From the SF Chronicle:
Navigating 2,600 years of children's literature Mary Dixie Carter
Sunday, July 6, 2008Children's Literature: A Reader's History From Aesop to Harry Potter
By Seth Lerer
University of Chicago Press; 385 pages; $30If you find yourself in the children's section at a bookstore and you happen to cross paths with a savvy third-grade boy who's asking a salesperson for "The Adventures of Captain Underpants," or a seventh-grade girl, cross-legged in the aisle, who's engrossed in "Cut," a first-person account of self-mutilating behavior, you might think to yourself (depending upon how old you are), what happened to the good old days? Where's "Charlotte's Web"? Where are "Aesop's Fables"?
In "Children's Literature: A Reader's History From Aesop to Harry Potter," Seth Lerer answers that question, guiding us through the canons of children's literature, with an emphasis on English. (Lerer is a Stanford professor and the author of "Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language.") As the subtitle suggests, he focuses on the reader's history, not the writer's. He covers not only literature that was intended for children, but also literature that was intended for adults and ended up being read by children, or adapted for them. In ancient Greece, teachers excerpted passages from Homer's "Iliad" for schoolbooks. And "Aesop's Fables" (approximately 600 BCE) were not only read by adults, but also existed at the heart of Greek education.
Lerer navigates his way through 2,600 years, highlighting significant work along the way, such as John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678) and Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), both considered essential for children.
In 1690, John Locke transformed education in the West with two groundbreaking treatises, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" and "Some Thoughts Concerning Education." It was Locke who invented the children's book, as we know it today - the pretty picture book that delights a child as well as instructs. "Children may ... be taught to read," Locke writes, "without perceiving it to be any thing but a sport." He also came up with alphabet blocks, "dice and play-things, with the letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing." And Locke believed that every child must read Aesop.
Lerer returns to Aesop time and again, but it's not until Chapter 11 that he reveals the unsavory role girls play. The fables about parents and daughters usually have "the smoke of illicit sexuality about them." In one, an ugly daughter falsely accuses her handsome brother of molesting her, seemingly because she envies his good looks. Not only do girls lack moral virtue, but they're also rather slow on the uptake. "Boys learn lessons in the fables." Lerer writes, "Girls seem to learn nothing."
With regard to the treatment of girls, Lerer puts fairy tales in the same category. Alison Lurie, author of "Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature," considers the heroines of fairy tales to be liberated women, but Lerer writes that they appear as sexual objects or predators, lost or threatened, and the girl's body is "something dark and inexplicable, something in need of management, of clearing, of cleansing." Consider Little Red Riding Hood, as Lerer does: a vulnerable girl who is pursued by the wolf, a sexual predator. (The original pre-Grimm version is quite ghastly.)
Children's literature came into its own in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lerer tells us, losing some of its didacticism, with books such as "Alice in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan." The first decade of the 20th century was the high point, before World War I ended an era of innocence.
In sharp contrast to that era, Lerer's last chapter looks at irony in modern children, the " 'been there, done that' distance that the modern child affects." Books like Jon Scieszka's "The Stinky Cheese Man" have burst the bubble of earnestness we once attributed to youth. Lerer compares today's childhood to Christmas in Southern California - a poignant comparison.
In Diane Ravitch's 2003 book, "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn," she describes the bizarre process of creating a public school textbook. The publisher engages a "bias and sensitivity panel" to review the content. In theory, the concept is an important one, but in practice it's distorted: In one case, the panel ruled that Aesop's "The Fox and the Crow" showed gender bias. (A male fox sees a female crow with a piece of cheese in her beak. He flatters her and coaxes her to sing. When she opens her mouth, the cheese falls and the fox gets it.) Compared to some of Aesop's raunchier fables, "The Fox and the Crow" would seem to be relatively harmless. The panel also flagged a story about pioneer women making patchwork quilts. The guidelines state that pioneer women should be depicted "chopping wood, using a plow, using firearms, and handling large animals."
If some find fault with "The Fox and the Crow," others will find fault with "James and the Giant Peach," "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude," all of which appeared on a list of most frequently challenged books. Lerer's history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. Some of it may cause offense, but don't we want children to know what came before them?
Lerer approaches his subject as a scholar. Rarely do we feel him engage emotionally, and rarely do we. Still, with his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child's imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read. {sbox}
Mary Dixie Carter's writing has appeared in the Economist and the New York Observer. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
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