Margaret Kean on 'The Young Inferno'

In our last session for 2011 - how time flies! - Dr Margaret Kean (St Hilda's) presented on a children's lit-related element from her wider project charting cultural responses to Hell: the picture book The Young Inferno, written by John Agard and illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura. Beginning with the premise that much of children's literature depends on either the child saving the adult or the child being saved by the adult (an interesting dynamic where depictions of Hell are concerned), Dr Kean positioned The Young Inferno as a renewal of Dante couched in Agard's own cultural milieu (the damned are updated to include various twentieth-century figures of note, for example) and fully conversant with the picture book's unique techniques for 'making meaning' through word and image. Dr Kean's many pictorial examples showed Kitamura himself visually 'reading' Dante and Dante's illustrators, updating, for example, the bone landscapes Blake used to illustrate the work in the nineteenth century with his own chilling and beautiful piles of skulls and fish skeletons. Kitamura's stark black and white illustrations become a visual pun on Agard's text, which questions the binary between black and white, good and evil (from canto 2: 'neither beast nor man / can be divided into black and white'). Darkness and vivacity, what Dr Kean called the 'double energy' of updated versions of Dante's Inferno for children (she also touched on Dale Basye's Circles of Heck series), generate a rich, multilayered quality in both text and illustration.

Happy holidays, everyone! Next term's programme, as well as a number of special events associated with the new centrally-taught children's literature paper for Oxford finalists, will be posted here early in 2012.

Anna Caughey on Lewis and Tolkien

Beginning with Philip Pullman’s incendiary critique of the Chronicles of Narnia in The Guardian in 1998 (online here), Anna Caughey posed the question why, if the Chronicles and the compositions of C. S. Lewis’s fellow Inkling Tolkien are as disempowering as Pullman and others have suggested—a reading that Anna doesn’t dispute—they experience such enduring popularity with all sorts of readers. Anna’s paper built upon Peter Hollindale’s concept of 'childness' (as a state in which the child continuously negotiates his or her own subject position in dialogue with various messages from the external world) to propose the idea of 'compulsory childhood': a state in which the external world imposes limitations on the child subject, preventing this negotiation from taking place. She demonstrated the ways in which Lewis and Tolkien, in both their critical writing and their fiction, dispute the 'pigeonholing' of the child as either an idolised or denigrated Other of the adult, suggesting that despite suspect gender, race, and class politics, Lewis and Tolkien actively empower the child (and the child’s analogue, the small person) in their stories. Rejecting the idea that children should be contained and protected, both authors depict a masculinity in which there is a level of emotional freedom absent from, say, the boys' school story: one in which moments of vulnerability are permitted to even the strongest of Lewis’s male heroes (Peter crying post-battle isn’t at all a ‘girlish thing’ for him to do). Moreover, Anna suggested that in the character arcs of Merry and Pippin, as well as Peter, both authors represent a liminal space between childhood and adult masculinity: an opportunity for characters to shift back and forward between the respective pleasures and responsibilities of adulthood and childhood, rather than the straightforward opposition between these categories entailed in ‘compulsory childhood’. Of course, female characters are not given such an opportunity to shift between adult and child selves—Susan’s famed fate in The Last Battle being a case in point—and Anna proposed ‘circumlegation’, or reading around, as a possible solution to the problem of why, considering the portrayals of femininity in these books, they continue to draw so many female fans.

Katherine Rundell on Writing (and Publishing) for Children

Katherine Rundell became a Prize Fellow at All Souls around the same time she finished the manuscript for her first children's novel, The Girl Savage, which was subsequently published by Faber. Since then, these two seemingly antithetical occupations have existed in parallel. At CLYCC's first session for 2011/12, Kate took us through her thoughts about writing in general and writing children's books in particular. Kate's hilarious, erudite talk challenged the perception that writing children's literature is akin to painting watercolours of cats (an opinion that she has encountered in her time), as she touched on, for example, reading as one of the few private activities allowed to the child, the children's book as an apotropaic against the tawdrier products of children's culture, and the robustness of children's publishing throughout the recession. Her talk was also a practical exploration of the vicissitudes of children's publishing, literary agents, writing schedules, etc—meaning that her talk offered perspectives on children's books both idealistic and pragmatic.

Read more about The Girl Savage here, and stay tuned for Kate's new book, also published by Faber and provisionally entitled Across the Rooftops.

Michaelmas 2011 Termcard

Welcome back, everyone! Our first paper is only a week away....

All talks in Seminar Room A of the English Faculty Building (directions) at 5.15pm - and all welcome.

Also please add Matthew Grenby's talk 'Wilkes in Lilliput: On the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Children's Books' on Wednesday 9 November to your diaries. The talk will take place at five o'clock in the Memorial Room at Worcester as part of the Graduate Seminar in History 1680-1850.

Exciting times for children's literature at Oxford!

24 October (Week 3): Advances and Submissions: Hope and Compromise in Today’s Publishing Industry. Katherine Rundell, All Souls College
Katherine Rundell is an Examination Fellow of All Souls and is about to send her second children’s book to press. (Her first children’s novel, The Girl Savage, was published by Faber earlier this year.) She will be speaking about the publishing industry, about the writing process, and about why, sometimes, it is necessary to tie yourself to the desk with a skipping rope.

7 November (Week 5): Hard, Bold, and Wicked: Masculinity and Liminality in Lewis and Tolkien. Dr Anna Caughey, College Lecturer in Old and Middle English, Keble College
In Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the boundaries between adult and child identities are at once blurred and reinforced. Childhood, and boyhood in particular, is presented as a state that can be both transcended and retreated to when necessary, while full physical/social adulthood is generally marginalised. Using Peter Hollindale’s theory of ‘childness’ as a base, this paper examines the ways in which both texts use their fantasy settings to provide younger readers with access to material that emphasises the capability and autonomy of child/child-substitute protagonists while privileging the state of childhood.

21 November (Week 7): Hoodies in Hell. Dr Margaret Kean, Helen Gardner Fellow in English, St Hilda’s College
This talk will consider the recent revision of Dante’s Inferno undertaken by the poet John Agard in The Young Inferno (illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura). Agard’s upbeat renewal of Dante can be usefully compared with Dayle E. Basye’s irreverent take on authority in his Circles of Heck series (Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go is the first volume; illustrator Bob Dob). This talk will contrast the approach of contemporary writers towards Dante with that taken by Kingsley in The Water Babies.

Josephine Rout on Dress for Female Students in Japan

Josephine discussed recent research she has undertaken as part of the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum’s joint Master’s programme. Josephine focused on the development of dress for female students, or jogakusei, in Japan’s Meiji Period (1868-1912). In this epoch, a concern with modernisation and ‘catching up with the West’ often played out in terms of women’s education, and Josephine used a particular garment, the hakama (a sort of culottes worn over kimono) to illuminate the history of Meiji jogakusei. Associated with state functions, hakama were a garment typically worn by men prior to this period. Josephine suggested that the adoption of hakama by female students reflected an identification with the figure of the student, rather than gender travesty: the only grown-up students prior to this period were male, and as they wore hakama, so did the new breed of jogakusei. Regardless, the short hairstyles and supposed masculinisation of female students were castigated in the media, and there was a more general distaste symbolised in, for example, the magazine serial from 1905 entitled ‘Tales of Degenerate Schoolgirls’. Josephine illustrated her talk with modern-day hakama (the piece remains popular as graduation garb for female students), as well as a wealth of images that included some from children’s books of the period.

Diane Purkiss on Children's Literature at Oxford

Dr Diane Purkiss began by assuring the group that there is nothing more traditional to the children's book than being soaked to the skin: highly apposite, of course, as most members of her audience were in that very state on the wet Bank Holiday Monday of this talk!

Diane discussed the new special topic option for third-year Oxford undergraduates, which involves centralised teaching in children's literature: a milestone for a university that has sometimes dismissed the subject out of hand. This dismissal is rather perplexing, of course, as Oxford (more so even than the 'Other Place', in Diane's august opinion) has produced a slew of phenomenal children's books, and also holds one of the best collections of children's literature in the world (the Opie Collection at the Bodleian). The special topic programme legitimates Oxford as a cultural centre of children's literature, while also legitimating students' interest in studying and researching children's literature at Oxford.

To this end Diane ranged over authors including Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and Matthew Skelton, and topics including the effect of both Oxford's built environment and its pastoral surrounds on children's books written here, or about here. She also spoke to the broader issues involved in the discipline: the relationship between adult author and child reader, and the perhaps less acknowledged relationship between adult and (remembered) child selves for any one individual. Her talk was an exciting taste of the programme, and I'll update you all on its progress as classes get up and running next academic year.





Alice and the Mouse swimming in the Pool of Tears: May weather in Oxford isn't quite that wet, but still....

Alice Nuttall on Pocahontas

Last Monday Alice discussed the depiction of Native Americans in a film for children which touts an overt anti-racist message: Disney's Pocahontas (1995). Despite the direct engagement with issues of race, racism, and cross-cultural interaction in Pocahontas—which Alice reads as in part an apology for previous Disney characters such as Tiger Lily in the 1953 Peter Pan—the film holds some problematic subtexts beneath its worthy surface message of tolerance and anti-colonialism. Elements of the production, such as Pocahontas' signature costume (a skimpy buckskin mini-dress) and the division between 'good Indians' (those who assimilate to European culture) and 'bad Indians' (those who fight it), make free use of prevalent stereotypes of Native American culture. When the important character Grandmother Willow, a spirit guide, encourages Pocahontas to learn English, the film even seems to tacitly suggest divine approval of colonialism. Alice also discussed 'Savages', the controversial song which appeared toward the end of the original version of the film (it was cut upon video release). The song depicts Native and European parties calling each other savages, ostensibly to show that both sides hold erroneous conceptions about race, and can be violent and hate-filled. However, racist slurs incorporated in the song were on occasion used to taunt Native children after the film's release—despite the diegetic emphasis on the wrongheadedness of such language and behaviour.

CLYCC wishes Alice all the best for her upcoming field research.