Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde ed. by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (review)

Stemming from a 2012 international conference, this book offers a diverse study of the avant-garde in children’s literature, tackling a consideration that has often been suggested but rarely addressed with such intellectual rigor. Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer have assembled a collection that is interested not only in validating the study of the avant-garde within children’s literature, but also in using this relationship as validation for the study of children’s literature in general. Consequently, this text has applications that reach far beyond the field of children’s literature, and should be of interest to scholars and students of comparative literature, modern art, and literary periodization, among many other practical possibilities.

The editors’ introduction first attempts to formulate a working concept of the avant-garde via historical overview, from its late nineteenthcentury origins to its association with a number of art movements of the early to mid-twentieth century, including expressionism, surrealism, and—both most especially and problematically—modernism. Much as the avant-garde is both culturally contingent and historically disparate, “avantgarde ideas about children’s literature often reflect a general desire to break free from aesthetic boundaries and labels” (5). The scholars contributing to this volume have uncovered a great many previously unseen materials that serve as fascinating precursors to some of the more recognizable contemporary children’s texts, in the process highlighting the mutual impact between the avant-garde and children’s literature in Europe and North America.

Part 1, “Vanguard tendencies since the beginning of the twentieth century,” considers the early interplay of children’s culture and avant-garde development with chapters on John Ruskin (Marilynn S. Olson), Einar Nerman (Druker), Sándor Bortnyik (Samuel D. Albert), and the lost legacy of the early avant-garde British children’s book (Kimberley Reynolds). Olson’s assessment of Ruskin as an early champion of the avant-garde for children presents a logical lead-off to the book, as its effective background of children’s literature and art experiments prior to the twentieth century proposes an origin for the more widespread movements to follow. Druker’s subsequent chapter analyzes the crossover between Swedish artist Nerman’s children’s books and his avant-garde work in caricature art and performance, suggesting that this points to a modernism in Swedish children’s literature that precedes Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson. Albert, meanwhile, examines Hungarian artist Bortnyik’s only children’s book, Potty és Pötty, theorizing how this originally wordless text is illustrative of the relationship between modernism and graphic design in interwar Europe. In comparison with the single-artist focus of the earlier chapters, Reynolds offers a more expansive analysis of early avant-garde publishing in Britain, suggesting that the forgotten works of Jean de Bosschére, Enid Bagnold, and Edith Saunders represent a “romantic Modernism” that contrasts to the historically perceived conservatism of British children’s literature of the time.

Part 2, “The impact of the Russian avant-garde,” highlights this movement’s influence, both at home and abroad, on children’s literature from the 1920s through the 1940s. Sara Pankenier Weld’s excellent study of the avant-garde infantile begins this section, demonstrating how the minimalist suprematism of Kazimir Malevich can be usefully aligned with works for children by El Lissitzky, Vladimir Lebedev, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Serge-Aljosja Stommels and Albert Lemmens follow with the most catalog-oriented chapter in the book, an overview of early Soviet Union children’s publishing followed by a reconstruction and assessment of the landmark 1929 Amsterdam exhibition of Soviet picture books. Nina Christensen’s chapter similarly explores the outside influence of the Russian avant-garde on four progressive Danish picture books of the 1930s and ‘40s, all the while stressing that this new model of Scandinavian children’s book was inspired by multiple cultural sources—and thereby marking its development as more than a direct offshoot of the Soviet model...