Undressing the Lyric

Lesnik-Oberstein continuedfrom previous page from children's books. In this sense, the stage is set: this is a book about children's books produced and presented as a children's book. And this, it turns out, to my reading, perfectly sums up both the claims of fhe book itself and the very profound problems wifh it. Griswold has not, with this volume, in fact written an academic text on children's literature or children's literature criticism , but has produced his own personal dream of childhood—a personal memoir or fantasy. Griswold simply asserts that "Five themes recur in classic and popular works ofChildren's Literature" and mat these five themes—"snugness," "scariness," "smallness," "lightness," and "aliveness"—"can be seen as feelings or sensations prevalent in childhood." Moreover, for Griswold, citing critics Alison Lurie and Hugh WaIpole , these childhood traits are in the books because children's authors have "in some essential way...remained in touch with fheir childhoods." And these assertions are the only justifications offered for the readings ofchildren's literature throughout the book, which are all formulated in terms of the accuracy, as Griswold sees it, of their capturing of these traits of childhood. Not only, then, can the book as artifact be taken as presenting itself as a children's book, but it can be understood even more importantly to be itself a "children's book" in the sense that Griswold is therefore assuming, in the face of very numerous and extensive critiques to the contrary in children's literature criticism studies since the early 1980s at least, that children's books simply contain or even are themselves childhood or children. It can in this way perhaps be regarded as particularly ironic that the cover of the book has on it an illustration from Peter Pan's A B C, for if any book on children's literature criticism may be located as proposing the fundamental critique of the idea that adult authors of children's literature simply know or remember what children are like, and then put this in the book, thereby simply attracting child-readers through the recognition of themselves in and indeed as that book, then it is Jacqueline Rose's study of the writing and reception history of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, The Case ofPeter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984). As Rose famously argued, Children's fiction rests on the idea that there is a child who is simply there to be addressed and that speaking to it might be simple. . .that it represents the child, speaks to and for children, addresses them as a group which is knowable and exists for the group, much as the book (so the claim runs) exists for them. ... There is no child behind the category "children's fiction," other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes. Griswold has not infact written an academic text but his own personal dream ofchildhood. But perhaps I am wrong to read the use of the Peter Pan image as potentially ironic? Perhaps this is meant as an open challenge to Rose's famous and influential arguments? It is impossible to tell, as there is no further argument in the text, or any reference to Rose, or indeed any discussion of any children's literature criticism which has asked related questions around the problem of how adults produce books on behalf of children: no Nicholas Tucker, no Aidan Chambers, no Perry Nodelman, no Peter Hunt, no Zohar Shavit, no Barbara Wall, no Roderick McGiIlis , no Claudia Nelson, no Peter Hollindale, no John Stephens, to name just a few. But then, perhaps, this book was never meant as an academic text at all; perhaps it was indeed meant to be a personal reverie, a work simply of sentimental nostalgia? Detailfrom cover If so, my main question would be not to Jerry Griswold, who, as with any author, may publish anything he can get published, but to The Johns Hopkins University Press: under what auspices is it publishing this book? There is no indication that this book is part...