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  • Uncharted Depths: Descent Narratives in English and French Children's Literature
  • Emma Wilson
Uncharted Depths: Descent Narratives in English and French Children's Literature. By Kiera vaclavik. Oxford: Legenda, 2010. x + 140 pp., ill. Hb 45.00; $89.50.

As its title indicates, Uncharted Depths seeks to draw new attention to the complexity and critical importance of nineteenth-century writing for children, and, indeed, to defend children's literature more generally as a serious object of study. It sets about this task through the examination of descent narratives, those fictions of the underground excursion that, explicitly or not, echo the katabatic travels traced in The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Dante's Inferno. The rich corpus of texts discussed includes Antoine de La Sale's Le Paradis de la reine Sibylle, François de Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque, William Hayley's The Triumphs of Temper, George Sand's 'La Fée poussière', Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la Terre, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. Beautifully produced by Legenda, the volume includes a welcome quantity of illustrations from these works. Key to the volume's methodology is a consideration of intertextuality as it relates to the perceived hierarchy between adult and children's literature. The book leads forcefully, through its various readings, to a conclusion suggesting that, although there are differences between traditional katabatic narratives and those addressed to younger readers, rarely 'are these distinctions in line with Genette's pronouncements about children's literature which together depict it as a conservative, inferior form characterized by sanitization and heavy-handed moralization' (p. 123). To reach this conclusion Vaclavik moves through four compelling chapters on 'Katabatic Intertextual Relations', 'The Underground Landscape and its Inhabitants', 'Gender Roles and Relations', and 'Didacticism and Diversion'. A particular strength of these chapters lies in the attention given to the precursor texts. The volume's moves through Homer, Virgil, and Dante are very rewarding. The detail of Vaclavik's insights enhances a sense of the complexity of the intertextual links she identifies. Her study of the children's novels is less immediately satisfying, however, perhaps as a result of the survey method used. Rather than look in detail at entire texts, and without always registering their playfulness and enchantment, Vaclavik assesses recurring elements of the narratives. This leads to some innovative conclusions about the role of katabatic narratives in exploring mortality, about their range of conservatism and innovation with relation to gender relations, and about their embrace of didacticism or sheer entertainment. With relation to didacticism, the consideration of these katabatic narratives in their nineteenth-century context, in a world where going underground is newly associated with scientific pursuits such as geology and archaeology, is particularly striking. Yet what these dispassionate analyses lose is any acknowledgement that Vaclavik's reader may herself have read and loved, as a child, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for example, or The Princess and the Goblin. Work championing children's literature, as Vaclavik's does so powerfully, can also perhaps aim towards an understanding of the peculiar appeal of works known affectively through time, works that have acquired [End Page 410] value and resonance precisely from their debts, and indeed their depths, remaining undisclosed.

Emma Wilson
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
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