The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  When in 2004 Hayao Miyazaki transformed the novel into an animated film, he worked within a different genre. The difference is not simply that one is a novel – an entirely verbal medium – and the other a film – a multimodal text which, in this case, subordinates narrative to visual representation, while also making use of words and music. Rather, the film illustrates how Japanese anime has its own forms and styles, and characteristically hybridises its common genres. Thus, while we can identify various story elements that derive from Jones’ novel, and a continuation of the theme of fragmented or lost subjectivities, the anime might also be said to have rather little to do with that novel.

  For this reason, and because when film retellings are concerned modern stories may also be retold, it is important to observe that a particular set of principles governs the retelling of books as films, namely a selection from the three modes of adaptation identified by Geoffrey Wagner: transposition, commentary and analogy. The first of these, transposition, in which a novel is transferred to the screen with the minimum of apparent interference, applies to the Harry Potter films. The other two modes apply to Miyazaki’s film, however. On the one hand, it functions as ‘commentary’ in so far as it is a narrative which has taken apart its pre-text and reassembled it as a version which is a new textual and ideological configuration. On the other hand, it also functions as an analogy – that is, as a departure from its pre-text for the sake of making another work of art. It is primarily an analogy, in that the anime genres which underpin it, its foregrounding of a story about war which is only a background threat in the novel, and its very different characterisation of Sophie and Howl make it a very different production. Hence audiences need to take notice of Wagner’s argument that an analogy ‘cannot be indicted as a violation of a literary original since the director has not attempted (or has only minimally attempted) to reproduce the original’.11

  Anime characteristically combines elements from several different genres; to some it may seem to be underplotted, although this aspect is largely because Japanese narrative is apt to be more interested in character than in events, so if audiences are used to the event-driven narratives of Disney films they may think anime seems disconnected. Reviews of Howl’s Moving Castle have tended to find the ending too abrupt, although it is effectively enabled in two main ways: the romance element; and the shift of the underlying fairy tale more towards a version of Beauty and the Beast, underpinned by the motif of the kiss that breaks a magic spell and by the overt articulation of theme in Sophie’s remark to Howl that ‘A heart is a heavy burden.’ Hence the sudden, astonishingly happy ending to a story of destruction, betrayal, malice, alienation and the threats to subjective wholeness posed by an irrational war and by the inner dangers of depression, despair and loss of identity, may suggest that human intersubjectivity is the only resource we have for keeping disorder and entropy at bay.

  The intertextual fabric evident in both novel and film of Howl’s Moving Castle is taken a stage further in Terry Pratchett’s reworking of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (2001). The presence of intertexts and allusions in this novel constitutes an overt signalling that various characters, motifs, registers and so on are borrowings from other texts, but it also reminds us that, as a corollary of the self-reflexive turn in processes of retelling, many stories are now retold as parodic and iconoclastic versions. Iconoclasm is most familiar in the form of the fractured fairy tale, in which the roles of major participants may be reversed, expected outcomes deflected or subverted, and point of view transferred from heroes to villains. An outcome is that the authority of tradition and of familiar story conventions are challenged. But fractured fairy tale is only the best-known site of such subversions, and none of the domains of twice-told tale have been immune. Bible story is wittily parodied in Pratchett’s Truckers (1989), and Tony Robinson’s zany, feminist retellings of the Robin Hood story in the BBC TV series Maid Marian and her Merry Men (1989–94) raised calculated anachronism to an art form as it laid bare the cherished ideological presuppositions of traditional retellings.

  As its frame story, The Amazing Maurice retells Robert Browning’s well-known The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842), but accords with numerous modern retellings in concluding that Browning’s poem masks an underlying story of fraud and deceit, and so constructs a story about how the cat Maurice exploits a tribe of rats and a naïve young musician to enact a ‘plague of rats’ scam in small towns. The novel goes further than other Pied Piper retellings, though, in presenting much of the narrative from the point of view of the rats and enriching the story with borrowings from numerous other texts and discourses.

  Like Howl’s Moving Castle, The Amazing Maurice extends its referencing beyond traditional folktale or myth to invest modern texts with a similar value to that attributed to older narratives. It is thus a fitting culmination for a discussion of retold tales because it incorporates the complete range of pre-texts found in retellings. It alludes to specific earlier texts by direct quotation or indirect citation – for example, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories and Browning’s Pied Piper are invoked on the opening page; oblique reference is made to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows; and the familiar discourse of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels appears frequently, as in, ‘it would be more . . . satisfying if we were four children and a dog, which is the right number for an adventure’. Common archetypal narrative motifs are deployed, such as the orphan of unknown parentage who restores the waste land to fertility, along with motifs from well-known stories, such as the folktale and pantomime of Dick Whittington and his Cat – ‘a young man with a smart cat can go a long way’, points out one character, Malicia (granddaughter of the ‘Sisters Grim’). In Pratchett’s retelling, Whittington has become ‘Dick Livingstone’, Mayor of Übergurgl, but the joke also extends to our own world and time, the allusion being to Ken Livingstone, just elected Mayor of London when The Amazing Maurice was published.12

  The overtly eclectic mixing of genres and conventions is one of Pratchett’s key strategies in his flaunting of the novel’s intertextuality – the references include fairy tales and folktales, adventure stories, romances, as well as Hollywood Westerns and arthouse films. A very effective example of this occurs when Malicia, who persists in reshaping everyday life into the form of a familiar story, is introducing herself to Keith as a Cinderella figure: Sardines, the dancing rat, comes abseiling down the kitchen wall behind her, and Maurice thinks to himself, ‘Of all the kitchens in all the town he could turn up in, he’s turned up in this one.’ Maurice’s thought is obviously a (mis-)quotation of a famous line spoken by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942). We now have a kind of dialogue between misquoted texts: Malicia’s misappropriation of Cinderella, and Maurice’s misquotation of Casablanca. The potential for such references to be arcane is epitomised by a psychoanalytic joke referring to Lacan’s version of the mirror stage in infant development: ‘[Maurice had] realized something was odd that day, just after lunch, when he’d looked into a reflection in a puddle and thought that’s me. He’d never been aware of himself before.’13

  One feature which most of these intertextual references have in common is a more or less parodic relation between the focused text and the pre-text. A parody is a comic imitation of something. While the purpose of parody is in general the production of humour of some kind, whether it be of a light-hearted or satirical nature, the object of that humour is not necessarily the parodied pre-text or narrative form. Instead, the object of humour will often be particular sentiments or values evoked via the mockery of a pre-text. Thus, Pratchett’s parodic allusions to The Wind in the Willows mocks not so much the pre-text itself, as the socially privileged, idyllic rural ideologies underpinning such narratives.

  Any story deemed traditional or ‘classic’ may be retold. The processes involved in retelling are rich and varied, but characteristically begin with raw material that is usually unstable, and usually unfixed in its origins.
The metanarratives which have shaped the story over time are themselves subject to change, and the story may be transposed from one genre to another. There may be a dialogue amongst various retellings, but this dialogue may also turn out to be coloured by ways of reading earlier versions of the focus tale.

  Notes

  1. Ruth Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children, ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

  2. Lucy Meredith, ‘Thorn Rose, the Sleeping Beauty’, in The Faber Book of Favourite Fairy Tales, ed. Sara and Stephen Corrin (London: Guild Publishing, 1988), p. 139.

  3. Bernard Miles, Favourite Tales from Shakespeare (London: Hamlyn, 1976), p. 30.

  4. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare Designed for the Use of Young Persons (2 vols., London: Thomas Hodgkins, 1807), vol. I, pp. 229–30.

  5. Michael Cadnum, In a Dark Wood (London: Orchard Books, 1998), p. 140.

  6. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

  7. Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), p. 99.

  8. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908; London: Puffin, 1994), p. 136.

  9. Michel Plessix, The Wind in the Willows, vol. III: The Gates of Dawn, trans. Joe Johnson (New York: NBM Publishing, 1999), p. 15.

  10. Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 1.

  11. Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), p. 227.

  12. Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (London: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 87 and 182.

  13. Pratchett, Amazing Maurice, pp. 69 and 17.

  7 Classics and canons

  Deborah Stevenson

  Most readers of American and British children’s literature can easily offer examples of children’s literature classics, readily agreeing that, say, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) would belong in that category. As its front-line representatives, classics publicly define the genre – but how does the genre define its classics? In order to answer this question, one must explore the unique forces and processes that affect children’s literature and its reception. Children’s literature operates differently from adult literature, for the latter offers a consistency of creators and audience: an adult book is written by adults, read by adults, judged by adults and passed on to adults; the people in the position of gatekeepers, selecting and championing particular texts for admission to the canon and lionisation as classics, are themselves inarguably members of those texts’ official and intended audiences. The forces behind the approval and canonisation of children’s literature constitute a complex Venn diagram, with categories defined by profession (academic literary critic or hands-on practitioner in libraries or schools), fields of study (English department, education department or school of library science), professional status (professional user of children’s literature or lay reader of books as parent or interested adult) and age (child or adult), all in dynamic relationship to one another, with categories sometimes overlapping, sometimes acting complementarily, sometimes operating antagonistically. The conscious if complicated canon selection of professional practitioners and academics is a world away from the popular anointing of classic texts; most people making popular judgments about children’s literature – parents and other caring adults seeking to transmit an important literary experience to children – have little access to, and even less interest in, academic judgments of children’s literature when it comes to choosing the works they believe to be the best.

  Although children themselves are the ostensible audience for this literature, their position in this configuration is perhaps the most complicated of all. In name, the genre belongs to children, but in actual fact their direct influence is limited. They can have some effect on a text’s status through purchasing, but they are likely to exercise their limited financial power on books that aren’t otherwise available to them through adult-run institutions and adult-funded shopping; their word of mouth can contribute to the reading popularity of a title, but that influence is more notable in connection with otherwise obscure or adult-unfriendly texts (author Judy Blume owed her great popularity in the late twentieth century to child support more than to adult approval) than with the known quantity of a prospective classic. Young people’s influence is heavily mediated and shaped by adults, as in the many book awards labelled ‘children’s choice’ that almost invariably start the judging process with an adult-selected list of titles, from which the child judges then select a winner; even when young readers are given what looks like free choice, there is an adult control at an early level of selection, be it collection development, funding provision or publishing. This adult mediation tends to treat books and reading on the nutritional model, operating on the theory that children, left to their own devices, will tend to consume junk, but that tactful adult assistance will lead them to partake of equally enjoyable and much more healthful fodder. This mediation is justified by the conviction that books affect young readers, that children cannot always judge what is and isn’t good for them, and that adults have not just a right, but a duty, to ensure children’s lack of judgment does not result in harm. (This protective impulse is now literarily unique; we have lost previous eras’ concern that poor-quality literature may harm adult readers and have concentrated all our efforts on uplifting child readers.) Yet children are still necessary to the literature, and competing adult claims of childish knowledge play a significant part in struggles for authority over the genre. Often, however, these children are theoretical, drawn from either adult ideals of childhood or memories of childhood. Ultimately, the literature’s most powerful children are ex-children.

  History of critical assessment

  The tradition of adult critical interest in children’s reading goes back several centuries, in logical concert with the production of materials for children to read. Even as early as Richard Steele’s 1709 article in the Tatler, wherein his persona Mr Bickerstaff fondly recounts his young godson’s literary commentary, we have an adult revelling in a child’s pleasure reading.1 For genuine reviews of children’s books, however, we must wait for the nineteenth century and Sarah Trimmer, whose periodical the Guardian of Education, published in Britain from 1802 to 1806, offered the first regular reviews of children’s literature. Its aim was to assist parents and teachers ‘in their selection of safe and good’ reading matter, since, as Trimmer put it, ‘There is not a bad principle inimical to religion and virtue which can be named, that is not to be found in books for children.’ Reviews carefully warned against books that might offer poor moral examples. Yet Trimmer herself had clearly been susceptible, as a child, to the charms of literature more geared to the pleasures of imagination than to the guidance of morals, and was initially unwilling to condemn such joys as Mother Goose’s Fairy Tales, a collection still well established as canonical material; Trimmer had loved books with a sentiment that allowed her to term several ‘the delight of [her] childish days’. Trimmer, in fact, obligingly plays out in her writing the forces that have influenced the genre of children’s literature for centuries, and the popularity of her periodical (and the vigour of her readers’ correspondence) offers a solid early indication that one didn’t have to be a prominent professional to care strongly about what children would read and to believe firmly that it was worth identifying the books that were truly superior.2

  Other writers soon picked up Trimmer’s baton. The Juvenile Review; or, Moral and Critical Observations on Children’s Books was published in London in 1817, and in America – even before the development of children’s librarianship in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and its attendant assessment of children’s books – children’s literature was reviewed in num
erous periodicals. Richard Darling has identified over thirty that regularly reviewed children’s books, from broadly popular journals such as the Nation and Atlantic Monthly and literary periodicals such as the Dial, to educational journals such as the New England Journal of Education, industry magazines such as Publisher’s Weekly, and children’s periodicals themselves such as Our Young Folks and, best-known of them all, St Nicholas.3 The twentieth century saw the further creation of review journals for the emerging field of librarianship, and the publication of children’s books in ever-growing numbers in the USA and the UK; Trimmer, overwhelmed by the enormity of assessing the children’s books in 1806, could hardly have borne the magnitude of the task that assessment was quickly to become.

  Academics and canon creation

  Despite the long history of interest in evaluation of children’s literature, the academy of scholars came late to the genre. As a result, in the strict academic sense, the children’s literature canon is a recent invention. The teaching of children’s literature at university level is a practice that became established only in the twentieth century, and the English department only in the last quarter thereof; the dominant critical journals were all founded in the 1970s, decades after the establishment of book-review periodicals for practitioners rather than scholars. This growth of interest in literature departments, where earlier there had been essential silence on this genre, is key to the issue of canonicity. It is this field that has the most enduring efficient machinery for establishing an academic canon, and that consequently, of all the main academic disciplines involved with the study of children’s literature, has been at the forefront of exploring its nature. In the struggle to establish children’s literature as a scholarly field, children’s literature studies turned to the traditional tools of legitimation and professionalisation, the creation of specialised critical journals, the production of critical anthologies, the generation of academic experts and the development of a rising profile within the literary community, all of which have resulted in an increasing investment in selectivity. As a result, there are increasing numbers of students in higher education learning about children’s literature; if one might cynically define a canon as ‘the books that you’re told in school are important’, an increasingly large number of people are now learning the children’s literature canon.