Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History

Far from continuing as the disempowered step-child of literary history, absent from survey courses and discussions of literary periods, children’s literature could become an organizing principle for literary history – if we act on its generic potential and its proclivity towards remediation. . Through generic remediation, children’s literature – more than other literatures – eludes conventions of periodization. As a result, by attending to genre, the very category which has relegated children’s literature beyond the canonical pale, scholars of children’s literature can revise existing narratives of literary history. The narratives of modernism offer a test case.