{"id":145,"date":"2016-07-03T20:19:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T20:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=145"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:35:58","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:35:58","slug":"marian-therese-keyes-and-aine-mcgillicuddy-eds-politics-and-ideology-in-childrens-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/07\/03\/marian-therese-keyes-and-aine-mcgillicuddy-eds-politics-and-ideology-in-childrens-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Marian Th\u00e8r\u00e9se Keyes and \u00c1ine McGillicuddy, eds. Politics and Ideology in Children\u2019s Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marian Th\u00e8r\u00e9se Keyes and \u00c1ine McGillicuddy, eds. Politics and Ideology in Children\u2019s Literature<\/em>. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. 191 p. ISBN 9781846825262. \u20ac49.50 (hardback).<\/p>\n

Children\u2019s literature became an established area of scholarly and critical attention in the 1980s, a time when academic enquiry and analysis were particularly focused on the way texts of all kinds are bound up in ideology. The role of writing and illustration for children and young people in transmitting, challenging, or subverting the dominant ideology and normative assumptions was regularly scrutinised. The insights from those years continue to inform critical work in the field, but there have been few studies specifically dedicated to the political and ideological work of writing for children over the last ten years or more. The introduction to this volume does some welcome reprising of earlier scholarship before its contributors embark on fresh analyses.<\/p>\n

The contributions all began as papers at a conference on the subject organised by the Irish Society for the Study of Children\u2019s Literature (ISSCL). It is the sixth set of ISSCL conference proceedings to be published by Four Courts, who have done an attractive job of presenting the book. The editors had a challenging job since the thirteen essays cover a wide range of work from several periods, about different genres, using a variety of approaches. The texts discussed range from Edward Lear\u2019s limericks to nineteenth-century juvenile periodicals, First World War stories, the young adult novels of Eil\u00eds Dillon, and a French cinematic retelling of the Bluebeard story to The Hunger Games<\/em>. To impose an internal order, the essays are divided into four groups: \u201cIdeology and Subversion,\u201d \u201cUtopias and Dystopias,\u201d \u201cExperiences of War and Exile,\u201d and \u201cGender Politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

The contributors represent a number of nationalities, language groups and disciplines, giving a sense of how the subject has evolved since the 1980s. Perhaps because several of the original conference papers were fragments of or spin-offs from doctoral research and so were more fully developed elsewhere, the quality of the contributions to this volume is uneven. A few have not entirely succeeded in turning a talk into a published essay. There are, however, several strong and original essays. Brief summaries of these, in the order in which they appear, give a sense of their arguments and coverage.<\/p>\n

Victoria de Rijke\u2019s biopolitical analysis of children\u2019s fables provides both a historical overview of the genre and some careful close reading based on Michel Foucault\u2019s discussion of biopolitics, meaning the way in which the living body is subject to vectors of knowledge-power. Ciara Ni Bhroin\u2019s discussion of homecoming is particularly redolent at a time when the collapse of the Celtic Tiger has stimulated Irish migration, though her topic is the way in which fantasy novels by earlier generations of migrants have tended to create imaginary, mythic homelands and communities. Using as a case study the work of Irish-born Canadian O.R. Melling, Ni Bhroin shows that the dynamics in such fantasies are often more complex than they initially appear. Jessica D\u2019Eath provides a detailed and insightful discussion of the way in which members of the Fascist regime used children\u2019s literature to inculcate their values and rehabilitate the grotesque behaviour of the squads who took it upon themselves to punish those they believed had offended the regime. Marian Keyes makes a contribution to publishing history with her discussion of the paratexts and self-portraits associated with the nineteenth-century writer and editor Anna Maria Fielding Hall. The volume closes with perhaps the most overtly political contribution: Marion Rana\u2019s discussion of the way in which a spectrum of young adult novels treat sexual violence against females as a rite of passage which reinforces traditional sex-role stereotyping and gender roles.<\/p>\n

Taken together, these essays give a sense of how children\u2019s literature criticism has begun to re-engage with the ways in which writing for children is bound up with ideology, and some ideas about the widening nature of the discipline. Beyond children\u2019s literature specialists, book historians and those with interests in the environment and gender will also find some relevant material in the contributions.<\/p>\n

Kimberley Reynolds<\/p>\n

Newcastle University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marian Th\u00e8r\u00e9se Keyes and \u00c1ine McGillicuddy, eds. Politics and Ideology in Children\u2019s Literature. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014. 191 p. ISBN 9781846825262. \u20ac49.50 (hardback). Children\u2019s literature became an established area of scholarly and critical attention in the 1980s, a time when academic enquiry and analysis were particularly focused on the way texts of all kinds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1913],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-children-ya"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":589,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}