The Reference Desk

AB Bookman's Weekly, Vol. LVIII, No. 18 (Nov. 8, 1976). "Special Children's Book Issue." Especially interesting in this issue is an article by Justin Schiller, "Collecting Historical Children's Books," which discusses the market, i.e. the factors that go into determining the monetary worth of a book, and includes recent auction prices for a number of classics.

Colby, Vineta. Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. (Princeton, N.J., 1974). In her examination of "that grey area in the history of the English novel, the first half of the nineteenth century," Ms. Colby deals extensively with the works of the group of women writers labelled by Percy Muir as "the Monstrous Regiment," as well as with the better known novelists of the Regency and Victorian period of English history. She attempts to define the novel of domestic realism as a genre which she claims "may have been invented [in a] passage from The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766," and culminated in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872). Ms. Colby's discussion of attitudes toward the home, manners, morals, education, and, generally, the family, relate directly to any examination of the nineteenth century contribution to the tradition of literature written for children.

Hotchkiss, Jeannette. European Historical Fiction for Children and Young People. Metuchen, N.J., 1967. This little volume is a gold mine for anyone who is interested in historical fiction and, especially, for anyone who prefers to use fictional texts to introduce children to history. Generally divided into sections dealing with the British Isles, Central Europe, France and the Lowlands, Greece and the Balkans, Italy and Switzerland, Russian and Poland, Scandinavia, and Spain and Portugal, each section is then broken down chronologically, from Prehistory to the Twentieth Century (in increments of one century) and includes sections on Myth and Legend. Entries in each section are listed alphabetically and are annotated. At the end of the book are Author and Title indexes. There are roughly 650 entries, enough to keep any historical fiction buff going for a long time. (Note: The author includes a very loose indication of age level.)

Pattison, Robert. The Child Figure in English Literature. Univ. of Georgia Press, Aug. 1977 (proposed publ. date). According to the publisher's blurb, "Graveyards or wonderlands have more often than firesides and nurseries been the element in which we encounter the child in English Literature, and Robert Pattison begins his narrative by asking why literary children are seldom associated with parents and family, but instead repeatedly occur as solitary figures against a background of social and philosophical melancholy. . . .Pattison isolates and analyzes the repeated conjunction of the literary figure of the child with two fundamental ideas of Western culture—the fall of man and the concept of Original Sin." Pattison discusses "the young protagonists in the children's literature of James Janeway, Christina Rossetti, and Lewis Carroll." From this description, Pattison's study will offer, at least, an alternative reading of the subject to Peter Coveney's Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature (London, 1967) which, although it is the standard treatment of the subject, presents a reading of children's literature that is strongly biased by certain Freudian assumptions.

Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. Oxford, 1966. This standard study, long known to students of the novel, is, finally, about storytelling. It examines narrative structures from the time they appeared in the oral tradition and attempts to delineate the development of narrative structures from the simplest folktale to the most complex novel. Particularly useful for the student of children's literature is the discussion of the oral, pre-classical sources of the various narrative forms, and the discussion of romance, "aesthetic" fiction. Scholes and Kellogg's definition of "meaning" (in relation to how it applies to a literary work), their distinctions among representative, illustrative and aesthetic aspects of fiction, and their differentiation of myth, folklore, fable and legend (in the context of the historical development of narrative) are extremely handy, albeit simplistic. Given their recognition that to apply the tenets of the realistic novel to narrative forms that developed before the novel is a...