application to children's literature in particular, as a genre that has traditionally employed tropes that explore "human distinctiveness dissolving, fracturing and connecting to those non-human entities who might be considered the most remote of all others" (2). Interestingly, in explaining the relevance of posthumanism to the study of children's literature, Jaques resists the urge to focus on ecopedagogy. Asserting that by exploring the "boundaries between the human and the non-human," discourses of post-humanism can "facilitate a dialogue as to how those very borders might become more fluid" (3), she avoids any reductive evaluation of children's texts in terms of their fulfilment of ecopedagogical agendas, instead demonstrating the ways in which children's texts open dialogues and provide possibilities.

Having provided the theoretical framework for the volume, Jaques divides the rest of the book into three key areas of posthuman interest: the animal/creature, the environment, and technology. Part 1 focuses on "animal" others, specifically two categories that Jaques labels "creature" and "pet." Under these headings, she explores questions of otherness, stewardship, subjectivity, and ontological instability with regard to a diverse range of texts. Beginning with the problematic canonical Gulliver's Travels and the Alice books in chapter 1, "Creature," Jaques moves on in chapter 2, "Pet," to an examination of Disney's Lady and the Tramp and Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came to Tea, showing how all four texts complicate the boundaries between human and animal in ways compounded by their popular and critical receptions.

Part 2, "Environment," focuses on two environmental tropes: "tree" and "water." Drawing on wider ecocritical theory as well as the narrower field of posthumanism, Jaques explores the ways in which children's literature complicates the boundaries between self and environment...

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