First Page Excerpts [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- INDEX: Signal 91 January 2000 Reading in Childhood Elaine Moss 4 Nina Bawden: An Author for Today [reprinted from Signal January 1971] Elaine Moss 9 Children's Literature and the Emerging Artist Susan T. Viguers 15 Children's Literature Studies in a New Century Susan R. Gannon 25 Betwixt and Between: The Canonization of Naughton and Nolan David Rudd 41 The Strange Story of the Unidentical Twins: The Patrick Hardy Lecture Quentin Blake 52 Endpapers 64 Contributors 67 *********** Reading in Childhood ELAINE MOSS Because my association with Signal since its second issue has been continuous Nancy asked me to write, for this, its thirtieth anniversary, a piece about my own background in children's books pre-Signal. From here, it looks as though the road was planned, since much of my life has been spent in or around this microcosm; but on reflection I think the path I took was largely the result of extraordinarily happy accidents for which I was more or less prepared, even from childhood. I did not come from a particularly bookish family, though my father read and collected the historical novels on which my historian's teeth were later to be cut. My mother borrowed books from Boots Booklovers' Library and I remember the pleasure I took in going with her up the wooden staircase from the pharmacy to the library and then being allowed to slip the bookmark, on its green cord with the thin metal bar at the top, from the eyelet hole in the returning volume to her newly selected Vicky Baum or Margaret Kennedy. I was born in London in 1924, the year Christopher Robin was first overheard praying in When We Were Very Young. That book and the subsequent Milnes as they were published over the next few years became part of our childhood, which was not all that different from CR's except that we didn't 'kneel at the foot of the bed' to say our prayers as we were a Jewish family and our rituals weren't quite the same. On Saturdays, for instance, we neither wrote nor rode so my mother would read to us in the afternoon. My sister was two years older than me, my brother three years younger, so I suppose it was hard to find books to suit all of us. I remember her reading Alice in Wonderland in the small sitting room in the centre of which there was a little octagonal table. Because the real joys of Alice were probably above my seven-year-old head, what comes vividly to mind now is that table with the intricate pattern of ivory diamond shapes inlaid into its brown wood. Then there was Peter Pan. I think I first met this character in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens or else in the theatre where he was played by Jean Forbes Robertson, whom my father and grandfather knew, the family business being historical costumes for theatre and film. (I can remember at the age of about six being sat on an enormous plaster pie on the set of the banqueting scene of Charles Laughton's Henry VIII when it was being filmed-at Elstree?) My first school was a small rather formal one where most of the *************** Children's Literature and the Emerging Artist SUSAN T. VIGUERS One of my undergraduate courses at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia is Children's Literature, and in another course, a studio colloquium in the graduate Book Arts/Printmaking programme, I focus in part on picture books. I am not teaching future librarians, teachers or scholars but future fine artists, designers, dancers, musicians, actors, multimedia artists, screen writers and book artists.1 I am also not an authority in the field but a generalist (whose doctoral work was in English Renaissance Drama); my primary and formative exper-ience in children's literature was as a child and an adolescent (with a mother who was an authority and whose knowledge and love of the field was one of her greatest gifts). Two thirds of our students' undergraduate programme is taken up with studio courses; one third with liberal arts and science courses. My argument years ago for a course in children's literature, when the curriculum allows so few courses in liberal arts (a perennial complaint), was that such a course would offer an extraordinary opportunity to introduce and sensitize students to central issues in the arts-aesthetics, narrative structure, cultural constructs, audience. All students coming to our university are interested and talented in at least one art, but that does not mean that they are sophisticated about the arts generally, that they are even highly literate readers, visual or verbal. Two clichés invariably surface early in the semester: a picture is worth a thousand words, and reading an unillustrated text requires more imagination than reading one with pictures. The first privileges images and the second language, but both reveal a limited perspective. The statements are accurate only when one medium is trying to do the job of the other. Peter Hollindale writes about courses in children's literature providing the opportunity for 'complex inquiries into the nature of reading'. I see the overriding concern of my course as just that: I want my students to become acutely aware of themselves as readers of visual, tactile, verbal information-which includes the memory of reading as a child-and to examine what they are experiencing when they read. Rather than impose expectations, I push them to attend to what they are actually reading, to examine why they are responding as they do and how ************** Children's Literature Studies in a New Century SUSAN R. GANNON I have been spending altogether too much time this past autumn trying to do things that require new frames of reference. I (no doubt rashly) agreed to teach a course on the Internet and am learning-awfully fast-more than I imagined I would ever have to know about teaching online. But some pioneers have kindly shown me their course materials, and I can already see the appealing possibilities of this way of interacting with students. And though it seems a strange assignment for a quiet teacher of children's literature, I have also been drafted to serve as faculty governance representative in a protracted struggle with the university administration over grievance and dismissal procedures. Since it is never comfortable to take on the president and provost of your university in hand-to-hand combat, no matter how polite everyone tries to be, I decided to enrol in a high-powered seminar on negotiation and mediation. And I soon found myself with about twenty faculty and staff of different ages and specialities, sitting around a meeting room in the Yale Club-role-playing, analysing negotiation processes, brainstorming tactics, learning how to probe for an opponent's real needs and reframe positions in such a way as to enable contending parties to come to a resolution of their problems. Like my struggle with Internet protocols and file attachments, the negotiation seminar has been a profitable experience: I learned how to look at what was happening at the negotiating table in a new way. And there were unexpected bonuses. When I turned to revising a paper on the image of heroism presented to nineteenth-century parents and children in American periodical literature, material I had worked with extensively for months looked quite fresh. Suddenly the representation of the interdependencies of family life, the power relations, the negotiation moves, the reframing devices, became intelligible and I began to understand how patriotic fiction might function to help families work out their differences over risk-taking behaviour and aspirations towards autonomy in the young. Writing in Signal recently, I suggested that there might be advantages to studying children's literature within a scholarly subculture that sustains a dialogue among colleagues with quite different critical agendas. I was thinking then about what the teachers, librarians, literary critics ************************** Betwixt and Between: The Canonization of Naughton and Nolan DAVID RUDD In May 1999 David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, announced a list of authors of recent fiction who would be on the National Curriculum in the new millennium, with a particular view to 're-engage the interest of underachieving boys'. To the surprise of many, one of the authors is Bill Naughton, who has for too long been on the margins of children's literature. A look at some of the standard critical works on children's literature confirms this, as they almost universally ignore him. I know of only one critical piece: an article by Andrew Stibbs, published almost thirty years ago. Yet, if you ask long-serving classroom teachers about Naughton, they will tell you that he has never gone away, citing My Pal Spadger, A Dog Called Nelson and, especially, The Goalkeeper's Revenge (this collection of short stories, including 'Spit Nolan', has been more or less continually in print since 1961). His books are ideal for reading aloud to a class, having the laconic appeal of the street-corner teller: vivid characters, visualizable scenes, witty dialogue, sensuous physical description and, frequently, a twist at the end, a characteristic that links his tales to the oral world of the joke. Naughton's recent official recognition prompts the question: why has he been neglected by the critics? In trying to answer this, I'd like to reappraise his writing, focusing on what seem to me to be two of the most important works-One Small Boy and 'Spit Nolan'. One of the reasons for the critical neglect is implied in my title, 'betwixt and between'. Even classifying his work is a problem: the latest, most populist edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature omits him entirely, perhaps considering him to be a children's author. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature does give Naughton an entry but suggests that he was an adult author who wrote 'several books for children . . . including The Goalkeeper's Revenge (1961) and Spit Nolan (1961)'-though these two were, in fact, the same book! Naughton has a more substantial entry, by Rosemary Stones, in St. James Guide to Children's Writers, which calls Naughton 'a writer about childhood' rather than 'a children's writer'. Certainly Naughton himself did not see The Goalkeeper's Revenge as specifically for children-he was surprised when Kaye Webb of Puffin wanted to market it that *************************** The Strange Story of the Unidentical Twins: The Patrick Hardy Lecture QUENTIN BLAKE In May 1999 Quentin Blake was appointed the first laureate for children's books by the Princess Royal at a ceremony in London. The laureateship, to be awarded biennially, intends to celebrate the lifetime's achievement of a living British writer or illustrator of children's books and to heighten the profile of children's books generally. The Patrick Hardy Lecture, under the auspices of the Children's Book Circle, was given on 4 November 1999 at the Royal Overseas League in London. Quentin Blake spoke from notes, and the following is an edited version of the transcript of his speech. I feel very privileged to be asked to give this Patrick Hardy Lecture. When I was invited to do so, I asked to be sent some of the previous ones so that I could get an idea of what I was about. They were so impressive, I have to admit, that for a while I couldn't help thinking that perhaps the best way to spend the evening would be simply to read one of them again. But that might have been cheating; so what I am going to do is to give you a few thoughts on what I have called the Unidentical Twins. (That rather meretricious title I invented in the hope of making the talk sound interesting, and getting you here.) My twins are words and pictures, and what I want to talk about is the relationship between them. One thing that made me particularly happy when that weighty medal was hung around my neck was that I was someone involved with both pictures and words. Most of the words were not my own, of course, but I thought it was very satisfactory that the laureateship should begin this way so that later on maybe we will have laureates who are exclusively writers and laureates who are exclusively illustrators, but we would have the sense that both of these twins would make their contribution, because they do find themselves together a great deal in children's books . I think sometimes the twin who is the visual one is regarded as someone to be dispensed with later; he is not going to be the success of the family. The pictures are there because children cannot read yet and pictures will help them until they get going. In fact, there is such an effect, because the visual is much more immediately accessible than the verbal; it happens immediately and it happens in wonderful ways. I can remember when I started drawing and when I started going to publishers, occasionally people would say to me, 'Well, yes, these are nice ********************+ Endpapers Children's Literature Convocations We have received the following press releases from Homerton College and the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature at Roehampton. International Symposium 1-4 September 2000 Homerton College, Cambridge Reading Pictures: Art, Narrative and Childhood Together with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Homerton College will host an international symposium and an exhibition of contemporary picture-book art for children. Reading Pictures: Art, Narrative and Childhood will celebrate and study the intricate relationships between pictorial texts, narrative and childhood in different historical periods and across cultures through visual artefacts springing from a spectrum of technologies: from fine art to primitive and vernacular traditions, from picture books and comic books to films, photography, CD-Roms and animation. Scholars and teachers from the fields of illustration, the visual arts, children's literature, social anthropology, cultural history, art history, education, publishing and the media are invited to explore the many facets of the relationship between art, story and culture in the worlds of childhood. Themes will include: - history and myth, culture and difference in visual texts for children; - childhood and the affective domain: humour, horror, romance; - constructions of class, race, gender, the environment in visual texts for children; - the comic book, animation and film texts; - religion, science and popular culture in pictorial texts for children; - postmodernity and metafictions in picture-book art. There will be a strand within the symposium which is directly concerned with visual literacy within the classroom. Those who have agreed to take part include: Quentin Blake, Clare Bradford, Eve Bearne, Helen Bromley, Ruth Brown, Anthony Browne, Eric Carle, Babette Cole, Helen Cowcher, Penni Cotton, Jane Doonan, Michael Foreman, Geoff Fox, Prue Goodwin, Judith Graham, Tina Hanlon, Shirley Brice Heath, Shirley Hughes, Peter Hunt, Pat Hutchins, Satoshi Kitamura, Gunther Kress, David Lewis, Gillian McClure, Hilary Minns, Maria Nikolajeva, Jan Ormerod, Jan Pienkowski, Kimberley Reynolds, Duncan Robinson, Michael Rosen, Nick Sharratt, Margaret Meek Spencer, Frances Sword (Head of Education, Fitzwilliam Museum), Nick Tucker, Victor Watson, Brian Wildsmith. For information about giving papers, contact Morag Styles at Homerton College, Cambridge CB2 2PH. Tel. 01223 507281 (voicemail) / 507111 Fax. 01223 507120 Email. ms104@cam.ac.uk For conference booking forms, contact Anne Herriot, Symposium Administrator, Homerton College. Tel. 01223 507136 (voicemail) Fax. 01223 507240 Email. ah284@cam.ac.uk Children's Literature International Summer School at the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature University of Surrey, Roehampton From 30 July to 13 August 2000 NCRCL will hold the first of what will be biennial two-week Children's Litera ************************************** CONTRIBUTORS Elaine Moss contributed 'John Burningham: Picture Book Artist Extraordinary' to the first-anniversary issue of Books and Company ('Issue Five The End of the Century 1999'), a quarterly journal published by Susan Hill, Long Barn Books, Ebrington, Glos. GL55 6NW (telephone 01386 593352, fax 01386 593443). Susan T. Viguers, professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and director of its University Writing Program, wrote about Ruth Hill Viguers in 'My Mother, My Children, and Books' for the January 1988 issue of Signal. Susan R. Gannon is professor of literature and communications in the Dyson College of Pace University, New York; she is co-author of Mary Mapes Dodge (Twayne) and is currently co-editing a collection of articles on St. Nicholas Magazine. David Rudd is a senior lecturer at Bolton Institute where he runs courses on children's literature within the undergraduate literature programme; a book based on his doctoral dissertation, Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature, is due for publication by Macmillan Press in April this year. Quentin Blake is preparing a book about his own work to be published by Jonathan Cape in September 2000 in conjunction with an exhibition at Chris Beetles Gallery in London. He is also working with the National Gallery on an exhibition for spring 2001, which will combine paintings from the gallery's collection with prints and contemporary children's book illustration to explore the idea of story in pictures. The Laureate's Party, a choice of fifty of his favourite children's books, will come from Random House in May 2000.