Frontiers in Children's Literature ed. by Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem (review)

This collection of essays grew out of a project by scholars in the Children's Literature Society of the American Literature Association to investigate the concept of the frontier in children's literature. Between 2009 and 2013, panels at the annual conference each addressed a different aspect of the frontier, with the resulting papers compiled into this volume. Dorothy Clark and Linda Salem, together with the contributors, define the frontier broadly and creatively, including such topics as negotiations with unfamiliar, traumatic, or potentially threatening historical knowledge; student resistance to uncomfortable texts; boundaries between humans and nonhumans; and explorations of new techniques in illustration, archiving, and genre. Scholars in a variety of areas will find individual essays or sections of interest; intersecting fields include trauma studies, posthumanism, fandom studies, illustration, and Native American and African American literature.

Clark and Salem's thoughtful introduction offers a reflection on the many potential meanings of the frontier. They begin with the premise that "childhood [is] itself a kind of frontier" (1), necessitating exploration and encounters with the unfamiliar. Thus they focus less on how children's literature addresses the experiences of children situated at literal borders between regions or nations and more on the metaphorical resonances of frontiers and borders—how Romantic models of childhood push up against conceptions of childhood that acknowledge trauma and harsh realities, how children's literature faces the new "territory" of digitized media, and how children's literature criticism continues to stretch boundaries by incorporating new methods of scholarship. In the remainder of the essay, Clark and Salem seek to provide readers with a guide through this wide-ranging volume by identifying three themes shared by essayists across the five sections. The first is a concern with moral vision and hope, in which narrative traditions carry readers across "boundaries of silence" or historical amnesia (3). The second is a shared conception of the experience of liminality as a border region of its own, one that can alter or transform existing hierarchies and realities. Finally, they point to frontiers as sites of trauma and suggest that the shattering encounter with trauma provides a kind of frontier as it edges readers into new ways of seeing.

Part 1, "Frontiers in History, Immigration, Trauma, and Resilience," includes a trio of essays. Anastasia Ulanowicz writes about paratext and visual rhetoric in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and her essay offers a particularly interesting discussion of how state-sponsored nationalism depends upon citizens' "remember[ing] to forget" historical conflicts in the name of national unity (15). Oona Hatton's "Defying Definition" provides a timely and nuanced discussion of the contested nature of national borders and identities in the young adult play The Highest Heaven, which takes place during the Mexican repatriation of the 1930s; her essay is a beautiful contribution to scholarship about border control. Melanie Koss and Nance Wilson outline patterns of emotional survival in young adult literature as exemplified by Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls and Ellen Hopkins's Identical.

Part 2, "Frontiers in African American Children's Literature," contains essays by Raphael Rogers, April Logan, Katharine Capshaw, and Kathleen Nigro. Rogers's and Nigro's essays address issues of representation in books about slavery and the Civil War, including questions of how to represent and acknowledge brutal violence without making spectacles of black bodies. Logan provides a fascinating interpretation of an 1890 novel by Mrs. A. E. Johnson that argues for linguistic diversity and African American signifying practices as a type of border zone in which skilled practitioners of more than one dialect can navigate between dominant and subordinate literacy practices. Capshaw's essay is another highlight of the collection, bringing attention to three plays from the 1930s and '40s about female heroes of the Haitian revolution. She points out how the plays ask readers not only to stretch the boundaries of gender, but also to consider the transnational frontiers of the long Civil Rights movement, as Haiti meant...