Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children's Literature in English (review)

The seventeen studies, formal essays, and commentaries that make up Windows and Words were born of a Canadian Children's Literature Symposium held at the University of Ottawa in 1999. According to Aïda Hudson, the participants in the symposium were concerned with two questions: 'What literary legacy do our children have to light up their future? What in the past and in the present in Canadian children's fiction is literature?' Contributors include children's writers Tim Wynne-Jones and Janet Lunn, Groundwood Books artistic director Michael Solomon, and internationally established scholars of Canadian children's literature Judith Saltman, Irene Gammel, and Elizabeth Waterston, among others.

The collection begins triumphantly with Wynne-Jones's rumination on the difference between writing for adults and children, offered in a style which makes clear why Wynne-Jones's writing for children rewards close critical study and ranks as some of the best Canada has to offer. 'In children's fiction, a writer tends to show rather than to tell,' he argues. '"After Lydia's phone call, Lyle was hurt and angry." That's a telling sentence. Whereas, "After Lydia's phone call, Lyle photocopied her portrait forty-three times, stapled them to his flesh and threw himself in the fish pond in the lobby of the school." That is a showing sentence.' With effective, memorable examples Wynne-Jones argues for the importance of 'Story in the Aristotelian sense,' transparency of language, and 'the degree to which the story is told.'

After this taste of what's currently vibrant and possible in Canadian children's fiction, Saltman, Beverly Haun, and Gregory Maillet offer overviews of what's available. Saltman sketches the trends and patterns in Canadian children's fiction since 1990; Haun discusses the rise of the Aboriginal voice 1970-90; Maillet brings attention to multiculturalism and contemporary children's literature of Saskatchewan. In presenting a rich array of contemporary voices, these scholars make a convincing, even enticing, case for the quality of Canadian children's fiction produced in the past three decades.

It is somewhat disappointing, then, that almost all the close literary analysis that follows focuses on the work of L.M. Montgomery. 'L.M. Montgomery and Everybody Else' is the title of one article, and indeed, it could have been the title of the book. Of its 232 pages of text, almost 100 are devoted to the work of LMM, giving the impression that although there may be many more recent writers of children's books in Canada, they can't merit the same respectful attention now devoted to that Canadian icon. Sandra Becket discusses two Canadian versions of 'Little Red Riding Hood'; Alan West and Lee Harris analyse the Gouldian philosophy in Wynne-Jones's The Maestro; Andrea Mackenzie compares illustrations by Henry Sandham and Michael Martchenko - but otherwise, Montgomery Rules.

That said, Irene Gammel's 'The Eros of Childhood and Early Adolescence in Girl Series: L.M. Montgomery's Emily Trilogy' is well worth the reading. Proposing a 'feminist model of body and pleasure reading' for the Emily books, Gammel uses feminist body theory to show how Montgomery's sense of a girl's body and her agency, transgressive for its time (she complained of the restraint she was under in depicting 'a young girl as she really is'), is encoded in images of self-representation such as Emily's journal and 'Emily-in-the-Glass.' Gammel demonstrates that obliquely, Montgomery makes the 'political claim that a girl should be in touch with her body pleasures and should exert agency in claiming these pleasures even if they are socially taboo.' Other essays consider 'Anne Shirley and the culture of imperial motherhood,' Emily as a Wordsworthian child, Montgomery as 'cultural capital,' material facts of Montgomery's historical context, and Anne as Christian convert.

In places technical errors mar the text ('this phenomena,' or Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the...