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  • Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood Ed. by Heather Snell and Lorna Hutchison
  • Melek Ortabasi (bio)
Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood. Ed. by Heather Snell and Lorna Hutchison. Series: Children’s literature and culture; 96. New York: Routledge, 2014. 236 pages. ISBN: 978-0-415-70473-1.

The title of this lively and engaging collection of essays, Children and Cultural Memory in Texts of Childhood, is necessarily broad since the idea of cultural memory treated by the various authors is not limited to the purely national; particular ethnic and cultural groups and their relationships with others are treated as well. The phrase “Texts of Childhood” indicates that the texts under examination cannot all be classified as children’s literature: while some of the authors discuss (not necessarily literary) texts written for children, others discuss the portrayal of children in adult-oriented texts. All the essays discuss modern contexts, from the early 1920s until the present. While the anthology is devoted primarily to Anglophone literature with representation from Britain, Canada, India, and the United States, some essays deal with other linguistic/national traditions such as Japan, Germany, and Spain.

The editors’ introduction is well written, theoretically aware, and clearly activist in its tone, noting that all the included essays “respond to the pressing need for sustained critiques of how particular engagements with children comply with or challenge the often rigid parameters of the nation and the versions of the national past it sanctions” (8). Rather than summarize each essay here—the introduction already does an admirable job—they will be listed and grouped in terms of the authors’ positions vis-à-vis this framing.

The essays “Constructing an Innocent German Past: Childhood and National Socialism in Dieter Forte’s ‘Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen’” by Nora Maquire, “Nationalism, Nostalgia, and Intergenerational Girlhood: Textual and Ideological Extensions to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House” by Benjamin Lefebvre, “A Japanese History Textbook and the Construction of World War II Memory” by Aya Matsushima, “Reading Canadian: Children and National Literature in the 1920s” by Gail Edwards, and “‘They’re Good with Good Girls’: Constructions of Childhood in Coming-of-Age Films about the Spanish Civil War” by Anindya Raychaudhuri discuss the complicity of particular texts with mainstream or traditional concepts of cultural/national identity.

Activist texts that attempt in some way to write against the dominant cultural ideologies are discussed in the following articles: Jean-Philippe Marcoux’s “‘You Say You Want a Revolution’: Cultural Memory, Black Nationalist Didacticism, and Sonia Sanchez’s ‘It’s a New Day’”, Doris Wolf’s “The Seductions of Good and Evil: Competing Cultural Memories in Steven Keewatin Sanderson’s Superhero Comics for Aboriginal Youth”, Lucy Hopkins’ “‘Infinnate Joy’: Play, Performance and Resistance in Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’,” and Adrienne Kertzer’s “‘Does not happen’: M.T. Anderson and Terry Pratchett Imagine the Nation.”

The rest of the essays are probably most fairly described as deconstructive readings that reveal the text itself to be deeply ambivalent about its role in reifying or resisting the hegemonic cultural discourse of its historical and cultural moment: “‘A Real True Merrican Like Us’: Edith Wharton’s Past, Modern Children and American Identity” by Jenny Glennon, “Modern Architecture, [End Page 96] National Traditions, and Ambivalent Internationalism: An East German Architectural Text for Young Readers” by Curtis Swope, and “Ambivalent Doomsday for the Young: Nuclear Fictions for Children and Adolescents in the 1980s” by Tamar Hager.

While this reader enjoyed the diversity of the essays, the sheer spectrum of materials discussed makes it doubtful that most readers would read the whole collection. Another potential problem, one that applies more to some essays than others, is the fact that the putative readers of such a diverse collection might not have the background knowledge necessary to understand the close analysis some authors offer of their texts. As someone unfamiliar with Sonia Sanchez’s work, for example, some images of her children’s poetry book would have helped me better appreciate Jean-Philippe Marcoux’s argument about her poetry’s musicality. Similarly, if one has not read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, then Lucy...

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