Ethics and Children’s Literature ed. by Claudia Mills (review)
- Ethics and Children’s Literature ed. by Claudia Mills
Children’s literature has always bridged knowledge forms that modern times have tended to separate, such as ethics and facts or pedagogical guidance and entertainment. In many ways, the idea of the ethical seems integral to the idea of children’s literature itself. The often asymmetrical relationship between an adult author and his or her implied young reader invites questions of values and ethical considerations. Ethics may be inherent in the notion of “passing on” information in a cross-generational format. Further, questions of form, contents, and values can perhaps not be so easily separated as a modernist reading would suggest. In children’s literature, the why, how, and what have often been complexly intertwined. To exemplify the deep connection between ethical values and children’s literature, Knud Erik Løgstrup, the Danish philosopher [End Page 85] of modern ethics, argued that there should always be “light at the end of the tunnel” in young people’s texts.
Claudia Mills has edited a collection of highly stimulating essays on the relation between children’s literature and ethical questions. The essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics and texts from historic children’s literature to modern adaptions and remediations and current literature for the young. The collection is an exploration of a number of different ethical aspects at work in and around children’s literature. The essays are held together by a joint questioning of the “common sense” that may thrive among adults, professionals, and even researchers. To put it briefly, this is both an analytical and a critical collection that invites the reader to rethink several basic assumptions on the relation between the ethical and children’s literature within the literature itself and in the knowledge field.
The book is divided into four parts. The essays in the first section highlight questions and dilemmas of didacticism and different attitudes to the moral shaping of children in specific historic periods and in different national bodies of children’s literature. For instance, chapters on the “book of golden deeds” for children in the so-called Progressive Era around the turn of the 19th and early 20th centuries, on Latin-American children’s literature, and on African-American children’s literature of 1930-45 reveal that the so-called education/amusement divide before and after the Lewis Carroll generation is a historically untenable interpretation. In the editor’s words, these chapters “reveal that the dominant disdain for didacticism demands further interrogation” (1). The historic case studies and essays in part one demonstrate that didacticism in children’s literature is rather an ethical dilemma than a strict period feature.
The second part of the book takes up various aspects of the ethical as it appears in a range of classical and contemporary texts from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy novels on the Murry Children, and A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books to Louis Sachar’s Holes and J. K. Rowling’s the Harry Potter series.
More specifically, the essays in this section focus on relations between the ethical and “meaning-making” (e.g., cognitive activity preceding action and producing a level of moral “discernment” in the Narnia books). In Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy books, fantastic journeys create encounters with “otherness,” enabling moral growth. Moreover, the ethical is not necessarily part of a grand theory. In A.A. Milne’s Pooh books, it is part of the pleasure of reading to encounter an ethics of ordinary life and communal living. Thereby, Milne’s books are marked by a pronounced anti-totalitarian stance, choosing the ethics of lived life and pacifism rather than adhering to more impersonal goals or political ideologies. Other chapters in this section deal with “virtuous transgression” in recent children’s literature and in the early children’s literature of 1960s Taiwan. For instance, in the Harry Potter series, the protagonists also have to break moral rules in order to achieve a higher goal. They transgress...
