Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 52

While concerns over series novels indicated adult anxieties about how adolescents might use literature as a conduit to reject the standards and expectations of their elders, literature for the youngest readers – those who need an adult interpreter of written texts or are just beginning to decipher them independently – remained more reassuringly under adult control. The two genres targeting these audiences, picturebooks and early readers, existed well before 1900, but they underwent significant changes during the twentieth century, intersecting in many ways before diverging more definitively after the 1950s. In distinguishing between the two genres, I follow the comparison put forth by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker (2016): “Early Readers differ from picturebooks, which often feature more sophisticated and poetic language because they are meant to be read aloud by adults to children, and which also differ from Early Readers in shape, size, and production quality because they privilege illustration as an art form” (pp. 4–5). Significant developments in the form of the picturebook have depended on available printing technologies and have been marked by noticeable moments of innovation, such as Wanda Gág’s double-page spreads in her 1928 Millions of Cats (op de Beeck 2011), while the evolution of the early reader has been driven by literacy theories and marked by changes in tone such as Dr. Seuss’s (Theodor Geisel) famous antidote to the orderly world of Dick and Jane with the chaos of The Cat in the Hat (1957). The Cat’s hijinks, along with Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear series, also initiated in 1957, were the first of the long-lasting Beginner Books and I Can Read! series (Caponegro 2016). As the above quote reveals, picturebooks have carried more aesthetic cachet than early readers, which within the field of children’s literature criticism have been laden with the disdain that the early twentieth century directed toward children’s literature in general; Miskec and Wannamaker’s collection was the first to approach the early reader from a literary-critical perspective. In contrast, the picture-book side of the field, which in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s included Virginia Lee Burton, Robert McCloskey, and Ludwig Bemelmans, connotes significant aesthetic value: lush illustrations in a wide variety of artistic styles and texts that achieve eloquence and encourage deep thinking, whether the language is spare or detailed. The opportunity for an author/illustrator collaboration in picturebook creation also helps to frame the process as artistically, even personally, enriching, with partnerships such as that of Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson or Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd producing some of the most enduring work from the period (Nel 2012). During the 1960s, some texts began to challenge expectations about how children should interact with picturebooks and what kinds of formats or topics were appropriate for young audiences. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), for example, integrates both carefully spaced text and an acceptance of childhood unruliness, consequently reinventing a conventional journey narrative. However, increased use of many innovations, including metafictional and tactile elements, would wait until the late twentieth century. In sum, with picturebooks as in so many other aspects of the time period I have discussed here, the 1960s seem to set up revolutionary changes that do not fully emerge until the 1970s or later.