Children's Literature/Reading in the Light: Studies in Children's Literature 1500-2000: Though still sometimes fuddy-duddily referred to as the Groves of Academe, there's nothing quaint about the expert work that goes on there. Rigorous academic focus and scholarship are not only vital but serve as a steadying, clarifying, valuable resource in our fast, crass time and this international collection of 17 papers from the inaugural conference of the ISSCL (Irish Society for the Collection of Children's Literature) is stimulating, wide- ranging and mind-opening, writes Niall MacMonagle
Though 1500-2000 is somewhat deceptive - most of the essays focus on 19th- and 20th-century children's literature - A.J. Piesse's opening study of 16th-century grammar school curricula alerts us to the longer perspective. In 1592, Giggleswick school in Yorkshire, typically, ordained that the "scholemaister . . . shalbe a man fearinge God" and, using pedagogical sources and Shakespeare's portrayal of children, Piesse identifies "rhetoric, history, proper social conduct and processes of change" as key elements in shaping the renaissance child in those pre-dumbing-down days. What has determined and shaped children's literary lives in recent centuries, this book argues, is more complex and less easily determined.
School stories are Declan Kiberd's focus and he traces how Mark Twain's 'The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief' (1870) subverts and rejects a "high-minded tosh" which stunted religious influences and Calvinist ethics had generated. In much American fiction the open air is preferred to the schoolroom as a place of growth and Kiberd argues that "in a time when children are allowed fewer and fewer unmonitored activities by parents understandably fearful of molesters and abusers", the British boarding school story still holds its own attractions. For Kiberd, J.K. Rowling's real achievement is not only her combination of genres - school stories with magic - but that Rowling's characters, unlike Blyton's, grow older.
Mary Flynn shows, through her analysis of the Educational Company of Ireland and its sister firm, the Talbot Press, how religious publications influenced the life of the Irish child. The Catholic Church dictated. Guilt was acceptable as a moulder and shaper and there was little to awaken the young to the "joy and excitement at life".
Ann Alston discusses food, size-ism and stereotypes and accuses children's literature of political incorrectness. From Billy Bunter to Dudley, Scrooge to Count Olaf, "extremes are disparaged . . . for they represent a lack of balance" and yet Blyton's Famous Five, who eat for England, remain slim and trim. Food here, Alston argues, is not only necessary - the Five fight against criminals and, originating in 1942, their "war" parallels that of British troops - but their picnic baskets are patriotic, corroborating Roland Barthes's idea that food creates belonging and national identity.
Áine Nic Gabhann's paper on Hodgson Burnett, which examines the "darker side of the adult-child dynamic" and the "dangerous and unsettling force field" where the child becomes "the object of the sexual gaze", and David Rudd's study of the genealogy of "Golliwog" are yet other indications of this book's strength.
Jacqueline Rose has spoken of "the impossible relation between adult and child" and argues that "adults do not write for children but for themselves". Rose, quoted here by Sebastien Chapleau in his questioning of child-ist criticism, reminds us of the extraordinarily strange and interesting contradiction that is at the heart of children's literature: "The adult writes the child, and the child reads the adult." Chapleau offers a clear-sighted, interrogative account of how a book becomes "a dialogical place where both the adult and the child must be allowed to communicate".
Deborah Thacker examines Robert Frost's and Edward Thomas's stories, "radical and experimental", written for their own children, and highlights "the serendipitous qualities of childlike language and, simultaneously, an adult sensibility observing it". Robert Dunbar looks at Flora Shaw's flawed 1878 Castle Blair and shows how it juxtaposes English and Irish perspectives and, unusually for its time, tackles contemporary political events. Carole Dunbar explores how the "wild Irish girl", as portrayed by Meade and De Horne Vaizey, promoted a primitive and negative image. The sense of Ireland in Patricia Lynch's writing (study by Margaret Burke), identity in Eilís Dillon (Ciara Ní Bhroin) and Irish histories in Gerard Whelan and Siobhán Parkinson (Padraic Whyte) are given detailed attention. Jane O'Hanlon examines whether fantasy is a gendered genre in Tolkien, Le Guin and Pullman. Kimberley Reynolds is concerned, and convincingly illustrates, that youth fiction is "overly preoccupied with reflecting and appealing to negative aspects of adolescence". Howard Hollands and Victoria de Rijke find that picture books by Max Velthuijs contain both motifs and motives and the final essay, by Sandra L. Beckett, looks at how picture books by artists Bruno Munari, Warja Lavater and Katsumi Komagata are also profoundly aesthetic (and expensive) experiences.
But word count is against me. What this book does so magnificently is to create a diverse and dynamic symposium. In her introduction, Shine Thompson brilliantly signposts how the collection "interrogates the relationship between aspects of Irish studies and their British and global contexts". Clearly, the conference itself was an exciting and important one. This volume brings that conference alive and shines a bright light on reading, writing and evaluating children's literature.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, DublinNiall MacMonagle
Reading in the Light: Studies in Children's Literature 1500-2000 Edited by Celia Keenan and Mary Shine Thompson Four Courts Press, 181pp. NPG