Studies in Children's Literature 1500-2000

Modern Ireland is a startling country. Over just a few decades it has transformed itself – to admiring English eyes quite seamlessly and effortlessly – from a (literally) insular and secluded nation still locked in its turbulent past into a prosperous and outward-looking modern political economy, embracing the European enterprise with an intelligent certainty of purpose that makes Britain look silly. In the process it has freed itself of constitutional bondage to Roman Catholicism, gone far towards establishing intellectual control over its own history, faced and exposed the hidden shames in its past treatment of children, and become a serious player in international academic debate.

This admirable book marks the place that children’s literature has won as part of this extraordinary national progress. It consists of seventeen papers (plus an indispensable introductory essay) from the inaugural conference of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature, and like a miniature of modern Ireland itself, it partly offers a retrospective assessment of Ireland’s past writing for children, and partly looks at questions of common interest to children’s literature critics everywhere. Most of the contributors are Irish, but there are invited contributions from several critics based elsewhere.

With only two or three exceptions, the standard of essays is very high, and almost everything is interesting. I intend no disrespect to the Irish contributors by picking out three pieces from writers based in Britain. They are simply too good and too important to go unnoticed by concerned readers everywhere.

Most important among them is Sebastien Chapleau’s lucid, closely reasoned landmark essay, ‘A theory without a centre: developing childist criticism’. Though mainly re-examining Karin Lesnik-Oberstein’s book Children’s Literature, he tracks back to its forerunner, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, a book which has exerted influence disproportionate to its merits, and provides a long overdue antidote to Rose’s argument. He does us all a service.

David Rudd’s essay ‘Golliwog: genealogy of a non-PC icon’ is an object lesson in what immaculate research and an open mind can do to taken-for-granted political correctness.

Kimberley Reynolds’s ‘Alchemy and alco-pops: breaking the ideology trap’ is a beautifully clear, jargon-free, optimistic and imaginative take on modern adolescence and the fiction written for it: a piece to cheer up pessimists, and thankfully written as if Jacqueline Rose’s book had never existed.

Among the Irish essays – nearly all worth reading (we will draw a discreet veil over Declan Kiberd’s ‘School Stories’) – special mention is needed for two: Aine Nic Gabhann’s study of Frances Hodgson Burnett, ‘The voyeur’, is an original and perceptive study spoilt only by mistaking Burnett’s obsessive sensuous pleasure in childhood health (the driving force of The Secret Garden) for a perverted voyeuristic sexual desire. And Mary Flynn’s ‘The Talbot Press and its religious publications for children’ is a factual and passionate examination of the quite recent ecclesiastical maltreatment of Irish children. If you want to observe and admire the emancipation of modern Ireland, read that.