Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2010), "Children's Literature: A Reader's History, from Aesop to Harry Potter", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 6, pp. 469-471. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011053977

The extensive critical literature about children's books is evidence that it now sits confidently in the wider framework of social history and literary criticism. Some incisive, as well as descriptive, work has been done to suggest that we understand children's reading best when we bring together practical (e.g. education and library practitioner) and theoretical/academic (e.g. sociology, cognition, cultural theory and narrative) approaches. There is still a need for plain bibliographic guidance, for a strong emphasis on buying and providing the right stuff, for catering for diversity and disability, and for taking on board internet and computer game options for children and young people. The literature about the literature, then, is varied and professionals in the area are rightly eclectic.

Seth Lerer comes at things from an academic viewpoint and his study of children's literature is more for the academic reader than for the busy practitioner. This is so, not only because there is a lot of history here, but also because Lerer explores some interesting theoretical perspectives – like ways in which an encounter with narrative narrativizes the experience of young readers – and tries to tease out some meta‐critical issues (like how and if postmodern irony and the ability young readers have, they think, to spot bullshit is changing children's reading). I shall suggest that, promising though these things are, Lerer (who is a Literature Professor at Stanford University and author of books on language and Chaucer) provides some useful information and insights even though his arguments don't always convince, his evidence is idiosyncratic, and his grip on some of his stated aims is rather limp. That said, it is an interesting and cannily priced book and will (and should) find its way into many collections serving courses on children's literature and aspects of relevant professional practice.

Let's start with the strengths of the book and move on, I hope not condescendingly, to the weaknesses. The first eight (of the 15) chapters take a broadly historical approach and, emerging from Lerer's own interest in and knowledge of medieval literature and language, are well‐documented and sure‐footed. Harvey Darton, Alderson, Thwaite, and others have written about such things as grammars and books of courtesy and fables before, but, even so, Lerer does a useful job with them. He discusses how Homer was studied for both style and content, how fables (like those of Aesop) were used as ways to learn language and to inculcate advice about relationships and morality, how medieval literature provides a rich social backdrop on how childhood itself was perceived and represented, what the Puritans did (Bunyan, Isaac Watts, Janeway and others) and how Locke's ideas about education shaped literature for children (notably Rousseau and Newbery).

These are familiar markers in the field and we should expect to find them in any systematic study of the history of children's books. And so, looking for something distinctive in the book, we turn to what Lerer says he is trying to do – avoid the mere form approach in such critical studies (fairy tales, books for girls, and so forth), and he successfully avoids avoiding this trap – and highlight what he calls a reader approach. This is where the book shifts from being sure‐footed to being a lot less sure of itself. Pragmatically, the forms that emerge in the book (not only under the chronological framework of the earlier chapters but also later in chapters like those on fairy tales and female fiction) are useful and probably unavoidable. Readers can dip into them and draw on a useful index and generous notes to deepen their knowledge. Lerer does identify a good range of sources and a few of these are cited in the references to this review for you to follow up for yourself.

Form approach aside, however, there is then this reader approach. Lerer defines this early on as one that foregrounds the impact literature has on the reader, not just what authors intend, and what is read and heard by children and not just what is written for them (Introduction). Children's books, historically, aimed to teach and entertain, and shaped lives and taste. We cannot properly understand children's reading without understanding childhood itself, and the social and cultural context of childhood.

Two strands emerge from this position. One is that historical one – that a description of the classical and medieval and Puritan and Lockean context sufficiently addresses this in and for the past, extending up to our critical understanding today of even later children's reading such as the imperialist stories of Henty. Lerer waylays himself and his reader by reminding us he is a medievalist, and his analysis of fairy tales (from Grimm to Harry Potter) wanders off implausibly into philology. Rather more radical chapters, like one on Kingsley to Seuss, explore how Darwinian ideas trace through the books (e.g. Just So reflects evolution, Seuss is fantasy with a social purpose), and like another on nonsense, explore where taboo boundaries seem to appear. Intellectually interesting but you wonder whether it has been superimposed on the literature and you wonder more where and what the reader is here.

The other strand is more fertile: that story or narrative (starting in fable, for the Aesopic is where Lerer believes a lot of it started) not only represents reality but gives us ways of controlling it: by that token, young readers are shaped by what they read and by the very ways in which narrative works. Books are not only critical for an inner life, not only useful for teaching social decorum and moral virtue (think of The Wizard of Oz, Anne of Green Gables, and Little Women), but novelize and narrativize the readers: identity is role, story gives readers an idea of what it is like to be a boy or a girl (above all in island and empire books in the nineteenth century, he says). With postmodern irony, the “whatever” world where everything said is a remark, we distrust narrative and find sincerity boring, the irony about such irony is that narrative (stories read and that narrative we provide for ourselves in living) is still central to identity and self‐consciousness.

I have extended Lerer's argument here until, I must admit, I find it convincing enough to believe in it. He does not: the idea he presents of the reader is shadowy, not worked out in any reader‐response or cognitive or even cultural theoretic sense. This makes the arguments in the book frustrating – academic readers will want things more intellectually worked out while practitioners will put the book aside at what seems to be pretentious (because it fails to convince – sad because it should!). Self‐indulgence seeps in when Lerer's evidence, if that's what it is, for the reader is based on autobiographical anecdote (his son's preferences in chapter 15, his own favourite fairy tale in chapter 10, how he liked Make Way for Ducklings! in chapter 13, and so forth).

Beyond both these strands is a tendency towards truisms – books are places of absorption, children's books deal with emotions, there are treasures on the bookshelf – and far too little rigour in selection (chapter 13 on prize‐winners and libraries is fragmentary, awkward and superfluous), and the epilogue introduces new themes and provides nothing like a conclusion to the overall argument that is very much needed. Yet there is more than a little there if we shuffle the cards he gives us: a chapter on the Edwardian age (Nesbit, Burnett, Grahame, Potter) contrasts well with a later one on today's ironic age (Blume, Block, Harriet the Spy), and this could and should have provided a framework for probably the most promising chapter (14) on style and the child.

Lerer contends that Stuart Little and The Cat in the Hat are two books that successfully address the problematic of identity and role in children's reading, and that it is here, if anywhere, that we find the start of an answer to what is going on with readers when they read. By this point he needs to convince that there is, in such books, a convergence of narrative and moral experience, where readers realise that role is the narrativised modality of identity. This subtle and complex idea peeps through, convinces with Stuart Little, is implausible with Seuss. But no attempt is made to gather in the evidence from the rest of the book as proof for this critical insight, an insight which itself has been only partly revealed and explored. In conclusion, a critical study which opens up some new ideas, provides some helpful information, shows wide reading, wins some of the games but fails to win the set. Some line illustrations are provided but are merely decorative.