The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature
Page 40
Upon a very great Fall of Rain, the Current carry’d Away a Huge Heap of Apples, together with a Dunghill that lay in the Water-Course. They Floated a good while together like Brethren and Companions; and as they went thus Dancing down the stream, the Horse-Turds would be every foot crying out still, Alack a day! How wee Apples Swim!18
The fable’s expected lesson – here the horse-turds pretend to be what they are not – finds expression in a pleasurable dip into scatology. L’Estrange’s version of Aesop is instructive because it combines a number of elements relating to humour that we can identify in children’s literature across history. I have mentioned scatology, and, as we have seen, scatology continues to inform much humour for children as pleasurable instruction. The verbal ingenuity of this fable is also a feature we continue to see in children’s books, as the work of William Steig makes abundantly clear. Simple inflations such as ‘water-course’ for ‘stream’, the pun inherent in the ‘dancing’ turds crying out ‘every foot’, and the energetic colloquialism of ‘Alack a day’ contribute to the linguistic bounce of this short fable. Limited though it may be in this fable, verbal humour continues to entertain young readers, as a glance at the verbal play in a book such as Daniel Pinkwater’s Slaves of Spiegel (1982) will illustrate.
The dancing turds also remind us of energy emanating from kinetic bodies. Much fun for children derives from active rather than passive behaviour. Here the dancing turds are a satire of false pretence and bodies performing duplicity. They may float and cavort among the apples, but like the emperor in his new clothes they cannot hide their true nature. Although parody is more prominent in children’s literature (and we might almost see ‘Apples and Horse-Turds’ as a parody of the fable), true satire does occur. Take, for example, Dr Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle (1950), a story that is both a parody of the Brothers Grimm story ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’ and also a satire of political ambition and unjust desire for power. Satire and parody deserve separate scrutiny. Here, however, it will be sufficient for me to point out that much humour for young readers finds expression in satire and parody. Examples abound, but I might just note the work of John Scieszka and Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales) because of its clear intertextuality. Satire and parody thrive on the interconnectedness of literature, and much of the fun young readers have in reading satiric and parodic books derives from the game of spotting the intertextual connection. ‘Spot the reference’ has always been a feature of children’s books, but the game has virtually taken over much contemporary literature for children. And now intertextual connections are made not only to literature, but to the full range of cultural production. Two examples will suffice: the picture book Willy’s Pictures (2003) by Anthony Browne takes art history for its parodic subject, and Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) depends upon the reader’s knowledge of literature, art, film and film history.
Humour in children’s literature comes in a variety of forms, both verbal and visual. A taxonomy is useful, but perhaps we can collapse the various forms into their ultimate destination: the body. Just as the body is the source of so much humour for children, so too is the body the destination for this humour; it is subject and object. The question is: just what is the body supposed to do when it receives humorous communication from books? My question might well initiate an investigation into the politics of laughter. Without embarking on such an investigation, I note here that the various forms of humour from nonsense to parody, from reversal to exaggeration, ostensibly have both a participatory and a liberatory function. I say ‘ostensibly’ because the various forms of humour also may function to put quietness on the reader. The appeal of humour is its call to bodily pleasure, a pleasure that serves either quietness or thunder.
Notes
1. Patricia Demers (ed.), From Instruction to Delight. An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1815, 2nd edn (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 84.
2. Demers (ed.), From Instruction to Delight, p. 83.
3. Dav Pilkey, Kat Kong (New York: Harcourt, 1993), unpaginated.
4. Mary Norton, The Complete Adventures of the Borrowers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 291.
5. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. xii.
6. Julius Lester, John Henry, pictures by Jerry Pinkney (New York: Dial, 1994), unpaginated.
7. Catherine Sinclair, Holiday House: A Book for the Young (1839; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972), p. 127.
8. Sinclair, Holiday House, pp. 128–30.
9. Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 186.
10. Quoted in John Rieder, ‘Edward Lear’s Limericks: The Function of Children’s Nonsense Poetry’,Children’s Literature, 26 (1998), 47–60 (p. 47).
11. George MacDonald, The Light Princess, ill. Maurice Sendak (1864; New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), p. 74.
12. See William Raeper, George MacDonald (Tring: Lion Publishing, 1987), pp. 222–3.
13. MacDonald, Light Princess, pp. 74–6.
14. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1897), pp. 177–80.
15. Kerry Mallan, Laugh Lines: Exploring Humour in Children’s Literature (Newtown, NSW: Primary English Teaching Association, 1993), p. 18.
16. Stewart, On Longing, p. 109.
17. Robert Pfaller, ‘The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic: The Aesthetic Effects of the Thought Experiment’, in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 198–216 (p. 201).
18. Sir Roger L’Estrange, Fables of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists with Morals and Reflexions (London: R. Sare et al., 1692), p. 124.
Further reading
General studies
Avery, Gillian, Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books 1621–1922, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994
Avery, Gillian, and Julia Briggs (eds.), Children and their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989
Carpenter, Humphrey, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, London: Unwin, 1985
Darton, F. J. Harvey, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, 3rd edn, rev. Brian Alderson, London: British Library, 1999
Dusinberre, Juliet, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art, London: Macmillan, 1987
Grenby, M. O., Children’s Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008
Hunt, Peter, An Introduction to Children’s Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
Immel, Andrea, and Michael Witmore (eds.), Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800, New York: Routledge, 2006
Lerer, Seth, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008
Lurie, Alison, Not in Front of the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children’s Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 1990
McGavran, James (ed.), Romanticism and Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991
Marcus, Leonard S., Minders of Make-believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008
O’Malley, Andrew, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century, New York: Routledge, 2003
Pickering, Samuel F., Jr, John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Reynolds, Kimberley, Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007
Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994
Stephens, Joh
n, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction, London: Longman, 1992
Chapter 1 (The origins of children’s literature)
Adams, Gillian, ‘Ancient and Medieval Children’s Texts’, in Peter Hunt (ed.), International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 2nd edn, 2 vols., London: Routledge, 2004, vol. I, pp. 225–38
Alderson, Brian, ‘New Playthings and Gigantick Histories: The Nonage of English Children’s Books’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 60 (1999), 178–95
Arizpe, Evelyn, and Morag Styles, with Shirley Brice Heath, Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts, Lichfield: Pied Piper, 2006
Grenby, M. O., ‘Chapbooks, Children, and Children’s Literature’, The Library, 8 (2007), 277–303
Hunt, Peter, ‘Passing on the Past: The Problem of Books that Are for Children and that Were for Children’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 21 (1996–7), 200–2
King, Margaret L. ‘Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 371–407
Lerer, Seth, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993
Morgenstern, John, ‘The Rise of Children’s Literature Reconsidered’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 26 (2001), 64–73
Plumb, J. H., ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 67 (1975), 64–95
Shaner, Mary E., ‘Instruction and Delight: Medieval Romances as Children’s Literature’, Poetics Today, 13 (1992), 5–15
Shefrin, Jill, ‘“Governesses to their Children”: Royal and Aristocratic Mothers Educating Daughters in the Reign of George III’, in Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore (eds.), Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 181–211
Sommerville, C. John, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992
Wooden, Warren W., Children’s Literature and the English Renaissance, ed. Jeanie Watson, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986
Chapter 2 (Children’s books and constructions of childhood)
Fass, Paula S. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004
Gupta, Suman, ‘Sociological Speculations on the Professions of Children’s Literature’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 29 (2005), 299–323
Hollindale, Peter, Signs of Childness in Children’s Books, Stroud: Thimble Press, 1997
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994
Matthews, Gareth B., The Philosophy of Childhood, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994
Pennac, Daniel, The Rights of the Reader, trans. Sarah Adams, London: Walker Books, 2006
Rose, Jacqueline, The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, London: Macmillan, 1984
Spufford, Francis, The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002
Turner, Susan M., and Gareth B. Matthews, The Philosopher’s Child: Critical Essays in the Western Tradition, New York: University of Rochester Press, 1998
Zelizer, Viviana, The Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994
Zipes, Jack, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter, New York: Routledge, 2001
Chapter 3 (The making of children’s books)
Alderson, Brian. ‘Novelty Books and Movables: Questions of Terminology’, Children’s Books History Society Newsletter, 61 (1998), 14–22
Alderson, Brian, and Felix de Marez Oyens, Be Merry and Wise: The Origins of Children’s Book Publishing in England, 1650–1850, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006
Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972
Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall, Encyclopedia of the Book, 2nd edn with a new introduction by Donald Farren, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001
Jennet, Seán, The Making of Books, 5th edn, London: Faber & Faber, 1973
McLean, Ruari, Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing, 2nd edn, London: Faber, 1972
Chapter 4 (Picture-book worlds and ways of seeing)
Alderson, Brian, Sing a Song of Sixpence: The English Picture-Book Tradition and Randolph Caldecott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986
Bader, Barbara, American Picturebooks: From Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within, New York: Macmillan, 1976
Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott, How Picturebooks Work, New York: Routledge, 2006
Nodelman, Perry, Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988
Spitz, Ellen Handler, Inside Picture Books, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999
Steiner, Evgeny, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists and the Making of Early Soviet Children’s Books, trans. Jane Ann Miller, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999
Trumpener, Katie, ‘City Scenes: Commerce, Modernity, and the Birth of the Picture Book’, in Richard Maxwell (ed.), The Victorian Illustrated Book: New Explorations, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002, pp. 332–84
Whalley, Joyce Irene, and Tessa Rose Chester, The History of Children’s Book Illustration, London: John Murray with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1988
Chapter 5 (The fear of poetry)
Flynn, Richard, ‘Consolation Prize’, Signal, 100 (2003), 66–83
Rubin, Joan Sherley, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007
Rukeyser, Muriel, The Life of Poetry, Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996
Sloan, Glenna, ‘But Is It Poetry?’ Children’s Literature in Education, 32 (2001), 45–56
Sorby, Angela, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917, Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005
Styles, Morag, From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children, London: Cassell, 1998
Thomas, Joseph T., Jr, Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American Children’s Poetry, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007
Chapter 6: (Retelling stories across time and cultures)
Beckett, Sandra L., Recycling Red Riding Hood, New York: Routledge, 2002
Chaston, Joel D., ‘Baum, Bakhtin, and Broadway: A Centennial Look at the Carnival of Oz’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 25 (2001), 128–49
Gates, Geoffrey, ‘“Always the Outlaw”: The Potential for Subversion of the Metanarrative in Retellings of Robin Hood’, Children’s Literature in Education, 37 (2006), 69–79
McCallum, Robyn, ‘Film Adaptations of Children’s and Young Adult Literature’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, 4 vols., New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, vol. II, pp. 73–7
Stephens, John, and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature, New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1998
Wagner, Geoffrey, The Novel and the Cinema, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975
Chapter 7: (Classics and canons)
Cai, Mingshui, Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults: Reflections on Critical Issues, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002
Clark, Beverly Lyon, Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003
Gorak, Jan (ed.), Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, New York: Garland, 2001
Lundin, Anne, Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature: Beyond Library Walls and Ivory Towers, New York: Routledge, 2004
Morrissey, Lee, Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
&nb
sp; Stevenson, Deborah, ‘Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children’s Literature Canon; or, the Drowning of The Water-Babies’, The Lion and the Unicorn, 21 (1997), 112–30
Stimpson, Catharine R., ‘Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March’, New Literary History, 21 (1990), 957–76
Chapter 8 (Learning to be literate)
Fischer, Steven Roger, History of Reading, London: Reaktion Books, 2003
Meek, Margaret, On Being Literate, London: Bodley Head, 1991
Monaghan, E. Jennifer, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Nel, Philip, Dr. Seuss: American Icon, New York: Continuum, 2004
Salmon, David, The Practical Parts of Lancaster’s Improvements and Bell’s Experiment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932
Spufford, Margaret, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, London: Methuen, 1981
Waterland, Liz, Read with Me, Stroud: Thimble Press, 1985
Chapter 9 (Gender roles in children’s fiction)
Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Margaret R. Higonnet (eds.), Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999
Kidd, Kenneth B., Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Knoepflmacher, U. C., Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998
Lehr, Susan (ed.), Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The Construction of Gender in Children’s Literature, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001
Levstik, Linda S. ‘“I am no lady!”: The Tomboy in Children’s Fiction’, Children’s Literature in Education, 14 (1983), 14–20
Mitchell, Sally, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995
Nelson, Claudia, Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991