{"id":90504,"date":"2014-03-21T08:24:34","date_gmt":"2014-03-21T12:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=90504"},"modified":"2014-03-27T09:32:16","modified_gmt":"2014-03-27T13:32:16","slug":"childrens-literature-not-as-simple-as-it-seems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/03\/childrens-literature-not-as-simple-as-it-seems\/","title":{"rendered":"Children\u2019s Literature Not as Simple as It Seems"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Victoria<\/a>
Victoria Ford Smith, assistant professor of English and a specialist in children\u2019s literature. (Sean Flynn\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Children\u2019s literature expert Victoria Ford Smith has found an ideal environment in Storrs to teach her specialty.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time I\u2019m teaching children\u2019s literature at an institution that has an investment in the genre,\u201d says Smith, an assistant professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. \u201cI\u2019m trying to design my classes to take advantage of these opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opportunities include visiting the Northeast Children\u2019s Literature Collection at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center; an annual children\u2019s book fair that features contemporary authors and illustrators; and a School of Fine Arts that has majors in illustration and puppetry, as well as the newly expanded Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in Storrs Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a critical mass of people who are really invested in this subject,\u201d Smith says. \u201cWe have so many events dealing with children\u2019s books. I\u2019m encouraging my students to attend them. It\u2019s exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Children\u2019s literature in a multimedia world<\/b><\/p>\n

Teaching children\u2019s literature to college students who have lived in a multimedia world for their entire lives presents both challenges and opportunities, says Smith, who also is a specialist in 19th and 20th-century British literature and culture. Children\u2019s literature today is saturated with media, and many beloved children\u2019s stories are best known through the lens of animation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen students know Peter Pan through Disney, they know a pretty scrubbed version,\u201d Smith says. \u201cThe characters in J.M. Barrie\u2019s play don\u2019t know if Peter\u2019s adventures are real. In the novelized version, he often went out alone and they never knew whether he had had an adventure because he might have forgotten about it, and they would go outside and find a body. This is a very jarring moment for them. I ask what does Walt Disney\u2019s adaptation of Peter Pan say about how we view childhood now, as opposed to how it was understood in the early 20th century when Peter Pan was popular on the stage? You can\u2019t fight Disney. You have to let him in.\u201d<\/p>\n

When students study classic books they have read, however, such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are<\/i>, or E.B. White\u2019s Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/i>, Smith says there is an emotional attachment to the books. She presents the material through a critical lens that can face some resistance, as contemporary cultural and historical views may change the way characters are depicted, such as the representation of Native Americans in Little House on the Prairie<\/i> by Laura Ingalls Wilder.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to work through that kind of resistance and say [a critical view] does matter, because these are books that are communicating our cultural values to very young readers and it\u2019s good to know the assumptions that underpin them,\u201d Smith says. \u201cFor the most part, students are excited to learn about the critical context of the books they think they know so well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The emergence of a genre<\/b><\/p>\n

There is no general agreement on when children\u2019s literature emerged as a genre, according to Smith. While there is an established oral tradition of adults sharing stories and songs with children, some scholars begin tracing the history of children\u2019s literature from 18th-century England, when John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book<\/i>, the first of his successful line of books for children, in 1744. Today, the Newbery Medal is the top prize in children\u2019s literature awarded by the American Library Association.<\/p>\n

Smith says earlier literature for children primarily was educational, such as primers, alphabet books, and religious texts. The first picture book for children is considered to be Orbis Pictus<\/i>, a Latin text published in 1658 by John Amos Comenius, a Czech educator.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really kind of ends up being how you define what a children\u2019s book is,\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith says seeking a firm starting point for the genre depends on the definition of what a children\u2019s book is. \u201cIs it meant to give a child pleasure reading, or is it something meant to teach them? Can it be both at the same time? I\u2019m biased,\u201d she says, \u201cin that children\u2019s literature as we define it begins in the 19th century as far as how we value imagination and fantasy \u2013 it\u2019s the Golden Age of Lewis Carroll (Alice\u2019s Adventure in Wonderland<\/i>), Edward Lear (A Book of Nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat<\/i>), George McDonald (Phantastes<\/i>), and Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers<\/i>). It\u2019s a pivotal moment in its development.\u201d<\/p>\n

Children and the creation of stories<\/b><\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s graduate and doctoral studies at Rice University began in Victorian British literature, but her focus changed after she discovered a document by Barrie, who was reflecting on the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies who became the inspiration for Peter Pan <\/i>when <\/i>the author became their guardian following the death of their parents. She became interested in the role of children in the creation of their own literature and culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested not only in how we value children\u2019s art or how it has been valued as evidence of the child\u2019s imagination and how it should be fostered, but also in evidence from the 19th and early 20th centuries of a child\u2019s art being valued according to its own aesthetic principles \u2013 recognizing child artists in a more serious way than we are used to, in galleries and not on refrigerators,\u201d says Smith, who is working on a new book tracing the history of children\u2019s art.<\/p>\n

Her first book, Between Generations: The Collaborative Child and Nineteenth-Century Authorship<\/i>, examines how children collaborate in the creation of stories and can be traced to her interest in how Lloyd Osborne used a toy press to produce the poetry of his step-father, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island.<\/i> The book was inspired by the boy\u2019s drawing of an imaginary island.<\/p>\n

Stevenson is at the top of Smith\u2019s list of those who wrote books for children. She describes him as \u201ca complicated writer,\u201d who had a knack for appropriating popular forms of children\u2019s literature such as adventure stories and changing them in interesting ways. She also enjoys the British author Roald Dahl, who wrote Matilda<\/i>, because he challenges the notion of stories about playful children by creating characters that may not behave so innocently. Dahl portrays more complex characters who are more closely related to those found in early literature for children, such as Carroll\u2019s Alice: in the original book, she is not always so wonderful. Smith would like to be able to talk more about the complexity of the literature.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlice is a collage of many different ideas about childhood, some that we find familiar; some that we find unsettling,\u201d says Smith. \u201cAlice is a brat. She\u2019s not an appealing character. It\u2019s not this tale of whimsy and fantasy and imagination. It\u2019s a critique of drawing room education methods for children. It\u2019s a strange example of Victorian book culture. It\u2019s so much more complicated than this hermetically sealed children\u2019s tale. I wish I had more opportunities to talk about how complex texts that are perceived as very simple really are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Children’s literature expert Victoria Ford Smith says many books perceived as simple are actually very complex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":87972,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-90504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 15:08:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90504"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90515,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90504\/revisions\/90515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/87972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90504"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=90504"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=90504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}