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  • Constructing Children’s Stories and Learning to Resist Them
  • Leona W. Fisher (bio)
Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature, edited by Mike Cadden. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010.

Because of its theoretical and intellectual heft, this book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the ways in which stories—for any age—are produced and received. As the first volume to address the intersections of narratology and children’s literature, this wide-ranging and smart collection is the result of Mike Cadden’s imagination and hard work, and he is to be thanked for undertaking the project. All of us who read and interpret children’s texts, both formal narratologists and others, will be indebted to him for years to come. I am both daunted by the task of reviewing his work and honored to have been asked to do so.

Cadden’s introduction to the volume’s fourteen essays is a clever metatextual meditation—a peritext about peritexts, among other things—on the importance of narrative theory to children’s literature studies and, reciprocally, of children’s literature to narrative studies. This cross-communication between narratologists and children’s literature scholars is the book’s goal; in Cadden’s words, “It’s my hope that this volume can acquaint narratologists with the richness and depth of children’s literature and conversely acquaint children’s literature scholars and critics with the usefulness of narrative approaches for analyzing this unique genre” (xxii). In the process of articulating these hopes, he also traces the development of children’s literature studies in the past forty years and calls for an increase in the use of narratological approaches in this field.

Since the book is intended for novices, advanced undergraduates, and graduate students as well as those who have been working with narrative, Cadden establishes that “technical terms have been kept to a minimum, and where they are used, they are always defined immediately” (xxii). While I might have wished for a more precise use of certain narratological terms throughout the essays (Genette’s or Chatman’s or Bal’s, for example), I also recognize that such scientific terminology can be estranging to those who have not been immersed in the field—as my students have so frequently pointed out. Nonetheless, the spirits of [End Page 276] Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman definitely hover protectively over the volume even if they rarely intrude. Rather more surprisingly, I found that the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (or, working from his theories, Robyn McCallum) informs more than half of the essays, either directly or through references to “dialogism” in one form or another. Several of these pieces correspondingly tend to privilege the desirability of readers’ resistance to a book’s focalization, following John Stephens’s early insistence on the necessity of teaching children to do so. The most useful, however, pay careful and respectful attention to the children’s authors’ own rhetorical strategies—critiquing or deconstructing them when appropriate, of course, but also respecting the texts’ deliberate constructions of reader response. As something of an old-fashioned narratological critic myself, I confess to being especially drawn to the structuralist and technical analyses that articulate the ways in which a text makes meaning, and to what ideological effect.

The collection’s essays are arranged in four sections according to methodology and approaches, which Cadden acknowledges as being by no means exhaustive: “genre, picture books, narrators and implied readers, and narrative time” (xxi). While several of the essays could have been placed in a different section, the divisions are coherent and understandable given the variety and richness of the discussions; they help the reader assimilate the diverse perspectives and codify them into meaningful categories. It is also important to point out that each essay contains a Works Cited section, and that the volume as a whole has a Further Reading list of works not cited in any of the essays. The latter is divided into relevant subcategories (e.g., Ethics, Genre, Metafiction, Narration and Voice, Special Journal Issues on Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature); I might only have added Focalization to this list. This bibliographical thoroughness and precision is enormously useful, particularly...

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