Affect, Emotion, and Children's Literature: Representation and Socialization in Texts for Children and Young Adults ed. by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen (review)

Since the 1990s, scholars across diverse fields have turned their attention to the central role that affect, emotion, and the pre-personal body play in shaping subjective and embodied identities, steering socialization processes, and supporting ideologies. It is only recently that the "affective turn" has been taken up in the critical analysis of children's literature, though. This volume of collected essays contributes solidly to this emerging field of discourse, leaving no doubt as to the benefit of attending to the affective and emotional dimensions of narrative representation and impact in works written for young audiences. As the coeditors propose, such attending can reveal "how texts for children and young adults are used as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, political persuasion, and moral or ethical education" (Bullen et al. 2).

The included essays consider texts produced across diverse European epochs and genres—from medieval advice literature and nineteenth-century waif novels, to children's literature classics such as Black Beauty and A Secret Garden, and on to recent mainstream YA fiction and films, including Chaos Walking, Delirium, and Frozen. What the contributions collectively uncover is that no text is innocent when it comes to enlisting young readers' affective or emotional responses for the transmission of meanings, messages, and lessons. Some such cases, as when a reader's empathic imagination is developed through contact with a likeable protagonist who nonetheless is importantly unlike the reader, will not strike us as troubling. Other cases are not so easy: for instance, as several authors in the collection note, recent YA dystopian writing tends toward a trope wherein a lead character commits a morally ambiguous, or even obviously wrong, act for ostensibly selfish or preferentialist reasons, as when many innocents are sacrificed to save the life of a single or a few loved ones. What meanings are young hearts and minds making from such narratives?

The volume is divided into four sections. The essays featured in the first section, "Affect and the Historical Child Reader," take up cases of historical children's literature intentionally crafted to co-opt readers' affective responses for socialization purposes or for the sake of moral education. Emotions such as shame, pity, empathy, and self-confidence are particularly in the spotlight.

The second section, "Theory of Mind," contains three essays that delve into works aiming to build young readers' "mind-reading" abilities, that is, the act of modeling another's state of mind for the sake of understanding their intentions and action motivations. Concerns are justly raised regarding the moral risks involved in creating characters whom teens identify affectively with, since these characters become quasi-role models. As fictional characters, though, they often remain psychologically oversimplified and behaviorally constrained by storytelling artifices.

The third section, "Place and Space," features essays that show how affect and emotion must be localized to be most effective on young readers—that is, embedded into specific spatiotemporal, existentially weighted, and socially meaningful scenes.

The fourth section of the volume, "Emotions of Belonging," contains chapters that examine cases where particular emotions crystallize into markers of identity and relationship, as in the case where love becomes a symbol of rebellion in a society that seeks to repress expressions of individual choice. As noted by the authors in this section, texts featuring protagonists whose identities remain marginalized in the real world deserve particular critical scrutiny, since both the perceived maladaptation and eventual adaptation of these individuals to dominant norms may be narratively constrained or prescribed by other characters' affective appraisals of them.

The range of contributions to this volume is impressive. Some incoherence across authors' accounts of cognitive development, as well as the distinction of emotion from affect, prove somewhat distracting at times. For instance, at least one author works from the assumption...