Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature Ed. by Angela E. Hubler (review)

A plethora of studies about children’s literature focuses on gender and race. In Little Red Readings, the contributors analyze these aspects as well as the question of class from a (feminist) historical materialist perspective. They argue that there are certain inequalities that children have faced as a consequence of the development of capitalism but that these issues have not been explored and discussed thoroughly and overtly in children’s literature studies. Hence, by offering a Marxist perspective on class struggle and inequality, the thirteen essays in the book aspire to contribute “to the development of historical materialist approaches to children’s literature”.

In the introduction, Editor Angela E. Hubler, associate professor of Women’s Studies at Kansas University, asserts that the volume seeks to exemplify different historical materialist approaches to children’s literature. She begins by providing a solid definition of historical materialism—referring to well-known Anglo-American literary critics like Robert C. Tucker, Raymond Williams, and Jack Zipes—and argues that the lack of knowledge of historical materialism is related to “the predominance of poststructuralist, or more broadly postmodernist theory within the study of literature”. She also enhances her argument with the idea that feminist historical materialism furnishes the scholar with a theoretical framework to grasp the intersection of gender with class and race, which are all pivotal in the study of children’s literature.

Little Red Readings starts with Mervyn Nicholson’s essay about class aggression and struggle, which compares the children and adult protagonists in some major works (such as Anne of Green Gables, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz) to workers and capital owners. In the following contribution, Anastacia Ulanowicz defines the concept of commodification by referring to Gilded Age nostalgia in the Gossip Girl television series (nineteenth-century roles of twenty-first-century characters), whereas Carl F. Miller shows how awards add to the commodification of children’s books in “Precious Medals: The Newbery Medal, the YRCA, and Gold Standard of Children’s Book Awards.” Sharon Smulders argues that, apart from representing features of the working class and bourgeois family, Mary Poppins reimagines the English nanny as the embodiment of oriental philosophy.

In “Solidarity of Times Past: Historicizing the Labor Movement in American Children’s Novels,” Cynthia Anne McLeod explains how labor is historicized in a number of novels, and Daniel Hade and Heidi Brush portray the picture books of Eve Bunting as books in which “the poor … are costumes of the wealthy” (130). In “The Young Socialist,” Jane Rosen introduces the reader to the magazine of the Socialist Sunday School, which was published during the heyday of the British radical movement as a periodical that aimed to criticize class hegemony and imperialism. In the subsequent essay, Jana Mikota refers to the girls’ books (which have a long history in Germany) that were written by exiled German writers during the Nazi era. By emphasizing their heterogeneity, she asserts that the girls in those novels “represent the social and political changes of an era” (166), which were detached from nationalism and national pride. In “Different Tales and Different Lives,” Naomi Wood sheds a light on the meaning of “childhood” in India by focusing on the political activism that has flourished in Andra Pradesh (south-central India) which—through commissioning and writing “Different Tales”—aims to annihilate “the disjunction between the ‘ideal child’ defined by the educational establishment and the actual children found in the seats of the schools” (171).

In his essay, Ian Wojcik-Andrews focuses on a different genre and presents a meticulous Marxist account of the multicultural history of children’s films by demonstrating examples from Asian American and African American films. In “Bloodthirsty Little Brats; or, the Child’s Desire for Biblical Violence,” Roland Boer discusses how some biblical stories become popular with children as a “response to the...