Many exciting things are happening in the world of children’s books research. It is very international, for one thing, and for another it has been harnessing effective critical cultural, historical, and literary approaches from the mainstream. This comes across here. Seminars and study tours often lead to publications of mixed quality, but in this work Jean Webb (long associated with children’s literature research at Worcester) has put together an excellent and provocative collection. NORDINFO is the Nordic Council for Scientific Information, and is an institution responsible to the Nordic Council of Ministers (founded in 1971 to encourage co‐operation). It gave its support to the seminar and its director, Sigrun Hannesdottir, contributed a research study on Icelandic publishing and readership during the Christmas season.
The focus of attention is the link between the text (including the images) in children’s literature, cultural and social and historical factors at work influencing how they are created and how people (from children to critics) respond to them, and national identity. The approach reinforces the central cultural position of writing for children in national ideology, for various countries at various periods of history. It also allows important critical perspectives (sociological, historical, psychological, feminist) to be applied to well‐known texts for children and young people. A batch of papers on British imperialism and national identity teases out the impact of ideology and culture on works like Kipling’s Kim, and, more broadly, argues that the influence of the English on Ireland, on didactic works for children in Australia, and on English, English‐language, and white‐race‐centric ideas and assumptions on South African books for children needs re‐examination. The cases are well‐argued, based on texts readers can examine for themselves, and supported by up‐to‐date and relevant critical materials.
Landscape, too, plays an important part in the writing of and response to children’s books. Palsdottir’s study of the Icelandic and English landscapes shows how they influence writers like Garner and Steinsdottir, and play an emblematic role in such works with resonances into national identity itself. The same insidious and under‐researched process takes place in books written during and after (and set in) times of war: the political and military climate shows through children’s books in Denmark written in the 1940s and 1950s, while the growth of Nazism in the 1930s impacted in many ways on the thinking and work of children’s writers like H.A. Rey, Dr Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), and William Steig. These studies examine texts and illustrations (included to a generous extent in the book) and are valuable examples of applied research. Another approach is that of gender and change, taken by two studies, one of Swedish young adult fiction of the 1980s (suggesting androgyny might underlie representations of tomboys), and the other of children metamorphosing into animals (speculating about boundaries and moral ambiguity).
Text, culture and national identity work together in other interesting ways – in modern Greek children’s books (where the influence of classical Greece and stereotypes about Greece are very powerful), in the limited amount of Finnish‐language publishing (other than Tove Jansson’s Moomin series) in Finland because Swedish dominates, and the interest in English‐language works in Czech translation in the Czech Republic. There are many important critical and historical issues here – about imperialism, national and personal identity, the education of children, the economics of publishing children’s books. This collection opens up these issues in an exciting and accessible way. At times, of course, some approaches lead to special pleading and pedantry, and practitioners in the children’s field may grow impatient that some children’s books seem to be hi‐jacked by critics for criticism’s sake (and that some children’s books do not really seem to be for children at all), but research like this is worth it. It reaffirms the place children’s literature has at the cultural and ideological centrepoint of national identity. It’s value for money, too, given the price.
