Alice, Not Peter

I had the pleasure of serving last year on the ChLA's Book Award committee. We read a number of fine critical works, but for me one book stood out as the clear winner, Kimberley Reynolds's Radical Children's Literature. It's a small volume, but it's out to push a big claim and it takes direct aim at one of the most influential and controversial critical works of the past quarter century, Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984). Although she finds things of value in Rose's book, Reynolds criticizes it for seeing "the child in children's literature (and by extension, children's literature itself) not as embodying the disruptive and creative force of Lyotard's monster-child, but as having an innately conservative effect on what can be written for children" (3). Her intent is to disprove this claim, arguing that children's literature can be radical, can "contribute . . . to the social and aesthetic transformation of culture by . . . encouraging readers to approach ideas, issues, and objects from new perspectives and so prepare the way for change" (1). Reynolds looks at the work of a number of modernists who either emphasized the importance of their childhood reading on their adult production or, going further, actually produced children's literature in accord with the aesthetic theories that guided their adult work. Her thinking, she says, is in part indebted to ideas developed by Juliet Dusinberre in Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art (1987), a book that Reynolds believes should be better known that it is. One of Dusinberre's most startling arguments, for example, is that Alice in Wonderland (1865) not only radically altered the course of children's literature, but in fact "ushered in the modernist movement in all its forms" (9) due to its enormous childhood influence on writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The stories adults present to children, Reynolds insists, "are blueprints for living in culture as it exists, but they are also where alternative ways of living are often piloted in recognition of the fact that children will not just inherit the future, but need to participate in shaping it" (14; emphasis in original).

Reynolds argues that children's literature is attractive to writers with radical agendas for several reasons. Frequently, because they do not receive the same kind of attention given to work for adults, children's books essentially fly "under the cultural radar" (15), thus, for example, allowing them to serve as a haven for left-wing writers during the McCarthy era. Such books can play a similar role for artists with nonpolitical but equally radical aesthetic or social agendas. The creation of children's books can also be appealing because they allow entry into the realm of dreams and fantasy, a world often associated with childhood. Further, they make it possible to combine the written word with visual images in creative and often sophisticated ways, something rarely possible in work explicitly aimed at adults. The very plasticity of children's literature allows it to be used in the creation of new genres and movements; Reynolds argues that it was instrumental in the development not only of literary modernism, but also of magic realism, citing the work of Nesbit and Travers as early examples and Burgess's Lady: My Life as a Bitch (2001) as a more recent one.

Reynolds's second chapter centers on radical picturebooks, beginning with attempts at that form by Woolf, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. The first two works, although clearly modernist fiction in picturebook form, were not intended for commercial publication and had negligible influence on the genre. Stein's book, The World is Round (1939), however, was intended for commercial release from its inception and, Reynolds argues, "can be regarded as the beginning of a strong modernist vein in twentieth-century children's publishing" (30). Reynolds then discusses a variety of avant-garde and modernist picturebooks, from early...