IRSCL

Maastricht 2013

clare — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:37:25 +0000

The IRSCL Board has decided that the 2013 IRSCL Congress will be held in Maastricht, our first Congress in the Netherlands. Look for further information on this site. The convenor of the Congress is Lies Wesseling, Maastricht University.

IRSCL Congress in Brisbane

clare — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:25:26 +0000

For the Paper Call and information about the 2011 IRSCL Congress in Brisbane, please go to the Congress website: http://irscl2011.com/

Review – Acts of Reading. Teachers, Texts and Childhood

dale — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:51:01 +0000

Acts of Reading. Teachers, Texts and Childhood. Edited by Morag Styles and Evelyn Arizpe. Stoke-on-Trent, Sterling: Trentham Books, 2009. v +244 pages. USD 34.95 (paperback).

This book gathers papers initially given at an international conference in 2007, which originated in the discovery of the so-called “Jane Johnson archive” in Indiana. As indicated by M. Spenser’s initial chapter, this is a collection of 438 items of great textual variety, which Jane Johnson produced for the benefit of her own four children in the 1740s, when she was in the process of teaching them to read. Under the heading “Jane Johnson and her world,” the following three essays in the collection are directly linked to the archive, and make for fascinating reading. Victor Watson ponders on the rationale behind the selection of quotations from the Bible and other texts, copied out by Johnson in her commonplace book, while Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles uncover and analyse evidence of the influence of Aesop, Isaac Watts and John Newbery on her selection of reading material. Shirley Brice Heath convincingly demonstrates the modernity of a teaching approach that blends “the verbal, visual and dramatic” (46), and goes so far as to assert that Jane Johnson’s nursery library “reflects theories of learning that came to prominence only in the twentieth century” (57).

The next section, entitled “Reading the Past: Pedagogies, Texts and Teachers,” starts with Judith Graham’s examination of the options taken by various illustrators of Aesop’s Fables in different historical and linguistic contexts. Karliin Navest concentrates on the works of Lady Ellenor Fenn, who under the pseudonym of Mrs Lovechild, or Mrs Teachwell, set out to write books that could be used by mothers to teach their children the rudiments of English grammar, even if they had not been taught it to a great degree of proficiency. The pedagogical concern common to Jane Johnson and Lady Ellenor Fenn is also central to Valerie Coghlan and Geraldine O’Connor’s contribution. This time, however, the potential scope of the innovative teaching aids discussed is much wider, since they consider the ambitions and achievements of the Kildare Place Society, set up in Ireland in 1811 to provide the poor with non-denominational education before universal public education was installed in 1831. The authors stress the society’s specific interest in the publication of educational texts for children, and consider their possible use of the Darton Rudiment Box and rolls: strips of calico wound around wooden rollers at either end, carrying 25 picture sheets and covering all kinds of subjects – Biblical scenes, grammar, arithmetic, history. These were apparently used as teaching aids in infant schools. Francesca Orestano picks up Virginia Woolf’s question “How Should One Read a Book,” and explores the possibility of the child fitting Woolf’s definition of the common reader. Her essay first considers the varied opinions expressed by Mary Woolstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth on the rights and wrongs of reading, and their sometimes restrictive definition of what may constitute “good” reading material for young readers, especially girls. Then she analyses the changes that took place towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the “Golden Age” of literature developed and the “joint value of reading and religion” (108) was emphasized by such an influential institution as the Evangelical Tract society.

Orestano’s essay provides an easy transition to the following section. “Reading, Imagination and Childhood” no longer considers the process by which children are taught to read, but rather their status as readers and the types of books they are allowed and encouraged to read. David White’s interesting analysis of William Wordsworth’s “rereading of childhood” (113) insists on the originality of his concept of the child as subject. It finds a stimulating complement in Janet Bottom’s presentation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concerns with the importance of imaginative works such as “fairy tales, myths and legends” for the child’s “emotional, cognitive and moral growth” (129), at a time when “the weight of educational publishing was heavily on the side of the rationalists and the moralists” (133). The essential link of imagination with childhood is also stressed by Peter Cook, from a different angle. Considering the depiction of childhood and the relationship between children and adults in a selection of books by Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit and Saki, he argues that all three authors suggest that children are often neglected, despised, or at best treated with indifference by the adults around them. Yet childhood is a very special time, thanks to the central part which imagination plays in it.

Vivienne Smith inaugurates the section dedicated to “Reading Fictions” with an essay on Kevin Crossley-Holland’s trilogy set in the Welsh Marches in the early thirteenth century. Published between 2000 and 2003, it tells the story of Arthur de Caldicott from the age of 13 onwards. By the end of the trilogy, aged 16, he has taken part in the Crusades, been knighted, and returns home. To Smith, Arthur is a very relevant figure to “young readers in the twenty-first century” (157), because his character shows “that it is possible to be a normal literate boy: that boys can and do read and write, and that they do so without compromising their masculinity or becoming misfits” (157-58). She also daringly suggests that the society described by the books as being in a state of flux because of the emergence of new forms of literacy mirrors some of the questions raised by the appearance of new technologies and means of communication in contemporary life. Arthur’s ability to make the best of those uncertain times may point to similarly positive developments, if only today’s older generations are willing to accept change without falling prey to moral panic. Laura Tosi then addresses the ability of traditional narrative forms – in her case, fairy tales – to adapt to changing ideologies, a point she demonstrates by examining alternative twentieth-century versions of well-known tales, written with either children or adults in mind. The section ends with an original contribution by Elizabeth Hammill, the co-founder of the Seven Stories Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle. She reflects on the challenges posed by exhibitions of pictures that are “changing frames,” as they leave the books in order to be displayed for public viewing, without the narrative context. Her comments suggest new dimensions of the artists’ works thus displayed may then be revealed.

The final part of the book is called “Reading the future.” In “Reading in a digital age,” Anouk Lang explores the use of new technologies as an alternative to traditional classroom discussions of books. Her case study, based on the use of a virtual learning environment platform with undergraduates, leads her to conclude that while the technology may help those less confident students who are unwilling to participate in class, others will resent the somewhat impersonal and delayed interactive experience, and state their preference for face-to-face discussion. Both teachers and students need time and help before they can use such new technologies effectively. In a similar way, the following article by Teresa Cremin, Eve Bearne, Marilyn Mottram and Prue Goodwin emphasizes the challenges posed by the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy in England and Wales in 1988. Their study of a sample of 1,200 primary teachers suggests that “[t]here is room for development in finding ways to extend the scope and range of teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature” (214). Finally, in “And what do you think happened next?,” Eve Bearne tries to assess the way in which the development of multimodal texts and the expansion of digital reading have already started to change the very experience of reading and the critical skills children need to develop.

All in all, this eclectic collection provides all kinds of interesting insights into the multifaceted experience which the act of reading represents for children, and the complex, but rewarding challenges faced by the adults who accompany their progress as increasingly competent, autonomous and appreciative readers.

Rose-May Pham Dinh

Université Paris 13, France

Review – Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures

dale — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:50:09 +0000

Shakespeare as Children’s Literature: Edwardian Retellings in Words and Pictures. Velma Bourgeois Richmond. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. 363 pages. USD 35.00 (paperback).

In their Preface to Tales From Shakespeare (1807), Charles and Mary Lamb engage in a complex dialectic with some twenty plays by Shakespeare that serve curiously as both the point of departure for their rewritings and as their ultimate destinations. The tales offer young readers “a few hints and little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years, when they come to the rich treasures from which these small and valueless coins are extracted.” These “imperfect abridgments,” the Lambs hope, will have “no worse effect […] than to make them wish themselves a little older, that they may be allowed to read the Plays at full length.” The Preface concludes with a great hope: “What these Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers’ wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years – enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity; for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages are full” (xii-xv). It is one of the fascinating truths in the history of Shakespeare adaptations for children that the Lamb’s Tales has itself become the central text variously refracted not only in the more than 200 editions printed (in dozens of languages), but also in countless would-be rival retellings that their work inspired. Among its many virtues, Velma Bourgeois Richmond’s Shakespeare as Children’s Literature undertakes to write the life and, especially, the afterlife of Tales From Shakespeare.

In framing her study of Shakespeare as children’s literature, Richmond locates her work and her goals for it against “a general loss of quiet, thoughtful reading and a valuing of the humanities” in the digital and electronic age. She hopes “that an awareness of Edwardian Shakespeare as children’s literature […] will be a contribution to current efforts to defend English studies” (5). This seems unwarranted today: the electronic environment will not defeat the pleasures of reading literature and the adaptation of Shakespeare for children is an increasingly visible and important area of current research. But this defensiveness does perhaps signal a certain unwillingness to engage fully with the critical and theoretical questions this recent criticism foregrounds. The quiet disinclination to grapple with sometimes troubling issues is evident, for instance, in Richmond’s discussion of Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832). As evidence of pronounced Edwardian favor, Richmond quotes the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910-1911) and its praise of Mrs. Jameson’s “delicacy of critical insight and fineness of literary touch. They are the work of a penetrating but essentially feminine mind, applied to the study of individuals of her own sex, detecting characteristics and defining differences not perceived by the ordinary critic and entirely overlooked by the general reader.” Richmond’s only response follows immediately – and flatly: “An advantage of Shakespeare’s stories for children is that women, whose interpretations differ from those of male critics, wrote most of them and thus made an impact” (129). Such a conclusion is the highway sign of a road not taken. But one should not fault a book – especially one as rich as the present one – for not being a different kind of book.

Richmond’s particular focus rests on Edwardian retellings of Shakespeare for young readers. She is deeply concerned with the adaptations as material objects and attends to the aesthetics of pictorial representation across a wide range of media and styles. She discusses work by some of the best-known artists and illustrators of the period, as well as a number of less-known but still engaging figures, including Arthur Rackham, A. E. Jackson, Sir John Gilbert, Edith Ewen, A. A. Dixon, Frances Brundage, Edmund Dulac, W. H. Robinson, and Walter Crane, among many others. She offers a detailed overview of particular editions of adaptations, both as art objects and as instances of a drive toward moral didacticism that typified late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature for children, and on these terms Richmond’s book succeeds admirably.

Of special interest to Shakespeareans are Richmond’s discussions of the role that eminent Shakespearean scholars play in the history of adaptations. We learn, for instance, of F.J. Furnivall’s elaborate and expansive edition of Tales from Shakespeare (1901), a two-volume “sumptuous collector’s item with scholarly enhancement,” as well as subsequent efforts by Sidney Lee in his important Introduction to Mary Macleod’sThe Shakespeare Story-Book (1902, with illustrations by Gordon Browne). “No contradiction exists,” Richmond assures her readers, “between making Shakespeare’s plays into readable stories for children and providing academic details and a cogent defense of great literature” (173). Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch can be said to have extended these efforts to supplement – or, indeed, to supersede – retlings (especially the Lamb’s) with scholarly concerns. His Historical Tales from Shakespeare (1910) supplies the lack of retellings of the history plays (carefully avoided by the Lambs), in part because he argues that “the real hero of Shakespeare’s historical plays is England; and no one can read them and be deaf to the ringing vibrating note of pride, of almost fierce joy to be an Englishman, to have inherited the liberties of so great a country and to be partaker in her glory” (201).

Such telling insights abound in Shakespeare as Children’s Literature and help sketch a virtually encyclopedic catalog, not only of Edwardian Shakespeare adaptations (either as re-articulations or extensions of the definitional work of the Lambs by such prominent writers as Mrs. Lang or Edith Nesbit), but also of those social, cultural, and political concerns that defined the era. Richmond addresses the Edwardian concern with notions of “race” and “Englishness,” for instance, or with the status of women, the role of English literature in education, and the fate of nation and empire. This book is a compelling compendium of texts, illustrations and insights related to the art of Shakespeare adaptations for children.

Howard Marchitello

Rutgers University, USA

WORKS CITED

Lamb, Charles and Mary. Tales from Shakespeare. London: J.M. Dent, 1999.

Review – Representations of Technology in Science Fiction for Young People

dale — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:48:53 +0000

Representations of Technology in Science Fiction for Young People. Noga Applebaum. New York: Routledge, 2010. 187 pages. £80 (hardback).

Noga Applebaum’s contribution to Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series offers an insightful new angle from which to explore constructions of childhood in literature for young readers. The study is motivated by her concern that the technophobia expressed by adults in both literature and in public debates may lead children to become alienated from the tools they will depend on in later life. She begins by situating technophobia within wider debates concerning the Romantic “innocence” of the child and the perceived disparity between the worlds of science and the humanities. Applebaum then considers the ways in which technological innovations, particularly consul games, have shaped the narrative structure of Young SF novels. The fourth chapter examines how technology may be changing the hierarchical power structures between children and adults, and the final chapter offers a case study of a specific theme within the genre: cloning. This is a fascinating study which has much to offer to those interested in science fiction, but perhaps even more to those interested in the myriad of ways in which adult-child power relations inform children’s literature.

The study draws on a corpus of some 200 Young SF novels published between 1980 (the year in which IBM first produced a PC and BITNET, the internet’s precursor, was launched) and 2008 (when Applebaum was presumably fine tuning the study for publication). The impressive size of this corpus is an overt response to the critique that Jill P. May offered to Perry Nodelman for a study in which he arrived at many of the same conclusions as Applebaum, but without the necessary empirical support. Applebaum’s sizable corpus is further supplemented by references to canonical texts which have informed the development of Young SF as a genre and to non-literary works such as computer games and films. Her overview of the history and form of the genre is helpfully thorough, and thankfully avoids getting bogged down in the traditional mire of distinguishing between SF and Fantasy fiction.

The use of so many texts has affected the study in a number of ways. Applebaum’s goal is not to offer in-depth analyses of each text in the corpus, but rather each chapter identifies a manageable number of texts which illustrate the issue she examines. The precise number varies, depending, in part, on how common a particular feature is in the corpus as a whole. Chapters One and Five refer briefly to sixteen texts each, commenting very precisely on only those aspects of the novels that are relevant to the argument, whereas Chapter Three focuses on just three novels, but in considerably more detail. About three quarters of the texts in the corpus are, sensibly, not analysed within the study.

Applebaum relates adult technophobia to the myth of the Romantic child. Since children are perceived as being “naturally” oriented towards the world of nature, technology is perceived as being a threat to the child’s innocence. In the first chapter, Applebaum draws on the work within the field of environmental ethics in order to create a basic framework for categorizing the novels according to their assumptions about relationships between nature, humanity and technology. She observes that there are very few texts which treat technology as being neither good nor bad per se or suggest that the ways in which technology is used determine its value. The vast majority of the texts in her corpus show, at best, ambivalence towards technological innovation, and many take technophobia to the extreme and demonize technological tools. This demonization, Applebaum demonstrates in the following chapter, is intimately connected to debates concerning the value of the humanities in an increasingly technological world, and the humanities’ repeated claims that the arts are central to the maintenance of higher human values. Another, more practical, explanation as to why adults might be so prone to technophobia is offered in the fourth chapter, where Applebaum contemplates the ways in which children’s apparent aptitude for computers often leaves adults feeling disempowered. Not only is children’s affinity with technology perceived as running counter to their assumed affinity with nature, it also undermines the knowledge-based hierarchy which allows adults to dominate children.

The third chapter shifts the focus from thematic elements to the structure of Young SF novels. Applebaum examines the ways in which computer games have affected the narrative structure of the novels in her corpus. She maps the parameters of her enquiry with references to the ways in which narratologists have tended to treat computer games as natural evolutions of traditional storytelling formats and, at the other extreme, with references to studies by ludologists (who specialise in computer game theory) who claim that the dissimilarities between games and traditional literary narratives are so great that an entirely new vocabulary needs to be developed. Applebaum’s method is to identify four central elements which reveal the influence of consul games on children’s literature: multilinearity, interactivity, blurred or collective authorship and multiple perspectives. Her examples in this chapter are limited to just three novels, which indicates that this format is still very rare. Nevertheless, I cannot help reconsidering the corpus – for although it is extensive, some of the omissions are surprising. I was particularly struck by the lack of reference to works by Diana Wynne Jones, especially since Applebaum accredits Wynne Jones with the term “Young SF” (5). Homeward Bounders and Hexwood both make reference to consul games, the former on a more thematic level, but the latter is also structured in accordance with games. Applebaum also omits all references to the DIY adventure books which were popular in the 1980s and made a reappearance in the mid-noughties. Given how many texts she does include, it may seem pedantic to be critical of such absences. Yet her observation that only two texts in her original corpus (i.e. 1%) draw on technological innovations such as consul games for their structure suggests a rarity which may not be justified. Her discussion of the four narratological elements is detailed and would be as applicable to Wynne Jones or the series books. Another element to which Applebaum alludes, but does not specifically mention as being inspired by consul games is the invitation to multiple readings. As with game playing, each time one reads these novels will be different, for DIY adventure books, even the plot will change on each reading.

The final chapter considers one of the most common tropes in Young SF: the cloned child. Setting her examination of novels containing such characters within the context of debates surrounding the cloning of animals and GMO foods, Applebaum notes that although some novels raise the complexity of the issues behind the debates, they all conclude by rejecting human cloning as a means of developing society.

Overall, Applebaum’s study offers a detailed, well-evidenced, convincing argument that Young SF shows an overly marked tendency towards technophobia. Adults’ fear of computers, electronic media and other recent technologies is primarily rooted in traditional, Romantic views of the child, but also in the fear that children may understand such technological innovations better than adults themselves. By presenting worlds in which technology leads to dystopia, Young SF novels attempt to repress children’s interests, and reinstate a view of childhood as a time of affinity with the natural world, in which they live subordinated to the adults around them. Applebaum has presented her case well, and her concern that we may be encouraging children to alienate themselves from the technology they enjoy and which is likely to prove beneficial to them seems equally well founded. However, like Applebaum, I have considerable trust in our young readers. If they really are, as they seem, more savvy than the adult population about how technology works, one can also suppose that they will not swallow texts which consistently shed enjoyable activities such as gaming in a negative light without first chewing over the alternatives.

Lydia Kokkola

University of Turku, Finland

Works cited

Wynne Jones, Diana. Hexwood. London: Methuen, 1993.

—. The Homewood Bounders. London: Macmillan, 1981.

Review – Frigjord oskuld. Heterosexuellt mognadsimperativ i svensk ungdomsroman

dale — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:47:46 +0000

Frigjord oskuld. Heterosexuellt mognadsimperativ i svensk ungdomsroman [Empowered Innocence. The heterosexual Developmental Imperative in Swedish Young Adult Fiction]. Mia Franck. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2009. 322 pages. 27€ (paperback).

Ever since 1906, when Finland was the first European nation to grant women the right to vote, women’s rights have been at the centre of attention in Finnish society. In correspondence with this social awareness, women’s studies have always been strongly represented in academic life and research into this topic is currently carried out at no less than eight out of Finland’s twenty universities. Finno-Swedish Mia Franck’s dissertation Empowered Innocence fits well into this tradition of foregrounding women’s perspective and experiences. In her doctoral research, she sets out to scrutinize “the varying possibilities for girl characters to act out and negotiate (hetero)sexuality in Swedish young adult fiction (YAF) from the 1960s to the 2000s” (286).

Franck constructs her theoretical framework from several feminist and queer theories. The main concept behind her analyses is Penelope Eckert’s “developmental imperative,” a notion which hints at the demands made on girls to show the right kind of behaviour according to their age. Franck stresses that she does not interpret sexuality “as a separate entity, but as affected by gender, class and age” (286), and consequently broadens the concept of a developmental imperative to comprise heterosexuality. Such a heterosexual developmental imperative implies that girls – in addition to age – are expected to act in accordance with heteronormative expectations. These heterosexual norms are defined by Gayle Rubin’s hierarchical circle of sexuality, and combined with Maria Österlund’s girl and boy matrixes, which list stereotypes such as the good, boyish and bad girl, as well as the macho, soft boy and coward.

Franck argues that the depiction of sexuality in Swedish YAF can be divided into three categories, which also structure the rest of the dissertation: broken romance, violent norm and heteronormative failure (286). Franck examines nine novels by renowned Swedish YAF authors: Tillträde till festen [Admission to the Party] (1969) and Ett slag i ansiktet [A Slap in the Face] (1976) by Gunnel Beckman; Juliane och jag [Juliane and I] (1982) and Duktig pojke! [Good Boy!] (1983) by Inger Edelfeldt; När alla ljuger [When Everybody Lies] (1995) and Man kan inte säga allt [One Cannot Say Everything] (1999) by German-born Peter Pohl; Lilla Marie [Little Marie] (1995) by Mats Wahl, and Ingen grekisk gud, precis [Not Exactly a Grecian God] (2002) and Dansar Elias? Nej! [Does Elias Dance? No!] (2004) by Katarina Kieri. The selected books came out between 1969 and 2004 and are therefore expected to represent changing concepts of gender and class. In order to understand the effect of age on changing sexual relationships, Franck chooses novels featuring protagonists between 12 and 19 years old. Some of these novels fit into more than one category. Five of the books have girl narrators, whereas surprisingly enough four are narrated from a boy’s perspective. Franck contends that the inclusion of boy and girl narratives by the same author is essential for her study of girl sexuality, as the male narrative angle may influence the interpretation of that sexuality.

Central to the first category, broken romance, is a maturation process. Franck’s analysis demonstrates that the characters’ behaviour is directed by heteronormativity and that sexuality is negotiable, although always within the boundaries of heterosexuality. The body plays an important role and is constantly being observed and scrutinized. Respectability and shame are crucial concepts for the second category, violent norm, where femininity is linked to inferiority. Male desire is depicted as uncontrollable, and women are therefore expected to behave respectably and tame their own longings in order not to arouse men. Violence is used to force women to act within the borders of heterosexuality. Again, heteronormativity dictates the behaviour of the characters, as it is male desire which sets the rules for acceptable sexual conduct. The last category, heteronormative failure, is all about questioning heterosexuality. The protagonists all struggle with desires which deviate from normalised boy-girl relationships (such as homosexual, lesbian or incestuous feelings). They have to stage their heterosexuality and control their lust in order not to be perceived as aberrant. The close readings which start from this perspective, namely those of När alla ljuger, Duktig pojke! and Juliane och jag, prove to be the most persuasive.

Mia Franck’s reading of the novels exposes some recurrent motifs. Throughout the works in her corpus, the act of writing plays an important part, and in some novels it is essential to the protagonist’s maturation. Another aspect which features in several books is an investigation of one’s own body. Especially in those works that can be labelled as violent norm, the girl progatonist is contrasted by a “sidechick.” This girl in a supporting role is sexually active and fearless and thus counterbalances the protagonist, foregrounding the latter as a typical “good girl” in Österlund’s matrix. Franck comes to the conclusion that “prevailing conceptions of masculinity and femininity shape the ways in which sexuality is depicted” and that the characters have to hide deviant sexual preferences and stage heterosexuality “in order to live up to gender expectations” (289). In her summary she admits that she is somewhat torn with regards to the results of her analysis: “I feel ambiguous about the ways in which heterosexual representations of girls and boys are constantly ranked in relation to other sexualities, within heterosexual discourses and in relation to gender, class and age” (290). Franck’s analyses prove however to be quite convincing.

Given that Empowered Innocence is a doctoral thesis published in book form, it cannot be expected to be an easy read. Unfortunately, the text is occasionally marred by small grammatical and typographical errors. Moreover, the theoretical concepts are not all clear from the beginning, but only become lucid in the close readings. These analyses, in which Franck puts her theoretical concepts to the test, show that the three categories –especially the third category, heteronormative failure – are workable tools for examining the depiction of sexuality in literature. The analyses are well written, and provide for lucid illustrations of the abstract notions of broken romance, violent norm and heteronormative failure. The reader is expected to make some loose ends meet as well. Reading the book thus proves to be interesting and thought-provoking. There is one aspect which seems to be lacking, though. When accounting for her selection of novels, Franck argued that she chose books from different decades so as to be able to identify possible evolutions. After having finished the book, however, I feel that these questions remain to be answered and that a diachronic perspective could shed another light on the material. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, Mia Franck’s research definitely does stand up to scrutiny.

Sara Van den Bossche

Ghent University, Belgium

Review – Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence

dale — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:46:36 +0000

Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence. Jenny Holt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 270 pages. £55 (hardback).

In her exploration of the dynamic between public school literature, male adolescence and citizenship, Jenny Holt proposes the public school story as a source through which to examine developing ideas about adolescence and citizenship. She studies the genre from the second half of the nineteenth century through to the aftermath of World War I, arguing that the evolution of the public school story coincided with the expansion of the sociological concept of adolescence. Awareness of adolescence as a stage of development distinct from childhood became more evident in the later decades of the nineteenth century and in turn, its perceived rationale as a time during which the values of citizenship were to be learnt became more visible in various cultural paradigms. The upper-class adolescent male, considered a potential future leader in society, is of particular importance to those who want to shape and influence the social landscape, and the substance of his education is therefore of particular significance.

Holt draws together an impressive range of material through which to examine the social history of the period along with personal memoirs of public school life and a diverse range of fictional narratives. Using an interdisciplinary methodology she is able to explore the various, often contradictory discourses which inform the period under discussion and demonstrate how they are visible in public school literature, producing what she refers to as a “heteroglossic patchwork of voices and influences that portrayed adolescent subjectivity in some very contradictory ways” (58).

The work consists of a general introduction which considers the concepts of “adolescence” and “citizenship” and the elusive nature of these terms. This is followed by six further chapters which explore in detail various examples of public school literature and their relationships with the shifting social mores that influence understandings of male identity. While Holt concentrates on a genre of literature which is associated with the upper classes, she stresses the changes taking place in society that result in increased middle-class influence. The effect becomes visible in the genre as a whole, which she goes on to substantiate through textual analysis. Further, she considers the implications of a diverse readership which was to include the working classes, raising questions about agency for fictional protagonists that potentially lead to tensions in the narratives. While upper-class boys were to embrace citizenship by being active leaders for the future, the working-class adolescent was to be a “good” citizen by following and upholding the laws and regulations of the Land. The protagonist of stories intended for working-class boys was politically inactive, what Holt describes in a later chapter as “an introverted and often burlesque figure preoccupied by his personal moral universe but not engaged with bigger social problems” (156).

Chapter one considers the subject of youth as symbolically representative of social progress and this theme continues in various forms throughout the book, as Holt examines the impact of changing cultural paradigms alongside different authorial approaches within the genre. Chapters Two and Three explore the fictional works of Thomas Hughes and F.W. Farrar respectively, demonstrating the impact of diverse authorial influences on adolescent citizenship in fictional texts. Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) presents the adolescent as an active citizen, engaged in his individual development, which is part of a larger social growth. In comparison, Farrar presents a much less optimistic picture of adolescent agency in Eric, or Little By Little (1858), following a doctrine which tries to combine various incompatible discourses (Romanticism, Evangelicalism, and Darwinism). The consequence is a fictional protagonist ultimately without agency, unable to take control of his own life.

A particularly effective chapter explores changing social attitudes towards discipline and corporal punishment and how this is impacted by the relationship between citizenship and social class. Holt argues that fictional texts take on distinct purposes in relation to discussions about discipline depending on their intended readership; novels written for the upper-class boy act as sites for debate about corporal punishment, where fictional protagonists actively question school discipline regimes. In contrast, novels intended for working-class youth were “part of the disciplinary mechanism that aimed to stem unrest and protect the status quo” (155).

Throughout the course of the work Holt deftly re-enforces the significance of the threat which male adolescents are perceived to present to the stability of society, particularly boys from working-class landscapes. This comes to the fore in Chapter Five as she outlines what she considers to be the implications of the “National Efficiency” movement on attitudes to male identity. A fear of moral and physical degeneracy at the end of the millennium saw an increased emphasis on biological determinism, eugenics, and social Darwinism. Holt suggests that this leads to a suppression of various boyhoods, most notably the feminized youth who is now stigmatized with the classification of homosexuality.

To conclude Holt considers the aftermath of World War I and its impact on the genre. She suggests that individual authors no longer had a consistent message, which is further supported by disparate voices in other social configurations in relation to male adolescent citizenship. Examining a number of works by adolescents themselves she concludes that the impact of war, “breaking bonds of trust between adults and adolescents, turns young people into the ultimate deconstructionists” (227). As such it makes a return to didactic tales, with the intention of reform, impossible.

Jenny Holt’s study is impeccably researched and well constructed. Although much has previously been written about the school story, the fusing of genre and male adolescent identity with the question of citizenship presents an opportunity to reconsider the fictional texts from a somewhat different perspective and as such is a thought provoking piece of research. While I would have preferred a more structured introduction to guide the reader into each of the chapters, this is a minor issue. Holt’s work is a commendable addition to the Ashgate series of Studies in Childhood, which continues to grow in scope and quality.

Michele Gill

Newcastle University, UK

Review – Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England. Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC

dale — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:45:20 +0000

Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England. Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC. Monica Flegel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 208 pages. 55£ (hardback).

“Couple try to sell baby son for £20.” “Drunken mum jailed over baby death.” “Teen admits squirting bleach over mother after Harry Potter film.” “Parents of disabled girl found hanged are charged with child neglect.” “Cruel mum beat 6 kids.” As recent British newspapers show, any combination of “children” and “cruelty” makes for catchy headlines and fascinating stories. Whether the child is the victim or the perpetrator, cruelty and children seems to be a contradictio in terminis. As an expert in the recently mediatized case of the “Edlington torture brothers” states in The Daily Mirror: “Child attackers aren’t born evil, pathological monsters. But the Edlington brothers [...] were born into a world of violence which set them on a path to evil. From a young age they will have witnessed domestic violence, drunken arguments and severe physical and sexual abuse. And violence breeds violence” (The Daily Mirror, 24/01/2010). This fragment, picked from a 2010 newspaper, might just as well have appeared in the nineteenth-century journal The Child’s Guardian, published by the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). Up to the present day this Society advertises in British newspapers with headlines like “No child’s cries for help must go unheard” and statistics saying that “a child is killed every TEN DAYS in the UK by a parent or carer.” The NSPCC continues: “it just goes to show that there’s never been a greater need to protect children, the most vulnerable members of society” (The Daily Mirror, 24/11/2009). The discourse is still very similar to that of nineteenth-century NSPCC, as Monica Flegel shows. Of course these days children are urged to “email for help, interact on message boards, and access information on bullying, abuse and neglect” (idem), but the appeal to the public remains the same: “Help them to make sure no cry goes unheard – and donate today. Every pound helps save children from suffering in silence” (idem).

Monica Flegel’s Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Centruy England provides an interpretative framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the NSPCC in the late nineteenth century. The NSPCC played a major role in developing and disseminating the concept of what is now known as child abuse. “In charting the territory of this new crime,” Flegel writes, “the NSPCC built upon pre-existing narratives of child suffering” (2). Literary texts functioned at the time as “authoritative voices” in the field of social intervention. The rise of professional discourse, brought about by organizations like the NSPCC, reduced the impact of literature and art on the definition of social ills and their cure. Flegel’s research into “the displacement of narratives of child endangerment with the narrative of child protection” is thorough and detailed. She aims to “trace the persistence of, and divergence from, pre-existing stories and representations of child endangerment in order to reveal the irresolvable contradictions located within a rationality of childhood and of child endangerment that persists to this day” (4). As can be derived from this quote, Flegel’s research method is discursive: she is not concerned with facts or figures, but with texts (stories, representation, rhetoric, narrative). She takes into account two textual genres that heavily relied on each other, literary and social-scientific narratives, and examines how they represent childhood in general and the endangered and abused child in particular. She traces how the discourse on endangered children in the late Victorian period shifts from an individual, ad hoc concern to an institutionalized social system. It is interesting how she applies the same kind of detailed, “literary” reading to both textual genres. She is very convincing and thorough in her reading of any text, be it a novel by Charles Dickens, a poem by Barrett-Browning or a report by NSPCC’s Benjamin Waugh.

Flegel’s first chapter provides the reader with information on the NSPCC and its role in defining the concept of cruelty to children. It traces the origin of child protection in England. The next chapters are all concerned with one more or less specific topic in narratives about endangered children in the nineteenth century. Chapter Two traces in a most intriguing way how the discourse on child protection was modeled on the discourse on animal protection. Representations of children and animals – sharing a kind of mute innocence – as companions in suffering continually reoccur in Victorian literature. It seemed to be inevitable that the child and the animal should come to be represented in competition with each other for the compassion of English society, Flegel states. Chapter Three deals with the nineteenth-century child performer, who proved to be “a source of anxiety because it encapsulated contradictory narratives about what it meant to be a child: playful versus manipulative, open and artless versus deceitful and artful, natural versus artificial” (74). This chapter immediately calls to my mind the story of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, written in 1883, which also balances on these two narratives. Flegel strictly limits herself to Victorian England, thereby largely ignoring the probability that similar ‘conceptualizing’ and ‘representation’ can be found across Europe. This impression that England is a self-contained entity with its own values and discourse ignores the “intertextuality” of the narratives she examines.

In Chapter Four Flegel discusses the child as victim of commerce. She calls the chapter “Cannibalism in England,” referring to the economic exploitation of children (making them feed the family). Flegel reconstructs the way in which England’s “defining characteristics” – its industry and its domestic virtues – were balanced in narratives on working children. Chapter Five focuses on the combination of children and cruelty from another angle. Not the endangered child, but the dangerous child is being discussed here. Flegel examines how the NSPCC, but also novelists like Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist!) deal with the irresolvable contradiction between the innocent child victim, and the aggressive child produced by violence. In her conclusion Flegel comments on the emergence of the Inspector, representing the (new) institutionalized discourse on endangered children. The inspector, Flegel states, “was both an important player in the NSPCC as an institution, and a symbolic construction of NSPCC propaganda” (183). He marks the end of her interesting study.

In this short overview of Flegel’s book I have not done justice to the nuanced way in which she disentangles the narratives she examines. She sees the complexity and ambiguity of the texts, both literary and social-scientific. Not only does she provide insights into nineteenth-century discourse and society, she is also convincing in stating that our present-day discourse still largely depends on concepts such as childhood, crime, innocence, and evil as they were defined during that period. Throughout her book, Flegel continually takes into account the influence of class and gender on the narratives she examines, which gives her discursive research an important ideological angle as well. There are two drawbacks to her approach: since it is an in-depth reading, it is limited in its scope. Alongside the NSPCC, other organizations were at work, but Flegel leaves those unexamined. Also, as I have already mentioned, she has no eye for the broader international context of the discourse she unravels. The frequently used term “Victorian” reinforces this, I think: it suggests that England had its own, incomparable isolated microcosm of norms and values; it is a term which carries its own narrative as a normative burden. Second drawback: the meticulous reading makes this book a bit tedious. It is not told like a compelling story, it is a study. But I can advise everyone to make the effort to read it: it is definitely worthwhile.

Elke Brems

University College Brussels, Belgium

Review – Facets of Children’s Literature Research: Collected and Revised Writings

dale — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:44:14 +0000

Facets of Children’s Literature Research: Collected and Revised Writings. Göte Klingberg. Stockholm: Swedish Institute for Children’s Books, 2008. 197 pages. E-book.

It is inspiring to read a work by someone who dedicated his life to children’s literature research. In this e-book, Göte Klingberg offers numerous reflections collected from various papers and presentations in order to offer those who are newer to the study of children’s literature some worthwhile issues to consider. Klingberg highlights considerations that should contribute to the organisation of one’s research into children’s literature: define relevant terms as they will be used for a particular project, describe how those terms become operational in one’s research, and consider the cross-disciplinary influences of psychology, sociology and pedagogy on children’s literature. In addition, Klingberg stresses the importance of terminological and conceptual definition when establishing a working bibliography. Although he states that the concept of children’s literature is a construct so that “it can be defined as the bibliographer chooses” (21), it is important that the definition should be informed by contemporary criticism concerning how children’s literature is understood in different contexts. Klingberg offers a list of questions that researchers should consider when developing the scope of a particular research project, including the time span, languages, publishers, and order of information. Later in the text, in a section titled “A typology of the fantasy-fantastic field,” Klingberg demonstrates how his advice may be applied.

Klingberg’s e-book provides advice for studying adaptations of children’s literature, whether from a historical approach, from a translation-studies angle, or from comparative analysis with adult texts. Throughout the book he offers interesting insights into the issues faced when researching works in minor languages. Klingberg draws the novice researcher’s attention to the fact that didacticising is still “vogue” in children’s literature, which of course eventually leads to reflections on constructs of the child, whose interests those constructs serve, and the relationship between adults and children (15). He writes that “children are what the adults make of them” (13). His text contributes to the dialogue concerning the “politics of innocence” (Giroux, 1993) surrounding children’s literature when he describes how purification occurs when adults adapt works for young readers. Klingberg states that purification is based on “the set of values of the adult intermediary;” therefore, children’s texts often do not contain social taboos of a given culture . Different societies will purify texts in different ways, which can, as Klingberg notes, show how societies’ “virtues” change over time (29, 34).

Even though his research is for the most grounded in his vast knowledge of the Swedish context, Klingberg offers a generalised overview of the historical development of children’s literature, which he imbeds into his discussion of different typologies in the field of children’s literature research. He notes the influences of oral traditions, poetry, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the development of national literatures on books produced for children. He draws attention to the fact that children’s books are political and have often functioned to promote patriotism and “save the cultural heritage” of a particular society (50). In sum, he states that books for children usually have a double message in that they are designed to entertain but also to “warn” or teach children (41).

One of the most useful aspects of this book is that Klingberg makes several recommendations for further research in the field of children’s literature, suggesting that scholars should engage in various modes of interdisciplinary collaboration and consider how increasing globalisation influences the dissemination of national literatures, especially oral traditions. Although Klingberg mentions that researchers have to take into account the relationship between texts and readers, he fails to position himself firmly in relation to current criticism and theories of text-reader interplay. Facets of Children’s Literature offers novice researchers in the field wise advice in many respects; however, the consolidation of numerous works into this one e- book, mixed with numerous editorial mistakes, gives the book a feeling of disconnection and inconsistency. If a reader can overcome these challenges , the wise and experienced Klingberg offers plenty of worthwhile information to consider.

Sarah Minslow

University of Newcastle, Australia

WORKS CITED

Giroux, Henry A. ‘Beyond the Politics of Innocence: Memory and Pedagogy in the “Wonderful World of Disney”’. Socialist Review 23.2 (1993): 79-107.

Review – Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature

dale — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:41:48 +0000

Keeling, Kara K. and Pollard, Scott T. (eds) Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature, New York & London: Routledge, 2009. 276pp. 0 415 96366 4

This is an excellent contribution to what has increasingly been called “food studies” – a discipline that for many might be viewed as curiously as “child studies.” Bring the two together and you have a wonderfully hybrid mix. Keeling and Pollard’s introduction is particularly impressive, showing that they have not just dabbled in this area (as one or two contributors seem to have done); they are thoroughly immersed in the anthropological, sociological and literary (let alone culinary) literature on the subject. And, over the course of sixteen chapters, there is a veritable feast of good things to digest. Some texts might be predictable (In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Tale of Peter Rabbit), but there are a great many less expected ones, and much that was new to me. Let me whet your appetites.

The book opens promisingly, but strangely, with Part II, “Reading as Cooking,” Part I having comprised the introduction. Jodie Slothower and Jan Susina write about “Literary Cookbooks,” which allow readers “to indirectly consume the book. … a form of literary cannibalism in which you become what you eat” (36). Entertaining as this chapter is, it is – like Part I in fact – just a single chapter long, making us impatient for some main course to arrive.

Part III, though (“Girls, Mothers, Children”), turns out to be another entrée, this time of two chapters. Holly Blackford’s “Recipe for Reciprocity and Repression: The Politics of Cooking and Consumption in Girls’ Coming-of-Age Literature,” considers such texts as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Alcott’s Little Women, Burnett’s A Little Princess, but also less expected texts, such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Rosetti’s Goblin Market and Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. She demonstrates how cooking can both acculturate girls, but can also be a marker of rebellion – as Jo March demonstrates. Lisa Rowe Fraustino, in “The Apple of her Eye,” looks more specifically at the role of the good mother, showing how closely she’s associated with providing sustenance in picture books. She astutely notes the parallel between sitting in a mother’s lap, being fed, and being read to, and notes that what the child digests in both instances tends to consolidate the dominant ideology, perhaps most overtly represented in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

Part IV, “Food and the Body,” is tantalisingly one chapter longer, opening with Leona W. Fisher’s perceptive “Nancy Drew and the ‘F’ Word,” which examines “F” for Food in this series, noting that, before the 1990s, three square meals a day seemed the norm, such that, she calculates, the characters eat “between 4,000 and 6,000 calories a day, enough to sustain a professional athlete” (80). She wittily explores both this “F” and two others: “F” for “fat” and for “feminism,” noting the sense of female agency in the series. It was also rewarding for me to read that “In the 1940s wartime texts there is somewhat less mention of food, perhaps in deference to rationing” (79), which chimes with my own explorations of Blyton – though other commentators continue to imagine that there is more food during this period, precisely because of its actual lack.

Jacqueline M. Labbe writes about the moral dimensions of eating in such nineteenth-century children’s texts as Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House, Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and others. She examines how certain characters are seen as food, which demonstrates some form of corruption on their part and its attendant punishment (through consumption). Jean Webb takes this further, looking at how fatness becomes associated with negative character in children’s books about boys, moving from a discussion of “muscular Christianity” (where the lean and healthy look was the ideal) to its opposite, epitomised in Billy Bunter (though attributed to Charles Hunter, rather than Hamilton) and, later, in William Golding’s Piggy, from Lord of the Flies. This stereotype, as she notes, continues in more recent works, like Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dudley Dursley in Rowling’s series. However, Webb also notes more recent changes, examining Catherine Forde’s Fat Boy Swim and Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.

Part V, “Global/Multicultural/ Postcolonial Food,” is a solid five chapters long. Winnie Chan begins with an essay on Kipling’s “narratives of imperial boys,” whose main title, “The Eaters of Everything,” references the uncouth grey apes of The Jungle Books. As she argues, the imperialist project was backed up by strict rules on cuisine and etiquette, captured in Mrs Beeton likening “the mistress of the house” to “the commander of an army” (1861). Chan also quotes Jessie Conrad (Joseph Conrad’s wife), who wrote her own book on cookery, itself full of imperious prohibitions. Lan Dong then writes on Asian Americans and their food through two memoirs (one Chinese, one Japanese) in “Eating Different, Looking Different,” showing how foodstuffs and eating habits helped forge these children’s growing sense of identity.

Karen Hill McNamara’s “The Potato Eaters” forms quite a contrast, looking at representations of nineteenth century Irish Famine in children’s fiction. She mentions some startling statistics; for example, that the average man then consumed 70 potatoes a day, or over a million in 50 years. In 1845, Ireland’s population was 8 million; even now it is only 4 million, never having recovered from the famine and subsequent emigration (though 100 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry). She shows that many modern books, even picture books, deal with the horrors of the Famine quite realistically, even drawing attention to the fact that there was food aid available; however, it never reached the starving – something that has clearly not changed much in the last 160 years!

Genny Ballard’s work shifts our focus to Latin American and Latino children’s literature, taking three picture books to explore how learning to cook is involved in girls’ development, and is a marker of power, of female solidarity. She explores these areas with sensitivity, avoiding clumsy wielding of patriarchal clubs. However, the extent to which these girls are simultaneously tied into positions of servitude (or not), could have done with more attention, I thought.

Richard Vernon moves us on to Brazil, showing how here, the work of one person, Monteiro Lobato, helped shape the critical edge of Brazilian children’s literature. Through his characters, Lobato “advocated independent thought, feminism, individual freedom mixed with national pride, and the scrutiny of cultural tradition” (182). This tradition continues with other writers, notably Ana Maria Bohrer, whose non-conformist work, “The Sugar-coated Girl” (A menina açucarada), provides the chapter’s focus. In contrast to the shift in English children’s literature, from the fairly reactionary works of its golden age to more edgy, critical works, Bohrer argues that Brazil, thanks to its founding father, has always had this more subversive tradition.

The final Part (VI), also five chapters long, has the rather clumsy title, “Through Food the/a Self.” It “looks at how food impacts [sic] various constructions and deconstructions of childhood identity and agency” (16). James Everett opens this section with “Oranges of Paradise,” noting the ambivalence of this fruit, which promises so much, “because the orange, as metonym, nicely encases the complex relationships among childhood and food and colonialism in Europe and its literature” (194). The orange shifts from being exotic, through increasing popularity, eventually reaching its “expiration date for its symbolic value” (ibid.). Everett then takes us through literary uses of the orange, starting with Maria Edgeworth’s “The Orange Man” (1796) and ending, beyond Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at Patricia Polacco’s An Orange for Frankie (2004).

Elizabeth Gargano continues with “Trials of Taste,” which looks at “ideological ‘food fights’ in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time” (207). She brilliantly picks up on the centrality of food in this Cold War novel (1962), where L’Engle’s protagonists fight against a bland consumerist (and ultimately, communist) society bent on robbing them of their individuality. The new and handy “convenience food” is therefore particularly criticised for being against individual “taste.” Though not mentioned, M.T. Andereson’s Feed came to mind as an interesting text to juxtapose with this.

Robert M. Kachur examines Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, preferring to explain its immense popularity not in psychoanalytical terms (as others have done, seeing it as a regressive anal fantasy, or as an attempt by Dahl to reinstate the lost father), but in terms of biblical metanarrative – of paradise, the fall, and redemption – with the five Golden Tickets indicating the chosen few. In this reading, the Chocolate Room is Paradise, where the chosen ones can eat from anywhere except the chocolate river – a command that Augustus Gloop disobeys, resulting in the party’s banishment. In this reading, the Oompa-Loompas are Wonka’s angels. Charlie therefore becomes the Christ-like son, ascending at the end in the glass elevator. It’s a convincing reading, which also works well with the first film adaptation (1971), though less successfully in Tim Burton’s 2005 version.

Martha Satz examines Judi Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, arguing that it too suggests how we can reinvoke an Edenic state, where we are totally fulfilled and satiated. Like the fairy tale, Barrett’s picture book offers “comfort for loss of the primal state of ecstasy and for the problems of maturing and eventual death” (236). The grandfather, who represents impending death, shows how, through art and the imagination, this earlier state can be recreated.

In the book’s final essay, Annette Wannamaker looks at the use of food in Dav Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants” series, moving on her earlier discussion in Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture (2007). This series of books is “consistently listed among the most challenged and censored … in the United States” (252) but, as she makes clear, the books depend upon children knowing the proper way to eat and speak in order for their disruptive humour to be effective. She also points out the books’ own status as capitalist artefacts to be consumed – and specifically, as books that celebrate a male-oriented universe – ending with this provocative statement: “Perhaps, when adults object to the Captain Underpants books, which depict conspicuous consumption as both pleasurable and subversive, it is because we are made aware of our own adult excesses” (254). It is a provocative essay but, as I’ve commented elsewhere, I wish that Wannamaker was aware of Rod McGillis’s work in this area (especially his essays, “Captain Underpants is my hero” [2002] and “Coprophilia for kids” [2003]).

All in all, this is an excellent collection, to be recommended in libraries everywhere (the cost puts it beyond most individuals, I fear). I have only two quibbles: the way the book has been sectioned, two parts being single chapters only; and the claim on the blurb that “This book is the first scholarly volume on the topic,” when Carolyn Daniel’s Voracious Children (to which the editors themselves allude) appeared in the same series just three years prior!

References

Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.

McGillis, Roderick. “‘Captain Underpants is my hero’: things have changed-or have they?” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 27 (2) 2002, pp. 62-70

———–. “Coprophilia for kids: the culture of grossness.” Youth Cultures:

Texts, Images and Identities, ed. Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce. Westport, CN and London: Praeger, 2003, pp. 183-9