The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature (review)

With twenty-six original essays and an insightful introduction, Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone’s Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature is both more and less than a survey of the field. It highlights trends in the study of children’s literature and features thorough scholarship on many of the field’s major figures and texts, but it makes no attempt to cover every corner of a discipline whose interests reach across continents and centuries. The result is a collection of strong essays that will be useful for readers researching the topics of the individual chapters, as well as for people watching for large-scale directions in the field.

The book’s editorial vision misfires only in rare cases. Each chapter, for example, begins with an italicized preamble that introduces the text or author under consideration and ends with a list of suggestions for further reading. In some cases, the reading lists feel half-heartedly assembled, offering titles that are either obvious or only superficially relevant to the chapter’s argument. The preambles regularly give information that is repeated in the chapters, sometimes word-for-word, which makes the role of the preambles uncertain and the experience of reading the preamble together with the chapter awkward.

If the preambles and reading lists make less than ideal bookends to the essays, Mickenberg and Vallone make other choices that not only pay off, but lend the collection an air of confidence. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the thematic organization. Four “general rubrics,” each of them the title of one of the collection’s major sections, include what the editors identify as “key areas of inquiry in children’s literature study: Adults and Children’s Literature; Pictures and Poetics; Reading History/Learning Race and Class; and Innocence and Agency” (4). These categories are familiar enough to serve as easily acceptable cornerstones of the field, but they also point provocatively to some topics of unresolved disagreement.

The final section, to take just one example, tackles both innocence and agency, terms typically understood to operate at odds with one another. In the individual essays and the section as a whole, that all-but-paradoxical pair of terms drives compelling arguments with wide implications for the field. Courtney Weikle-Mills’ chapter considers the New England Primer “as a transitional text between patriarchal subjecthood and modern subjectivity, oral and textual culture, and ancient and early modern understandings of spirituality and the heart” (412), exploring “the debates within children’s literature studies between seeing children’s books as transmitting adult authority and as validating children’s potential for self-determination” (413). Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s essay on the creative play of real children who read The Swiss Family Robinson explains how to “use children’s writings as a means of understanding not only children’s perspectives on the specific books they read, but even more the role such reading plays in children’s imagination, activities, sense of self, and ultimately their participation in the social world ” (434). Sánchez-Eppler’s goal, arising from her own research on children’s diaries and record-keeping, resonates with Leslie Paris’s chapter on children’s participation in second-wave feminism in U.S. culture of the 1970s. Eric L. Tribunella’s queer reading of boy friendships (and adoration) in the Tom Brown books produces subtle insights on how fictional schoolboy crushes could script but not fully contain the “desires, pleasures, and relationships” of real schoolboys (456). Marah Gubar’s chapter on the play Peter Pan makes the refreshing, even exciting argument that “young people had more to do with the development of children’s theatre than we think, not only as intended and actual audience members, but also as active participants in a thriving tradition of private theatricals that helped inspire the production and shape the form and content of professional children’s plays” (477). Claudia Nelson’s essay on Sally Watson’s Jade connects with tomboy scholarship to explain how twentieth-century...