Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America (review)

On July 23, 2000, the New York Times Book Review changed the rules. For 82 weeks previously, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had appeared on their Bestseller List and her two subsequent books also occupied two more positions on that treasured list of fifteen. But Goblet of Fire, her fourth book, was about to appear and the Times felt something must be done. Despite the fact that the Harry Potter books were being read by children and adults, in a fit of gerrymandering meant to give space to other books, the Book Review created a separate children's bestseller list and bumped Rowling there.

What if, instead of Rowling, the bestseller spots had been occupied for weeks by works by Toni Morrison or Judith Krantz or Stephen King? Would the New York Times have created a separate list for African-American Fiction, Women's Books, or Popular Reading? Why does it seem so unthinkingly acceptable that if a "separate but equal" ghetto should be created, if the concept "bestseller" needed to be redefined and skewed, that it would be okay to do so in terms of age but objectionable if done in terms of race, gender, or class?

In her terrific and important Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature, Beverly Lyon Clark indicates this wasn't always so. A little more than a hundred years ago, the great writers wrote books for an audience composed of both children and adults: Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louisa May Alcott, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, et al. And the bestseller lists of the time were headed by the likes of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Heidi, The Call of the Wild, and Anne of Green Gables. These books were prominently reviewed by leading critics in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and other popular magazines. What happened to those days?

Following Felicity Hughes, Clark symbolically lays blame at the doorstep of Henry James. In a bid for respectability, James divided a shared American literature by creating a kind of complex and adult fiction that would be disassociated from the vulgar and popular reading of women and children. He appealed to a cognoscenti, a coterie largely composed of adult white males of a certain social station, the Eastern Establishment nuanced by British inclinations. As Clark points out, James' heirs eventually came to occupy the men's clubs at ivy-league universities, the boys in blazers whose highbrow tastes and iron canon ruled throughout most of the twentieth century.

Then came the "culture wars" of the last few decades where everybody else asked, "What about us?" In that regard, the new Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) was a milestone, widening the canon to include women and people of color as well as previously unacceptable genres and authors. Now mention could be made, for example, of detective fiction and science fiction, Mexican-American and Asian-American literature, Zora Neale Hurston and Pearl Buck. But what was still unacceptable? In some 1300 pages of a Literary History of the United States, no essay concerns children's literature; and since no mention is made of it, you would never know that anyone in America had ever read, for example, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As Leslie Fiedler has observed, what distinguishes America's masterpieces from those of other nations—what is central to our literature—is that our classics (e.g., Red Badge of Courage, Huckleberry Finn, The Last of the Mohicans) are notoriously at home in the children's section of the library. Consequently, to conceive the magnitude of the omission of children's literature in Columbia Literary History of the United States, one would have to imagine a 1300-page study of transportation in China that makes no mention of the bicycle.

In her book, Clark tracks the various moves by which "Kiddie Lit" has been diminished...