Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation by Rebecca Knuth (review)

In her new book, Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation, Library Science professor Rebecca Knuth moves away from a topic she knows well, the threatened state of libraries, to take up a very different one: the history of British children's literature.

Knuth's goal is to give readers an overview of children's literature in Britain. She brings to her work enthusiasm for her subject matter and a familiarity with a wide range of texts. Taking on more than 50 authors and more than 250 years of literary history, Knuth approaches this large body of material chronologically; she begins with early works, such as John Newberry's The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), and ends off with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Different periods are broken down according to their defining themes. Her discussion of nineteenth-century literature is, for example, organized by topics which include: "Socialization: Loyalty, Duty and Self-Sacrifice" and "Creating Manliness and the Boy Hero."

It is important to note that this book is not aimed at audiences well versed in recent work on literature for young readers. Instead, it offers readers unfamiliar with what is now several decades of scholarship on literature for young people an introductory overview of the field. Whereas readers with knowledge of the scholarly study of literature for young people will not need to be reminded that "values and cultural rituals portrayed to children in books served ideological purposes" (11), this message may well be of interest to the reader who is new to the critical analysis of children's literature and in search of a quick moving introduction. While Knuth does demonstrate her own familiarity with important works of scholarship on children's literature, she tends to quote authorities on different authors or texts and then move on. She does not pause to engage closely with the arguments of other scholars nor does she develop and articulate readings of her own.

Some of the central claims that Knuth makes in the book are less than novel. Discussing her research on children's literature, she outlines one of her major findings: "I found that children's books contribute to the development of character and, as well, to an ethos and national identity—in the case of Britain, the nebulous thing called Englishness" (vii). It's a valid point, but it is not a new one. Other points put forward by Knuth are likely to raise eyebrows. Knuth makes some sweeping claims about the historical periods she covers. She argues, for instance, that "Dickens's compelling child characters were created out of an earnest desire to counter the emotional apathy that plagued Victorian England" (33). She goes on to describe the Victorians and Edwardians as an "emotionally locked-down population" (89), a broad generalization that is neither supported nor fully elucidated by Knuth. Some of Knuth's arguments are hard to follow. As part of a discussion of children's literature written after the First World War, she proposes that, after the war, "the grip of ideology on children's literature loosened" (115)—something that informed readers of, for example, the C.S. Lewis' Narnia series are likely to balk at.

It should also be noted that this is not a book for literary critics, who will find little in it by way of discussion of literary technique or of quotation of the primary texts. Knuth does offer a lot of biographical information about the many authors she treats, but she says almost nothing about the literary techniques they employ. As Knuth explains in her preface, in place of a narrow literary or historical study, she hopes to offer readers "a cosmography of the universe of British children's literature and a representation of its main features and effects as the genre has emerged over time" (viii).

More of a survey than a study, the book's...