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  • International Trends in Children's Literature
  • Roberta Seelinger Trites (bio)
Poetics Today. Special issue: " Children's Literature." Zohar Shavit, ed. 13.1 (1992).

Published at Tel Aviv University, Poetics Todayis an international journal of poststructural theory and its applications to literature and communication. That a journal with the reputation of Poetics Todaywould devote a special issue (Spring 1992) to children's literature is a significant recognition of how much the field has to offer literary studies world-wide.

All of the articles—by sixteen scholars from three continents—address in some way the place of children's texts within various cultures. In the introduction to the volume, editor Zohar Shavit succinctly identifies how much children's literature can contribute to cultural studies. But Shavit's introductory comments about the field of children's literature seem to undercut the very legitimacy she tries to grant it. She comments: "As a new scholarly domain literally taking its first steps, children's literature has only recently made its debut as a field of study in its own right" (1). This shows a curious disregard for the long tradition of scholars in the field, from nineteenth-century critics of children's books such as those contained in Lance Salway's A Peculiar Gift: 19th Century Writing on Books for Children(1976) to twentieth-century scholars such as F. J. Harvey Darton, Cornelia Meigs, Percy Muir, John Rowe Townsend, Roger Lancelyn Green, and Gillian Avery, to name only a few.

Later in the introduction, when dismissing how some "scholars prefer to address children's literature strictly within the context of certain traditional and somewhat timeworn questions dictated by literary criticism," Shavit makes clear that the newness she is attributing to the field actually describes the recent strides in the application of poststructural theories to children's texts (1). Certainly the study of children's literature is growing—as is the entire field of literary criticism—in exciting directions. But to condemn critics of children's literature who do not rely on poststructural theories is to delegitimize the roots of our field and, for that matter, to invalidate most of the literary criticism written before the 1960s. [End Page 103]

Many of the authors in this collection share Shavit's revisionary tone, but they apply their revisions to better understanding the sociohistorical roles of children's books. Some of the articles show how children's texts form cultural identity, and some demonstrate the textual relationship between cultural formation and cultural identity: but all of the essays in this volume hold children's texts to be culturally bound to their social context.

A strong analysis of how children's books respond to changes in the Zeitgeistoccurs in Ségolène Le Men's "Mother Goose Illustrated: From Perrault to Dorè." This article is a semiotic reading of the cultural codes inscribed in various manifestations of the Mother Goose icon from 1695 to 1862. Le Men demonstrates how changes in this icon reflect changing cultural perceptions of memory, of children, of children's literature, and of the oral and the written traditions. In the same vein, Anne Scott MacLeod, in "From Rational to Romantic: The Children of Children's Literature in the Nineteenth Century," delineates how the American protest movements of the 1840s and 1850s influenced writers of children's books to create child characters who reflected a need for social reform. But in the prosperity of the Gilded Age, American writers created romantic characters—such as Jo March, Ragged Dick, Elsie Dinsmore, and little Lord Fauntleroy—that reinforced the dominant culture's acceptance of the status quo. Similarly, in "Pan and Peur Aeternus: Aestheticism and the Spirit of the Age," Jean Perrot traces how the Aesthetic movement influenced an increased use of the Pan archetype in such pivotal books as Treasure Island. Reinbert Tabbert's "The Surprising Career of Wolf Spillner's Wild Geese: A Case Study of East German Literature" provides an interesting corollary to the concept of children's books reflecting the times in which they are written. Tabbert argues that in the defunct East Germany, children's literature provided an outlet for reform writers—such as the environmentalist Wolf Spillner—who...

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