Narrations

“Children’s literature” gets its name from its audience—or rather, from one segment of its audience, since texts designated “for children” are also enjoyed by adults. Yet just as children’s literature frequently concerns itself with the representation of figures who are simultaneously reader and writer, the question of who listens to a story is often inseparable from the question of who tells it, how, and why. That many texts for children openly and joyfully celebrate their inevitable indebtedness to earlier texts is, among other things, a way of illustrating the interplay between the consumption and the production of stories. The articles in this issue share a focus on narrative construction, ranging from speaker to author to the relationships that narratives may have to one another.

In the opening article, “Everything I Wanted to Know about Sex I Learned from My Cat: Animal Stories, Working-Class ‘Life Troubles,’ and the Child Reader in Victorian England,” Monica Flegel pays particular attention to the popular nineteenth-century genre of the animal autobiography and to its social valences. Although for Victorian writers the overt purpose of employing a cat, a dog, or a horse as narrator was typically to encourage values of compassion and kindness to animals, Flegel notes that we may find here other, darker values as well. She highlights the way in which the use of the animal’s voice reinforces nineteenth-century British stereotypes about social class, arguing that cat narrators are especially likely to be caught up in domestic violence and sexual immorality, a trait that is presented as inherent to their working-class status. Here the choice of narrator determines from the outset the nature of the story to be told.

Sinister sexuality is also at the center of Mary Gryctko’s contribution, “‘The Romance of the Nursery’: Lost Boys and Deadly Femininity in The Turn of the Screw and Peter Pan.” Gryctko traces the attitudinal similarities of Henry James’s and J. M. Barrie’s canonical turn-of-the-twentieth-century texts about boys who do not grow up, arguing that both texts are structured around “battle[s] between the forces of the conventional and the queer” and that in both cases the queering of the boy child (and the child-man) is a response to authorial and cultural anxieties about adult femininity. The article’s contention is not that Peter Pan is best seen as a response to The Turn of the Screw, but rather that both texts respond to the same deeper social narrative and to the buried horror implicit in the differences between male and female childhood as constructed in late Victorian culture.

In “Cross-Writing from the Crosstrees: Travel, Authority, and Juvenile Self-Representation in Barbara Newhall Follett’s The Voyage of the Norman D.,” Caroline Lieffers examines a piece of adventure travel writing published in 1928 by a fourteen-year-old author. Lieffers is especially interested in the question of how Follett constructed not only her narrative, which combines lived experience with material clearly influenced by her literary models, but also her authorial persona. In the figure of this precocious child writer, we see her desires and expectations commingled with those of the adults around her. Although her voice is clearly not ventriloquized to anything like the extent on display in the animal autobiographies that Flegel discusses, Follett’s narration is arguably not entirely her own—but after reading the articles in this issue, we may be inclined to wonder whether this is not the case with any writer, whether child or adult.

Patrick C. Fleming approaches this question from a different angle in “Dickens, Disney, Oliver, and Company: Adaptation in a Corporate Media Age.” The central texts of his article are the 1988 animated feature Oliver & Company and documents from the Walt Disney Archives relating to its production. Fleming’s account of the evolution of the film emphasizes how the production team’s drafts and memos illustrate “Disney’s tradition of actively engaging with the reception histories of the texts it adapts.” He calls for a reevaluation of the scholarly community’s tendency to look down on the “Disneyfication” of canonical works such as...