Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970 ed. by Ute Frevert (review)

The “affective turn” in the humanities has produced a burgeoning scholarship on the role of emotion in social life from a variety of philosophical, theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Among researchers of children’s literature, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Maria Nikolajeva, and John Stephens have introduced Cognitive Poetics and Theory of Mind to the analysis of emotion and empathy in children’s texts. The affective turn has also stimulated renewed interest in, and a proliferation of research centres for, the history of emotion across the globe. Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–1970is the work of researchers affiliated with one such institution, the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. The majority of the contributors are historians. Their disciplinary location informs their approach to children’s fiction, mostly from Western Europe, Britain and the United States. It also shapes the contributor’s understanding of how literary texts mediate in the emotional socialization of children and adolescents.

Readers looking for extended analyses informed by contemporary theories of emotion will not find it in this volume. As the introductory essay indicates, the volume principally understands the pedagogic capacity of children’s fiction in terms of mimesis. Discussed in depth in the epilogue, this theory of mimesis derives from Anthropology. Few of the twelve essays engage with literary theory or narratology, and a number overlook relevant children’s literature scholarship. Instead, the volume uses children’s narratives to exemplify broader social trends in the history of emotion rather than as objects of close critical analysis. The value of Learning How to Feellays elsewhere in the rich historical research on emotion that contextualizes the discussion of the fiction, including: advice manuals; political and scholarly tracts articulating the influence of religious, educational, and political reforms; developments in child psychology and child-rearing practices; and changing attitudes to gender, race and class.

Each essay focuses on a “feeling”, a term that encompasses primary affects like fear and pain, social emotions like shame and love, as well as epistemologically ambiguous “emotions” like trust, homesickness, and piety. Virtue is sometimes a close relation of emotional didacticism in the fiction in question. The conceptual design of the collection is elegant, even if not all the contributors adhere to the book’s organising principles. The chapter titles typically link an emotion with a fictional character. A synopsis of an episode from the novel in which the character appears introduces the chapter and frames the discussion of a large number of novels. There are exceptions to this rule. Chapter one, “Mrs Gaskell’s Anxiety”, begins with the author’s personal baby diary and concentrates on advice literature for parents. If Gaskell precedes the period of the study, chapter six, “Wendy’s Love ( Peter Pan)”, extends its discussion into the twenty-first century when it describes new family formations.

If mention of Mrs Gaskell and JM Barrie suggests a focus on British or Anglophone literature, this is not the case. One of the main strengths of this book is its extensive coverage of children’s literature from a wide range of countries. German children’s literature is strongly represented, unsurprising given the book’s provenance. However, American, British, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, and Swiss texts are also discussed. On the one hand, Learning How to Feelis exemplary in its conduct of comparative analysis across the axes of time and space. It observes changing trends in understandings of childhood, emotion and its literary representation between 1870 and 1970, and the influence of cultural sensibility, for instance, British emotional restraint, and the political imperatives of empire and nation, including revolution in Russian and National Socialism in Germany.

On the other hand, with the exception of Pernau’s contribution – the chapter on children’s literature in India and an extended...