Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen (review)

With the neuroscientific turn in developmental psychology and the affective turn in multiple disciplines, scholarship on children's literature is in a unique position to gain considerable understanding and open up new possibilities for sourcework and rhetorical methods. Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen have rigorously edited a diverse and economically structured collection that demonstrates both depth in affect theory and breadth in well-selected applications that range widely in historical context, genre, identity, and even in appeals to varied specialized audiences. Though I would expect most readers to be scholars and graduate students, some of the chapters are so neatly self-contained as to be individually recommendable to undergraduate students.

For a reader new to affect theory and cognitive literary studies, the introduction does a great job of setting up the theoretical provenance, frame, and vocabulary. More importantly, it also establishes why the study of affective responses, including subconscious, bodily, and "preindividual" reactions, is so important in studying literature for children, who are subjects in becoming themselves (4). Updating methods from reader-oriented and embodiment approaches in light of cognitive and neuroscientific discoveries (mirror neurons, mind modeling), this introduction prepares the reader to consider how texts use affective triggers, while emotion is a narrative product. In some ways, this method resurrects traditional close reading for didactic messages, but it revalidates the method for new and far more complicated reasons. Any lessons aimed toward developing emotional intelligence that are written or illustrated into a text depend upon the affective response of the reader, who in turn might learn self-control, empathy, and the affective weight of history. The act of reading is a fluid process that can "require young readers to modify existing schemas and develop new ones in order to comprehend the text" (7). The reading act, defined as such (admittedly loosely), becomes infinitely connectible to other methods and purposes. At first glance, cognitive literary studies—described as "precisely interested in the often unconscious mental and affective processes readers use to understand texts and each other"—may seem less precisely to fall back too easily on arbitrary interpretation of, even projection onto, an unknowable implied child reader. Many of the writers in this volume, however, admirably do the diligent sourcework necessary to find and cite testimonies of actual child readers or historic adult recollections of child reading (6–7). This sourcework is convincing in its concreteness, and since scholars in children's literature cannot afford to dismiss the very readers who define the genre that we study, we should value this evidence for the small but hard-earned revelations that it can enable.

The book flows easily in four sections devoted to different perspectives: historical, theoretical, space and place, and identity and relationships. Section 1 establishes early examples of affective reading from premodern through Victorian texts. Juanita Feros Ruys demonstrates that medieval didactic texts operate on a subtler affective level than is usually acknowledged, offering child readers "affective literacy" and a resulting self-control over emotional states (20–21). Moruzi first provides a critical contextualization for understanding how evangelical waif novels in the mid-nineteenth century exploit affect in order to build social empathy. She then argues, with sophisticated nuance, that this empathy does not translate into interclass solidarity or action: "While there is little doubt that these texts produced emotional and affective responses in previous generations of readers, emotion and affect were used in conservative ways that suggested individual responsibility but failed to consider more radical social change" (49). Adrienne E. Gavin's contribution is particularly strong in sourcework and in dignifying sentimental texts such as Black Beauty by showing how important affective cues are to its popularity and impact (this chapter would also appeal to anyone in animal studies). Smith demonstrates how health and beauty become incentivized through affect in Six...