Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature ed. by Angela Hubler (review)

Since George Orwell identified the middle-class bias in popular boys’ weekly magazines in 1940 there have been periodic calls for both quality left-wing, class-conscious publications for children and an appreciation of the enduring influence of youthful reading; as Orwell observed, we carry the legacies of childhood reading through life. The 1970s introduced a period of interest in politically radical children’s texts and politically informed approaches to reading works produced for the young. Pioneering figures including Bob Dixon, Robert Leeson, and Jack Zipes pointed to the ways in which children’s literature serves the interests of capitalism and the dominant ideology. Angela Hubler suggests in her Introduction to this valuable collection of essays that the exigencies of the global economic crisis have reignited concern over how and how far children’s literature is helping its readers engage with issues dealing with economic inequality, social justice, and the impact of actions by those with wealth and power on vulnerable people at home and abroad.

Those who read this volume in its entirety will discover that its thirteen essays constitute a wide-ranging and lively addition to debates about the political messages conveyed through children’s literature. However, the disparate nature of the individual chapters is likely to mean that many readers will focus on one or two contributions. Doing so exposes some weaknesses in the way Little Red Readings has been conceptualized and structured. There is, for instance, no dialogue between essays, meaning readers are not alerted to the need to identify the contributions that provide a methodological scaffolding for the work, which is necessary since the Introduction itself is too brief and wide ranging to set the scene adequately. Additionally, the organization of the essays neither indicates where this material is located nor shows them to best advantage. Finally, the volume needs a formal Conclusion that summarizes what it has achieved and makes a call of its own for more work in key areas. Specifically, it needs to articulate the need several contributors implicitly identify for a coherent series that looks at class and children’s literature on a worldwide basis. Much of Hubler’s Introduction focuses on the need for more work on class by scholars and critics of children’s literature, but while individual essays cover texts, including films, from a number of countries by contributors from Canada, China, Germany, Poland, the UK and the US, there is little interrogation of the ways in which class functions in different parts of the world or claims that Western societies have become “classless” (in Britain, for example, this claim has been made by Prime Ministers Major, Blair and Cameron).

Hubler’s Introduction provides a rapid overview of key works and figures who have adapted aspects of what is variously called a Marxist, Marxian and, as in this collection, historical materialist approach to reading children’s literature. Such an approach, she explains, “analyses texts in terms of the material conditions and social relations from which they emerge and upon which they comment” (x) and calls particular attention to the way social relationships and opportunities are shaped by race, sex, and class. As a student at Sussex University, at the time one of the most left-wing and radicalized universities in Britain, this way of reading texts from any period and for any audience was part and parcel of my undergraduate education. I stayed at Sussex to do an MA and PhD and watched Marxist-driven theories give way to interest in deconstruction, poststructuralism and postmodernism. As a consequence, as David Harvey notes in A Companion to Marx’s “Capital” (2010), “a whole generation has grown up bereft of familiarity with, let alone training in, Marxian political economy” (vii). Hubler quotes Harvey in her Introduction and sets out the twin aims of Little Red Readings as being “to broaden understanding of historical materialist literary criticism and to remedy the marginal status of this approach...