Johns Hopkins University Press
Reviewed by:
Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, editors. Keywords for Children's Literature Second Edition. New York UP, 2021.

The introduction to the second edition of Keywords for Children's Literature is titled "Expanding the Map." In selecting this title, the editors—Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen—signal major differences from the first edition (2011). One difference is the number of essays. The first edition had forty-nine keywords. In contrast, the "codex version of the second edition" includes entries on fifty-nine keywords: twenty-nine of them on new keywords, the remainder, revised versions of essays from the first edition. The second edition is not limited to the codex. Instead, the second edition also includes the keywords NYU Press website where first edition essays omitted from the codex are available.

The other difference is that the map aims to be "explicitly international" (viii). To accomplish this goal, the editors invited contributors "to seek interesting national or linguistic differences in use and to include examples from children's literatures in different countries" (xi). As Kimberley Reynolds' revision of "Modernism" illustrates, doing so permits her to sharpen her critique of Jacqueline Rose's conclusion that children's literature has "provided a refuge for writers in retreat from modernism." Noting that Rose's conclusion is facilitated by her limiting herself "to works written in English and mostly published in Britain," Reynolds offers a more nuanced account (124).

The focus on keywords that are "crucial to the discussion of children's literature but also … contested or conflicted" produces essays not intended to be "definitive but rather generative" (x, vii). This editorial distinction implies that the volume's success will be marked by its ability to challenge readers to ask their own questions. Anyone who reads the collection may find herself—as this reviewer did—continuing the scholarly conversation by putting the premises of one essay in dialogue with others in the volume. How, for example, does the interest in agency affect the representation of national trauma? How do essays that rely on single texts to support their argument avoid what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls "The Danger of a Single Story" ("Authenticity")?

Creating the website as part of the book is commendable, but the website I examined could benefit from its own revisions. The codex refers to nineteen web essays, but because one web essay has been mistakenly categorized as a print essay, anyone consulting the website can only access its first paragraph. [End Page 119] More importantly, as a map the website is confusing because its headings do not always clarify whether its content refers to the first edition or to the second. This is strikingly apparent on the Home page where the title of the second edition takes readers to a link "About This Site," which proceeds to describe the content of the first edition (the opening paragraph is taken verbatim from the dustjacket of that edition). Those who click on the link for "Works Cited" that appears below each second edition print essay may wonder why they are taken to the first edition list of works cited.

One factor contributing to the second edition's expanded map is the editors' perception that growing global problems "have underscored the necessity of a transnational language … and for children's books that promote multicultural democracy and international understanding" (ix). The assumptions behind this statement are interrogated in Emer O'Sullivan's "Translation." Like Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer who remarks in "Irony" that we know very little "about whether children really understand the meaning of the ironic statements in children's books" (114), O'Sullivan observes that "[w]hat children actually understand and how well they can and do cope with the culturally unfamiliar is the great black box of translating for children" (185). Questioning further assumptions, including the belief that translation acts "as a window through which children can access foreign cultures," she provides disturbing data regarding which nations welcome translations and which do not, and notes that while some believe translation "may open new perspectives and encourage intercultural tolerance" others "fear cultural erasure" (185, 186). Although power is not one of the second edition's keywords, its uneven distribution factors into O'Sullivan's analysis as it does throughout the collection.

The editors also allude to "the contours of an unofficial transnational canon of children's literature" (viii). In "Transnational," however, Evelyn Arizpe asks whether "transnational experiences are beneficial" for all children and highlights the blind spots that come with this utopian vision (188). Repeatedly, she raises questions of authenticity and identity: are "books by transnational authors … transnational by default?" "[C]an a 'monocultural' author write a transnational book?" (189). And like so many of the other contributors, she emphasizes how little research has been done on how "readers with transnational experiences negotiate meaning" (190). One of the scholarly shifts the second edition demonstrates is the growing interest in researching how young readers negotiate meaning.

Judging by the number of times the keywords identity and authenticity are mentioned, they are among the most contested. In "Identity," Karen Coats writes that "the new understanding of transgender identity and sexual orientation as inborn identities marks a return to a discourse of authenticity" [End Page 120] (99). This statement implies that identity and authenticity are opposed, but in "Trans," Derritt Mason complicates that opposition by focusing on his keyword's "instability and contradictions" and on the limitation of one word "captur[ing] the diversity of gender (anti-)identity in childhood across history and geography" (182, 183). Isn't anti-identity a kind of identity? In "Authenticity," Sarah Park Dahlen points to other key tensions: "[r]eaders assume that insiders write authentic stories," but it is possible to write a story "authentic to oneself" that is perceived as not authentic to a culture simply because "cultures are not monolithic" (24). Writing that "shifting responses to immigration patterns produce evolving definitions of who can be 'European'," Dahlen blurs the opposition between identity and authenticity (24).

One of the many questions Dahlen raises about authenticity is "who decides" what it is. Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair's essay "Indigenous" provides one answer. Agreeing that cultures are not monolithic, he objects that "Indigenous is a term that collapses complexity—when complexity is the hallmark of Indigeneity" (103). The obstacle to defining this keyword is "the use of pre-existing, constraining and limiting ideas, languages, and conclusions outside of Indigenous perspectives, politics, and space" (102). Coats writes that "pluralism … informs our contemporary understanding of identity" (101), whereas Sinclair locates that pluralism within the "distinct cultures, languages and histories" of Indigenous peoples (103). The editors propose that the keyword essays provide "the mappings of key questions that circle around a term" (vii). Sinclair's essay demonstrates that sometimes mapping key questions requires changing who gets to decide what those key questions are and who gets to draw the map.

In focusing on the conflicts revealed by keywords, the second edition may seem opposed to the assumptions that surround the didactic, for example, the assumption that it "threaten[s] to reduce plural viewpoints to a single perspective" ("Didactic"). In "Didactic," Clémentine Beauvais challenges this perception. Labeling didacticism "a theoretical blind spot in literary theory," she observes that to call something didactic is more polemical than descriptive and questions the master narrative in which children's literature is assumed to have progressed from didactic to enjoyable (59). The problematic distinction between the literary and the didactic not only hampers critics' willingness to consider the literary merit of educational texts; Beauvais suggests that it may also have contributed to the slow emergence of children's literature criticism. Her call for the need to rethink the didactic's relationship to aesthetic merit and readerly pleasure exemplifies that one of the intellectual pleasures Keywords offers is surprising readers to reconsider their understanding of words that they may have taken for granted. In the seventy-seven essays available—seventy-eight if NYU Press fixes the website—readers will find many essays that prompt this response. [End Page 121]

Adrienne Kertzer

Adrienne Kertzer is Professor Emerita, University of Calgary. Author of My Mother's Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust and numerous essays on the Holocaust and the representation of trauma in young people's writing, she recently published "'One Jew, One Half-Jew, a WASP, and an Indian': Diversity in The View from Saturday" in Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial.

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