Contemporary British Children's Fiction and Cosmopolitanism by Fiona McCulloch (review)

Fiona McCulloch's most recent book marks an important contribution to studies of contemporary literature for children and young adults (YA). It makes an especially timely and telling intervention in a specifically Scottish critical landscape that has still to give proper, sustained attention to the rich and diverse modes of writing which it encompasses. In making a highly persuasive, compelling, and densely argued case for the ethical relevance and reach of this body of work, McCulloch's is surely the study that can redress that limitation. McCulloch begins by making an especially eloquent point about why young readerships–a highly diverse constituency–are so important: young people, of course, are 'future citizens'; they hold our world in their hands; it is theirs to (re)shape geopolitically and ecologically, socially and culturally. These fictions sow the imaginative seeds of those transformative possibilities on both local and global scales.

Historically speaking, literature for children and adolescents has predominantly portrayed journeys of growth and development, and its protagonists are quintessentially nomadic as they negotiate a variety of literal and figurative transitions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the complex ramifications of 'growing up' could generate anxiety as writers, preachers, and moralists sought to curb child and adolescent energies within reactionary models of socialisation; and children's literature now is still culturally contentious terrain. For McCulloch, these particular fictions by contemporary female authors–J. K. Rowling, Jackie Kay, Theresa Breslin, Gillian Cross, Kerry Drewery, Saci Lloyd, and Julie Bertagna–imbue 'childhood agency' with the ability to create productive, pluralistic, and positively enabling transformations. Both drawing on, and subverting, the traditions and conventions of realism, fantasy, and the hybrid interstices of magical realism, their work, McCulloch argues, ranges significantly across periods of particular political fracture in these isles. Albeit in very different imaginative ways, these writers explore (and, vitally, suggest alternatives to) the impact of globalisation, capitalism, neoliberalism, and environmental degradation. These issues are especially pertinent in the context of a post-devolution, post-referendum Scotland, the book suggests, and in attentive, rich, and nuanced discussions of Rowling, Kay, Breslin, and Bertagna, McCulloch skilfully unpicks the meaningful ethical resonances of their work, held together by the shared thread of 'cosmopolitan empathy', and their vision and enactment of 'more positive communitarian possibilities'. Theirs is significantly a cosmopolitanism with feminism at its core.

Potter criticism is a capacious and highly varied critical field but the book's opening chapter, ' ''We're All Human, Aren't We?'': Scottish Cosmopolitics in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter', succeeds in offering fresh insights, perceiving its gothic Scottish landscape as a space which opens up a dialogue with the philosopher Rosi Braidotti and her theories of nomadism, and ultimately offers a vision of 'communal connectivity' (p. 44), a 'healing' cosmopolitanism. All of these fictions revisit the conventional tropes and traditions of young adult literature only to remould and recharge them. This is especially seen to be the case in McCulloch's exploration of Kay's beautifully sensitive portrayal of maturation in her children's novel, Strawgirl. Amidst potentially resistant circumstances alternative models of 'being' are offered, 'evidence of the potential for a queer cosmopolitan euphoria in Kay's vision of post-devolution Scotland' (p. 80). So too does Breslin's depiction of Glasgow in Divided City seek 'to break silences and promote ethical understanding in the cosmopolitan hope that its future citizens will sustain a glocalised community and accept rather than fear difference, in a city historically steeped in transnationalism' (pp. 95–96). One of the richest discussions of radical potentiality lies in the chapter on Julie Bertagna's brilliant Exodus trilogy whose heroine Mara traverses the alternative cultures and communities of a cyberworld, fostering in her wake a new 'transnational connectivity' (p. 157), and processes of ecological renewal.

McCulloch's excellent book argues for these fictions' portrayal of ultimately affirmative, transformative, and radical visions which, the book argues, in part mirror the diverse activisms of a post-devolution, post-referendum Scotland. Such...