The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature

by M. O. Grenby

  Canon creation, however, is never a simple and uncontroversial matter. In children’s literature, this drive towards canon creation came, ironically, just as English departments were reconsidering and dismantling canons, making children’s literature an old-fashioned field of study even as it newly arrived; the Children’s Literature Association’s canon-declarative Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s Literature (1985–9) appeared at a time when such ‘great books’ approaches were falling precipitately out of favour. There is also a quiet paradox, or at least a tension, between the tendency to exclude the literature of institutional education from children’s literature, focusing instead on texts designed to be read for pleasure, and the desire to have those texts authoritatively judged not by the pleasure readers but by institutions of education. Even more than children’s literature in the popular sphere, children’s literature in the academy is an indirect literature, read by an audience explicitly excluded by the literature’s own name. Library science and education classes tend to teach the literature in expectation that its students will use the works directly with children, returning the books to their official audience, but in literature departments the teaching continues the tradition of indirectness: students read the works as an end, as a way that they as adults can understand the genre, rather than as texts they will be bringing to children. Another growing movement since the 1980s, however, removes the child from even the theoretical picture in the teaching of young people’s texts; some educators are including children’s or young adult texts alongside adult texts in high school and university classes, subjecting all the texts to the same scholarly puzzling (and/or bored resentment) and treating the adult, rather than the child, as the intended reader.

  The community of scholars with an investment in canon creation therefore expands, but at the same time it grows increasingly heterogeneous and increasingly varied in its requirements, making it less and less likely that one single canon will suffice to encapsulate significance for all comers. The traditional academic markers of canonicity have never really been disinterested roll-calls of the pantheon, uninflected judgments of significance, anyway; anthologies and syllabi develop out of a variety of needs, including taste, expediency and availability, either of books or of affordable reprint rights, and they are called upon to meet many different needs. The literature draws from several centuries and several countries (it is interesting that the 2005 Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature carefully employs the plural in its subtitle, The Traditions in English), and it contains a multitude of subgenres, ranging from fantasy and historical fiction through non-fiction genres such as biography to the illustratively significant picture books. Often a text achieves significance within the scope of its subgenre and then acts as a delegate for its kind within the larger literature, so that a syllabus or anthology will include representative poetry, representative fantasy, representative history, not even claiming to include the best books of the genre as a whole.

  It is interesting to see how some specific texts, each of which has embodied a fair degree of critical and/or popular success, fare in a quick look at current on-line syllabi. Virginia Euwer Wolff’s True Believer (2001) is a critically acclaimed winner of the prestigious National Book Award, while Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998) won both the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal (all in the USA); K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs series (1997–2001) is a mass-market paperback fantasy series, wildly popular and profitable in recent years but dwindling rapidly in status since the conclusion of the series, while J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (1997–2007) is a bestselling fantasy series whose popularity continues unabated. A limited Google internet search for these texts in university syllabi (in 2007, and predominantly American, but any Anglophone syllabus was counted) reveals some intriguing patterns. In a limited sampling, True Believer was featured in thirteen syllabi, roughly equally divided between Education, English, and Library rubrics, while Holes was featured in forty syllabi, twenty-one of which were English (it turned up, intriguingly, on Ecology, Theatre, and ‘Corrections’ or Criminal Justice syllabi as well). Animorphs was mentioned in six syllabi, in all cases as an example of a mass-market series assignment rather than as a specific assignment; Harry Potter appeared in sixteen syllabi, twelve of which were English literature (this number is deceptively low, since the high rate of hits on ‘Harry Potter’ meant that a considerably higher proportion of hits within the limits were false), as well as being the subject of two courses in their entirety. The mere fact that all of these texts turned up in syllabi is significant in its own right, indicating that critical acclaim and popular prominence have ensured that they are considered worthy of academic notice, but already some differences between the pairings are apparent. With only the single data set, it is impossible to rely on these figures as indications of future academic status, but the different fates are suggestive; despite similar award status, Holes and True Believer are faring quite differently in the classroom; despite both being the subject of popular frenzies, the Animorphs and the Harry Potter novels are hardly equally represented in the academy.

  Popular audiences and classic creation

  Yet children’s literature, like other popular genres, can never be wholly assessed within the academy, and academic status means little to the popular audience (it is unlikely, for instance, that the news of Harry Potter’s inclusion in syllabi has drawn a single new child reader to the books, outside the classroom). Since such audiences rarely feel like invested participants in disputes about the relative merits of King Lear and Hamlet, they are generally uninterested in challenging the academy’s judgment on such questions. Children’s literature, however, is a different matter, offering considerable ground for challenge to the notion of special academic authority. Children may have limited influence even in the popular sphere – indeed, it is the power vacuum left by the audience’s weakness that enables the adult factions’ claims of authority – but they are completely excluded from the academic sphere, an exclusion that often results in other audiences’ privileging their viewpoints on the grounds that they are more informed by child response. Even practitioners have more impact on lay adult enthusiasts than do academics, with library associations offering the highest-profile recognition for texts in the form of awards such as the Newbery Medal in the United States and the Carnegie Medal in Great Britain.

  By the genre’s very nature, it should be accessible to and appreciable by non-professionals, and we all started out as the named audience for this literature, so we all have insiders’ credentials; in fact, for many people, childhood is the time of their greatest literary involvement. As a consequence, popular adult audiences feel an ownership of this genre. Children’s books are part of the family, not part of the academy; popular readership isn’t seeking a canon of anthology inclusion but a collection of classics that are cherished legacies from previous generations and gifts of love to the next, a transmission that is the genesis of classic status. Such texts are still discriminatingly selected and celebrated – popular audiences merely assess based on different criteria from the academic world, and the popular sphere offers different indications of status. While the academic audience looks to scholarly anthologies such as the Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature for a compilation of the important, popular audiences turn to books whose titles prominently feature the word ‘treasury’, whether it be in controversial conservative William Bennett’s The Children’s Treasury of Virtues (2000), which argues for its own criteria for classic children’s literature, or in the venerable World Treasury of Children’s Literature (1984) by Clifton Fadiman, an associate of Mortimer Adler, founder of the mid-century Great Books movement. Inclusion in such treasuries can certainly indicate popular regard and likely classic status; more significant indications include library circulation figures, sales numbers, the creation of multiple editions and reprintings (especially significant in regard to a text still in copyright, because of the greater financial investment on the p
art of the publisher). Sometimes generations do not so much interpret a work anew as celebrate it anew: sale value of memorabilia can indicate popular value, as can references in current popular culture. It has been a long time since Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) was a cultural rite of passage for young female bookworms, but only a few years ago it played a key role, in a plotline that depended on the book’s actual storyline, in an episode of the television series Friends (1994–2004). The internet again offers some informative indications: returning to our four sample texts, we find the following numbers in a series of Google searches, conducted in 2007, for author and title or title equivalent: Wolff’s True Believer received 73,900 hits, Sachar’s Holes 439,000; K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs elicited 119,900 hits, while Rowling’s Harry Potter produced 4,280,000 hits, leaving no doubt as to which texts elicit the most interest. On the Amazon.com website, all four texts are qualitatively equal, each receiving a rating of four and one-half stars, but True Believer had 49 reviews and Holes 3,161; the bestselling Animorphs title (no. 2) had 52 reviews, while Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had 5,241, demonstrating that interest levels may vary considerably even when judgments of quality are equivalent.

  More traditional venues still play their parts in the delineation of classic status: while bookstores seem to have largely abandoned classics sections for adults, such sections remain staunchly entrenched in children’s areas, conferring quasi-official status on the titles on their shelves. Such sections are fairly consistent in their type of offerings, whether the store in question is a chain store or an independent, and they are conservative and exclusive clubs: the cut-off publication date tends to be the mid twentieth century (later revisions and reillustrations of earlier publications are allowed, with the idea of a particular work rather than the specific edition or full version being the important consideration); there is no apparent concern for representation, with authors included almost uniformly white, and the non-Anglophone authors being old standards of the nineteenth century and earlier (Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Jules Verne, Johann Wyss). There is no informational non-fiction, poetry tends to be limited to A. A. Milne, and very few picture books creep in: Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) or the facsimile reprint of the American edition of Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899).

  These titles weren’t chosen for this section merely on those characteristics, however. Classic status accrues from writerly qualities as well, with the makers of such sections and the readers and buyers who haunt them evincing a firm belief that classic status must mean something about the text itself, not just its history. ‘High literary quality’ is a commonly proffered criterion for classic status – a classic has to be classy. Classics are books expected to give readers a real literary experience – books where the writing alone has the capacity to bring kids something important. (It is somewhat ironic, then, that the classic status accrues sufficiently to a book’s title or idea to allow for abridgments and adaptations to count as classics as well as the original work.) The idea is that the classics are the best representatives of the genre of children’s literature – books published to respect and acclaim (most of them were, indeed, well received and well reviewed on their first appearance) as well as popularity; subsequently, their fine qualities have been proven by these texts’ continued prominence. Ultimately, they are classics because they are still here, just as much as they are still here because they are classics.

  Their subject matter varies, and they are not relentlessly cheerful – there is certainly death and illness in Little Women and savagery in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) – but these darker notes tend to occur in the service of a glorious and fantastical adventure, to cast subtle shadows in a way younger readers might miss, or to operate as events in a larger story whose ultimate message is upbeat and hopeful. That ultimately positive nature is important to their inclusion in the classic family, because classics need to be loved, not just respected, and their textual story needs to fit into the popular audience’s story of childhood. These are not, as a rule, books to help their readers deal with pressing contemporary issues; instead, these are books that could support Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1969 view of the child as ‘a last refuge from a literature gone berserk and ready for suicide’.4 Regardless of what these books may have brought in their day, today they are definitely agents of refuge and escape.

  That difference between their day and this day is significant, since time clearly plays an important part in easing entry to classic status. The youngest books in these sections are nearly 50 years old, and most are closer to 100. Classic status seems to be subject to a mandatory waiting period, which helps soften the sharper edges of immediacy and grant a text a requisite patina. ‘New classic’ is, functionally speaking, oxymoronic; a classic has to be old. The age of these books also means that they entered popular consciousness in a different era of book evaluation; these are all texts that were published and popular before the dismantling of ‘Western Civilisation’ courses and the challenging of the very notion of canonicity in the late twentieth century. The titles on the classic shelf are great books from a time when being a great book meant something important; the very collecting of these classics rejects the last quarter-century’s challenges to such hierarchical privileging and proudly stands firm on the notion of concrete and non-relativist excellence.

  This classics section is therefore more anachronistic than reflective of contemporary realities, possessed as it is of the very narrowness that elicited the anti-canonical ferment of the late twentieth century. Contemporary children’s literature may not be a perfect distillation of global or even national cultural diversity (and it is worth remembering that notions of diversity are culturally and chronologically conditioned, so books of the past were diverse in their way and contemporary literature may appear shockingly uniform to future generations), but it is far from monolithic; no longer are its most celebrated authors or annual award winners a relentless parade of whiteness and straightness. Children’s literature has become as consciously aware of inclusion as the children’s classics shelves are, like the canons of the past, unconscious of their exclusivity. The boom in multicultural literature hasn’t been reflected in the pantheon of classics, and the classics section may now be the whitest spot in the bookstore.

  That restrictiveness could simply be an artefact of the age requirement for a classic. Classic titles come from an era when the genre’s subjects and authors were rarely identifiable as anything other than white and heterosexual, so a contemporary re-examination of earlier texts finds few works that could be added to increase the diversity of the classics collection. Even for those rare exceptions, such as the works of prominent mid-century African-American authors such as Jesse Jackson or Lorenz Graham, it is unlikely that popular regard would manage to claim them as classics alongside Little Women and Treasure Island, since there is no mechanism for such popular recovery. If one were to name classic authors or books from the latter part of the twentieth century, however, few would exclude luminaries such as Virginia Hamilton, a gifted novelist and recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant along with too many awards to list, or John Steptoe, legendary prodigy whose Stevie (1969) was one of the first picture books to feature a child narrator speaking in everyday, colloquially informal African-American English. Even if the chronological threshold for classic status moves up as the years go by, however, it is possible that the extant classics are too definitive to allow for broader inclusion; that the very diversity of recent literature is enough to mark it as too recent, too contemporary, insufficiently long ago and far away to be considered for classic status. Classic-ness would seem to be recursive, defining itself by what’s already there and thereby favouring not the groundbreaking but the traditional. Harry Potter’s chance at classic status is thereby enhanced by the series’ operating in a recognisable, beloved convention. A classic must look like a classic.

  On the other
hand, classics may demonstrate more linguistic diversity than the genre as a whole. While translated works such as Heidi (1881) and The Swiss Family Robinson (1812–13), by Swiss authors Johanna Spyri and Johann Wyss, respectively, are comfortably naturalised alongside born Anglophone classics, translated contemporary books face a rough ride in publishing or promotion, with Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord (2002), originally written in German, a rare contemporary import in its achievement of genuine popularity in the USA and the UK. The genre is even farther from true multilingualism; even in the USA, bilingualism is largely limited to a handful of picture books, and only a few publishers regularly offer second-language publications for young people, most of them translations into Spanish rather than original non-Anglophone texts. Internet specialist publications such as the periodical Críticas (sister journal to professional publications Library Journal and School Library Journal) and distribution services such as Libros Sin Fronteras (now owned by major American distributor Baker and Taylor), are increasingly making available tools for disseminating such works, but the American classics are still largely an Anglophone phenomenon.