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Reviewed by:
  • Ethics and Children’s Literature ed. by Claudia Mills
  • Thomas P. Fair
Claudia Mills, ed. Ethics and Children’s Literature. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 264p.

Ethics and Children’s Literature, edited by Claudia Mills, is the insightful, recent addition to the critically acclaimed series Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present. While most readers familiar with children’s literature might assume the moral and ethical components of the literature to be obvious, Mills has assembled a selection of essays that moves the consideration of ethical factors in children’s literature to fresh topics of analysis.

The opening section, “The Dilemma of Didacticism: Attempts to Shape Children as Moral Beings,” examines earlier texts and probes the efforts to instill morality through literature. In “Transmitting Ethics through Books of Golden Deeds for Children,” Claudia Nelson surveys several examples of Books of Golden Deeds, primarily from 1864 through the 1920s, and [End Page 99] explores the didactic morality of these often over-looked texts. Emma Adelaida Otheguy’s “Sermonizing in New York: The Children’s Magazines of Mary Mapes Dodge and José Martí” contrasts the anti-moralizing editorial position of Dodge with Martí’s didactic preferences in the publication of their nineteenth-century children’s magazines. Otheguy’s perceptive analysis of the well-received works Martí publishes successfully argues for the inclusion of didactic style as a plausible format for children’s literature. With particular focus on pioneering librarians such as Charlemae Rollins, Moira Hinderer’s “Talking to Children about Race: Children’s Literature in a Segregated Era, 1930–1945” next discusses the historically important efforts in the 1930s and 1940s to promote a literature providing positive and realistic black characters and countering the racial stereotypes present in other works.

Offering a more familiar focus, “Ethical Themes in Classic and Contemporary Texts” critically examines and often challenges the ethical questions and thematic issues raised in a range of established young adult and children’s texts. In “Discernment and the Moral Life in Prince Caspian and the Later Narnia Chronicles,” Emanuelle Burton deftly moves the discussion of C. S. Lewis’s major works away from his role as a Christian apologist and considers the moral and ethical components of his novels separately. Burton effectively demonstrates how the growth in moral discernment of Lewis’s characters offers a humanistic model for young readers to follow. Mary Jeanette Moran’s “Making a Difference: Ethical Recognition through Otherness in Madeleine L’Engle’s Fiction” examines L’Engle’s major texts with both an ethical commentary and a feminist critique. Diverging from any Christian interpretive context, Moran examines the various manifestations of “otherness” in the texts and establishes that L’Engle favors disrupting the “antagonistic self-other dynamic” and values an empathy with otherness (87). Niall Nance-Carroll investigates A. A. Milne’s application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s prosaic ethics, an assertion that small, daily decisions are more personally defining than consideration of greater ethical questions. In “A Prosaics of the Hundred Acre Wood: Ethics in A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner,” Nance-Carroll explores and dismisses several criticisms of Milne’s use of prosaic ethics and maintains his argument that Milne follows Bakhtin’s view that one’s moral obligation to act appropriately forms the basis of ethical behavior. Jani L. Barker’s “Virtuous Transgressors, Not Moral Saints: Protagonists in Contemporary Children’s Literature” next opens a topic especially relevant to contemporary children’s and young adult literature. Although the concept of the “virtuous transgressor” has a long literary tradition, Barker examines the contemporary texts of Louis Sachar’s Holes and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series within the context of several earlier twentieth-century texts. Barker differentiates between the “moral exemplar” and “sanctimonious model children” and argues that texts with virtuous transgressors both reinforce moral standards such as love and also investigate “troubling aspects of the status quo” (121). Although “Model Children, Little Rebels, and Moral Transgressors: Virtuous Childhood Images in Taiwanese Juvenile Fiction in the 1960s” initially appears slightly incongruous with the other selections, it offers a global perspective of the “good child” or “good student” model. Andrea Mei-Ying Wu’s discussion of moral...

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