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Introduction This book examines a common narrative in twentieth-century American literature for youth: that of the child-protagonist’s love for some cherished object—a dear friend, a dog, a possibility, an ideal—the loss of that loved object, and his or her subsequent maturation through the experience of loving and losing it. I explore why this particular narrative of love and loss recurs in some of the most widely read and honored novels for children and young adults, and I consider what we can learn about children and childhood by studying what these narratives mean and how they work. Why do we feel that such an experience is useful for ushering children into adulthood? Irrevocable loss, especially of something dear, is experienced as a trauma, so American children’s literature turns time and again to that which is traumatic as a way of provoking or ensuring the development of children. The striking recurrence of this pattern suggests that children ’s literature, and indeed American culture, relies on the contrived traumatization of children—both protagonists and readers—as a way of representing and promoting the process of becoming a mature adult. It is as if loss generates the escape velocity of youth. It is the fuel used to achieve the speed necessary for escaping the gravitational force of childhood. I attempt to explain the resonance and utility of this narrative in American culture and to consider how love and loss work as a catalyst for maturation. In “Reflections on the ‘Problem Novel,’” Barbara Feinberg ruminates over what she sees as the disturbing nature of the books her twelve-year-old son is forced to read in school, the kind of books, she observes, that are recommended by the American Library Association and plastered with the gold and silver medallions that denote Newbery Medal and Honor winners. She notes that her children look as though they are “bracing themselves” as they read, and she recalls encouraging her dismayed son by telling him to “just do it” (10). She reflects on what she meant by this: “I meant it in the same way someone might have said, ‘Just drink your milk,’ or ‘Just take your cod liver oil,’ or, I realized suddenly, the way someone might believe that a child ought to endure a beating, because even though it hurt, it was a ‘good beating,’ would make him better, build character ” (10). Feinberg rightly notes the trend toward realist writing for children x Introduction xii and young adults and the way it resonates with the practice of discipline. Many of these texts center on a narrative in which a child is forced to relinquish a loved object, often through the untimely death or loss of that object. The question is why children’s literature turns in particular to the narrative of traumatic loss, which Feinberg sees as marring the innocence and playfulness of childhood. The answer might seem like an obvious one: to experience tough things toughens us up, an idea to which Feinberg alludes in her comparison of these texts with a “good beating.” We want children to grow up into mature adults who are prepared to deal with the brutalities of life. But how does the experience of trauma and loss produce this effect? Or, how does reading about such experiences affect readers and propel them toward a successful adulthood? What assumptions underlie an understanding of literature as working like a good beating? What does this literary phenomenon suggest about the contours of modern life and our cultural conceptions of childhood, child rearing, maturation, and what it means to be a mature adult? These are the questions that Feinberg’s observations raise. While Feinberg finds the prominence of trauma in contemporary children’s literature troublesome, my purpose here is not to discipline children’s literature by taking it to task for being too disturbing. Rather, we might profit from thinking about this literary phenomenon as a cultural mechanism and investigating how that mechanism works. Ultimately, Feinberg finds contemporary children’s literature malignantly disturbing, which raises the question as to why the enterprise of children’s literature so frequently focuses on traumatic events. I argue that in these texts trauma works to transform the child-protagonists and, as I will claim, the child-reader in ways that are culturally valued. Trauma is therefore represented in them as beneficial, a kind of inoculation by which the toxicity of loss is introduced into the life of the child in order to help...

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