Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature (review)

Like Mike Cadden in his introduction to this engaging collection of essays, I begin with the peritext. The cover of Telling Children’s Stories reproduces an 1875 painting by Italian artist Pietro Saltini, Grandmother’s Story, in which the raconteur grandmother at the center of the painting gestures broadly, framing a rather lethal-looking distaff, while three children—two boys and a girl—appear to pay rapt attention to the story. At the far left of the painting, an adult woman stirs a washtub, and at the far right another woman appears to be preparing a meal on the hearth. The little girl, at whom the grandmother looks directly, holds the spindle, while the two boys appear rather idle; one has his hands in his pockets, and in the foreground the other little boy, looking rather disheveled with his stockings and breeches awry, clutches a kitten beneath his overcoat. Aside from romanticizing a rustic and presumably bygone era, the painting also implies that, like washing, cooking, and spinning, storytelling is woman’s work. The audience for the grandmother’s tale comprises women and children, but not adult males. Knowing the date of the painting, I read the picture as a sentimentalized, nostalgic depiction of storytelling. Happily, turning from the peritext to the text itself, I encountered a number of original essays that describe bold and innovative storytelling, so I conclude that the cover illustration provides an ironic commentary on the book’s contents.

Nevertheless, though I’m holding a book titled Telling Children’s Stories I see before me the telling of a Grandmother’s Story, so I have to wonder about that possessive “children’s.” To do so is, of course, to raise perennial questions about the field we call “children’s literature,” a field that recently seems to be engaged perpetually and a bit excessively in the act of defining itself. Cadden states in the introduction that “an editor’s introduction to any book about narrative approaches should begin with some self-consciousness about two separate matters: the role of the peritext and the nature of the implied reader” (vii). Both concepts, he argues, are not only intertwined, but central to a consideration of children’s literature. I am obviously part of the implied readership for this book—I am a scholar of children’s literature—but I also consider myself a resisting reader. Usually, when I encounter the term “narratology,” I find myself yawning. I am not so foolish as to question the usefulness of narrative theory for discussing children’s or any other kind of fiction. However, I am unwilling, as I have recently argued elsewhere, to grant the assumption implicit in this anthology that “children’s literature” and “children’s fiction” are synonymous. As a scholar of children’s literature, I recognize that the concept of children’s literature rests on its implied audience and that the audience considerations are, as Cadden points out, “necessary . . . to those studying children’s literature whether they care about narratology or not” (xiv). I am less comfortable with the seeming conflation of narrative theory with all serious theoretical approaches to children’s texts. I am also increasingly weary of the project of defining children’s literature and creating taxonomies that place fiction at the top of the hierarchy, while marginalizing genres that are not primarily or exclusively narrative.

Reservations aside, I’m pleased to recommend this informative and thought-provoking collection. Cadden is to be commended for the excellent job he has done shepherding these original essays along and for encouraging his contributors to keep technical jargon to a minimum. The best essays in the volume are rigorous while at the same time gesturing beyond strict structural analysis. Divided into four categories—“Genre Templates and Transformations,” “Approaches to the Picture Book,” “Narrators and Implied Readers,” and “Narrative Time”—each section is accompanied by a brief introductory note that ties the essays together. While the categories strike me as being at once...