Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature ed. by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris (review)

This volume, a collection of nineteen essays (including a coda by Chinese children's writer Mei Zihan), is part of a growing body of scholarship on children's literature in Asia. It follows John Stephens' collection Subjectivity in Asian Children's Literature and Film (2013) by just one year, and, as such, effectively answers Stephens' previous call for "a reciprocal exchange of literary theories and methodologies between Eastern and Western scholars of children's literature" (7). The essays included in the collection provide a model for the kind of intellectual exchange that Stephens identifies as woefully absent from the bulk of children's literature criticism and is also a useful starting point for exploring the rich history of Chinese children's literature. Originally intended to create a dialogue between U.S. and Chinese children's literature scholars, the book identifies its audience as "English-speak[ers]" (3), and thus shifts its purpose to educating this group of scholars about rhetorical traditions and literary movements in the Chinese tradition. Indeed, these aspects of the book are its strongest points and will be the focus of this review.

The book is divided into five sections, which include essays on topics ranging from fantasy fiction, picture books, middle-grade readers, and young adult novels. In Section I ("Theorizing Children's Literature: Journey as Metaphor and Motif"), Roberta Seelinger Trites revisits a familiar classic of American young adult literature, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and considers how embodied metaphors related to Huck's physical journey are used to conceptualize his psychological growth. Ban Ma contrasts this motif of "dynamism" (represented by the active, travelling child) with the "quietness" of Chinese children's literature from the mid-Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which often required children to be still and stay within the home (23). Sections II and III primarily contain individual author studies, but the former, which deals with the May Fourth Movement, is broader in scope and considers how Chinese authors participated in this pivotal cultural movement that erupted after a 1919 student protest in Beijing. Section IV is devoted to didactic children's literature and features essays by leaders of Chinese and American children's literature. In "Children's Disposition and Children's Views," award-winning author Cao Wenxuan describes the difference between children's views and dispositions, and resists collapsing these two terms into a single descriptive category. Michelle Martin and Katharine Capshaw write about a different form of resistance, stressing the importance of picture books in challenging what Nancy Larrick, in 1965, referred to as the "all-white world of children's books." Importantly, the need for diverse books is a concern that is shared by Chinese scholars, as is evidenced in Tan Fengxia's essay on American realistic novels for young adults, where she draws upon the American literary tradition in search of inspiration for a nascent body of young adult literature in China and calls for more books that "deal with the challenges regarding the image of adolescents" (218).

For me, Section II was one of the most informative and best aided in the editors' goal of educating English-speaking scholars about the rich history of Chinese children's literature. In this section, contributors Wang Quangen, Xu Yan, and Zhu Ziqiang provide a fundamental introduction to the May Fourth Movement, a period that many Chinese scholars agree to be the starting point of modern Chinese children's literature. With over five hundred children's publishers currently active in China, children's literature is now a substantial part of the publishing industry and is meeting new demands of a rising middle class. However, it was in the period of the May Fourth Movement, which flourished in the 1920s, that new ideas about children and literature written specifically for this age group emerged. At this time, Chinese authors, including Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Bing Xin, and Ye Shengtao, among...