First Page Excerpts from Signal #87, September 1998 [please, note that italics and other formats are not produced in this excerpt] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INDEX: Modern Language Association of America Papers presented 27-30 December 1997, Toronto edited by Sandra L. Beckett & Lissa Paul INTRODUCTION 153 Forum THE STATE OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS IN THIS MILLENNIUM AND THE NEXT 157 The Survival of the Book Tim Wynne-Jones 160 Strange Business: The Publishing Point of View Wendy Lamb 167 The Left-Handed Story Nancy Willard 174 Workshop I Preserving the Past to Create the Future 181 The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books Leslie McGrath 184 Revolution and Reverence: French Children's Literature Collections Jean Perrot 187 Workshop II Literary Theory and Children's Literature: Reflections on the Past and Predictions for the Future 193 Man-books, Kiddie Lit and Critical Distemper Beverly Lyon Clark 196 Cultural History and the Meanings of Children's Literature Ruth Bottigheimer 203 IN CONCLUSION 210 The annual Signal index for 1998 appears on pages 211-14. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTION The Modern Language Association convention is the largest international gathering of professional English and modern language academics working in literary studies. The inclusion of a forum on children's literature in its December 1997 programme signals timely interest in the subject. For academics working in literary studies in English and other modern languages in universities and colleges (primarily in North America but also in the rest of the world) the MLA is their governing body: a `venerable though not quite universally venerated organization', as one past MLA president put it. Since its founding in 1883 it has held sway over what is worth studying and writing about—and what is not. Some examples: The MLA database on periodical articles is usually the first stop for students and academics researching work in a literary field. Although over 4000 journals are screened, very few children's literature journals are included in the list (this point was made by Beverly Lyon Clark in an essay published in the MLA journal, Profession). At the moment you will not find articles from Signal, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children's Literature in Education, Magpies or Canadian Children's Literature in the MLA database. So academics not familiar with studies in children's literature searching, say, for critical material on Ted Hughes's writing for children would not find any of the Signal articles in the MLA database. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers is the bible for what another MLA president calls `a community of writers who greatly value scrupulous scholarship and careful documentation, or recording of research' (xiii). It is the style guide used by most North American journals of literary studies, and it is what university students in literature departments are taught to use. The annual MLA convention serves as a clearing house for employment opportunities in the (American, for the most part) academy. If post-colonial studies are hot at the MLA, for example, universities might decide to institute programmes on the subject, and then give first interviews to likely candidates at the MLA convention. Subjects deemed by the MLA to be worth academic attention are accorded division status. When a subject makes the grade to a division, it then carries the MLA seal of approval. There are 81 divisions at the moment: from African Literature to Women's Studies in Language and Literature. In the wings—preparing, perhaps, for division status—the MLA currently lists 39 discussion groups (from Anglo-Irish Literature to Yiddish Literature). And there are also around one hundred allied .... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FORUM: THE STATE OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS IN THIS MILLENNIUM AND THE NEXT The forum participants were selected to bring the international, interdisciplinary context of children's literature to a community composed primarily of literary critics. From their individual experiences all spoke about particular clashes and contradictions in current children's literature production and criticism. Reading through the texts in retrospect, it is possible to see the participants naming their particular `real' world of children's literature and the forces bending those worlds out of shape. (In the same time slot, incidentally, there were forty other sessions, among them `Electronic Culture I: CyberStyle', `The Graduate Student Perspective on the Intellectual Work of Teaching' and `Reader versus Writer: Marginalia of circa 1590, 1690, 1790'.) The participants were: — Tim Wynne-Jones. It was important to begin with a Canadian. Though Tim may be best known internationally for his fiction for older children and young adults, especially Some of the Kinder Planets and The Maestro (both Groundwood), he has produced successful picture books (the Zoom series), adult novels, songs for TV's Fraggle Rock, radio dramas, and he has been the children's book reviewer for Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail. As he continues to work as a fiction writer, he is particularly concerned about the unsettled state of the Book. Like many contemporary novelists, he knows that literature is being changed by technology. — Wendy Lamb, executive editor in the Books for Young Readers Department at Bantam Doubleday Dell, part of Random House, Inc., in New York. She edits Carol Dines, Gary Paulsen, Graham Salisbury and Jacqueline Woodson, among other authors. Wendy's world centres on the business of children's literature and on marketing in a market economy. — Nancy Willard, acclaimed American author for both children and adults, an illustrator, poet and essayist. Her book A Visit to William Blake's Inn was the first collection of poems to win a Newbery Medal. Nancy could have spoken about any of the fields in which she works, but on this panel she spoke as a photographer. In the darkened room, as she flicked through slide images from her books, paced to the rhythm of turning the pages of a picture book, the connection between the ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Survival of the Book Tim Wynne-Jones It is said that stories are as old as bread. I like this analogy. The grain of happenstance leavened by the agent of narrative into something nourishing. Manna, if you will. In the Bible manna is `a small round thing, whitish like hoar frost' (Metford 66). Sounds more like a CD-ROM than a book. How did God really sustain the Israelites in the desert? Story is how we first come to understand the world, reforming our lives into `story-structured words' as Aidan Chambers has said. He refers to lived experience as remaining in the realm of `beastly knowledge' until such time as we creatively transform it. `It is storying', he says, `that changes us, not events' (112). Ah, but what does this have to do with books? Storying is, after all, an oral thing. Like bread, remember. Surely the word storying implies a more verbal, less noun-like event. Storying is an experience, an act complete with audience. A book is merely a repository for Story. Do we need repositories? Do we need all that clutter? We invent ourselves through Storyas Annie Dillard says throughout Living by Fiction. Or, as Northrop Frye says one way or another in Creation and Recreation, we recreate ourselves as we read. Story is a regenerative operation, an essential feedback system to the human condition. This, anyway, is the story we book people keep telling ourselves. It is an article of faith. Are we deluding ourselves? And what, for that matter, is Story, anyway? Well, to us book people, Story, at its best, is a minor cosmic event. Order is brought forth out of a chaotic situation. The conflict that generated the storyfor there can be no story without something being out of whackis resolved. Harmony is more or less restored or, at least, a balance found. In the well-turned resolution, something like sense is made even of death. A book is thought-provoking at the same time as it is soul-soothing. In `Cybernetics and Ghosts' Italo Calvino talks about the relief, the security, a story can bring `in the shapeless avalanche of events'. `Faced with the vertigo of what is countless, unclassifiable, in a state of flux, I feel reassured by what is finite, "discrete" and reduced to a system', he writes (17). Story is reductive. A concentrated and vivid look at a single tree instead of the whole forest. But why reduce the world when there has ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wendy Lamb I'm here today to tell you about the business side of publishing for children, and a strange business it is indeed. But let me begin with a few observations about the publishing industry as a whole. It's an industry unlike any other, and it is wildly unpredictable. Aside from celebrity books and big-ticket fiction and nonfiction by established writers, one right book in the stores when readers want it most, in a format they like and can afford. As you can see in the following statistics, this is a growing market with enormous spending potential: Sales figures provided from The Bowker Annual (a database of information about the publishing industry) by the Children's Book Council: number of books total sales published 1920 420 no financial figures available 1970 2,640 $111,000,000 1985 2,938 $336,200,000 1990 5,056 $1,021,100,000 (hardcover: $781,500,000 paperback :$259,600,000) l996 4,734 $1,479,200,000 (hardcover: $909,100,000 paperback: $570,100,000) An article in The New York Times, 22 February 1998, projects that the teenage population of America, 38.2 million in l997, will soar to 42 million by 2010. Their present spending power is approximately 80 billion dollars. Quality control and keeping books in print The success of a book is generally review-driven rather than publicity-driven, for children's books cannot overcome bad reviews the way an adult book can and still sell. Children set a high standardno ad or gimmick will make them keep reading something that doesn't hold their interest. It costs more to publish an adult book in terms of marketing and publicity budget, and an adult book has a shorter shelf life. The lower cost of children's books once helped to keep them in print despite low sales. However, a recent change in tax laws means that publishers can no longer write off inventory, so it costs more to keep books in a warehouse. This is one reason for the alarming new trend of putting children's books out of print in hardcover at almost the same rate as adult books. The paperback, however, does tend to stay in print longer than the hardcover, usually due to school sales. Eighty per cent of our sales of `literary' books is institutional, to schools and libraries. Marketing is focused on getting the book to teachers and giving them teachers' guides and other materials to help them use it in the classroom, and we post them on our web site on the Internet. We look for books that have curriculum value and sometimes add maps, historical notes and other materials to enlarge on the facts behind the fiction. Publishers ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Left-Handed Story Nancy Willard I might as well confess right now that when I heard the subject of this panel, `The State of Children's Books in this Millennium and the Next', I felt as if I'd been asked to build a small galaxy, star by star. So I hope you will forgive me if I come here as a writer who looks at the subject through the wrong end of the telescope, a view which lets you believe that even the largest planets can be made to fit in the palm of your hand. Most of my ideas about what makes a good book for children start with the books I loved as a child. When I grew up and put away childish things, among the things I did not put away were four books: Through the Looking-Glass, The Wizard of Oz, The Snow Queen, and The Princess and the Goblin. It happens that the main characters in these books are girls, but their gender did not attract me so much as their grace under pressure. No matter how dangerous the journey or how curious the companionship, the heroines, possessing no magical power themselves, hold their own against goblins, witches and unpleasant queens. But if a wise woman or a talking crow offers advice, they know enough to listen. My favourite passage in `The Snow Queen' is the scene in which Gerda goes to the house of the Finn Woman to ask directions to the Snow Queen's palace, and the reindeer who has accompanied her asks for a potion to make Gerda into a super woman: "You are so clever," said the reindeer finally. "I know you can tie all the winds of the world into four knots on a single thread . . . . Won't you give this little girl a magic drink so that she gains the strength of twelve men and can conquer the Snow Queen?" . . . "I can't give her any more power than she already has! Don't you understand how great it is? Don't you see how men and animals must serve her; how else could she have come so far, walking on her bare feet?" It would be hard to say what I learned from these books, for their lessons changed as I changed, and when I read them, I did not imagine that they were teaching me anything. And what books from my childhood did I forget? All the books in which the moral of the story was more important than the story itself. So when I am writing a book for children, I take care never to ask ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Workshop I: Preserving the Past to Create the Future When academics speak at conferences they tend to talk about what they find, not how they found it or where they looked for it. Because we spend a lot of time in research collections looking things up, we value the collections and the librarians who work in them. This workshop developed out of a desire to highlight collections of children's books and focus attention on their continuing need for support. Sandra invited Leslie McGrath, head of the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books in Toronto; Barbara Scharioth, Director of the International Youth Library (IYL) in Munich; and Jean Perrot, founder of the Charles Perrault Institute in Eaubonne, outside Paris. To demonstrate the link between research collections and scholarship, we invited the British writer and critic Marina Warner. Marina's talk was based on her forthcoming book, No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, which meant it was not available for publication. Unfortunately, Barbara Scharioth had to cancel her trip at the last minute and so was unable to present her paper, `The International Youth Library: The Past and the Future of a Unique Collection'. The library provides a multilingual, multinational collection unlike any other in the world. Its collection holds 465,000 books for children and young adults in over one hundred languages. Sandra had worked at the IYL on a fellowship during the summers of 1996 and 1997, doing research on intertextuality in children's books. She needed to consult a range of texts (critical resource material, traditional tales and retellings of classic works of children's literature, such as the 650 editions of Robinson Crusoe held there) in several languages (French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and Swedish), and the IYL allowed her to concentrate her work in a dedicated research environment. The International Youth Library was founded in 1948 (coincident with the founding of the State of Israel) by Jella Lepman, who also founded the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). It was Lepman's insistence on making manifest the connection between literature and cultural memory that brought the library into being. Her idea of `one children's world' served as a motto for both the library and IBBY. A year later, the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books was founded as part of the Toronto Public Libraries, a gift from an Englishman, Edgar Osborne. Like Jella Lepman, Osborne recognized the importance of cultural memory and the necessity of keeping that memory available to future generations: the gift was made to a public ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books Leslie McGrath Research library collections are an important starting point for this discussion. My particular topic is the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, and its role in preserving the past. Marina Warner, whose lecture will be the focus of the panel, has illustrated through her distinguished lectures and award-winning publications the value of research library resources, including the Osborne Collection, in providing the original sources from which the literary traditions of the past can be analysed to create directions for the future. The Osborne Collection's function in this creative process is to preserve original materials and to provide access to them. A fitting subtitle for this talk will therefore be `Preservation through Access'. Many of you are familiar with the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, but despite its international reputation for excellence the collection is not well known in its own community. To give a brief historical background, the collection was begun by a British librarian, Edgar Osborne, after the first world war. Starting with their own childhood books, Osborne and his wife Mabel assembled a collection of nearly two thousand early children's books. Mabel Osborne died in 1946, and in her memory Edgar Osborne decided to present this collection to Boys and Girls House of the Toronto Public Library, for both he and Mabel had been greatly impressed with the quality of children's services they had observed there during a visit in 1934. The books arrived in 1949, and were accepted with the conditions that the collection be adequately housed and staffed, that it should be added to, and that a catalogue be published within a reasonable time. These conditions were met. A catalogue, now out of date but considered a prototype for cataloguing antiquarian collections of children's books, was published in 1958 and expanded in 1975. In-house electronic cataloguing continues today, though the wider access that an automated catalogue will provide waits on a city-wide library software purchase. The initial collection of approximately two thousand books has now grown to over 30,000 items, and covers the development of English children's literature. Holdings include a fourteenth-century manuscript of Aesop's fables through fifteenth-century traditional tales, sixteenth-century ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Revolution and Reverence: French Children's Literature Collections Jean Perrot You may have heard of the Maréchal, once at the head of the French State, who used to say that French people have a short memory. I do not think the man, who betrayed his country later, had ever read Socrates' discourse to Phaedrus, in which Plato's master discusses the myth of Toth, the Egyptian devil-god who is supposed to have invented writing. In Plato's dialogue, the King emphasizes the risk of mental atrophy run by the users of the artificial memory imparted by writing. He also expresses his fear that reading is pernicious, for it encourages people to rely on the external knowledge given by written texts and not on the inner knowledge accumulated though personal experience. Fortunately, Plato, as a true philosopher, was not sensitive to the argument and left us this admirable dialogue. But the lesson is one on which our marshall should have meditated, especially as his prefect, Maurice Papon, is now being tried for sending thousands of Jewish children, women and men to the death camps—a fact he seems to have forgotten. In a less dramatic vein, we know that in La dissémination Jacques Derrida, grounding his theory in the same dialogue, stressed that the phonocentric or logocentric dominance of Western civilization was a philosophical mistake. I am here today to speak about the necessity of archives and to express my concern for the somewhat nonchalant attitude of French researchers towards their written past in the field of children's literature. I also hope, of course, to point out to you a few treasures left in our inheritance. It is relatively difficult to locate French collections of children's books in our country, since the Republican centralizing power and the obligation to deposit a sample of each published text at the National Library have had the indirect effect of discouraging any attempt at building private collections. It is as though the nostalgia for our Revolution, which is lurking in the soul of every citizen, has always led us to regard institutions with suspicion in the belief that they enjoy special privileges. It is also true that we may have burned a few libraries and set fire to many venerable mansions harbouring old books in the course of the centuries. But I did not cross the Atlantic to bring you grim prospects. My aim is to provide some help to American researchers, who may ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Workshop II: Literary Theory and Children's Literature: Reflections on the Past and Predictions for the future Jan Susina, professor of English, Illinois State University, and the chair of this session, pointed out that this was the second year in a row that his children's literature panel had been scheduled for the very end of the conference. The last morning of the last half-day is not an auspicious slot. It is the time when a lot of people have already caught their flights home. The session was well attended, though a number in the audience were wearing their travel clothes. Each of the four presentations went off on schedule and without a hitch, despite the fact that a complex and comprehensive hook-up was needed for the technological presentation given by Ronald Soetaert and Guy van Belle from Belgium. As in the earlier sessions an international, interdisciplinary range was important, this time attention focusing on the influence of contem-porary theories on children's literature criticism and on the pedagogical question of disseminating literacy in a technological age. In some ways the speakers were exploring questions Jack Zipes had raised in the opening forum about the relation between theory and teaching. The speakers were arranged to mark out the order of the discussion. — Beverly Lyon Clark, professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, has written extensively on fantasy, tutoring, school stories and literary studies. Beverly surveyed the ground for this session by taking a hard look at the state of children's literature studies within the academic world of literary studies, following up her 1996 MLA talk, `Kiddie Lit in Academe', published in Profession 1996. — Roderick McGillis, professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Alberta, was next. A well-known Canadian scholar and critic he has a strong international presence. As the paper he gave is from his forthcoming book on postcolonial theory and children's literature, it is unavailable for publication here. The title of the paper `"And the Celt Knew the Indian": Knowingness, Postcolonialism, Children's Literature' is derived from `one of Western Europe's most libratory texts: Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound".' Colonialism is, of course, fundamental to the Canadian experience. As Rod pointed out, the links between political discourses on colonialism and on children are all too apparent. Children continue to be subaltern, ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Man-books, Kiddie Lit and Critical Distemper Beverly Lyon Clark When I was in high school in the 1960s, I was required to read Hemingway and Crane, especially Crane; The Red Badge of Courage was assigned in three different years. When I went on to college and majored in English I proceeded to avoid American literature almost entirely. Of course I avoided children's literature too, but that was because it wasn't offered. Avoiding American literature in an American college, while taking the maximum number of courses that I was allowed to take in the English department, was more of a challenge. I feared at the time that there was something wrong with me, something faulty about my literary taste. Maybe it was partly to persuade myself that I was nevertheless a worthy scholar that I wrote a senior thesis on Milton. But I also appreciated that he was grappling with how men and women related. The Hemingway that I'd read did not. Neither did The Red Badge. Nor did Moby-Dick, which I'd struggled with, in high school, outside of class. But of course that was American literature as it was constructed then. I had been exposed to works that had been canonized according to principles laid down early in the twentieth century. Paul Lauter and others have documented how the canon shifted early in the century, increasingly excluding works by women and by men of colour, in tandem with the professionalizing of literary study. The almost-all-white, almost-all-male professoriat then emerging was no longer interested in, for instance, the schoolroom or fireside poets, the James Russell Lowells and Henry Wadsworth Longfellows. Nor were the professors interested in the power and pathos of a Harriet Beecher Stowe. Instead they enshrined the likes of Melville, Twain, Thoreau and James. The professoriat was likewise not much interested in literature that it identified as speaking to juveniles. Poetry popular in the schoolroom or at the fireside—sites that invited the presence of children—had to be simplistic. And woe betide anyone who had been identified as the Children's Friend in the nineteenth century, especially if she were female. But more on that later. These twentieth-century attitudes towards literature are very different from those prominent in the nineteenth century. The cultural arbiters were different, for one thing. Instead of being the professoriat, the ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cultural History and the Meanings of Children's Literature RUTH BOTTIGHEIMER Historians of children's literature have been turning to histories of childhood by historians such as Lawrence Stone, Philippe Ariès, and Lloyd DeMause for nearly three decades, and more recently to historians like Linda Pollack who have revised the harsh views of their predecessors. New Historicists, for their part, have enriched literary criticism with the inclusion of dramatically telling, closely described examples of historical fact. What is equally, or perhaps even more significant, in my view, are broad historical social phenomena that are fundamental to understanding interrelationships among historical books, their contents, and their readers. In this article I'd like to investigate three areas of New Historicism as applied to children's literature criticism: — understanding texts themselves, — understanding the eighteenth-century emergence and nineteenth-century expansion of children's literature, — and the continuing development of critical tools for broadening and deepening our understanding of children's literature texts. Much thought has been expended on the question of whether readers are more important than texts: once that question has been explored, texts and their puzzles still remain. One such puzzle, hinted at in Sam Pickering's observation in Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children 1749-1820, is that boys and girls exhibited different patterns of loyalty in children's books (170-2). His remarks suggest that cataloguing children's loyalties might uncover an unarticulated moral scaffolding underlying the development of plots and characterizations in various kinds of children's literature. That hunch pays off as it slowly emerges that girls' loyalties, unlike boys', are expressed vertically—not just principally vertically but almost exclusively vertically. Sarah Fielding's Governess, for example, opens with a fight over an apple in Mrs Teachum's little academy. The story's general outlines are familiar, but its details add brilliant colour. The little pupils fall a-fighting over a shiny red apple, and when they're caught out by Mrs Teachum, they burst into a counterpoint of tattling: ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IN CONCLUSION In the months since the Toronto convention we have been involved in other conferences. Lissa participated in a workshop organized by Sandra—`Border Crossings: Narratives for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults', for the International Society for the Study of European Ideas conference on `Twentieth-Century European Narratives: Tradition and Innovation'—in Haifa in August; and we both attended the Children's Literature Association conference in Paris in July We are conscious of how similar issues arise, no matter what the setting: concern for the future of children's literature and children's literature studies in the light of — technological change; — changes in the market for and dissemination of children's books; — changes in the notion of `children' as a defining category; — changes in what it means to be literate; — the difficulty of constructing an international ground for discussions about children's literature; — the difficulty of constructing an interdisciplinary ground for discussions about children's literature (education, library science and literary studies still exist in exclusive spheres, each only partly aware and usually suspicious of the practice of the others); — the problem of getting translations of children's books into English (French, Dutch, Swedish and German translations of English-language books abound, but the reverse is not true). We value the fact that our participation in the children's literature community, at home and abroad, enables us to develop networks of connections with authors, illustrators, librarians, scholars, publishers and booksellers and teachers. We hope that out of these continuing connections—which the MLA forum and workshops were devised to exemplify—new critical directions in children's literature studies will be developed and clarified. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ END © The Thimble Press, 1999 For further information about Signal, please, contact The Thimble Press, Lockwood, Station Road, Woodchester, Stroud, Glos. GL5 5EQ England phone: 01453 87 3716; fax: 01453 87 8599