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  • Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction
  • Annette Wannamaker (bio)
Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. By Kimberley Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

The recent publication of Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2007) and Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature (2008), edited by Mickenberg and Philip Nel, suggest a current scholarly focus on the transformative potential of children’s literature. Kimberley Reynolds’s book, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction, contributes significantly to this conversation in the ways it weaves together various strands of criticism about texts and culture in order to build a comprehensive, careful, and compelling argument asserting that many texts created for younger readers recognize the “fact that children will not just inherit the future, but need to participate in shaping it” (14).

Reynolds’s book is a thorough argument against one of the foundational texts (and ideas) that has shaped the discipline of children’s literature for the past twenty-five years: Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984). Reynolds is not the first to disagree with Rose’s argument that the child reader is objectified by the adult-created, adult-centered children’s book. As various critics have pointed out, Rose’s position ignores child agency and the ability of child readers to engage critically with texts they read. Where Reynolds moves far beyond this common challenge to Rose is in her well-supported assertion that children may be learning to be active, perhaps even radical, readers and thinkers from works of children’s literature. She argues that instead of perpetuating a nostalgic, static, colonized construction of the child for the benefit of the adult author and reader, radical children’s literature speaks to an imagined child reader who is thoughtful, capable, resilient, and rebellious. Reynolds most takes issue with Rose’s claim that all children’s literature is bounded by adult assumptions of childhood innocence, resulting in the genre, as a whole, “being arrested as a literary form” (4). Instead, Reynolds works to assert and develop the antithetical point that “many children’s books offer quirky or critical or alternative visions of the world designed to provoke that ultimate response of childhood, ‘Why?’ ‘Why are things as they are?’ ‘Why can’t they be different?’” (3).

The greatest strength of Radical Children’s Literature is the range of texts Reynolds includes in her discussion. [End Page 287] Because Reynolds develops her argument by drawing on examples representing a wide range of critical and creative texts, she asks us, as critics of children’s literature, to imagine what, precisely, “radical” might mean in a variety of contexts. The book features chapters on modernist picture books, nonsense verse, horror, dystopian fiction, young adult literature, and youth culture, as well as chapters focused on themes like depression and sex and sexuality. Reynolds also considers contemporary genres such as graphic novels, films, online games, fan fiction, and electronic books as sites of adult anxieties about new media, and, conversely, as potential sites for young readers to experiment, play, create, and discover the pleasures of text. Because contemporary young readers are adept at moving among various mediums such as print text, hypertext, visual media, and participatory culture, Reynolds argues that they “are accustomed to encountering different versions of the same text in different formats: as they develop it will be they who see the potential for new kinds of stories delivered in new kinds of ways” (183).

Here and elsewhere, Reynolds’s most thought-provoking discussions consider the ways in which experiments in form may challenge young readers to question the transparency of language and the role of language in shaping the self. Because so many children’s texts combine the visual and the textual in metafictional ways, and because texts for children often play with the slipperiness of language, they can be ideal sites for stimulating active and critical reading. “Many textual experiments are given their first expression in...

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