A roadmap to the field

“A fervent relation with the world” is John Updike’s touchstone for criticism. I like that measure of passion ascribed to the trade’s handiwork in the larger world. That is what the authors in this volume bear: a sense of their life’s work intimately connected with the history of the present, the children’s book-in-the-making. Here we find the scholars who have taken bold steps beyond the tradition, who have envisioned children’s book history as more than just golden Victoriana, who have dared explore the New World’s own print heritage, and who have expanded the cultural archive as to what was—and is—literature.

The last few years have witnessed a fervor of children’s book historiography. Anne Scott MacLeod’s persistent work on American children’s literature as cultural studies is noteworthy, especially her recent collection of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American children’s literature, American Childhood (1994). She is, to my mind, the preeminent scholar in American children’s literature and its intricate weave with the work of children’s librarianship. Jack Zipes’ series, “Children’s Literature and Culture” (Garland), explores new authors and aesthetics in the genre. Gillian Avery’s highly visible Behold the Child (1994) breaks new ground by centering on the American literary landscape for children and making major distinctions between the British and the American experience. Peter Hunt, esteemed for his own theoretical works and anthologies of criticism, has now popularized many of these new approaches to children’s literature historiography in his latest edited work, Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History.

Hunt’s interest is in demystifying the history of children’s literature—in making it accessible to the common reader of literary history, open in its consideration of format and canon, and inclusive in its Anglo-American coverage. The parameters of the field are left nebulous, allowing for coverage of young adult literature in one section while excluding discussion of Huckleberry Finn as “outside the scope of this book” (239) in another. Hunt is generous in his scope, covering a vast historical and geographical region, from medieval beginnings through modern children’s books, with an Anglo-American matrix that extends boundaries to include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The book includes several chapters written by Hunt himself, as well as contributions by an array of distinguished scholars, such as Gillian Avery, Margaret Kinnell, Dennis Butts, Anne Scott MacLeod, Julia Briggs, Peter Hollindale, Zena Sutherland, Michael Stone, Roderick McGillis, and Betty Gilderdale. Hunt writes the preface and the chapter on English children’s literature from 1914–1945, while editing the overall text, which reads well. Basically, the work is a collection of critical essays on a chronological, if not necessarily progressive, literary tradition. The lack of an introduction and conclusion to the entire work leaves these various strands of history, format, and provenance seemingly unconnected.

The omission of preview and postscript is curious. Who is the intended audience? As editor, Hunt states in his preface that his intention is to present “today’s edition of a road-map (albeit on a very large scale) that might provide a fresh viewpoint for the social historian, or outline an immensely fascinating and influential body of texts for literary critics and other readers” (xiii–xiv). As a roadmap, the work can be downright frustrating in its absence of citations. A reading list appears at the end, but no references ground the sources within the text. It is difficult at times to tell whether something is, in fact, a quotation or an author’s commentary, since the quoted passage is only indicated as such by a slightly smaller font. Cartographers need to name the site so the serendipitous road can be found again.

Hunt’s purpose seems more attuned to the second goal—that of providing an outline of texts and territory. Here the work is immensely valuable. Despite Hunt’s claim in the preface that the work is aimed at “balance rather than revolution” (xiii), the contributors offer revisionist insights which challenge some...