{"title":"“A Younger, Less Hairy Me”: Developing the Inner Child in Film Adaptations of Children’s Literature","authors":"Rebecca Rowe","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905626","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I juxtapose influential inner-child self-help books of the 1990s with my own analysis of two film adaptations of children’s books—How the Grinch Stole Christmas(2000) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)—to argue that many adaptations of children’s literature refocus on adults by developing new content that draws on the concept of the inner child. Ultimately, I argue that reliance on such theory both essentializes the child and acknowledges the connections between childhood and adulthood in a way that privileges adults and their understanding of childhood.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"63 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45507958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"British Children’s Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850–1914 by Jane Suzanne Carroll (review)","authors":"Shuqin Jiang","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905636","url":null,"abstract":"Book Reviews would have been interesting to see what he might have done with such a chapter or section in this book). In Empire’s Nursery, Brian Rouleau develops a strong case for how literature aimed at children, in its various forms, helped construct the idea of American Exceptionalism and the rise of the American Century in its pages. Well written, insightful, and meticulously researched and documented, it contributes greatly to this growing body of work in the field of childhood studies.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"121 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45626092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class by Emily C. Bruce (review)","authors":"Martina Winkler","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905634","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905634","url":null,"abstract":"Book Reviews sentimental fiction and Thomas Malthus’s ideas about population and reproduction. Most literary discussions of Malthus focus on British literature, so this chapter fills a gap in scholarship by considering Malthus’s American influence. Reading Dred through a Malthusian perspective reveals how Stowe does not imagine children as solving societal problems; rather, white children call attention to anxieties about overpopulation and reinforce settler colonialist ideologies. For example, some characters marry but don’t have children, while impoverished white children threaten the survival of their whole family. The book’s conclusion addresses how the various types of “antisocial” childhoods continue past the antebellum period, as evident in Zitkala-Ša’s writings and Pauline Hopkins’s Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest. Soderberg also raises interesting points about contemporary classifications such as “crack baby” that still exclude children of color from more idealized definitions of childhood. Indeed, the book’s discussion on viewing children as threats to the future of the United States is particularly relevant today, especially after the murders of Black youth like Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. Although the book pays careful attention to race and age categories, Soderberg acknowledges the project’s limits: it risks reinforcing harmful narratives about marginalized children, especially Black children, and it centers on adult constructions of childhood rather than children’s perspectives. While reading, I wondered whether antebellum children saw themselves as vicious—or as anything other than innocent, vulnerable, and sentimental. Furthermore, if a child steals from a store or burns down a building, are they participants in constructing childhood as incorrigible? Future studies considering child-authored texts or Marah Gubar’s kinship model could be particularly useful to further map out alternative antebellum childhoods. Overall, Vicious Infants would be useful for scholars interested in antebellum US literature, medical or legal histories of US childhood, and how race impacted nineteenth-century US childhoods. This book shows the value of reconsidering the categories scholars use to understand childhood. Thinking further about which children belong to these categories and which are excluded from them can produce a better understanding of how the antebellum United States envisioned their society.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"115 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43076532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"East of the Wardrobe: The Unexpected Worlds of C.S. Lewis by Warwick Ball (review)","authors":"N. Wood","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905629","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"103 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43020613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Primate Visionary: Peter Dickinson’s Eva and the Environmental Uncanny","authors":"Barbara Tannert-Smith","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905627","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Peter Dickinson’s YA novel Eva is thematically concerned with the bioethics of the posthuman in an age of ecological catastrophe. Eva also in many ways exemplifies the new materialist challenge to species ontologies, not least in its affirmation of how transspecies neuroplasticity undoes ontological divisions between humans and apes and so destabilizes taxonomy and selfhood. But Eva also demonstrates, in its visionary placement of the human within the nonhuman and subsequent meditation upon the complexities of symbiogenetic form, that the most effective YA speculative fiction engaging ecological catastrophe and its impact on the adolescent body may have to do so by engaging an environmental uncanny whose “interventions” (Ghosh, 31) of the nonhuman confound conventional strategies of representation.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"100 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41762708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after 100 Years ed. by Jennifer Harrison (review)","authors":"Sarah Minslow","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905630","url":null,"abstract":"Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Lord of the Rings (Mills 119). Still, Ball demonstrates and justifies Lewis’s Orientalism even as he objects to the “full armoury” of Said’s theory (131, 230). East of the Wardrobe opens an area that benefits from more discussion: C. S. Lewis’s ideological and aesthetic construction of Narnia beyond “mere Christianity.” Ball’s work shares a family resemblance with Laura Miller’s Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (2008) in that it describes how an adult may revisit childhood favorites with an awareness of how the books have spurred subsequent tastes and interests (books and Anglophilia, in Miller’s case; archaeology and the East, in Ball’s). Like Miller, Ball delights in recognizing the origins of his vocation and interests while using adult frameworks to reassess his old favorites. Ball’s introduction of central Asian texts and art could inspire new areas for research. Despite these promising aspects, the book is not so much literary criticism as it is a product of nostalgia, a work that links this world and imagined ones without necessarily distinguishing between them. East of the Wardrobe misses an opportunity to engage seriously with Lewis’s legacy in a way that could, as scholars are now doing with the Crusades, name and acknowledge the subterranean contributions of Arab, Persian, and other Near Eastern thinkers and artists to Narnia and to us.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"106 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48304825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Childhood Diaries of a British Girl and a British Boy, 1899–1924: Drawing Some Conclusions","authors":"Alisa Clapp-Itnyre","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905624","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"22 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43007681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empire’s Nursery: Children’s Literature and the Origins of the American Century by Brian Rouleau (review)","authors":"C. Nesmith","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905635","url":null,"abstract":"Book Reviews well-behaved, and diligent child and the imperfect yet cute, “child-like” youngster. The last chapter, “Writing the Self,” transfers this concept from letters to diaries. Similar to the letters, diaries are read as a medium of both pedagogical strategies and a means of self-fashioning. These chapters are lined up in a generally chronological order; they also, however, lead the reader from reading material created for children to texts written by children. Bruce picks up on a fundamental problem of the field, and probably all historians of childhood will feel sympathetic towards her difficulties in the endeavor to find suitable and manageable sources. She deals with this problem in creative ways, by reading the periodicals, books, and tales as scripts that would reflect on and prescribe children’s lives. Bruce also works with children’s notes and marginalia in textbooks, certainly an innovative approach. In the last two chapters, she analyzes letters and diaries written by children. However, her conclusions about children being active participants in their own education, reflecting their own personal development and fashioning a “modern self,” remain somewhat vague. The framing within an “Age of Revolution” could have been explained more in-depth and used in more fruitful ways. In a similar vein, the relation between a general history of media, reading, and writing on the one hand and the role of children and childhood within these processes would have deserved a closer look. Ultimately, the often-repeated phrases of the modern child, the modern self, and subjectivity appear at times indiscriminate and formulaic. Bruce provides innovative, diligent, and valuable work (in particular the detailed tracing of several versions and editions is impressive), but the analysis at times seems to come to a halt too soon. In fact, the author’s decision to divide her chapters in very small sections supports this impression—I have been disappointed by the abrupt stop to a train of thought more than once. This is a book with tremendous potential which, unfortunately, has not always been redeemed. Nevertheless, Bruce has written an interesting, readable, and inspiring study.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"117 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46978457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"International LGBTQ+ Literature for Children and Young Adults ed. by B. J. Epstein and Elizabeth L. Chapman (review)","authors":"J. Lussier","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905632","url":null,"abstract":"Book Reviews the reader to see the clear delineation between the theories and frameworks. More importantly, Brown crafts this text in a compelling manner, providing the level of description of each text necessary to fully understand her analysis. Though this is not a weakness of the book, it is a cautionary tale. This book was triggering for me. As someone who regularly walks past a building where a deadly school shooting occurred, I definitely struggled to read about the masterminds and execution of school shootings. At times, I had to put the book down to read something a bit lighter. I definitely appreciated the depth to which Brown analyzed all of the interconnected systems of influence that empowered these shooters and hope that readers will take away the message that it is our responsibility, as educators, parents, and members of the community, to recognize when adolescents demonstrate a change in behavior. I also hope that this book will encourage readers to advocate for more resources to support the mental health of adolescents experiencing trauma.","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"111 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43267246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To Begin Again: Known Paths and New Routes of Exploration","authors":"J. Sommers","doi":"10.1353/chq.2023.a905622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2023.a905622","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40856,"journal":{"name":"Childrens Literature Association Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"1 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43081365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}