"There but Not There": Representations, Roles, and Experiences of Children's Embodiment in Literature and Culture

As contested sites, children's bodies are often overlooked in cultural scholarship. In her empirical work on gender, bodies, and schooling, Carrie Paechter notably laments that even real-world "children's bodies are not expected to be remarked upon" (311)—unless they are deemed unusual or lacking in relation to paradigms of childhood normalcy. Similarly, despite the ubiquity of children's bodies in popular cultural texts, few scholars have examined their varied and multi-layered expressions in literature, film, and other commercial products. Noting the predominant focus on discursive constructions of childhood in children's literature research in particular, Maria Nikolajeva posits that only recently have literary analyses considered the child as "a material body existing in the material world" (133).

The Embodied Child: Readings in Children's Literature and Culture, thoughtfully curated by editors Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola, endeavours to address this long-standing scholarly oversight. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, and education, authors in this collection analyze how and why children's bodies are constructed and consumed in and through a variety of historical and contemporary texts—as well as how fictional children and their real-world counterparts engage with intersecting depictions of age, race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality. In conversation with Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco's comprehensive overview, The Body: A Reader, their essays build on broader theorizations of the (mainly adult) body offered by scholars such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, and Grosz to trace how the "marked category" (Embodied Child 2) of the child's body reveals, resists, or sustains widespread cultural and political ideologies. Such interdisciplinary views on the child's body in relation to literature, culture, and the process of reading itself are especially relevant in the current cultural landscape, wherein, as editor Lydia Kokkola writes, "[e]xposure is the new normal" (14). She asserts in her introduction that there is an "increased urgency of understanding the limits and limitations of the body in the posthuman era" (12).

Harde and Kokkola bring a wealth of combined expertise on American fiction and culture, international children's literature, and English literature and education to this work. In keeping with their previously coedited volume of perspectives on Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna, this most recent collaboration focuses primarily on the embodied experiences of preteen and adolescent girls; as Kokkola acknowledges, the emphasis on representations of older children is in part due to their observation that "the body is more overtly problematized in fiction for teens …" (15). It is also worth noting that while the advance of post-humanism is given as a rationale for the volume's timely publication, a post-humanist or new materialist lens is not explored beyond Kokkola's passing introductory reference. Nevertheless, what might be considered gaps in theoretical perspectives are largely offset by the collection's depth, scope, and polished curation; it provides rich and boundary-pushing material spanning multiple disciplines of the arts and humanities for readers invested in children's studies, scholarship of the body, or more general research concerning the texts and cultures of young people.

The volume's sixteen essays are grouped according to four major themes—"Politicizations," "Corporealities," "Reading Bodies," and "Commodifications"—with editorial prefaces to each section that helpfully guide readers who may have specific interests. The one outlier in this structure is Janet Wesselius's second introductory chapter to the collection as a whole, in which she relates the history of the Cartesian body-mind dualism to Anne Shirley's character in L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Wesselius's definition of embodiment offers another departure; rather than provide readers with an example of a more explicit theoretical interpretation of embodiment as it relates to social and political processes—as subsequent chapters do—Wesselius's treatment emphasizes the connections between embodiment and individual development. Specifically...