Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods

Rachel Conrad, L. Brown Kennedy, Rachel Conrad, L. Brown Kennedy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030353919
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030353926
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children's television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literaryculture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers. 

© The Author(s) 2020

R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.)Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century ChildhoodsLiterary Cultures and Childhoodshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods

Rachel Conrad¹ and L. Brown Kennedy¹

(1)

Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA

Rachel Conrad (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

L. Brown Kennedy

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The history of the twentieth century, if not airbrushed, is brutal. What stories should be told, and how should they be written for child readers who will approach them from various points of identification, as “insiders” or “outsiders” to diverse histories? How do literary texts built for or through children (or adult ideas about children) enter into these histories? How have literary cultures more broadly intersected with children and childhood across the twentieth century? How have children themselves been involved in the construction of twentieth-century literary cultures?

In 1900 the Swedish feminist reformer Ellen Key called for the twentieth century to be The Century of the Child through her book of that title, which became a surprising bestseller. Key’s concerns included child labor, schools that commit “soul murder” (203), and patriarchal families in the context of industrial capitalism. In the United States, those invested in matters concerning children, as Michael Zuckerman argues, “took up the title of her book and, with obtuse optimism, changed it from a summons to a slogan” (228). One could argue that calls to place the child at the center of adults’ thinking in the twentieth century resulted only in adults’ ideas about children taking center stage. And in this regard, the twentieth century ended as it began, with an opportunity to rethink how to center children in cultural and political actions, projects, and texts.

A major issue in recent scholarship rethinking twentieth-century treatments of childhood across the disciplines has been the recognition that “the child” is not a unitary category, that childhoods are plural, and that the experience of being a child is culturally and historically specific, as Allison James, Adrian James, and others discuss.¹ In her “call for our scholarship … to grow” (238) through “resituating diversity within children’s literature and the academy” (251), Katharine Capshaw eloquently argues for centering race and ethnicity when considering writers, readers, and representations. The scholars writing in this volume—working in and across disciplines including literary studies, history, psychology and psychoanalysis, education, cultural studies, and the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies—foreground diverse representations of childhoods and focus on texts that have not necessarily been part of the standard English-language repertory for child audiences, including texts from former US and British colonies.

Beyond the unquestionable need to add writers and texts to the “canon,” contributors to this collection also ask us to shift the questions and frameworks we use in reading literary and cultural texts. They engage major intellectual movements and political crises so as to reconfigure our conception of how childhoods were understood and represented during a twentieth century marked by war, by political struggle over civil and political rights, and by the cultural clash of postcolonial, racial, class-based, gender, and sexual identities. They ask us not just to “include” the “peripheral,” but rather to take up stances that reposition us as readers and critics and re-center our view of the whole. As they work from different methodologies and theoretical bases, their chapters come together here to insist that literary and visual representation are not neutral processes but are historically and culturally shaped, no less than are child subjects who themselves act—as readers and as creators—to reshape culture.

This volume engages with two crucial acts of re-centering: not only focusing on the multiplicity of childhoods, but also centering the agency—or in certain cases critical and parodic lack of agency—of children, as subjects of representations, as readers , even as writers themselves. Richard Flynn’s recent essay in Jeunesse, included in a panel on “Divergent Perspectives on Children’s Agency,” hones in on “children’s competence and capability as social actors” (262) in contrast to the developmental discourse of children’s incapability, ignorance, and incompetence. Flynn draws in part on Allison James’ delineation of what is meant by children as “social actors” in her 2007 essay problematizing adults’ interest in and mediation of children’s voices: “Childhood is a social space that is structurally determined by a range of social institutions, but, precisely because of this, children as subjects are also structurally and culturally determined as social actors with specific social roles to play, as children” (270). Children’s agency doesn’t merely emerge within social institutions but helps to construct them, as the anthropologist Myra Bluebond-Langner writes in her prescient 1978 book, The Private Worlds of Dying Children, in which she articulates a view of children “as willful, purposeful individuals capable of creating their own world, as well as acting in the world others create for them” (7). Centering children’s agency, then, involves not only the idea that children are capable and competent, but also the recognition that children’s experiences as and views of children and childhood enable them to shape their social worlds and to redefine our understanding of childhoods and, in the case of child writers, of aspects of literary culture. Adults writing literary childhoods can foreground the idea of agency in imagining their young characters and/or young readers. Yet another theme of this volume is to see literary culture not simply as a body of materials produced by adults for consumption by children, but also as co-created by young people in their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers .

The chapters in this collection pursue multiple avenues to constructing literary cultures of childhoods, with emphasis on the plural of both “literary cultures” and “childhoods.” Without pretending to be exhaustive, we have been particularly interested in scholars and writers who are grappling with received notions of childhood, depicting active children engaging with their worlds, and representing diverse childhoods. Contributors approach writers who worked to rewrite scripts of the “natural” child (Holly Blackford, Aneesh Barai), writers who positioned child protagonists so as to offer young readers multiple points of entry and identification (Adrienne Kertzer, Nithya Sivashankar), or writers who crafted child subjects so as to do justice to complex aspirations and identities (Karen Chandler, Amanda Seaman). Other contributors undertake critiques of hegemonic perspectives (Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish, Solsiree del Moral), explore projects that directly involved young people as participants in or makers of literary culture (Victoria Ford Smith, Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley, Leslie Paris, Awad Ibrahim), and write about the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural projects (William Moebius, Karen Coats).

In the context of this volume, the term “literary cultures” implies, in part, the exchange and circulation of texts and ideas among those who read and write. These texts include here the written genres of poetry, biography, fiction, and historical fiction. Increasingly through the twentieth century, though, this general notion of “literary cultures” was augmented by other cultural forms used to circulate the ideas and the imaginary of those who are literate. Chapters within this volume consider such other cultural forms as visual art and illustration, the picturebook, spoken word poetry, and television, as well as the institutions that support and “authorize” cultural circulation: schools, libraries, museums and archives, and the publishing and production industries.

Texts that feature child protagonists and appear to seek child readers draw on an immense range of intertextual reference. Hughes and Bontemps’ Popo and Fifina bears useful comparison to Rousseau, so Aneesh Barai argues, while William Moebius notes that Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are echoes Wagner’s Parsifal. Child readers and writers, no less than adult writers, participate in this circulation of literary cultures and are both enabled and at times constrained by its assumptions and practices. Young writers Hall and Whitlock draw not only on Ransome, but on Keats and Matthew Arnold. And Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley speak to the engagement of Kali Grosvenor with Langston Hughes’ poetry, and to the role of Gwendolyn Brooks in promoting, from her position as poet laureate of Illinois, the work of young poets such as Aurelia Davidson.

Across the twentieth century, the enlarging circulation of what people imagine, write, reference, and sample regarding children and childhood encompasses recent narratives and images as well as time-worn myths, tropes, and, yes, stereotypes. Part of what circulates in and through literary cultures are figures and plotlines that can alienate or delimit as well as attract or delight their readers, sometimes by means of a complex symbiosis. This is especially the case when the school curriculum or books with an explicit educational mission become the agent of transmission. Fictions and their writers can also, however, serve to rewrite old narratives, expose or mock cultural constraints and bigotries, and open new possibilities for their young readers. The “reading” young person—whether present through representation or as the “implied reader” of the text—is the direct concern of many of the contributors to this vol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods
• Part I. Framing the Twentieth Century: Spectacle, Self, and Specularity
• Part II. Representations of Childhoods: Questioning or Re-Imposing Received Tropes
• Part III. Identity and Displacement: Narrating History and Culture
• Part IV. Children as Culture-Makers: Young People, Agency, and Literary Cultures
• Back Matter