Suspended Animation: Children's Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity by Nathalie op de Beeck (review)

In her magisterial American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within (1976), Barbara Bader comments on the early twentieth-century admiration in America for things European, including picturebooks, but, "[n]ot until the close of World War I, a time of national assertiveness, did the cry go up, why can't we have picturebooks like these? By then it was too late: the Europeans had so far outdistanced us in color printing that, whatever the will, there was no way, not for another fifteen years" (6-7). Yet, Bader reveals that picturebooks of high quality in content and production values were produced in the United States during the years between the two World Wars, books that in many instances are today still enjoyed by children and adults and are regarded as landmarks in the development of the picturebook. Many of the creators of these books were of European origin who came, or whose families had come, to the United States as refugees from war or persecution in European, among their number Kurt Wiese and Wanda Gág, both influential in the development of the twentieth-century picturebook.

Perhaps color printing was technically more developed in Europe, but the significance of the American picturebook of these years is high, artistically, and now, as Nathalie op de Beeck shows us, in another important book on the subject, as a social, cultural and political artefact that has informed and is informed by American childhood in the broadest sense.

While not neglecting the means whereby the visual and the verbal interact in picturebooks to convey meaning and aesthetic sensibilities, the focus of op de Beeck's work is the contextualization of the form within developing modernism in the USA allied to a growing sense of a distinctive American identity. She states that the "[t]he picture book fossilizes information about a lived world and projects its belief systems, rightly or wrongly, into new eras" (xiv), but her main concern is with the means whereby it reflects "[t]he fairy tale of modernity, an early to mid-twentieth century mode ... conceived in the context of modern, industrial urbanizing life and realized in commodity form" (xvi).

Some of the themes covered in Suspended Animation have already been addressed by op de Beeck in journal articles, but here she brings her thinking together in four chapters, plus an introduction and a "postscript" concerning picturebooks post-1942. The generously-sized pages are illustrated by black-and-white images and there are sixteen color plates from some of the texts discussed. These are a welcome addition since many of the texts may not be familiar, and in particular to non-American readers. It is unfortunate, however, that the placing of the monochrome images is not always on the page which refers to them, or on the page opposite, as the extensive notes related to each chapter already lead to a lot of leafing through the book. This, presumably, is due to the designer and not to the author, and if there is another edition of the book, perhaps this may be remedied.

Chapter One: "Here-and-Now Fairy Tales: Old World Tradition and Modern Technology," considers the growing popularity of the picturebook following World War I and sets the tone for the ensuing chapters. Recognition of the possibilities of its physical form and improvements in production techniques were timely since the increasing number of children in education and the greater acceptability of childhood as a time for leisure activities created new market possibilities for the picture-book. Op de Beeck describes the growth in publishing and product placement and the resulting debate about what children should, could or might read. Critical and reviewing journals were established and awards initiated, and women came to the fore in these activities.

The objectification of children and the nostalgia that constructed an idealized and sometimes sentimentalized view of...