Divided Worlds: Studies in Children's Literature (review)

With books arising from conference papers there is often a lack of coherence, making them interesting, no doubt, but frequently as curates' eggs. This is not the case with Divided Worlds, the third collection from the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature. This collection comprises seventeen essays, ranging widely, but united in the way they show the fissures and fault lines running through the works studied. As Mary Shine Thompson says in her excellent introduction, there is "little evidence of criticism predicated on the idea that literature is a self-enclosed system or an elitist discourse" (12); the contributors are well-versed in a range of approaches that Thompson subsumes eclectically under a New Historicist label. Let me try to give a flavor of each.

Ciara Ní Bhroin examines Maria Edgeworth's Orlandino, her final story set in Ireland (1817), said to be so because of "the contradiction of her vision of Union with the reality of growing poverty, hunger and violence" (23). The eponymous character is of mixed parentage, English and Irish, with the latter, wild, maternal side predominating till the Anglo-Irish save him, which Bhroin reads as "an allegory of national reform through union with Britain" (24–25). The notion of the "Wild Irish" is pursued in Colette Epplé's examination of Katharine Tynan's children's works, specifically Heart O' Gold; or, The Little Princess (1912) and Bitha's Wonderful Year (1921), noting how they carefully navigate an acceptable path between British and Irish sensibilities, "to instruct British children how to treat the Irish; and to instruct Irish children how to resist assimilation and navigate successfully the waters of postcolonial society" (40).

Julie Anne Stevens examines Somerville and Ross's neglected children's stories, using the image of "the little big house" in her title. This alludes to a story by Somerville's aunt, Louisa Greene, about a dolls' house that the girl owner accidentally sets on fire by lighting the house's candles, which supposedly "also mirrors in miniature the decline of Irish country houses and the Protestant Ascendancy" (43). It's an interesting allegory, but not brought sufficiently into relief in what is too condensed an argument (and we all know the problems of trying to cram quarts into pint-pot articles). Thus the material on the way that the fox features as a trickster figure (Reynard) in the hunting scenes could really have been more central.

Pádraic Whyte examines Mark O'Sullivan's novel, Melody for Nora, in the light of trauma theory, which he argues can be closely linked to the novel's postmodernism; that is, the grand narrative of history becomes fragmented into a variety of accounts and perspectives on events. The links between personal history and the Irish Civil War are powerful, and the subsequent contemporary cultural amnesia over the events fits well with trauma theory—albeit sometimes the parallels between the individual as metonymic of the nation are overdone; for example, Nora's being "confined to her little bedroom after she falls down the stairs . . . can correspond to a sense of Ireland's decreasing space, from being part of the British Empire to being a small isolated Ireland" (56). It is notable that Whyte queries a freewheeling relativism at the end: "While the liberalism of the novel avoids creating simplistic dichotomies in the representation of conflicting ideologies, the postmodern nature of the text also avoids investigating or contesting the fundamental philosophies that inform these ideologies of the past and the present" (60).

Robert Dunbar's "'It's the way we tell 'em': Voices from Ulster Children's Fiction" takes its title from the comedian Frank Carson's catch-phrase, and is most apposite for his chapter. Not only does he capture the distinctive voices of Ulster writing, but Dunbar's own idiolect comes through strongly. Despite the political sensitivities of the region (the "six counties," which should really be nine), Dunbar gives some telling...