The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  But in order to use contemporary technologies to aid in the dissemination of poetry, it takes poets who are adept at performance, while also remaining vigilant in detecting the uses and misuses of the media with which they hope to interact. Television shows such as Sesame Street, or children’s singers like Raffi, present songs and nursery rhymes in ways that are very appealing. The internet has potential for presenting poetry in attractive formats, though it does not seem to have begun to fulfil that potential. And no matter how useful various technologies may be, they are no substitute for the embodied experience that characterises the young child’s first encounter with poetry. Children can only have a valuable ‘inter-media-ated’ experience if they are media literate, and media literacy can only be learned if there is a foundation of meaningful literacy to build on. Poems that challenge beyond their surface appeal, that will inhabit children and encourage them to inhabit language, are indispensable, if only we can see and hear them.

  Notes

  1. Barbara Z. Kiefer, with Susan Helper and Janet Hickman, Charlotte Huck’s Children’s Literature, 9th edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), p. 409.

  2. Glenna Sloan, ‘But Is It Poetry?’ Children’s Literature in Education, 32 (2001), 45–56 (p. 56).

  3. Sylvia Vardell, Poetry Aloud Here! Sharing Poetry with Children in the Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006), p. 75.

  4. John Mole, ‘Tune, Argument, Colour, Truth’, Signal, 98 (2002), 79–90 (p. 85).

  5. Randall Jarrell, The Bat-Poet (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 6.

  6. Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in Writing/Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p. 278.

  7. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996), pp. 166–7.

  8. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, pp. 9–10.

  9. Kornei Chukovsky, From Two to Five, trans. Miriam Morton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 7 and 154.

  10. Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005), pp. 187 and 189.

  11. Joseph Thomas Jr, Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007), p. 114.

  12. ‘Poetry Foundation to Name First Children’s Poet Laureate’, 18 September 2006, on-line at www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/release_091806.html (accessed 20 February 2008).

  13. Jack Prelutsky, ‘Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face’, Poetry Foundation Archive, on-line at www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177537 (accessed 20 February 2008).

  14. Karen Glenn, ‘Never Poke Your Uncle with a Fork’, Poetry Foundation Online Journal, on-line at www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=178694 (accessed 20 February 2008).

  15. Edward Lear, Nonsense Books: More Nonsense Pictures (Boston: Little Brown, 1904), p. 41.

  16. Gelett Burgess, Goops and How to Be Them (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1900), unpaginated.

  17. Isaac Watts, Divine and Moral Songs, attempted in easy language for the use of children, ed. J. H. Pafford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 149.

  18. Watts, Divine Songs, p. 150.

  19. Ann and Jane Taylor, Rhymes for the Nursery (1806; Philadelphia: George Appleton, 1849), p. 51.

  20. William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 256.

  21. Robert Louis Stevenson: Collected Poems, ed. Janet Adam Smith (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), p. 411.

  22. Rudyard Kipling, The Muse Among the Motors (1919), on-line at whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/musemotors/childsgarden.html (accessed 20 February 2008).

  23. Robert Louis Stevenson: Collected Poems, p. 370.

  24. Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969), p. 53. Copyright renewed 1997 by Mary von S. Jarrell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  25. Lara Saguisag, ‘Performance, Politics and Poetry for Children: Interviews with Michael Rosen and Benjamin Zephaniah’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 32 (2007), 3–28 (p. 11).

  6 Retelling stories across time and cultures

  John Stephens

  Throughout the world, literature for children originates with retelling and adapting the familiar stories of a culture – folktales, legends and stories about historical and fictional individuals memorialised for their heroism or holiness, adventurousness or mischief. When English-language children’s literature emerged as a visible entity from the seventeenth century, it followed this route, with the publication of various fairy (or folk) tale collections and religious texts. Subsequently, the principal domains of retold stories in children’s literature expanded to include myths and mythologies; medieval and quasi-medieval romance, especially tales of King Arthur’s knights; stories about legendary heroes such as Robin Hood; oriental tales, usually linked with The Arabian Nights; and modern classics, from Shakespeare to Kenneth Grahame and L. Frank Baum.

  A story retold for children serves important literary and social functions, inducting its audience into the social, ethical and aesthetic values of the producing culture. Retellings are thus marked by a strong sense that there is a distinct canon within any of the domains. The tendency for children’s literature to evolve as both separate and specialised is very pertinent here: its dominant concerns, especially social issues and personal maturation, make retellings for children a special area, which cannot be simply covered by implication in studies which do not explicitly discuss writing for children. Only a couple of the principal domains of retellings can boast a study dedicated to this writing, however.1 Most research has focused on retellings for adults and on fairy tales, which are implicitly treated as a special case, perhaps because feminist criticism has focused on them rather than on other kinds of retelling.

  To be a retelling, a text must of course exist in relationship to some kind of source, or ‘pre-text’, although this is only sometimes identifiable as a specific work, and stories may lose or accrete elements as they are refashioned over time. A new retelling may therefore include elements and motifs from multiple stages of a text’s tradition, may draw more widely on the genre with which a text is associated, or shape the text in the light of contemporary reinterpretations. Retellings of old tales are thus shaped by interaction amongst three elements: first, the already-known story, in whatever versions are circulating at the time of production, together with other stories of similar type or including similar motifs; second, the current social preoccupations and values (that is, metanarratives, or the larger cultural accounts which order and explain individual narratives) which constitute its top-down framing and ideology (and these may be mediated by current interpretations of the known story); and third, the textual forms through which the story is expressed (narrative modes, genres and so on).

  A substantial change to a story can quite quickly become naturalised. An example is the introduction of a Saracen/Muslim character as one of Robin Hood’s companions in the highly influential British TV series Robin of Sherwood (1984–6): the character subsequently seems to have become part of the story’s fabric, at least in film and television retellings. An obvious precedent is the evolution of the figure of Maid Marian, especially over the past two centuries, from shadowy companion to feminist heroine. A second example, also rapidly developing in the late twentieth century, is the mutation of the story of Aladdin under the influence of the Western folktale motif whereby someone is granted three wishes. Introduced to the story in the early 1980s and made pivotal in the Disney film of 1992, the motif, and the metanarrative of social responsibility and altruism which lies behind it, is now the only version of the story known to many people. Such a change can have a deep impact on what a story is generally thought to signify.

  Few retellings are simple replications, even when they appear to reproduce the story and narrative point of view of th
e source. In such cases, the purpose is generally cultural reproduction, in the sense of transmitting desired knowledge about society and the self, modes of learning and forms of authority. Myths, legends and folktales function as stories with tangible links to a larger system or pattern of narratives, and this relational network guarantees that any specific story has a significance over and above mere story outcome: its meaning is determined by its relationship to a presumed whole. In other words, any particular example is always already interpretable as a moral fable or allegory whose significance is shaped by a powerful, sometimes indefinable, emotional supplement and by its articulation within culture. Already existing stories thus offer children privileged patterns of thinking, believing and behaving which explain or suggest ways in which the self might relate to the surrounding world.

  Retellings may therefore have several kinds of significance, in addition to transmitting literary heritage, but three are of particular importance. First, a traditional story is invested with value as story itself. That is, as a narrative which audiences may recognise as similar to other such narratives because it is patterned by archetypal situations and characterisations, a story transmits its latent value as a particular working-out of perennial human desires and destinies. The structural pattern itself signifies without needing to be interpreted, because the meaning lies in the repeatability and the deeply laid similarity amongst otherwise apparently diverse stories. All traditional stories are liable to be subjected to such a story-only focus, but the principle also underlies numerous abridged retellings of substantial pre-texts. Well-known fairy tales, for example, may be reduced to a bare outline in mass-market picture books in which texts and illustrations merely reproduce the same abbreviated information. More subtle abridgments, such as Lucy Meredith’s 1988 retelling of the Grimms’ Dornröschen, may narrow the possibilities of reader response by eliminating material extraneous to story but rich in implication. Meredith renders the moment at which the princess pricks her finger as follows:

  She climbed the stairs and came to a little door with a golden key in the lock.

  She turned the key, the door flew open, and she saw a tiny room and an old woman spinning flax. The old woman welcomed her and showed her how to spin. But she hardly touched the spindle when she pricked herself and at once fell down in a deep sleep.2

  This narration has focused on the moment at which the curse is fulfilled and the implication that the old woman is part of a trap. Meredith accentuates the latter possibility by substituting an inviting golden key for the rusty key (ein verrosteter Schlüssel) of the Grimms’ pre-text. A strong influence on interpretation of this moment in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ retellings has been Disney’s 1959 identification of the old woman with the fairy who cast the spell, and readers may readily instantiate this connection. The princess’s curiosity is pivotal to the curse in Grimm, but Meredith’s abridgment minimises this by omitting the question-and-answer exchange between princess and old woman which expresses that curiosity. Even a careful and competent abridgment is thus apt to limit the narrative, and an examination of the process will call into question the notion that story has latent value.

  The second significance attributed to retellings lies in an assumption that traditional stories embody timeless and universal significances. Such an assumption underlies Freudian readings of fairy tales, or Jungian readings of hero stories and folktales. From seventeenth-century stories of childhood piety to Gregory Maguire’s inventive reworking of modern tooth fairy legends in What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy (2007), stories have pivoted on quests for identity. In What-the-Dickens, for example, the eponymous fairy begins life as an orphan and is clumsy and ignorant, but as his understanding grows so does his courage and compassion, and by the end of the story he is poised to transform his world. That the story of What-the Dickens is narrated to three children by a young adult striving to get through a stormy night in an end-of-the-world scenario well illustrates how narratives about social behaviour are framed by interpretative protocols: the frame story and the embedded story stand in a relationship of mutual interpretation, and demonstrate how the quest for identity may permeate story structure.

  Third, traditional stories are thought to facilitate intercultural communication by bringing out the similarities between various world cultures, and hence to affirm the common humanity of the world’s peoples. This assumption is often linked with folktales and the retelling of analogues from apparently unconnected cultures. As a grounding assumption of folktale collections, internationalism emerged strongly as the impetus for Andrew Lang’s colour fairy books, published between 1889 and 1910: individual volumes drew widely on European and Asian folktale traditions, and included a sprinkling of stories from Africa and the New World. The practice remains widespread, although the range represented by Lang’s series is now largely an untapped resource and only a few canonical tales dominate retellings. A popular example in the USA is Rafe Martin and David Shannon’s The Rough-Face Girl (1992), a retelling of a Native American story belonging to the Algonquin people. A quick surf of the internet will yield several teaching units working on comparisons between The Rough-Face Girl and a version of Cinderella from the Perrault–Grimm traditions. Such a strategy has a strong appeal because it affirms a common humanity shared by people of diverse cultures, and seems to suggest that all people have similar desires and emotions.

  A different impulse for retelling stories stems from a desire to challenge the cultural hegemony attributable to the metanarratives that shape notions of heritage and universality (metanarratives employ a society’s ideologies, systems and assumptions to generate narrative forms that explain knowledge and experience). To retell a story from familiar pre-texts can be somewhat akin to reproducing ‘facts’ (the already known), and the process was long grounded on third-person narration told from the singular point of view of an all-seeing narrator. For most genres – mythology, folk and fairy tales, Arthurian retellings, stories of Robin Hood – actions were described as reported by the narrator, characters were seen from outside, and their reactions and responses to events were narrated rather than focalised by the characters themselves. This narrative mode does not entirely preclude inventiveness or innovation, but does tend to leave a text’s assumed core values unaddressed and hence unchallenged.

  To some extent, a retelling may be enabled to interrogate the tradition simply through changes in the mode of discourse entailed in any retelling, since the language and style of pre-texts are usually not then reproduced. This is clearly seen in the numerous retellings of Shakespeare’s plays as factual prose. The following, from Bernard Miles’ retelling of Macbeth (1976), refashions the play as commented information:

  Now that he [Macbeth] knew the worst he became desperate and resolved to carry his wickedness to the very end. He would kill everyone who stood in his way. First of all he sent the two men who had killed Banquo to kill Macduff. But Macduff had already begun to suspect that Macbeth had murdered both Duncan and Banquo and that he might be next on the list. So, when the murderers arrived at his castle he was already on his way to England, to join Malcolm. In their fury the murderers killed his wife and little children instead. And that was the worst crime Macbeth ever committed, even worse than killing Duncan.3

  The story is presented as already interpreted, with clear cause-and-effect relationships (‘Now that . . . he became’; ‘In their fury . . . killed’) and temporal framing (‘Now . . . when . . . already’). The retelling is at pains to explain motivation, and hence incorporate an interpretation of the story, but it does not depict motivation from the character’s perspective. The fleeting attribution of thought to Macbeth in the second sentence is outweighed by the authorial comment of the final sentence.

  Such strategies contrast strongly with the sparer narrative cultivated by Charles and Mary Lamb in their classic 1807 retelling: ‘Macbeth, stung with rage, set upon the castle of Macduff and put his wife and children, whom the thane had left behind, to the swor
d, and extended the slaughter to all who claimed the least relationship to Macduff . . . These and such-like deeds alienated the minds of all his chief nobility from him.’4 The Lambs rely more on a story-only focus which includes a brief reference to motivation and a moral judgment implied by adduced public consensus rather than narrator opinion. In this version, the core values are presumed and taken for granted rather than aggressively asserted.

  A retelling is better facilitated to interrogate its story by two significant changes in predominating narrative strategy that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century: an increased tendency to tell the story from the point of view of one (or more) of the characters; and an increase in first-person narrated fiction, to the extent that it has become the dominant narrative form. Both developments also introduced the possibility of a range of voices, as a text might also have more than one narrator, several focalising characters, or even a mixture of both. From about 1970, these developments in narrative strategy coincided with a heightened attention to social issues pertaining to the representation of gender, ethnicity and class, and became extensively employed by feminist writers, in particular.