The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture ed. by Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day (review)

Sonya Sawyer Fritz and Sara K. Day’s fascinating collection, The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture, provocatively questions the purposes of twenty-first century adaptations and appropriations of Victorian texts. To this end, it examines how the literary figure of the child serves as a nexus between Victorian notions of childhood and more contemporary visions of young people. The essays anthologized in this collection—which study such various forms as board books, film, and young adult novels—“suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of youth and thus young readers, and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale” (Fritz and Day 16). Fritz and Day’s collection is indispensable reading for scholars working on intersections of Victorianism and children’s literature; moreover, many of its chapters will also be of interest to those working on adaptations and popular culture.

The collection “seeks to draw attention to a Victorian trend in contemporary children’s and young adult literature”: that is, the tendency to appropriate the Victorian period in contemporary works for young audiences to contribute to conversations on neo-Victorianism by engaging in more detail with neo-Victorian texts for young readers (2). However, “this collection argues less that there is a significant difference between appropriations of the Victorian works for young people and works for adults and more that many of the foundational ideas of neo-Victorianism apply and to and manifest themselves in children’s and young adult literature in productive and compelling ways, enriching both fields of study” (4). To best exemplify the trend of Victorianism in contemporary texts for young readers, the chapters are arranged chronologically, based on the publication dates of the primary texts they address. However, for the purposes of this review and to avoid repetition, I would prefer to address these essays according to their respective themes and theoretical focus.

Three of the essays anthologized in this collection discuss representations of gender. Maryna Matlock’s analysis of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Amy Hicks’s exploration of two YA adaptations of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau show how neo-Victorian texts for young audiences gives expression to twenty-first-, rather than nineteenth-century, perspectives on women and femininity. Gaiman’s Coraline is an empowered artist rather than a mere objet d’art (52). Coraline self-consciously reinterprets, rediscovers, and revises key Victorian texts and tropes, which makes Coraline neo-Victorian, according to Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn’s definition of the term (39). In having Coraline “identify with diverse conceptions of childhood and femininity, to resist hegemonic Victorian masks, and to offer these neo-Victorian possibilities to contemporary readers” (52, emphasis in original), Gaiman places his novel firmly in the twenty-first century. The adaptations in Hicks’s essay, Megan Shepherd’s The Madman’s Daughter and Ann Halam’s Dr. Franklin’s Island participate in the same neo-Victorian endeavor that Gaiman’s novel does: “to revise a nineteenth-century text to critique the absence of women in it and give voices to fully realized female characters” (85). The animalized protagonists Hicks describes succeed in this endeavor by ultimately embracing their animal sides, rather than it being used as a method of oppression reflecting Victorian anxieties about women (85). The third essay to explore gender is Fritz’s analysis of Treasure Planet, the Disney film adaptation of R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as a modernized version of this canonical text that participates “in a twenty-first-century discourse on at-risk boyhood” (69) by prioritizing the moral choices of Jim and Silver over the action of the treasure hunt. Although the film has been criticized by reviewers...