Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 48

According to many standard chronologies of the history of children’s literature, the dawn of the twentieth century did not herald a significant change in terms of the texts being produced for children; 1900/1901 falls well within the period designated as the “First Golden Age” of children’s literature, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending before World War I (Townsend 1996, p. 682). Hunt (2001) provides as endpoints Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, published in 1863, and Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, which appeared in 1913. Well-known examples from the early twentieth-century years of this “Golden Age” include Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (all 1902), Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). In New Zealand, popular texts included The Cradle Ship (1916) by Edith Howes, which used a narrative frame to convey knowledge about animal reproduction. The first part of the twentieth century likewise continued the development in preceding decades of greater accessibility to child-specific reading experiences for children beyond the upper classes. As Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone point out, referencing Viviana Zelizer’s 1985 Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, the “transformation of the child from performing important economic work to performing affective roles essential to a family’s emotional well-being was completed for children of the working classes only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after child labor was strictly curtailed and education mandated” (Mickenberg and Vallone 2011, p. 16). This switch from an economic to an affective role gave a wider range of children more time for both learning and leisure, thereby allowing them opportunities to be instructed and delighted by literature.

While the new century continued many trends from the old, the 1900s also heralded the beginnings of a significant shift in societal conceptions of children’s literature, a shift that diminished the cultural clout of the field and that has influenced academic and general views of literature for young people well into the twenty-first century. During the early 1900s, children’s literature became a specialized genre that was defined by and limited to its young audience, rather than existing as a subset of a more inclusive understanding of literature in which books directed to children could potentially hold adults’ interest as well. As Jerry Griswold (1992) notes, for example, US best-seller lists during the “Golden Age” regularly included literature written for both adults and children, a phenomenon which ceased in the early 1900s. In Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America (2003), Beverly Lyon Clark charts the rationales underlying the separation of literature for children and for adults. She argues that in working to legitimize the aesthetic value of fiction and the academic study of literature, scholars and authors created or reinforced categories of otherness in order to delineate the new territory; Clark focuses on the othered categories of economic disadvantage, femininity, and youth (which of course also intersected with each other as well as with other denigrated identities). Clark comments that “once Henry James and others started carving a niche for fiction for adults around the turn of the twentieth century, and once cultural gatekeeping professionalized – once its site became the academy instead of the literary journal – children’s literature generally disappeared from the purview of the cultural elite” (p. 181). The field then became the province of librarians, and this association shored up the division between children’s texts and male-dominated “serious” literature, given women’s prominence both in community libraries and in the professionalizing discipline (see Anne Lundin 2004 for an extended analysis of the parts that librarians, literary critics, and readers have played in determining the value of children’s literature). The twentieth century’s new cultural construction of children’s literature emphasized what Maria Nikolajeva (2010) has defined as an “aetonormative” understanding of childhood, in which the adult is seen to be the standard while childhood is an (inherently limited) departure from this norm. Given this foundational concept of childhood, it is unsurprising that cordoning off children’s literature has not prevented adults from admitting a certain flexibility to the boundaries when it suited them – as in the case of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) coming to be seen as “really” fitting within the more respectable category of adult literature. As Clark says, this approach displays “a tendency to consider anything that adults find valuable as really adult” (2003, p. 159).

While twentieth-century children’s literature was no longer considered to be equal in stature to literature for adults, isolating the field did provide new opportunities for recognizing quality within it, as seen by the number of prominent children’s literature awards established in the first half of the century. The American Library Association instituted the Newbery Medal in 1922 and the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1936; in 1935 the UK association of professional librarians established the Carnegie Medal for children’s books written in English, followed by the Kate Greenway Medal for illustrated texts in 1955; the Children’s Book Council of Australia, also the brainchild of librarians, first awarded a prize in 1936 and added a category for illustration in 1952; and New Zealand’s library association instituted the first of a series of awards in 1945. These efforts to acknowledge the aesthetic value of writing for children paralleled the expansion of access to the texts, as developments in publishing increased children’s ability to own books and exercise some choice in the purchase. Book tokens, an early form of the gift certificate, were introduced in Britain in 1932; more affordable Puffin paperback editions of children’s texts began to circulate in 1941, and the extremely cheap Golden Books first appeared in 1942 (Clark 1996, p. 474; Epstein 1996, p. 481). Meanwhile, the first half of the century saw the establishment in the United States of specialized children’s divisions in publishing houses and children’s rooms in public libraries (Epstein 1996, p. 479). England and the United States maintained a virtual stranglehold on publishing children’s books in English throughout the twentieth century until a US antitrust ruling in 1976 (Clark 1996, p. 475).