Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature ed. by Angela E. Hubler (review)

While the rising emphasis on multiculturalism has normalized conversations about race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and more, talking about class still carries with it a hint of the taboo. Angela E. Hubler’s collection of thirteen essays is a timely contribution not only to the field of children’s literature studies, but also to historical materialism and Marxist analysis overall. In her introduction, Hubler considers the manner in which the United States is in many ways toxic to Marxist thought and theory. The ideology of American society, built on economic advancement through hard work and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, “insists upon the irrelevance of class” (xv). In this cultural context, discussing and critiquing class struggles can be especially difficult.

Mervyn Nicholson’s “Class/ic Aggression in Children’s Literature” opens the collection with a glimpse at the parallels between “the relation of children to adults and the relation of wage labor to the owners of capital” (4). By looking at the classics of the so-called golden age of children’s literature, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and others, Nicholson sets up the exploration of class struggle and its various supports and subversions in the essays that follow. In “Shopping Like It’s 1899,” Anastasia Ulanowicz makes explicit the connections between Gossip Girl’s Upper East Side socialite characters Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen and the robber barons of the Gilded Age, ultimately exploring how “the Gossip Girl franchise provokes and deploys nostalgia for the purposes of provoking ultimately insatiable consumerist desires” (34). Next, Carl F. Miller considers these consumerist desires in light of how medals and awards do not just reflect a book’s already existing critical and commercial reception but also contribute to its continued material life. In Miller’s findings, the Newbery Medal—handpicked by a committee of adults, usually librarians, unlike the more democratic Young Reader’s Choice Award—not only signifies a text’s supposed value and longevity but in fact creates both through the very placement of the golden Newbery decal on its cover.

The three essays that follow focus on the way in which the ideal overshadows the reality in children’s books, as well as on how imagination can provide an escape from poverty and other drudgery, yet in doing so overshadows the possibility of any real change. Cynthia Anne McLeod writes of the idealized portrayal of past labor movements as necessary reform, while contemporary labor struggles are depicted as the work of ungrateful thugs. Daniel D. Hade and Heidi M. Brush analyze the naïve simplicity of Eve Bunting’s children’s picture books, which present homelessness, poverty, and racism as existing seemingly without cause. In naturalizing these hardships, Bunting may elicit sympathy and pity from her readers, but provides no real understanding of the structures of social inequality. Sharon Smulders considers how the magic of Mary Poppins allows its characters to transcend the difficulties of their class. But while “imagination allows the gratification of desire without financial or emotional cost . . . as fantasy it retreats from the need for political or social reform” (79). Characters such as Bert and the Bird Woman may live in a state of “social exclusion,” but their closeness to magic draws the reader’s focus away from the social tragedy of poverty.

Jane Rosen’s essay is perhaps the outlier of the collection, more historical than analytical in nature. It describes the history of The Young Socialist magazine, established in 1901 by the Socialist Sunday School movement in England. Rosen provides an overview of the struggles and successes of the magazine in striving to appeal to an audience of both children and adult educators, especially during the fraught years of the First World War. This historical track is followed by Jana Mikota’s look at girls’ literature by German writers in exile from the Nazi regime. Exile, according to Mikota, allows...