Children's Literature and Modernism: The Space Between

Reviewing the library stacks and online databases, we find little discussion of the relationship between the two terms children's literature and modernism. Whether we approach our search from the extensive discussions on modernism or the growing body of scholarship on children's literature, the result is the same. A two-part explanation emerges from anthologies like The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature (2005). First, as editors Jack Zipes, Lissa Paul, Lynne Vallone, Peter Hunt, and Gillian Avery note in their preface, "Typically, the term literature has excluded children's literature—that is, children's literature has generally been marked as separate from 'real literature'" (xxxii, emphasis in original). The second reason appears in the anthology's table of contents: it is organized first by genre and then by chronology. These two consequences of literary history—the exclusion of children's literature and its emphasis on genre—help us understand the past relationship between the terms children's literature and modernism. The articles in this special issue on "Children's Literature and Modernism" sketch the present and point us toward the future.

Culturally, both within and outside academia, children's literature has struggled to be recognized as literature rather than "kiddie lit," as scholars Beverly Lyon Clark (2003) and Anne Lundin (2004), among others, have demonstrated. Excluded in the past from many conversations about literature and literary history, children's literature has not found its way into most conversations about modernism as a literary movement or modernism as a literary period. The organization of scholarship on children's literature, I believe, may have compounded the problem.

Much scholarship on children's literature revolves around categories of genre rather than chronology. This organization may be a consequence of the earlier days of children's literature scholarship, which in turn was shaped by librarians, K–12 teachers, and publishers. As twentieth-century librarians, teachers, and publishers sorted books according to the child reader's age and reading ability, the resulting categories divided picture books from middle-grade readers, middle-grade readers from chapter books. Such distinctions continued in the teaching of and scholarship on children's literature, as the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature demonstrates. Unlike Norton's anthologies for British and American Literature (now in their eighth and sixth editions, respectively), the press's anthology for children's literature maps its subject by genre rather than century: "Alphabets," "Chapbooks," "Primers and Readers," "Fairy Tales," "Animal Fables," "Classical Myths," "Legends," "Religion: Judeo-Christian Stories," "Fantasy," "Science Fiction," "Picture Books," "Comics," "Verse," "Plays," "Books of Instruction," "Life Writing," "Adventure Stories," "School Stories," and "Domestic Fiction." History is hardly forgotten, as the editorial apparatus demonstrates, but the organizing principle is form rather than the passage of time. As a result, it is challenging to build a picture, let alone a canon, of children's literature between the conventional bookends of 1890–1950 or during a smaller span of years in the modernist period.

The degree to which children's literature moves seamlessly between generations of readers may also contribute to its categorization by genre over chronology. Only when a children's book no longer resonates with a particular cultural moment (the rejection of Little Black Sambo, for instance, first published in 1899) do many readers become aware of that book's historicity. Changes to a book's words or pictures in order to prevent a jarring juxtaposition of past and present ideologies—P. L. Travers's revisions to Mary Poppins (1934) to remove racial stereotypes, for example—further erase or suspend the moment of cultural production. For many readers, the best children's books transcend the limits of a single generation to speak to future generations. While literature in general often aspires to this goal, children's literature seems particularly susceptible to losing its historical grounding. In other words, for many readers, good "adult" literature can be both historical and ahistorical; good children's literature is frequently ahistorical, unless proven otherwise. As a result, genre becomes the way to categorize its texts.

Between its exclusion from literary canons and its emphasis on genre, children's literature has...