Fairy tales remain extremely popular, spurred on by the Disney corporation's film variants of tales such as "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," and "The Little Mermaid." Students who are interested in the field can choose among many resources for primary texts, including the Norton Critical edition of The Classic Fairy Tales and Usborne Illustrated Fairy Tales. A fine online resource for fairy tales is Heidi Anne Heiner's SurLaLune, which features carefully reproduced and annotated fairy tales -- everything from "Bluebeard" to "Beauty and the Beast" -- as well as a timeline of fairy tale scholarship and a link to conferences in the fields of folklore and fairy tales.
Children's literature scholars who have taken a keen interest in fairy tales include Jack Zipes, whose 1979 text, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, remains a relevant exploration of the political and cultural ideologies that spurred the development of the genre. Maria Tatar's Off With Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (1993), as well as her annotated versions of the fairy tales of H.C. Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, are valuable resources for a beginning scholar.
Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-tale Studies, which is available on the Project Muse website through most university libraries, represents the best resource for research articles on fairy tales, although most of the leading children's literature periodicals also regularly feature such articles, as well.
The first illustration, "The Frog Prince," was created by Jessie King for the Musée Galliera Exposition de l'Art pour l'Enfance, Paris, 1913. King's illustrations graced many early twentieth-century fairy tale books, including G.T. Foulis' How Cinderella Was Able to Go to the Ball (1924). The second illustration is from Walter Crane's "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," one of the tales found in his Mother Hubbard's Picture Book (1897).
The Golden Age of Children's Literature began with a garden party thrown by the Queen of Hearts in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and its end was initiated with Peter's banishment from Mr. McGregor's vegetable patch in Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902). From the 1860s to the 1910s, almost every author of British children's literature set his or her text in "a world apart," usually a pastoral setting, in which children (or childlike animals) developed away from the distractions and perceived dangers of the industrial world. As historian Hugh Cunningham notes, “the more adults and adult society seemed bleak, urbanized, and alienated, the more childhood came to be seen as properly a garden, enclosing within the safety of its walls a way of life which was in touch with nature” (43).
Among the scholarly texts that focus on the garden motif in British children's literature, Jackie Wullschlager's Inventing Wonderland stands out for its careful analysis of the economic and social factors that encouraged such authors as Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and J.M. Barrie to place their child protagonists within the natural world. Karen Patricia Smith's The Fabulous Realm: A Literary-Historical Approach to British Fantasy, 1780-1990 is also a valuable resource.
As far as primary texts are concerned, once you've read Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, you might want to read J.M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan or 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, featuring the hero who wishes to remain a boy forever in the imaginary world of Neverland. A fine follow-up would be Robert Louis Stevenson's collection, A Child's Garden of Verses(1885), which includes many pastoral poems. Frances Hodgson Burnett's aptly titled The Secret Garden (1911) invests a garden with magical properties which restore the physical and spiritual health of two young children. And then, of course, there is A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, written during the 1920s, but designed to evoke in post-war readers a nostalgia for their own Victorian and Edwardian childhoods.
No survey of the Golden Age Gardens would be complete, however, without Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908), a text that celebrates the supposed kinship between children and Nature. In the following segment, Mole and Rat are spellbound by the beauty of the dawn:
"On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition. A wide half-circle of foam and glinting lights and shining shoulders of green water, the great weir closed the backwater from bank to bank, troubled all the quiet surface with twirling eddies and floating foam-streaks, and deadened all other sounds with its solemn and soothing rumble. In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. Reserved, shy, but full of significance, it hid whatever it might hold behind a veil, keeping it till the hour should come, and, with the hour, those who were called and chosen" (207-208).
Smith, Karen Patricia. The Fabulous Realm: A Literary-Historical Approach to British Fantasy, 1780-1990. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Wullschlager, Jackie. Inventing Wonderland: The Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
The children’s and YA literature scene in Canada has always been vibrant. A number of the influential scholars in the field, including Perry Nodelman, Mavis Reimer, and the late Sheila Egoff, have hailed from Canada.
On the left sidebar, I've provided a link to The Centre for Research in Young People's Texts (CRYTC) at the University of Winnipeg, which sponsors the journal CCL/LCJ: Canadian Children's Literature/Litterature canadienne pour la jeunesse, and a link to the Canadian Children's Book Center (CCBC), which publishes "the quarterly magazine Canadian Children's Book News and the annual Our Choice selection guide...designed to help parents, librarians and educators discover the world of Canadian books." The Canadian Library and Archives has developed PIKA, an extensive database of the library's 35,000 holdings in Children's Literature, which can be searched using subject headings or author names.
Each year, a number of national organizations award prizes in Canadian children’s and YA literature; these include the Governor General’s Awards in Children’s Literature and Illustration, as well as the Canadian Library Association Awards. Award lists are a good place to begin exploring Canadian children’s literature, as is the online Kids Books section at the Canadian equivalent of Barnes and Noble or Borders, Chapters/Indigo.
The best known Canadian author for children is undoubtedly L.M. Montgomery, the creator of the memorable character, Anne Shirley, a young orphan whose imaginative worldview transforms the lives of her adoptive family. A number of conference papers and articles are due to come out this year to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Anne of Green Gables.
My favorite contemporary Canadian YA author is Susan Juby, whose texts Alice, I Think (2000); Miss Smithers (2003); and Alice Macleod, Realist At Last (2005), chronicle the adventures of a homeschooled Canadian girl who attempts to conform to smalltown teenage behavior, but always falls (thankfully) short of the mark. Juby has a great blog, Rare Birds, which includes links to her publisher and to the CBC television show based upon the novels.
Another favorite author is Rachna Gilmore, whose A Group of One (2001) follows the experiences of Tara Mehta, a young Canadian girl who learns to value her grandmother's participation with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement. Gilmore has written nineteen books for children and adolescent readers, and her website provides great background information on the author and her books.
I hope that this brief post will spark your interest in the children's and YA literature produced by our northern neighbors. Dr. Mavis Reimer, who is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg and the Director of the CRYTC, has just written a scholarly text entitled Home Words: Discourses of Children's Literature in Canada (2008), which provides a comprehensive introduction to the field.
If you've ever felt that there might be more to 18th- and 19th-century British children's literature than The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Treasure Island, well, you were correct. One of the best places to view digitalized versions of some of the earliest novels, magazines, and poems written for British children is The Hockliffe Collection.
Currently, I'm reading The Dog of Knowledge; or, Memoirs of Bob, The Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be written by Himself (1805). While this may sound lightweight, it turns out that Bob the Terrier comments on subjects such as slavery (he visits a plantation in the Caribbean) and poverty (two of his owners are beggars). The Hockliffe holdings run from the mid-18th century through until the early 20th century. Included are all sorts of popular texts, such as Charles Perrault's "Blue Beard" (a 1729 version of the 1697 fairy tale) and less well-known but intriguing novels, such as Mary Hughes' The Rebellious School-Girl (1821). Even if you don't wish to become an expert in this literature, it's well worth your time to take a look at the texts that preceded "The Golden Age of Children's Literature." (A Note to Researchers: The search engine at the Hockliffe is very sensitive -- for instance, you couldn't just type in "Dog of Knowledge" and get a hit; you have to type in the exact title: "The Dog of Knowledge." It might be easier to browse the entire collection by clicking on the drop down menu in the upper left-hand corner of the Hockliffe homepage and selecting "Catalogue.").
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