Trinity Term 2010 Programme

We're meeting 5.15pm odd Mondays in the History of the Book Room again this term; directions to the faculty can be found here - and here's what we have to look forward to:

Week 1 (April 26): Play, Edwardian Empire, and Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Wolfson College
Professor Boehmer will explore some of the many contradictions inherent in Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, a highly ideological text that expounds imperial values yet also promotes the creative and non-directed aspects of play and performance. She will question whether empire at its height in fact opened these contradictions, and if that might begin to explain why this period of literary history produced an outpouring of children's literature.

Week 3 (May 10): Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Secret Garden. Prof. Gretchen Gerzina, George Eastman Visiting Professor, Balliol College
Professor Gerzina will discuss the life and works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, especially with regard to her present-day reputation as an author primarily for children. Her most famous works for a child audience (The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy) were greatly overshadowed during her lifetime by the wealth of other material she produced, including 53 novels and thirteen plays written primarily for adults. The highest paid woman author of her time, Burnett's life and work will be re-examined in light of images, biographical materials, and new textual interpretation, reviving and reinterpreting the image of The Secret Garden's author that we have today.

Week 5 (May 24): Mirrors and Windows: Diversity and Children's Publishing. Ms Laura Atkins, Lecturer, National Centre for Research in Children's Literature (NCRCL), Roehampton University
Ms Atkins will look at recent controversies in the children's publishing world around race and representation, drawing partially from her own experience editing multicultural picture books in the United States. How are non-white characters represented in books published in the US, and how are these representations directed by the editorial and publication process? Recent discussion around this topic on the blogosphere will be shared before the floor is opened up for questions. With the election of a black president some have said the US is now a 'post-racial' society, but Ms Atkins will suggest just the opposite.

Week 7 (June 7): 'The Simple Creed / Of Childhood': Poetic Progeny and the Early Romantics. Amelia Greene, University College
Amelia's research for the M.St. focuses on issues of abandonment, illegitimacy, and independence as they relate to the status of children and ideas of childhood during the early part of the Romantic period. Examining the autonomous, non-social, foraging, 'natural' child found in both Wordsworth and Coleridge, and revisiting the Blakean representation of the dependent, socially and politically contingent, often urban, youth, Amelia will explore the ways in which Romantic poetry serves to simultaneously celebrate the literary ideal of the abstract 'Child' and to repress, neglect, or de-emphasise the troubled social status of British children during the period.

Hope to see many of you there!

Review: Wishing for Tomorrow, by Hilary McKay

105 years on, Hilary McKay has produced a sequel to Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1904 classic A Little Princess. Rising above its vague, sentimental title, Wishing For Tomorrow fleshes out the female characters that provide the backdrop to Sara Crewe’s story and gently raises serious questions about the class- and gender-based assumptions that are complicit in Sara’s restoration to privilege in the original. The inside cover of Wishing for Tomorrow calls the dire Miss Minchins’ school for girls a place where ‘fairytale endings do happen’, referring certainly to Sara’s rescue from the life of a scullery maid in A Little Princess but also, subversively, to the various ‘rescues’ of women by other women in this new sequel.

Sara’s friend Ermengarde serves as the protagonist of the sequel, and it is through her experiences that the reader discovers the tragedies behind the lives of many of the girls and women in A Little Princess. The icy headmistress Maria Minchin and the bully Lavinia emerge as particularly sympathetic characters, as McKay explores how poverty, neglect, and limited options might have strangled and embittered intelligent women in Edwardian England. Over the course of this generally lighthearted novel McKay re-imagines the plot that Burnett uses for Sara’s release from the Minchins’ and applies it to Lavinia: where the Indian Gentleman recognizes Sara’s inherent nobility and seeks to restore it to her by secretly furnishing her attic room with luxuries in A Little Princess, in Wishing for Tomorrow the new next-door neighbor swiftly grasps Lavinia’s intelligence and hunger for knowledge, and secretly gives her lessons to prepare her for university entrance exams to an Oxford college. McKay implicitly critiques the elitist, patriarchal, and even colonialist terms of Sara’s ‘fairy tale’ through this rewriting, but she does so—as she does with all of her critiques in this sequel—without overtly denouncing or overturning Burnett’s much-beloved novel.


Various female characters from the original receive critical attention in McKay’s sequel, and perhaps the most interesting is Ermengarde’s appraisal of Sara Crewe after seeing a production of Peter Pan. Ermengarde asks herself, “[w]ho was Sara? If she, Ermengarde, was Wendy, forever staring from the window, surely Sara was the heartless person who had left her stranded there?” This likening of Sara to Peter Pan problematizes the idealization of Sara’s character in A Little Princess and raises questions about who it ultimately serves. Meanwhile, it encourages us children’s literature critic types to turn Jacqueline Rose’s famous question about the “impossibility of children’s literature,” the “case of Peter Pan,” onto Burnett’s novel and then in turn onto McKay’s. How and, crucially, why do these texts, written over 100 years apart, model childhood and adulthood in the way that they do? To what ends? McKay’s conclusion is a little bit too neat and convenient for a work that raises so many complex issues, but it agrees with the bright tone that the novel attempts to maintain from the original, while offering a very different view on what magical happy endings for girls and women might look like.

Wishing for Tomorrow: The Sequel to A Little Princess
By Hilary McKay
Illustrated by Nick Maland
Hodder Children’s Books, 2009
ISBN 978-0340956533
Now also out from Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2010
ISBN 978-1442401693

Update: Next Seminar

Professor Elleke Boehmer's talk on Scouting for Boys, initially advertised for week 3, will take place in week 4 due to scheduling conflicts. Same time (5.15pm), same place (History of the Book Room in the English Faculty), different date (Monday 8th February). Please see the term card for more information on Professor Boehmer's topic.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Hilary Term 2010 Schedule

This term we're meeting on even Mondays at 5.15pm in the History of the Book Room, English Faculty Building. Click here for directions to the faculty.

18 January (Week 1): ‘Exemplified in a Series of Dresses: The Nineteenth-Century Paper Doll Book.’ Hannah Field, Somerville College.
Between around 1809 and 1830 the publishers and print-sellers S. and J. Fuller produced a number of what they billed as ‘esteemed and much admired JUVENILE BOOKS, with Figures which dress and undress’. These paper doll books consisted of a small black-and-white storybook, a number of separate coloured cut-out images of different costumes and a single cardboard head that was inserted into each costume to produce a complete illustration. Referring to examples from the Opie Collection at the Bodleian, DPhil student Hannah Field will discuss the ways these dress-up ‘figures’ generate an inordinate focus on clothing and fashion—as well as on the material properties of these books more broadly—that undermines the accompanying moralistic stories.

1 February (Week 3): ‘Play, Edwardian Empire and Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys.’ Prof. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Wolfson College.
Professor Boehmer will explore some of the many contradictions inherent in Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, a highly ideological text that expounds imperial values yet also promotes the creative and non-directed aspects of play and performance. She will question whether empire at its height in fact opened these contradictions, and if that might begin to explain why this period of literary history produced an outpouring of children's literature.

15 February (Week 5): ‘The Wild and the Cute: Disney Animation, Childhood and the Poetics of Nature.’ David Whitley, University of Cambridge.
Given the wealth of high quality animated productions that have recently focused on environmentally sensitive issues, it is worth asking whether there may be a tradition within popular, mainstream feature animation that such films are able to draw on in selective and distinctive ways. In this talk David Whitley, who teaches literature and film in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, explores the possibility that such a tradition does indeed exist and that its origins (perhaps rather surprisingly given the benighted status that is often accorded to Disney’s ideological credentials in recent writing) lie in the experiments that Disney undertook with the animated feature form in the classic period of its development.

1 March (Week 7): ‘Youth's Lifeworlds between Official Doctrine and its Challenges: The Local Dimension of the Soviet Young Communist League in the 1950s and 1960s.’ Katharina Uhl, St Antony’s College.
Katharina Uhl, DPhil candidate in the History Faculty and Rhodes Scholar, will focus on the way the Young Communist League, the official Soviet youth organization, positioned itself in the so-called Thaw period in Soviet history: the 1950s and 1960s. Stalin's death in 1953 opened the space for social, cultural and political changes. One of the means to fill the emerging gap between Party-state and society was the revival of the communist project. This was on the other hand challenged by various phenomena, including religion and nationalism, Western influence, and the growing importance of the private sphere. The presentation will examine this space of tension, ambivalence and contradictions with regard to the Young Communist League’s role in the life-worlds of young people.

Review: Nineteenth-Century Paper Doll Books

Modern-day paper dolls typically entail a cut-out figure (cardboard) and a set of costumes (paper) that are hooked onto this figure with tabs, but the nineteenth-century originators of the form, the publishers and printsellers S. and J. Fuller, utilised a different format. The basic elements of their paper doll books, produced from around 1805 to 1815 but available well after this period, were a small black-and-white book containing a moralistic children's story, a number of coloured cut-out images printed separately on card, showing costumes but sometimes framing these in a wider scene, and a single coloured cardboard head. Each costume had a small tab at its back into which the 'stem' of the head could be inserted to produce a standalone illustration to the storybook.

What I find most interesting about these early paper doll books is the tension between word and image. Moveable books, as has been observed by a number of critics, are characterised by the interplay between narrative and spectacle, expressly, the visual spectacle of both their illustrations and the mechanics of those illustrations. Paper doll books add another dimension to this picture book economy: they focus on clothing and costume, which are inherently spectacular topoi in and of themselves.

To explore this tension further - the titular heroine of the Fullers' History of Little Fanny (1810) is reproached by her mother for her desire to 'show off' her new clothes; her narcissism is the catalyst for the subsequent misfortunes which befall her. But the paper doll figures perform an exactly parallel move when they display Fanny's outfits for the delectation of the child reader. Lucinda of Lucinda, the Orphan (1812) visits a nunnery and idly expresses a wish to join the order. A nun's habit is then produced, and the narrator is at pains to remark, in a manner that throws the book's costume-proud features into relief, 'How much she eclipsed the sisters of the veil need not be told'. Lucinda's hazy admiration for religious belief is much less important than her pleasing appearance in the garments of a nun. More broadly, the drive to propel costumes into each tale, dictated by the formal focus on the paper doll as technical innovation, generates pictorial subtexts which undermine the purported textual morals.

Some images of the Fullers' paper doll books are reproduced here.

Review: Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child

Eff, born the unlucky thirteenth child of her large family, is the somewhat troublingly meek protagonist of Patricia Wrede’s The Thirteenth Child. Exploring an emblematically American frontier filled with magic, mythological/prehistoric beasts, and an encroaching enchanted wilderness that her generation will be called upon to combat, Eff struggles to cope with the stigma of her birth, as well as the shadow cast upon her by a magically talented twin brother. After the family is relocated to a growing university town near the Great Barrier, built to keep the dangerous but alluring wilderness at bay, Eff finds herself in that opportunistic space between civilization and wildness where she can begin to develop her hidden talents.

The book has received a lot of attention in the blog-o-sphere this year on the topic of Wrede’s erasure of native populations in her fantasy retelling of the American frontier story. From what I’ve read, these incensed readers offer more of a general critique than a textual one (that is, there isn't a lot of actual close reading that illustrates how colonial or possibly racist themes are played out in the writing), but I do agree with the underlying sentiment, which is that Wrede makes a huge misstep in failing to acknowledge the much more troubling American story that lies beneath Eff’s New World. Wrede’s fantasy, while frequently funny and occasionally enthralling, relies on the American fantasy, or on the erasure of parts of the American story that are ugly, cruel, devastating, and deeply important to remember. Unfortunately, Wrede’s world building suffers as a result of this removal, and the story feels a little plain despite all of Wrede’s storytelling magic.

The Thirteenth Child

by Patricia Wrede

Scholastic Press, April 2009

ISBN: 978-0545033428

Review: L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, illustrated by Graham Rawle

Collage artist and author Graham Rawle’s 2008 edition of The Wizard of Oz features his cut-out, constructed, borrowed, photographed, glued, and photoshopped illustrations, whose wild hybridity make them appropriate modern companions to L. Frank Baum’s original text. The novel was first published in 1900, but Rawle admits to knowing the story primarily through the 1939 film adaptation, which reached its current iconic status through repeated US television airings beginning in the late 1950s. So it seems fitting that Rawle combines household objects and bits of trash with more traditional collage elements in digital layers to create an Oz that is simultaneously nostalgic and new.

His Oz is, like the Technicolor universe in the film, lush and bizarre and dependent on contemporary technology for the shocking aesthetic that marks it as a true otherworld. But while Rawle uses photographs and other mixed media combinations for a number of minor characters, Dorothy and her travelling companions are all intact, poseable toys, each vintage or reconstructed to look old and worn. The expressions of these characters remain frozen, their gestures stiff, but as the reader accompanies the homely playthings on their adventures through the bright, fantastical landscape, they become increasingly familiar and imbued with personalities. These toys, especially Dorothy, with her matted, patchy hair and homemade doll’s clothes, evoke a wistful air of remembered (or imagined) childhood play in an ambiguous earlier era. And yet the settings against which they pose could not exist without the aid of digital manipulation, and for this reason Rawle’s images seem to be themselves a kind of multi-layered play: they revel in building a comprehensive make-believe world from ordinary objects, project complex personalities onto beloved toys, and delight in the possibilities of new technology, showing it off in images that can include up to 200 digitally arranged layers.

Meanwhile, the large, heavy format of the book and the mixed-font excerpts of text inset on the margins of most pages hint at who is meant to join in this play. Although it can be read straight through, Rawle’s edition feels more like a coffee-table book for adults to flip through, looking at the illustrations and skimming the enlarged quotations as if reading a magazine (indeed, Rawle has also written a novel composed entirely of collaged words from women’s magazines). Thus Rawle’s The Wizard of Oz is in many ways a celebration of a now-past childhood experience of that story. The more disturbing images in the book invite adult readers to consider what role the strange, frightening, and unsettling play in childhood, and to examine their current uses for and reactions to this edition in this light. Meanwhile, the accompanying text, ‘complete and unabridged’, offers the opportunity for this self-referential edition to serve as the defining experience of The Wizard of Oz for a new generation.

The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by Graham Rawle

London: Atlantic Books, 2008

Hardcover, 352 pages

ISBN: 978-1582434551

£25.00