The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature
Some of the most innovative and spell-binding literature has been written for young people, but only recently has academic study embraced its range and complexity. With discussions ranging from eighteenth-century moral tales to modern fantasies by J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, this Companion illuminates acknowledged classics and many more neglected works. Written by leading scholars from around the world, it will be essential reading for all students and scholars of children’s literature, offering original readings and new research that reflects the latest developments in the field.
Cambridge Companions to . . .
Authors
Edward Albee edited by Stephen J. Bottoms
Margaret Atwood edited by Coral Ann Howells
W. H. Auden edited by Stan Smith
Jane Austen edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster
Beckett edited by John Pilling
Aphra Behn edited by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd
Walter Benjamin edited by David S. Ferris
William Blake edited by Morris Eaves
Brecht edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (second edition)
The Brontës edited by Heather Glen
Frances Burney edited by Peter Sabor
Byron edited by Drummond Bone
Albert Camus edited by Edward J. Hughes
Willa Cather edited by Marilee Lindemann
Cervantes edited by Anthony J. Cascardi
Chaucer, second edition edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann
Chekhov edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain
Kate Chopin edited by Janet Beer
Coleridge edited by Lucy Newlyn
Wilkie Collins edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor
Joseph Conrad edited by J. H. Stape
Dante edited by Rachel Jacoff (second edition)
Daniel Defoe edited by John Richetti
Don DeLillo edited by John N. Duvall
Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan
Emily Dickinson edited by Wendy Martin
John Donne edited by Achsah Guibbory
Dostoevskii edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow
Theodore Dreiser edited by Leonard Cassuto and Claire Virginia Eby
John Dryden edited by Steven N. Zwicker
W. E. B. Du Bois edited by Shamoon Zamir
George Eliot edited by George Levine
T. S. Eliot edited by A. David Moody
Ralph Ellison edited by Ross Posnock
Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris
William Faulkner edited by Philip M. Weinstein
Henry Fielding edited by Claude Rawson
F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Ruth Prigozy
Flaubert edited by Timothy Unwin
E. M. Forster edited by David Bradshaw
Benjamin Franklin edited by Carla Mulford
Brian Friel edited by Anthony Roche
Robert Frost edited by Robert Faggen
Elizabeth Gaskell edited by Jill L. Matus
Goethe edited by Lesley Sharpe
Günter Grass edited by Stuart Taberner
Thomas Hardy edited by Dale Kramer
David Hare edited by Richard Boon
Nathaniel Hawthorne edited by Richard Millington
Seamus Heaney edited by Bernard O’Donoghue
Ernest Hemingway edited by Scott Donaldson
Homer edited by Robert Fowler
Ibsen edited by James McFarlane
Henry James edited by Jonathan Freedman
Samuel Johnson edited by Greg Clingham
Ben Jonson edited by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart
James Joyce edited by Derek Attridge (second edition)
Kafka edited by Julian Preece
Keats edited by Susan J. Wolfson
Lacan edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté
D. H. Lawrence edited by Anne Fernihough
Primo Levi edited by Robert Gordon
Lucretius edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie
David Mamet edited by Christopher Bigsby
Thomas Mann edited by Ritchie Robertson
Christopher Marlowe edited by Patrick Cheney
Herman Melville edited by Robert S. Levine
Arthur Miller edited by Christopher Bigsby
Milton edited by Dennis Danielson (second edition)
Molière edited by David Bradby and Andrew Calder
Toni Morrison edited by Justine Tally
Nabokov edited by Julian W. Connolly
Eugene O’Neill edited by Michael Manheim
George Orwell edited by John Rodden
Ovid edited by Philip Hardie
Harold Pinter edited by Peter Raby (second edition)
Sylvia Plath edited by Jo Gill
Edgar Allan Poe edited by Kevin J. Hayes
Alexander Pope edited by Pat Rogers
Ezra Pound edited by Ira B. Nadel
Proust edited by Richard Bales
Pushkin edited by Andrew Kahn
Philip Roth edited by Timothy Parrish
Salman Rushdie edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Shakespeare edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells
Shakespearean Comedy edited by Alexander Leggatt
Shakespeare and Popular Culture edited by Robert Shaughnessy
Shakespearean Tragedy edited by Claire McEachern
Shakespeare on Film edited by Russell Jackson (second edition)
Shakespeare on Stage edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton
Shakespeare’s History Plays edited by Michael Hattaway
Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander
Shakespeare’s Poetry edited by Patrick Cheney
George Bernard Shaw edited by Christopher Innes
Shelley edited by Timothy Morton
Mary Shelley edited by Esther Schor
Sam Shepard edited by Matthew C. Roudané
Spenser edited by Andrew Hadfield
Laurence Sterne edited by Thomas Keymer
Wallace Stevens edited by John N. Serio
Tom Stoppard edited by Katherine E. Kelly
Harriet Beecher Stowe edited by Cindy Weinstein
August Strindberg edited by Michael Robinson
Jonathan Swift edited by Christopher Fox
J. M. Synge edited by P. J. Mathews
Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson
Tolstoy edited by Donna Tussing Orwin
Mark Twain edited by Forrest G. Robinson
Virgil edited by Charles Martindale
Voltaire edited by Nicholas Cronk
Edith Wharton edited by Millicent Bell
Walt Whitman edited by Ezra Greenspan
Oscar Wilde edited by Peter Raby
Tennessee Williams edited by Matthew C. Roudané
August Wilson edited by Christopher Bigsby
Mary Wollstonecraft edited by Claudia L. Johnson
Virginia Woolf edited by Sue Roe and Susan Sellers
Wordsworth edited by Stephen Gill
W. B. Yeats edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly
Zola edited by Brian Nelson
Topics
The Actress edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes
The African American Novel edited by Maryemma Graham
The African American Slave Narrative edited by Audrey A. Fisch
American Modernism edited by Walter Kalaidjian
American Realism and Naturalism edited by Donald Pizer
American Travel Writing edited by Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera
A
merican Women Playwrights edited by Brenda Murphy
Arthurian Legend edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter
Australian Literature edited by Elizabeth Webby
British Romanticism edited by Stuart Curran
British Romantic Poetry edited by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane
British Theatre, 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn
Canadian Literature edited by Eva-Marie Kröller
Children’s Literature edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel
The Classic Russian Novel edited by Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller
Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Matthew Campbell
Crime Fiction edited by Martin Priestman
Early Modern Women’s Writing edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers
The Eighteenth-Century Novel edited by John Richetti
Eighteenth-Century Poetry edited by John Sitter
English Literature, 1500–1600 edited by Arthur F. Kinney
English Literature, 1650–1740 edited by Steven N. Zwicker
English Literature, 1740–1830 edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee
English Novelists edited by Adrian Poole
English Poetry, Donne to Marvell edited by Thomas N. Corns
English Poets edited by Claude Rawson
English Renaissance Drama, second edition edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway
English Restoration Theatre edited by Deborah C. Payne Fisk
Feminist Literary Theory edited by Ellen Rooney
Fiction in the Romantic Period edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener
The Fin de Siècle edited by Gail Marshall
The French Novel: from 1800 to the Present edited by Timothy Unwin
German Romanticism edited by Nicholas Saul
Gothic Fiction edited by Jerrold E. Hogle
The Greek and Roman Novel edited by Tim Whitmarsh
Greek and Roman Theatre edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton
Greek Tragedy edited by P. E. Easterling
The Harlem Renaissance edited by George Hutchinson
The Irish Novel edited by John Wilson Foster
The Italian Novel edited by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli
Jewish American Literature edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer
The Latin American Novel edited by Efraín Kristal
The Literature of the First World War edited by Vincent Sherry
The Literature of World War II edited by Marina MacKay
Literature on Screen edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan
Medieval English Literature edited by Larry Scanlon
Medieval English Theatre edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (second edition)
Medieval French Literature edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay
Medieval Romance edited by Roberta L. Krueger
Medieval Women’s Writing edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace
Modern American Culture edited by Christopher Bigsby
Modern British Women Playwrights edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt
Modern French Culture edited by Nicholas Hewitt
Modern German Culture edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will
The Modern German Novel edited by Graham Bartram
Modern Irish Culture edited by Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly
Modernism edited by Michael Levenson
The Modernist Novel edited by Morag Shiach
Modernist Poetry edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins
Modern Italian Culture edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West
Modern Latin American Culture edited by John King
Modern Russian Culture edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky
Modern Spanish Culture edited by David T. Gies
Narrative edited by David Herman
Native American Literature edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer
Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould
Old English Literature edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge
Performance Studies edited by Tracy C. Davis
Postcolonial Literary Studies edited by Neil Lazarus
Postmodernism edited by Steven Connor
Renaissance Humanism edited by Jill Kraye
Roman Satire edited by Kirk Freudenburg
The Spanish Novel: from 1600 to the Present edited by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez
Travel Writing edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs
The Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio
Twentieth-Century English Poetry edited by Neil Corcoran
Twentieth-Century Irish Drama edited by Shaun Richards
Victorian and Edwardian Theatre edited by Kerry Powell
The Victorian Novel edited by Deirdre David
Victorian Poetry edited by Joseph Bristow
War Writing edited by Kate McLoughlin
Writing of the English Revolution edited by N. H. Keeble
The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature
Edited by
M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521687829
© Cambridge University Press 2009
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2009
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-521-86819-8 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-68782-9 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Preface
Chronology
Eric J. Johnsonxvii
Part I Contexts and Genres
1 The origins of children’s literature
M. O. Grenby
2 Children’s books and constructions of childhood
Andrea Immel
3 The making of children’s books
Brian Alderson
4 Picture-book worlds and ways of seeing
Katie Trumpener
5 The fear of poetry
Richard Flynn
6 Retelling stories across time and cultures
John Stephens
7 Classics and canons
Deborah Stevenson
Part II Audiences
8 Learning to be literate
Lissa Paul
9 Gender roles in children’s fiction
Judy Simons
10 Children’s texts and the grown-up reader
U. C. Knoepflmacher
11 Ideas of difference in children’s literature
Lynne Vallone
Part III Forms and Themes
12 Changing families in children’s fiction
Kimberley Reynolds
13 Traditions of the school story
Mavis Reimer
14 Fantasy’s alternative geography for children
Andrea Immel, U. C. Knoepflmacher and Julia Briggs
15 Animal and object stories
>
David Rudd
16 Humour and the body in children’s literature
Roderick McGillis
Further reading
Index
Illustrations
All illustrations reproduced by permission of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, except where noted.
1. Lady Ellenor Fenn, Fables in Monosyllables. London: J. Marshall, [1783], frontispiece and title-page.
2. Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio. Illustrated by Attilio Mussino. 8th edn, Florence: Marzocco, 1943, p. 62.
3. Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit, front boards of the first trade edition and the privately published edition. With the permission of Frederick Warne & Co.
4. Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense. London: T. McLean, 1846, ‘There was an old Derry down Derry’.
5. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Illustrated by Joseph Schindelman. 1st edn. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964, p. 72. With permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
6. Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Illustrated by Schindelman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973, p. 72. Redrawn and revised text. With permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
7. Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus . . . Visible World, or Picture and Nomenclature of all the chief things in the world. London: J. Kirton, 1659, CXX ‘Societas parentalis’.
8. Randolph Caldecott, Sing a song of sixpence. London: Frederick Warne, c. 1883. ‘Queen was in the parlour counting all her money’.
9. Walter Crane, 1, 2, Buckle My Shoe. London: Routledge & Sons, 1867. ‘11, 12, ring the bell’.
10. Margaret Wise Brown. Illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, The Noisy Book. New York: Scott, 1939, p. 1. ‘Then he heard the little noises’. With permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
11. Paul O. Zelinsky, Rumpelstiltskin. New York: Dutton’s Children’s Books, 1986, pp. [35] and [36]. With permission of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved.