BULETIN ŞTIINŢIFIC, FASCICULA FILOLOGIE, SERIA A, VOL.

XXVI, 2017

RECENT HISTORICAL METADISCOURSES ON

CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

Adrian OŢOIU
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
Faculty of Letters
North University Centre of Baia Mare

Abstract
Starting from the reality of “grand” literary histories’ tending to ignore (or even minimize)
the importance of children’s and young adult literature, we survey here several recent
evolutions of the critical histories of this non-canonic literary segment, which might suggest
ways in which it is appropriating approaches and research methods hitherto confined to
mainstream literature. All this convergence may further suggest that a discrete revaluation
of “kidlit” within the Western canon might be well under way.

Keywords: children’s literature, young adult literature, fairy tales, revaluation, literary
history, metadiscourse, canon

Children’s and Young Adult Literature has long been relegated to

the footnotes of “grand” literary history. It used to hold, as Izabelle Nières
has shown, a marginal position in all major literatures (49). In other words,
until recently, it was seldom considered part of the literary canon.
This is visible in the paucity of references to the authors of
children’s literature in major reference books on English literature.
This situation is worse in the case of those authors who only wrote
children’s fiction (I would call them “full-time” children’s fiction authors).
Such authors are often simply left out from such encyclopedias, that happen
to be exceedingly generous to minor or obscure authors, as long as they did
not write for children. Thus in the 1147-page Oxford Companion to English
Literature (1992), there is no reference to Enyd Blyton, the enormously
popular author of children’s mystery, whose books sold in 600 million
copies and were translated in 90 languages worldwide. Nor do any of the
authors of the Pullein-Thompson “dynasty” get a mention of their massive
output of 176 horse- and pony books that changed several generations of

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children’s perception of animals. And this is not even a question of such

authors’ alleged lack of sophistication and modernity; take the case of the
author of the sophisticated and ambiguous Mary Poppins series, that still
elicits provocative critical insights (such as Giorgia Grilli’s recent book that
identifies an intricated web of symbols in the series and sees Mary Poppins
as a shaman and a provocateur); unfortunately, Mary Poppins author L.P.
Travers too is ommitted from The Oxford Companion.
And these are not historical omissions. Major post-war authors are
jarringly absent: there is no entry on one of the most beloved kidlit authors
ever, Roald Dahl, while J.R.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings gets a meagre
13 lines of text, nearly half of the entry on obscure politician-cum-
philologist John Thorne Tooke. Equally absent are celebrated contemporary
authors, from fantasy author Phillip Pullman (the author of His Dark
Materials), to world-famous author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling.
On the other hand, the ”part-time” children’s writers manage to
penetrate literary histories based primarily on anything they wrote that is not
children’s literature. Thus, while C.S. Lewis’s right to fame derives almost
entirely from his Narnia cycle, the Oxford Companion grants this cycle less
than three lines of text in his 22-line entry.
The more recent Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature
in English (2004) does more justice to children’s and young adult literature.
It gives decent presentations to mainstream authors’ inroads into the field
(such as Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Tales or Salman Rushdie’s Haroun
and the Sea of Stories). It includes Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, the
creator of Peter Pan J.M. Barrie, and even Enid Bagnold (the author of the
equine bestseller National Velvet), as well as Robert Heinlein and Penelope
Lively. However, disproportions persist: the entry on C.S. Lewis has 50
lines, of which just 7 are about his Narnia cycle; only half of the entry on
J.R.R. Tolkien is about his Middle-earth novels. And there are no entries on
concepts, typologies or theoretical approaches related to children’s
literature.
In order to find a historical and theoretical of this literature, we have
to turn away from “generalist” reference books to books that focus on fairy
tales, fantastic literature, or science fiction.

1. Reference works: kidlit encyclopedias

Some of such works encompass only a certain sector of children’s
literature. The two-volume Dictionary of British Fairy Tales in the English
Language (1970) is actually a mere anthology ordered loosely on the Aarne-
Thompson typology. The fairy tale encyclopedia edited by the reputed Jack
Zipes, under the title The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, (subtitled The
Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern, 2000) manifests in
exchange some distrust in the folklorists’ and structuralists’ typologies

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(Propp has to be regarded with caution, says Zipes, as the only common
ground in fairy tales is actually transformation) while he privileges the
literary fairy tale. The entries refer to folklorists, collectors, and historians
of the fairy tales, to authors of literary fairy talers, and hermeneuts of the
genre. The more synthetic entries trace the historical landmarks of fairy tale
motifs and themes (the motifs of Bluebeard or Cindrerella, that of the false
bride), follow the processing of the fairy tale in other media (ballet, opera,
TV, Victorian painting), reveal its cross-pollinating with other genres
(science fiction, the gothic tale), showcase the various critical approaches to
the fairy tale (historicist, feminist, psychoanalytic), or cover – in hors-texte
insets - the genre’s large geographical areas (the fairy tale in Canada and
North America, in Germany or Spain).
The three volumes of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and
Fairy Tales, edited by Donald Haase, contains 670 entires, based on both
the morphological and the historical criterion. Thus the section on “The
French Fairy Tale” consists of several subsections of the history of the
literary fairy tale in France, from chansons de geste to “les salonières” such
as Madame d’Aulnoy or Lhéritier, and from the baroque erotic tales of the
eighteenth century to Nerval’s fantastic tales or to Maeterlinck’s symbolist
plays, and then into the twentieth century to Contes à l’envers by Philippe
Dumas or the sombre Le roi des aulnes by Michel Tournier. Compared to
Zipes’ encyclopedia, the Greenwood Encyclopedia contains fewer entries on
authors and collectors, but reaches more remote areas (the tales of the
Pacific, or those of South-East Asia), includes further analytical terms (such
as transformation, transgression, trickster), and presents concepts that are
of interest for the recent evolutions of the fairy tale (parody, metafiction,
performance, postmodernism, utopia).
The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by
Victor Watson, sets off from a fairly loose criterion: that of gathering data
about the whole book-related art production (including illustrations, comics
or TV series) that has had a significant impact on juvenile audiences. Its
structuring is that of conventional encyclopedia, with alphabetically listed
entries, among which there are numerous obscure authors or long-forgotten
illustrators, but also more comprehensive entries on the genres of children’s
literature. The latter are conceived as brief histories of a partiocular genre
with its geographical subdivisions. Thus, under “Adventure literature” we
have a history of the genre in Great Britain, from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe and the subsequent proliferation of “robinsonades” to the recent
Invaders by John Rowe Townsend; this is followed by the North-American
history of the genre, derived from John Beadle’s dime novels; then the
Australian history of adventure, initiated by Mary Grant Bruce’s series
Billabong of 1910-1914. The historical criterion is also at work in the
entries on the various ethnic traditions (African-American literature or

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Hispanic literature) or in those on more complementary aspects, such as the

evolution of book illustration.
With its 900 pages, Peter Hunt’s massive International Companion
of Children’s Literature has been conceived ambitiously not as a list of
auhtors and works, but rather as an open structure, that just sketches the
definition of children’s or YA literature, reviews critical approches to it
(from historicist criticism to reader response criticism, from
psychoanalitical to feminist critique), inventories the main kidlit genres
(from faiory tales to penny dreadfuls, the pulp fiction equivalent in YA
literature, or from poney books to teenage metafictions or environment-
minded non-fictions), presents the social and cultural context of book
production (with captivating stopovers on censorship and translation
policy), and discusses the practical implications of children’s books (from
literacy to bibliotherapy). About a third of the book’s economy is occupied
by the national profiles of children’s literature (hence the international
credentials of this encyclopedia), ranging from Scotland to China and from
Turkey to Canada, within which the presentation runs in a historicist
chronological manner, with a clear preference for the literatures in English
(thus, as a result, Romania has a meagre 11-line article, of which 7 are about
The Peles Tales by Carmen Sylva).

2. Theme-driven partial histories

Some of the most relevant historical metadiscourses on children’s
literature are theme-based narratives that do not claim to exhaust their
subject but rather to shed a new light on old (and often anchylosed)
conventions. The leading spirit behind such discourses seems to be
revisionism.
More often than not, such rewritings are based on surprising new
historiographic data that may alter our perception of whole traditions or
literary paradigms.
This is the case of Ruth Bottigheimer’s Fairy Tales, A New History.
In this revolutionary book, Bottigheimer unfolds the history of the great
would-be fairy tale collectors à rebours, in the reverse. She starts from the
Brothers Grimm’s claims, which have gone unchecked for years, and which
now, based on new factual evidence, are being dispelled one by one. Their
claim that the fairy tales they had collected were reconted by illiterate
peasants from all over Germany turns out to be false; as does their claim
that the fairy tales had had an exclussively oral circulation or that originate
from time immemorial, from humanity’s childhood. As it has turned out,
their informants were mainly literate bourgeois from a limited region of
Germany (Hessen), and the fairy tales’ circulation was not so much oral but
mainly bookish, via those chapbooks brought from France during the
Napoleonian occupation. After debunking the Brothers Grimm myth as

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geared by romantic nationalism, Bottigheimer uncovers the deeper

implication for the genre: these classic fairy tales were not raw
transcriptions from an unadulterated oral traditions, but stylisations and
intertextual rewritings of already existing texts, that lay within the reach of
oral storytellers. And, by going upstream into the history of fairy tale
editions, Bottigheimer discovers that the pattern repeats itself in Charles
Perrault’s work, in that of the salonières, and further back in Giambatista
Basile and Giovan Francesco Strapparola. Each of these tapped not just into
some pure folk source, but also into a writerly textual tradition, that had
crossed many borders, from sixteenth-century Venice, to mid-seventeeenth-
century Naples, and from there to late seventeenth-century France and then
to Romantic-era Germany. Fairy tales, as we know them, were not collected
in the rigorous manner of today’s ethnographers, but were reshaped
according to the tastes and ideologies of the period (resulting in Baroque
stylisation in Basile, proto-feminist discourse in d’Aulnoy et comp., tool for
children’s socialization in Perrault, nationalist propaganda and then
children’s entertainment in the Grimms). Thus the surprising conclusion:
fairy tales, as we know them, have always been more literary than folk
productions.
Other books expand such histories outside the Europeans’ comfort
zone. Such is the case of a recent book signed by Marina Warner, Stranger
Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011). With the passion of
a true orientalist, Warner surveys the rich tradition of fantastic narratives of
the Orient. In her Wunderkammer of knowledge converge the many streams
of storytelling that flowed into the Arabian Nights and the scores of
rewritings produced ever since Antoine Galland had started the craze for
Oriental tales in 1704. Both an anthology of essential Orient-inspired tales
and a cultural history, Warner’s magnificently written book weaves a
complex tapestry of influences and echoes, while making us aware of the
irreductible intricacies of the real Orient versus the imagined one.
A significant part of Jack Zipes’ book Fairy Tales and the Art of
Subversion (2006) is a historical excursion, starting from from the remote
sources of the fairy tale to its contemporary metefictional avatars, from
Straparola and Basile to Walt Disney’s cinematic retellings (and
adulterations). The other part of the book, is an investigation into the
ideological and subversive nature of most fairy tales. Zipes is interested in
“the fairy tale discourse as a dynamic part of the historical civilizing
process”, while “the symbolic act of writing a fairy tale or producing a fairy
tale as play or film is problematized by the asking of questions that link the
fairy tale to society and our political unconscious.” (10)
On the one hand, subversion and utopia – two positive features in
Zipes’ view – are everywhere to be seen in fairy tales. Indeed, fairy tales use
subversion to question society’s norms and values. Historically fairy tales

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proved to be vents to release pressure within societies, by imagining

subversive rise stories of Cinderella or social underdogs (like Puss-in-Boots’
master a.k.a. Constantino or Gagliuso) acquiring wealth and rank, whether
through magic or cunning. And indeed, fairy tales’ happy endings are often
utopian corrections of unbearable and injust realities. The perfect social
justice projected by such endings represent imagined utopian solutions to
the unsolvable social problems of the day.
But on the other hand, when it comes to children, fairy tales often
prove to be surprisingly reactionary. Since children are regarded as
incompletely socialized (and disciplined) individuals, then “fairy tales
operate ideologically to indoctrinate children so that they will conform to
dominant social standards that are notnecessarily established in their
behalf.” (34)
Zipes’ analyses become outstandigly poignant when he deals with
the later authors of literary fairy tales. George MacDonald’s spiritual tales
of mystical adventures (such as The Light Princess or The Day Boy and the
Night Girl foreground a new type of pedagogy (which is not unlike’
Rousseau’s), that is, a free-styled, unstructured learning through
(self)discovery, a sort of maieutics that runs against the fossilized forms of
education; attaining perfection is not a one-man adventure, but the joint
effort of a girl and a boy (who has to unlearn “the arrogance of all male
creatures”, 116); individuals can be “civilized” in a natural way, on
condition that they “come to revere the totality of nature by developing a
receptivity to what they fear most” (116). While optimist about the
individual’s odds to attain perfection, MacDonald – Zipes notes – remains
deeply pessimistic about whether the society as a whole may attain such
“civilization;” this attitude is obvious in the sad end of his tale The Princess
and Curdie, where the next kingdom’s generation quickly forgets the moral
lesson of its saviour and eventually flounders into philistinism and collapses
in total self-annihilation.
Equally captivating are Jack Zipes’ re-readings of Oscar Wilde’s
tales, which he sees as turning the back on the author’s earlier aestheticism,
in order to embrace his own type of humanist socialism, the one does not
crush “true Individualism”, as Marxism did. Thus, while The Happy Prince
is indeed about Christlike sacrifice, it is also about the fact that this sacrifice
does not alter at all “the fabric of the society” and that such individual
actions “are not enough to put an end to poverty, injustice and exploitation.”
(123) Conversely, another tale, The Selfish Giant, emphasizes the need for
humane compassion, without which the rebuilding of society will never be
possible.

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3. New Histories Re-embedding Children’s Literature in its contexts

One of the most compelling developments of kidlit histories is one
that sees literary historians struggling to re-insert children’s literature back
into its original social, economic and ideological contexts, and to follow its
progress throughout the historically changing langscapes of society’s image
of the child, from the merely utilitarian to the romantic, from the spiritualist
to the environmentalist.
A captivating feminist spin on the history of the fairy tales is Marina
Warner’s book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their
Tellers (1995), which is a social history of the tradition of oral storytelling,
that revaluates the role played by women – and their often subversive and
anti-patriachal ideas – in the process of fairy tale transmission. Avoiding the
popular archetypal approach to fairy tales, Warner favours the historical-
geographical method, and thus she firmly retraces the tales’ social and
cultural contexts (where poverty, incest, as well as the incidence of orphans,
step mothers and even cannibalism were grim realities of daily life rather
than metaphors).
Joseph Zornado’s Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology and the
Story of Childhood (2001) starts, rather surprisingly, from the Columbine
school massacre which he interprets as “expressions of violence as a
symptom of an adult culture long gone blind to the child and the child’s
most basic biological and emotional needs.” (xiv) His book, which is by no
means a systematic literary history, becomes instead a narrative of the long
history of this blindness. This is a history of the numerous instances when
literature was used to as furthering “child-rearing pedagogies that celebrated
adult power and the child’s obedience” (38) in the Victorian era (an attitude
later denounced by Freud as part of “adult hysteria”), that regarded the
Child as a savage Other, in ways that are consistent with the rhetoric of
conquest of British colonialism (cf. 97). Or as part of the Calvinist-inspired
black “pedagogies bent on the domination and the subjugation of the child”
in the Grimms (91), which were later to turn their über-popular “household
tales” into “something useful for the forging of Hitler’s ’Teutonic Order’.”
(96). Zornado’s chapter on Walt Disney shows to what extent his father’s
violent child-rearing techniques later led to the “ideological transposition”
manifest both in his animated movies and in his controlling patriarchal
attitudes to his creative staff, as well as in his theme parks that commodify
the childhood of “an idealized past that never existed.” (156). These
attitudes are still present nowadays, in our age of global consumerism, when
literary or cinematic narratives induce children “to reclaim lost power, to
secure an unsecure identity” and to later “become an adult blind to his or her
unconscious emotional needs.” (219)
One of the most substantial contributions to this socio-cultural
approach to kidlit is Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History

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from Aesop to Harry Potter (2008). This is a history of fifteen significant

steps in the evolution of children’s literature, each associated with a
particular genre and thoroughly connected with the ideologies of its
immediate cultural background. Thus the Aesopic fable and antique
children’s literature got centered around the desire “of making the child a
citizen,” by means of tales of power and control, also manifest in the
extratextual practices of memorizing, mastery, performance and oratory (cf.
17-18). Lerer’s reading of early American children’s literature (such as
elegies and the alphabet books) links its popularity to the way the Puritans
rejected “an old image of ’fatherland’ [in order] to embrace a new order of
rebirth and childhood,” (82) in a paradigmatic relation where “[o]bedience
to God the Father matched obedience to a paternal England.” (83) The
somewhat miscalibrated “children’s novels” of the eighteenth century (from
Sarah Trimmer to Tobias Smollett) are read in connection with the
overwhelming influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment on child agency,
and especially with John Locke’s philosophy on the child’s “yet empty
cabinet of the Mind” and his belief that sensibly tailored tales may be
“turning everyday objects into pedagogic playthings” (118) in order for the
child to both gain empirical knowledge and “attain mastery of the world”
(115).
Lerer’s approach to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books foregrounds them
against a background of (A) an early intuition of the arbitrariness of the
linguistic sign (in Carroll’s own words: “No word has a meaning
inseparably attached to it; a word means what the speaker intends by it, and
what the hearer understands by it”, qtd in Lerer 193), exploited in self-
absorbed punning and wordplay, which anticipates the “anarchic ludistry of
the Dadaists” (204); and (B) the long shadow of Darwin’s narrative of the
species’ evolution, alongside with the paleontologists’ and naturalists’
efforts to cast the natural world into meaningful typologies and hierachies
(with biologist Ernst Haeckel even claiming that “historical philology
’anticipated’ the methods of paleontology”, 190).
Edwardian children’s literature is seen by Lerer as an expression of
two societies (British and American) living “under a boyish king or
president” (Edward VII and Theodore Roosevelt, respectively) and also, in
the optimism of antebellum years, “living in the toyhood of future,”
relishing in the infancy of modern technology (the car, the Zeppelin, the
airplane, the Titanic, the cable…). Edith Nesbit’s talismanic tales, Kenneth
Grahame’s psychodramas about shy dragons, J.M. Barrie’s autonomous
runaway boys – these all fed on the the new fad for spiritualism and magic,
on the rise of psychoanalysis and on the reversed image of the Child, no
longer a creature whose stigma of the original Sin could only be cleared by
civilizing, but an intriguing stranger, a playful Angel about to fall to the
pressure of civilization.

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As for contemporary children’s literature, Lerer describes it as lying

under the sign of whatever, the word that emerged in the 1970s “to connote
indifference, skepticism, impatience, or passive acceptance of people’s
failures.” (307) In other words, the stylistic keyword for much of recent
literature is benign irony. Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet Spies reverses many of
the reader’s received ideas about “the average child,” when Harriet, a 13-
year old voyeur and a would-be writer, ends up getting bullied when her
notebooks (full of satirical observations about her class) are discovered by
her classmates. In a letter, her former nurse, Ole Golly, teaches her about the
difference between mere diary notes (committed to truth) and stories (where
“little lies… are not that bad”), and thus instructs her about the difference
between the responsibility of non-fiction and the apparent irresponsibility
(read poetic licence) of fiction. Ironically, in such instances Truth may be
better served at the price of “small lies.” One should “recognize not simply
that on occasion one must lie, but also that all stories have something of a
lie about them.” (Lerer 311). Lerer interprets Ole Golly’s advice as meaning
simply “Be ironic,” (311) that is relativize. And he goes on to describe much
of contemporary YA literature as lying under the sign of this relativizing
irony, under tolerant banter and – I would add – in the ever shifting
perspectives of the interplay between subjecthood and objecthood.
Lerer ends his study with a reminder that literature calls for the
whole attention of all of our senses, and with a warning that in our current
image-obsessed age, children may have become very much like the faces in
Japanese anime, “children with very large eyes yet little button noses,” in a
way that “recast[s] the Western iconographies of sight and smell”, which
claims a new “aesthetic of the book for a new generation of world readers.”
(331).

4. In guise of conclusions
What could these new literary histories of children’s literature
indicate? Whether partial, theme-based, socio-cultural or comprehensive,
these recent literary histories of kidlit seem to show a significant shift. A
shift that may be not without parallels with our contemporary efforts to
recast minority and difference in our society; to bring the marginal at the
centre; to empower the traditionally empowered; to give voice to the
voiceless.
This of course is a literary shift, and claiming its unflinched
parallelism to societal shifts may be said to be a sign of mechanical
determinism. Thus we should not ask “which was first” nor “which one
influenced the other.” Maybe the answer is much simpler: such coincidences
occur just because the change was in the air.
Speaking of the way in which children’s literature relates to
mainstream literature, Sonja Svenson (cf. 58-60) distinguishes three

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patterns, that correspond to three historical phases: separation, incorporation

and integration. Separation refers to the maintenance of the history
children’s literature outside the history of national literature. Whereas this
situation has tha advantage of projecting a more coherent image, it has the
disadvantage of keeping kidlit in a sort of a conceptual ghetto and of
overlooking the fruitful exchanges between mainstream literature and
children’s literature.
When national literary histories begin to reserve distinct chapters to
children’s literature we may speak of incorporation. Nowdays this seems to
be the dominant approach; such treatment may well result from the critics’
specialization, sice few historians of mainstream literature are equally
knowledgeable and qualified to outline histories of children’s literature.
Integration would be the holistic treatment that may, for instance,
bring an author’s mainstream literary output together with his books for
children, and that without any prejudice about their relative value and
importance. To date, such a treatment remains utopian wishful thinking,
since there are few critics whose competence covers both slopes of the
mountain – as Svenson can acknowledge based on her experience as a co-
author of an “integrated history” of Swedish literature.
What these new shifts in the literary histories of children’s literature
may indicate is that, at last, critics and literary historians are about to
recognize that kidlit is not a footnote small narrative stuck beneath some
mainstream great narrative. And that the expansion of the literary canon is
about to include the relegated territory of children’s books, alongside with
other sections of the so-called “genre literature” or “popular culture,” from
adventure novels to spy novels, from erotic books to science fiction, from
the sentimental novel to the thriller.
What is more, the critics’ tools for the analysis of kidlit have evolved
in a significant way. Whether we speak of time-hallowed psychoanalitical
criticism, or of the geographical-historical method, or of comparativism, of
parallels with the history of ideas, of subaltern studies (from gender studies
to postcolonial studies, from ageism to disability studies) or of material
culture studies, we can see that the critics’ hermeneutic arsenal has refined
itself considerably and is now able to draw provocative parallels and offer
meaningful insights into a province of literature that was, until recently, off
critical limits.
We can only hope that the move will eventually go both ways. We
should learn not only to see the evolution children’s literature as a mirror
reflection of the progress of mainstream literature, but also to glimpse subtle
ways in which this former minor region of literature did feed substance and
meaning into the corpus of canonic literature, thus providing it vitality and
sense.

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