La littérature de jeunesse: pour une théorie littéraire by Nathalie Prince (review)

In this second edition of her work originally published in 2010, Prince traces a literary theory for the study of children’s literature. With a preface by Jean Perrot, founder of the Institute Charles Perrault at Eaubonne, France, this book yields promising directions for the study of the genre. What characterizes a book for children, and how do we recognize it? What readers does it target? Which works and which forms does it encompass? How do we value children’s books? Is this low or high literature? Does it purely entertain the child or does it teach moral lessons? In constructing a theory of the genre, do we not run the risk of undermining its complexity and its multifaceted aspects? These are some of the many questions that Prince elucidates in her thorough and detailed monograph, which brings to the forefront the many pressing issues surrounding the study of the child as one new kind of reader and the political, editorial, and aesthetic bent of children’s literature during different periods.

Chapter 1 examines the history of children’s literature through a comparative lens; Prince closely links the development of what she names “ le sentiment de l’enfance” (the wakefulness of childhood) to its emergence as early as the seventeenth century. Prince delves into the changing status of the child, paying close attention to the content of texts that address this new entity, thereby establishing a historiography of the genre. She analyzes both Charles Perrault’s tales and Jean de La Fontaine’s fables and contends that François Fénélon’s Les aventures de Télémaque(1694), written for the son of the king of France, may be considered a landmark text of children’s literature despite its obviously constricted and marginalized status. Prince shows how British, American, and German humanists and writers contributed to the development of the genre. In discussing John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education(1693) and John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book(1744), both of which viewed the child as a “ page blanche” or blank page, she maps the evolution of understandings of the child from an irrational negative individual to one who needs to be both taught and entertained: Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Peter Parley’s Juvenile Tales(1827–29), Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter(Shockheaded Peter, 1845) and the Grimms’ tales are such examples. With Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s L’Émile(1762), Prince notes a turning point in the development of the concept of childhood as a time when the child becomes a rational being with a capacity for imagination, creativity, and fantasy (43). With the growth of editorial presses, the child becomes a figure of heroism, as reflected in such works as the Comtesse de Ségur’s Nouveaux contes de fées(1857), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(1865), Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio(1883), and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan(1911).

Chapter 2 addresses the problem of characterization and its historiographical representations through many canonical texts. Prince begins her thesis by referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, which considers characters as anthropomorphic, an idea based on the principle of mimesis, wherein any fictional character must be believable and reflect life. She then turns to the nature of characters in children’s stories and justly contends that unlike those drawn from fictions for adults, they are in essence incredible, mostly unreal and mostly antimimetic. Their characterization, which eschews Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, leads her to consider two major stereotypical characters conveyed in many fictions for children: animals and children themselves. She convincingly makes her case with Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit(1901) and Jean De Brunhoff’s Babar(1931), discussing how Peter Rabbit is ambiguous in that he is neither a person nor an animal, but both. In her view, the choice of the animal is not arbitrary and ultimately...