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

Merely perusing the table of contents made it clear that essays in this book would be essential sources for an essay I was writing for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on “Radical Children’s Literature,” and, reading the book itself, I was not disappointed. This is an important book. Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde is self-consciously international in its approach, although its focus is on Europe. The volume emerged from a conference on Children’s Literature and the European Avant-Garde, held in Sweden in September 2012. Despite the explicit focus on Europe, the conference call for papers suggests that the impact of the European avant-garde on non-European children’s literature should be investigated as well; however, when it comes to this volume, outside of Europe, only the United States and Britain, which may or may not be considered part of Europe, are represented, although the Soviet Union seems to play a larger role than the conference organizers had originally anticipated. Divided into three sections, “Vanguard tendencies in the early twentieth century,” “The impact of the Russian avant-garde,” and “Postbellum avant-garde children’s books,” this volume’s eleven chapters are richly illustrated with color plates, adding immeasurably to the book’s quality and utility, and contributing to a growing scholarly literature that recognizes children’s literature’s connection to modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, a literature the editors cite in their excellent introduction. Notably, much of this scholarship and the works themselves are not published in English, making the volume under review especially valuable.

Editors Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer explain that the term “avant-garde” emerged in late nineteenth-century France to designate progressive and politically engaged art and literature, but note that the term has had various meanings in different times and places. Their overarching definition of avant-garde is “a spatial-temporal network that has constituted an artistic alternative to hegemonic art since the beginning of the twentieth century, with peaks in the 1910s and 1920s and again in the 1950s and 1960s, which still lives on in contemporary art” (4). Applied in the context of this book, they add: “avant-garde ideas about children’s literature often reflect a general desire to break free from artistic boundaries and labels, but also from previous norms in children’s literature and traditional conceptions of childhood, similar to the concept of ‘radical children’s literature’ explained in Reynolds (2007).” In her book of that title, Kimberley Reynolds defines “radical children’s literature” as boundary breaking in terms of form and/or content. Finally, they emphasize—and individual essays in the book confirm this point—that avant-garde ideas in children’s books are always related to “movements in arts, education, social systems, and ideologies” (8).

Chapters are rooted in varying national and transnational contexts, with some focusing on individual authors or texts and others offering more of a general overview. Marilynn Olson’s marvelously rich and provocative essay on “John Ruskin and the mutual influences of children’s literature and the avant-garde” actually does both of these things by focusing on an individual who had a wide-ranging influence. Olson tackles an earlier period than any other essays, making it a good choice as the volume’s opening chapter. Although Ruskin is a focus for her essay, Olson more broadly “looks at childhood as a touchstone for the overthrow of Academic standards in painting, at children’s books and their influence on those who became avant-garde artists and thinkers, and at the power of the Victorian avant-garde to influence the ideals of the twentieth-century picturebook” (20). She points to Ruskin’s influence on the pre-Raphaelites, early examples of England’s avant-gardes, and also on William Morris and, through him in particular, on the Arts and Crafts movement. Ruskin’s emphasis on art and beauty as tools of social reform, as...