A Companion to Children's Literature. Группа авторов

6 Developments in Fiction for Children

       Mary Jeanette Moran

The era between 1900 and 1970 represented a transitional period for English-language children’s literature, albeit one with a wide variety of internal developments and milestones. This period bridges nineteenth-century attempts to acknowledge, conceptualize, and respond to the desires and interests of a child audience – attempts that helped bring about the first “Golden Age” of literature for young people – and the post-1970 dramatic increase in the political, social, and critical engagement of children’s literature. Granting respect to children as an audience eventually led creators and critics within the field to realize the need for a more complex and dynamic understanding of the interactions among creator, text, and child, even as the value granted to children’s literature declined outside the field. While children’s publishing expanded and more young people gained literacy skills and access to books, the field simultaneously became increasingly separated from literature for adults, as literature for children was not considered valuable enough to be included in English departments or discussed in academic journals. In short, children’s literature assumed the status of what Peter Hunt (2001) calls “a parallel universe to the world of canonical literature” (p. 2). Associations with femininity also enabled the division of literature for young people from the almost exclusively male province of the canon and academic discourse, even as children’s family stories and spunky heroines provided a tantalizing blend of female empowerment and conservative ideology. The varied status of series books constitutes a microcosm of the presence of the field as a whole; while incredibly popular with readers, series books tended to be dismissed and denigrated by gatekeepers such as parents, librarians, and schools. Mid-century development of the “early reader” subgenre further marked off children’s literature as separate from and lesser than literature for adults.

      During this period, fantasy of various sorts continued to thrive in Britain, and British titles enjoyed corresponding popularity in the United States. In contrast, throughout the first half of the century US writers tended to produce realistic fiction, with some notable exceptions. By the 1960s, more US fantasy writers were achieving the respect and popularity of their British compatriots. However, even as both fantasy and realism continued to be popular, each genre reinforced the sequestering of children’s reading from “serious” adult literature. Fantasy could be typed as detrimental to an adult approach to the world and relegated to children’s material, while realism for young people was acceptable only if it was not too real – in other words, if the genre avoided topics thought to be grim, explicit, or diverse. In fact, all of these genres continued to be dominated by normative identity categories including those of race, gender identity, class, and sexuality, to the extent that Nancy Larrick famously wrote of the “All-White World of Children’s Books” in 1965. However, the era also saw authors of color making their own experiences more visible within children’s texts, with their efforts supported by librarians who worked to disseminate books to marginalized children.

      Writing at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, Hunt (2001) describes the progression of the field “over the last hundred years [as moving] from prescription, to description, to criticism” (p. x). Of the three approaches that Hunt mentions, prescription and description dominated the period from 1900 to 1970, both responses waxing and waning in turn and interacting in interesting ways as authority figures vacillated between dictating what children should read and simply observing what children seemed to prefer. While the great sea change to criticism did not fully take hold of the field until the 1970s, developments during the 1960s presaged this revolution, as well as increased integration of diverse identities and a greater acceptance of aesthetically and ideologically challenging material for children.

      The Shaping of a (Non-)Field

According to many standard chronologies of the history of children’s literature, the dawn of the twentieth century did not herald a significant change in terms of the texts being produced for children; 1900/1901 falls well within the period designated as the “First Golden Age” of children’s literature, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending before World War I (Townsend 1996, p. 682). Hunt (2001) provides as endpoints Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, published in 1863, and Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, which appeared in 1913. Well-known examples from the early twentieth-century years of this “Golden Age” include Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (all 1902), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). In New Zealand, popular texts included The Cradle Ship (1916) by Edith Howes, which used a narrative frame to convey knowledge about animal reproduction. The first part of the twentieth century likewise continued the development in preceding decades of greater accessibility to child-specific reading experiences for children beyond the upper classes. As Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone point out, referencing Viviana Zelizer’s 1985 Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, the “transformation of the child from performing important economic work to performing affective roles essential to a family’s emotional well-being was completed for children of the working classes only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after child labor was strictly curtailed and education mandated” (Mickenberg and Vallone 2011, p. 16). This switch from an economic to an affective role gave a wider range of children more time for both learning and leisure, thereby allowing them opportunities to be instructed and delighted by literature.

      While the new century continued many trends from the old, the 1900s also heralded the beginnings of a significant shift in societal conceptions of children’s literature, a shift that diminished the cultural clout of the field and that has influenced academic and general views of literature for young people well into the twenty-first century. During the early 1900s, children’s literature became a specialized genre that was defined by and limited to its young audience, rather than existing as a subset of a more inclusive understanding of literature in which books directed to children could potentially hold adults’ interest as well. As Jerry Griswold (1992) notes, for example, US best-seller lists during the “Golden Age” regularly included literature written for both adults and children, a phenomenon which ceased in the early 1900s. In Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003), Beverly Lyon Clark charts the rationales underlying the separation of literature for children and for adults. She argues that in working to legitimize the aesthetic value of fiction and the academic study of literature, scholars and authors created or reinforced categories of otherness in order to delineate the new territory; Clark focuses on the othered categories of economic disadvantage, femininity, and youth (which of course also intersected with each other as well as with other denigrated identities). Clark comments that “once

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