The State of International Research in Children's Literature: An Interview with James Fraser

GD: Could you make a general observation about the state of children's literature research around the world?

JF: Any reasonable observation would need qualification according to national objectives or cultural emphases. For example, research interests in third world, socialist, and capitalist countries tend to be guided by subtle and not so subtle national objectives. And I am well aware that even implying such crude categories raises other questions rather than answering your query. But I think you can appreciate that to a great degree national policy or lack of it, national enthusiasms, research trends in other fields, fads, media stimuli, etc. do affect research life in our field in a given country.

GD: Could you give a few examples.

JF: Let's start with A. In Albania in its relative cultural and political isolation research is tied almost exclusively to the goals of the Ministry of Education which in turn faithfully serves Party objectives. Research in Albania is understandably pragmatic, literary-critical within a highly restricted ideological framework. Research there also starts with the beginning of Albanian children's literature which for the most part begins with the Communist regime in 1944-45. If you look at the writings about children's literature since the break with China in the mid 1970s, it is virtually national in interest with little looking "outward."

Belgium with its much more recent research developments in children's literature is by location and cultural/language divisions quite individualistic with its few researchers looking cautiously in many directions outside of Belgium for models and guidance.

Canadian research in children's literature is modest in amount and writing about children's literature tends to follow a literary-critical trend. There seems to be a certain influence of the MLA in Anglophonic Canada at least and the tendencies within that group tend to be echoed in Canada. It is nothing more than an impression gathered from reading Canadian children's literature.

RN: But what about themes in research? Do they generally tend to follow a national outlook?

JF: Interestingly there seem to be themes that run through our field regardless of national boundaries or language areas and continue for a time and then another theme will have its day. Concerns with racism and fantasy, to take two quite different themes, have been a preoccupation of researchers in publishing countries in both east and west for years —in the case of racism for nearly two decades. Fantasy has certainly occupied researchers widely for over a decade now.

This interest in fantasy ranged from the Soviet Union to the United States and most of the media-intense nations in between. The interest was strongest in the Russian and Ukrainian Republics in the USSR. Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, the FRG, Japan —all had a growing literature about fantasy for approximately a decade and then interest began to wane. In the late 1970s we were cranking out over a hundred doctoral dissertations annually on children's literature in the United States (about ten dissertations annually in the USSR in the same period) and interestingly enough fantasy and fantasy-related themes were in roughly the same percentage in both countries, approximately fifteen percent.

In the period of the mid 1980s, but already observable in the early 1980s, research has become so fragmented that it is difficult to generalize or identify dominant themes in this or any other country. There are of course themes that are constant and appear year after year, for example illustrators, sex roles, political content, fairy tales, folklore, moral issues, religion, etc.

Probably the one thematic area among these accounting for a significant percentage is the fairy tale, particularly in the Anglo-American and Germanic language areas. And the measurable increase was noticeable within a year or so following the publication of Bettelheim's controversial book. The U.S. and the FRG lead the way in published interest. In the U.S. alone in 1984-85 there were still a dozen journals of serious scholarly articles and monographs on the fairy tale and this is nearly a decade...