The Children's Culture Reader (review)

Henry Jenkins, ed. The Children's Culture Reader. New York: New York UP, 1998.

Children's literature studies has long been aware of the necessity of interrogating "essentialized" and "decontextualized conceptions of the innocent child" (15). The idea that childhood is a concept largely defined by adults, that it is not universal transhistorically, and that it is an ideo-logically and politically inflected category is old news. Granted it is news we find it necessary to repeat to our students who resist the suggestions that childhood is constructed rather than "natural." That resistance, however, is not entirely anti-intellectual, but is based, in part, on a recognition that actual children lead lives and have needs and desires that are different from those of adults. Reading the essays in The Children's Culture Reader provokes a similar resistance in me: debunking childhood innocence doesn't reveal the whole story. Aren't there any useful concepts of childhood? Aren't there ways in which we can account for actual children who might themselves play some role in creating or defining something called children's culture? Judging by its announced intention--to provide exemplary "modes of cultural analysis . . . that account for the complexity of the interactions between children and adults" (30)--this anthology, while often compelling, falls short.

The burgeoning discipline of cultural studies has apparently just discovered childhood as the latest hot topic, a topic to which it previously paid scant attention. As Henry Jenkins notes in his introduction, "Until recently, cultural studies has said little about the politics of the child" (2). But the modes of cultural analysis represented here too often seem, as poet Elizabeth Bishop said, "tired / and a touch familiar" (57). Primarily consisting of previously published essays and excerpts from books, The Children's Culture Reader revisits territory well known to scholars and students of children's literature and culture, including essays or excerpts by Phillipe Ariès, Jacqueline Rose, Viviana Zelizer, James Kincaid, Valerie Walkerdine, Henry Giroux, Ellen Seiter, and Carolyn Steedman, among others. Arranged under the broad rubrics of "Childhood Innocence," "Childhood Sexuality," and "Child's Play," the collection is a still useful recycling of familiar texts, particularly for adoption in the classroom.

Jenkins's "Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths" is ambitious in scope and eloquent in discerning the limitations of many of the essays included in the volume. He intends for the Reader to help critics of children's culture get beyond "the mythology of childhood innocence" (2) in order to "explore what the figure of the child means to adults and to offer a more complex account of children's cultural lives" (3). This aim is both laudable and one the Reader too often leaves unfulfilled. In the fifteen years or so since Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan forced children's literature scholars to rethink their critical assumptions about children and literature, we have been vexed by the seemingly "impossible" relationship between children and adults. Rose's bold insights into "the impossibility of children's fiction" (excerpted in the Reader 58-66) were necessary, but in some ways they've reached a dead end; or at least they blind us to the specificities of the child's life in the world. Following Rose, Stephen Kline, in his essay "The Making of Children's Culture" (95-109), says that "what might be taken for children's culture has always been primarily a matter of culture produced for and urged upon children" (95). While he goes on to say that this does not preclude the idea that children "create and express themselves authentically," he nevertheless is firm in his insistence that "children's culture is always highly inflected with social purpose" (95) and that childhood itself is "a condition defined by powerlessness and dependence upon the adult community's directives and guidance" (95). Klein, like Rose, ascribes a very limited agency to children, in which children's subjectivities are...