Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and

Remediating Literary History

Karin E. Westman

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter

2013, pp. 464-469 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2013.0054

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/526081

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Beyond Periodization:
Children’s Literature, Genre,
and Remediating Literary History

Karin E. Westman

Today I propose a consciousness-raising project of the kind Eric Hayot enacts

in his 2011 article “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time.” Hayot
laments the “failure of self-consciousness” (742) that afflicts academia when
we default into period-based thinking, teaching, and hiring in literary studies.
He notes that we have “few institutionally viable nonperiodizing concepts” at
work, but that one of them is children’s literature (743).1 I couldn’t agree more.
Far from continuing as the disempowered stepchild of literary history, absent
from survey courses and discussions of literary periods, children’s literature
could become an organizing principle for literary history—if we act on its
generic potential and its proclivity toward remediation.
This morning, for context, I will begin by briefly situating the term “genre”
within literary studies more generally and children’s literature in particular. I
will then, as a test case, map the genealogy of children’s literature in relationship
to modernism. Doing so will allow us to see the viability of children’s literature
for rethinking our narratives of literary history.
Granted, genre is an amorphous category whose definition is amazingly
indeterminate, shifting over time and context. Originally from the French word
genre, meaning “kind” or “type” (Murfin n. pag.), with origins in ancient Greek
classifications (Abrams 76), in current theories, the term no longer denotes
an objective, stable set of categories to which one can assign a text according
to its formal characteristics. Indeed, for contemporary theorists like Jonathan
Frow, genre is “a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the
production and interpretation of meaning” (10). Those constraints might be
formal, thematic, or material—or, mostly likely, a combination of those three
in relative proportions, according to the expectations of an audience within a

Karin E. Westman is Associate Professor and Department Head of English at Kansas

State University, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary British
literature, including children’s literature. She has published Pat Barker’s Regeneration:
A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2001), as well as essays on Virginia Woolf, Georgette
Heyer, A. S. Byatt, Pat Barker, and J. K. Rowling. Forthcoming publications include
J. K. Rowling’s Library: Harry Potter in Context (UP of Mississippi, 2014).

464 Children’s Literature

© 2013 Children’s Literature Association
Association. Quarterly
Pp. 464–469.
particular historical moment. This more recent view, developing from the work
of Tzvetan Todorov, considers genre as discourse, as a speech act. For Todorov,
“The literary genres, indeed, are nothing but such choices among discursive
possibilities, choices that a given society has made conventional” (Todorov 10).
Genre thus becomes a “set of expectations,” in the words of Paul Cobley
(232), which readers bring to the text based on past experiences and current
conditions. This rhetorical situation is precisely the one that Amy Devitt asks
us to consider in her discussion of Writing Genres (2004): “Defining genre as
a kind of text,” she explains, “becomes circular, since what we call a kind of
text depends on what we think a genre is” (7). Instead, Devitt suggests, genres
are better viewed as “shorthand terms for situations.” Michael Goldman,
theorizing genre as drama, echoes Devitt’s approach: “Clearly,” he reminds
us, “the first function of genre is that it be recognized” (8). Yet, as with Devitt,
what interests Goldman is the drama of generic recognition, this moment of
audience expectations in action. “[I]n the heat of the moment,” he explains,
“we respond to genre as if it were taxonomical, as if it were an expression of
a coordinated system of types and subtypes—as if it helped us to recognize
and place something within a border, within a map of borders” (4). However,
Goldman continues, we really “experience it as something looming or fading,
definite or disrupted, something more like an expectation or occasion,” and
“we become aware of it as a phenomenon of performance” (5). For, like a
performance, a text’s generic classification is site specific, contingent upon an
audience’s expectations and response as much as on the text’s form and con-
tent. The audiences for a text—audiences past, present, and future—establish,
maintain, or change generic expectations, which emerge from a negotiation
between convention and innovation.
Children’s literature, of course, has a particularly complex relationship to
audience, as the manifestos by Marah Gubar and Robin Bernstein remind us.
I would argue that this complexity contributes to the field’s reliance on genre
as an organizing principle. Genre structures conversations about children’s
literature, even as individual titles may elude a single genre’s grasp. Indeed,
genre is both ubiquitous and inimical to the history of children’s literature,
dominating and vexing systems of classification in terms of form, theme, audi-
ence, and material production. If, as Peter Hunt remarks, “one of the delights
of children’s literature is that it does not fit easily into any cultural or academic
category” (1), children’s literature is consequently everywhere and nowhere.
It lacks “generic purity,” in Hunt’s words, happily “subsuming and assuming
other forms” (3)—and it is either lauded or disparaged for such flexibility,
such generosity, such omnipotence. The cultural history of children’s litera-
ture circulates around this intergeneric potential, as considerations of genre
not only organize responses to individual texts but also determine questions
for the field: When did children’s literature begin? What text is worthy of an
award? Is children’s literature its own genre or only the intersection of others?
For whom is children’s literature written?

Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History 465
 Often written by adults for child and adult readers, children’s literature from
the start serves at least two audiences: even if younger readers are the intended
addressees, adults are not far away. As a result, adult writers, readers, publish-
ers, scholars, teachers, and librarians influence the production and reception
of these texts through their performance of generic expectations. Early and
mid-twentieth-century librarians, teachers, and publishers sorted books ac-
cording to the child reader’s age and reading ability, and the resulting categories
divided picture books from middle-grade readers, middle-grade readers from
chapter books (Clark; Lundin). Much scholarship on children’s literature, in
turn, revolves around categories of genre rather than chronology, as the first
Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) demonstrates: it is organized
first by genre, and then by chronology. As I’ve noted elsewhere (Westman,
“Children’s Literature”), unlike Norton’s anthologies of British or American
literature (now in their eighth and seventh editions, respectively), this first
Norton anthology of children’s literature maps its subject by genre rather than
century: nineteen genres, including “Alphabets,” “Chapbooks,” “Primers and
Readers,” “Fairy Tales,” “Animal Fables,” “Classical Myths,” “Legends,” “Religion:
Judeo-Christian Stories,” “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” “Picture Books,” “Com-
ics,” “Verse,” “Plays,” “Books of Instruction,” “Life Writing,” “Adventure Stories,”
“School Stories,” and “Domestic Fiction.” History is hardly forgotten, as the
editorial apparatus demonstrates, but the organizing principle is genre—that
is, considerations of form, content, and audience—rather than the passage of
time or literary history.
Given this intellectual framework, shaped as it is by genre, it can be difficult
to find children’s literature within the broader landscape of literary history.
However, the generic performance of children’s literature—its multiplicity of
generic performances with various audiences—is, in fact, the field’s secret tool.
Thanks to genre’s negotiation between convention and innovation, between
form and audience, between style and historical specificity, children’s litera-
ture writes large the ability of genre to ground a text in the initial moments
of historical production, the moments of re-production, and the moments of
reception. Through generic remediation, children’s literature—more than other
literatures—eludes conventions of periodization. As a result, by attending to
genre, the very category which has relegated children’s literature beyond the
canonical pale, scholars of children’s literature can revise existing narratives of
literary history.2 The narratives of modernism will be our test case.
Children’s literature finds uneasy footholds in current narratives of modern-
ism—both modernism as a literary movement and modernism as a literary
period. As Kimberley Reynolds notes in her entry on “Modernism” for Key-
words for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul (2011), “the
relationship between children’s literature and modernism is convoluted and
contradictory,” given modernism’s indebtedness to the idea of the child and early
play of language, on the one hand, and, on the other, the (mis)perception that
modernism’s formal play and complex themes could not find a home in texts

466 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

for children (151–54). As a result, until recent efforts by scholars of modern-
ism and (more frequently) scholars of children’s literature, Juliet Dusinberre’s
Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art (1987,
1999) has been the most widely known exception that helped prove the rule:
that there’s about one scholarly book’s worth of overlap between children’s
literature and modernism.
The “new modernisms” model of periodization, as codified by Doug Mao
and Rebecca Walkowitz in PMLA in 2008, has provided children’s literature
with a bit more critical purchase. Here, children’s literature benefits primarily
from the “vertical” expansion of modernism’s defining boundaries: “low” texts
for children, produced for a mass audience on a range of themes, are resitu-
ated within or help reconfigure a modernist frame. However, the tyranny of
periodization still reigns.
What if, by contrast, we focus on the performance of genre? What if we
focus on genre’s dual attention of form and audience, and, in turn, the rela-
tionship between text and audience, between politics and text? For, by virtue
of its name, children’s literature presumes that dual address of adult and child
reader, prompting its readers (and its scholars) to ask, “For whom is this text
written? For whom and by whom is this text read? And for what purpose for
its audience(s)?” Such questions speak to the intersection of the vertical and
the temporal, as one generation reads to and writes for another—reads to and
writes across, for instance, the canonical half-century of modernism, as well as
any number of other conventional markers of literary periodization.
I’ll offer one example, by way of conclusion, though I’m sure we can locate
many during our discussion: Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, illus-
trated by Clement Hurd. Existing narratives of modernism have not typically
made room for this 1947 text, even as its initial date of publication and recep-
tion, as well as its aesthetics, could place it within traditional and new modernist
narratives of literary history. Yet Goodnight Moon, perhaps more easily, more
widely, and more obviously than other texts categorized as “modernist,” repeat-
edly and frequently exceeds its initial generic performance of “picture book.”
It is a “classic children’s book,” which means we must consider moments of its
re-production and its renewed reception within a number of historically specific
generic performances, from that 1947 date of publication on through to today.
Indeed, the remediation of Goodnight Moon—its re-presentation within other
media (Bolter and Grusin 45), such as Goodnight Bush (2008) and Goodnight
iPad (2011), and its re-presentation for other audiences, as grown children
read the familiar book to their own children and grandchildren—challenges
periodization as a defining method of literary history. To which “period” does
Goodnight Moon belong, if it exists in many? The answer does not lie with the
ahistorical or the synchronic, but resides instead with multiple and varied
instances of generic performance across established periods.
To resolve the “inadequacy of the period,” in Hayot’s words (740), and to
recognize the systemic contribution of children’s literature to literary history,

Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History 467
we should champion the generic performance and remediation of children’s
literature. We will then gain much-needed sightlines through the literary
landscapes of the past, present, and future.

Notes
My thanks to Lissa Paul and Phil Nel for inviting me to participate on their “Keywords
for Children’s Literature” panel at MLA 2012; and to Andrew Goldstone for inviting
me to join his round-table “Beyond Modernist Periodization: Alternatives to the
Canonical Half-Century” at the 14th Annual Modernist Studies Association in 2012,
where I presented earlier versions of this manifesto and benefited from the resulting
conversations.
1. Hayot’s On Literary Worlds (2012) develops these claims more fully, while still retaining
his reference to children’s literature (152).
2. My claim here about the generic potential of children’s literature to prompt
institutional change echoes the third claim made by Robin Bernstein in her manifesto:
how children’s literature has the potential to become “central to interdisciplinary fields.”
Sara Schwebel further extends this potential beyond institutional walls in her call to
“take children’s literature to the public.”

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Beyond Periodization: Children’s Literature, Genre, and Remediating Literary History 469