From Superman to Social Realism: Children’s Media and Scandinavian Childhood by Helle Strandgaard Jensen (review)

Helle Strandgaard Jensen’s From Superman to Social Realism: Children’s Media and Scandinavian Childhood (2017) is one of a growing number of recent works that recover and historicize politically engaged children’s literature and culture. In so doing, her project joins Emer O’Sullivan and Andrea Immel’s Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day (2017), Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane’s Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature (2017), and Kimberley Reynolds’ Left Out: The Forgotten History of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain 1910–1949 (2016). Indeed, the preceding list is but a sample of the books devoted to such inquiry that have been published in the last couple of years. Jensen’s book joins a much longer, international body of scholarship that goes back to at least Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (2006) and Evgeny Steiner’s Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Literature (1999). The rise of xenophobic nationalism around the world gives this entire body of work an urgency that, though it might not have been anticipated when they were being written, compels our attention—as scholars of an international children’s literature community, and as human beings who hope for a future that does not repeat the mistakes of the past and the present.

Jensen’s cultural history offers many such lessons for our contemporary moment, though its goal is more historical than activist. Or to put this another way, the book will be valuable for those who invest children’s literature with the capacity to nourish progressive social change, but Jensen is careful to maintain a thoughtful critical perspective on her subject. That subject is changing public debates over the function of children’s culture in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, constructed around three points in time: the mid-1950s, the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the early 1980s. To write this history, Jensen draws on over 3,000 articles from newspapers and periodicals in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. (As if the temporal scope and quantities of data were not sufficiently impressive, keep in mind she is doing research in three different languages and writing the book in a fourth.)

The result is a thick history that charts Scandinavian culture’s retreat from (in the 1950s) and return to comics and fantasy (in the 1980s). Her book finds 1950s Scandinavians rejecting American superhero comics in favor of better quality literature that (they allege) rejects the sexism, racism, and violence of comic books. By the 1960s, there is then a shift to social realism, because children need to understand the world in which they live. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, concerned that commercial culture may damage children’s imaginations and that realism burdens them with problems they’re not ready to solve, critics recommend fantasy as a way of nurturing children’s innate capacity to dream. To grant children the power to read what interests them, libraries begin to include what were formerly derided as “low-quality books and comics” (103).

My paragraph-length summary oversimplifies Jensen’s work: as she maps the evolving debate, she is careful to note that, in any given moment, all critics do not speak with one voice. Indeed, she notes the contradictions within a critic’s argument. For instance, Gunila Ambjörnsson, author of the influential Trash Culture for Children (1968), both wants children’s literature to be more political (in a social realist sense) and wants to encourage children to challenge the authority of adults—which would, presumably, enable them to challenge the politics of a social realist work. As Jensen writes,

we cannot understand her demand for a clear, upfront politicisation of children’s media as separate from an appeal that children would...