Books and Boundaries: Writers and their Audiences (review)

The 1999 publication of Sandra Beckett's collection of essays, Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, brought together some of the emerging scholarship on the difficulties of defining audience, rooted in both contemporary and historical examples. Overnight, it seemed, the discussion of children's and young adult books as complicated by their adult writers and/or readers achieved critical mass and has since found many forums, including a day-long annual conference held at Roehampton Institute in London. This volume contains the proceedings of that conference, held on November 15, 2003 and co-sponsored by the British section of IBBY and the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature (NCRCL).

In this printed collection, fifteen papers join talks by authors and publishers, reorganized from their place on the conference schedule into three catch-all sections. The majority of the papers are by writers who have some affiliation with the University of Surrey Roehampton, either as current or past students in the master's or doctoral program or as faculty members. The informal talks that frame the collection of papers add the insights of authors, publishers, critics, and a lone bookseller.

In the first section on picture books, Penni Cotton introduces the European Picture Book Collection, more thoroughly documented in her book Picture Books sans Frontières (2000). Funded by the European Union and available as an online resource, this project was designed to create a collection of books that can be used to foster cross-national knowledge among children in the countries of the European Union. Here Cotton, research fellow at NCRCL and project director, demonstrates how a teacher can point out visual and linguistic cues that reveal information or influences specific to a country or culture. She mentions but doesn't describe, for reasons of space, a methodology for examining pictures that will send some readers to seek out her book. Cotton's article addresses boundaries of all sorts—physical borders between countries, linguistic borders, and visual images that speak more or less loudly depending on one's culture or nationality.

The other papers in the picture book section deal with specific authors or topics. Catherine Buscall focuses on the dual-audience aspect of French writer Claude Ponti's picture books, while Sarah Godek examines the many ways in which the monster introduced in Mary Shelley's novel has been transmuted in children's picture books. Particularly fascinating to me was Mieke K.T.Desmet's study of the Taiwanese artist Jimmy Liao, whose work defies category and who has become a cultural phenomenon in Taiwan. In books published for the adult market, he uses the picture book format to address the exigencies of modern urban living. Desmet's meticulous discussion of four of these books suggest that Liao has developed a genre unto itself, one that calls to mind, but is distinctive from, the work of artists more widely known in Europe, such as Michèle Lemieux, Anthony Browne, and Satoshi Kitamura.

All of the essays in the second section explore the crossover nature of a group of books, either by author (Eoin Colfer, Melvin Burgess) or genre (e.g., historical fiction, epic narratives, autobiography, fantasy). As is the case with most conferences, not all papers directly address the stated theme. Instead, some writers have used this conference as an occasion to present work with the title or introduction tweaked to fit. "'On the Borders of Adult Knowledge': Children Growing Up in William Mayne's A Game of Dark, Midnight Fair & Cradlefasts," by Jenny Kendricks, is one such example, even as it offers a close and insightful reading to demonstrate how Mayne captures the essence of adolescence in these three books. Peter Bramwell's study of the marginalized positions of characters in several fantasy books highlights internal border crossings within the text, while also appearing to have been originally written for another purpose. Rachel Falconer's "Tolkien, Dante, and Crossover Epic" goes directly to the heart of...