Really Important Things About Children's Literature

[labellementeuse]

1. I finally read Kate de Goldi's new book The 10 PM Question. It is absolutely fantastic. Drop what you are reading and read it, it'll only take a few hours. I cried, I laughed, I read til 3 am in the morning to finish it. (Totally worth it.)

2. I'm working on the next bit of my research essay and I want to make some baseless assertions about what has happened to the holiday adventure genre since the 1960s. My assertions are that:
The conceit and the characters have basically split up.

The conceit - "children on their own without adults" - has finally acknowledged itself as fantasy and moved into actual fantasy instead of the faux realism (or in Ransome's case, the fetishised realism. This means that the children are no longer practical characters. Instead they're geeks or average children.

You can actually see a chronological progression in this, starting with Alan Garner's Weirdstone of Bringsamen and Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone, which feature Typical British Kids On Holiday Sucked Into Fantasy Adventures. Here Britain, instead of familiar, becomes alien. Modern novels are much more dramatic with things like Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom and N.M. Browne's Warriors of Alavna, which feature Typical British Kids Sucked Into Actual Fantasy Worlds.

The exception to this fantasy trend is hyper-realism (which I always feel is its own kind of fantasy), as in Gary Paulsen's wildly-popular-when-I-was-11 Hatchet survival novels. Jean Craighead George's 1959 My Side of the Mountain, a lovely wee book, also is part of this tradition. (Obviously Browne's work in particular owes a lot to this too.)

Meanwhile, the practical Johns and Susans and Nancies aren't in these books, which are all fish out of water narratives starring Arthur Penhaligons or Jane, Simon, and Barneys. Instead they end up in realistic or mostly-realistic Problem Novels. In these novels they rarely do the performative gender role/parent thing, although sometimes they take care of younger siblings.

People who read a lot of YA and children's literature: do you think this hangs together? Got any more examples? Counterexamples?

Comments

[china_shop]

I haven't read enough recent stuff to be able to chart a trend, but I was just reading some of E. Nesbit's Five Children and It, which very much fits into the Typical British Kids On Holiday Sucked Into Fantasy Adventures genre. (And there's also Narnia, of course.)

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but those are pre Ransome, so they suck as examples. They're counterevidence. :P Curse you! Oh well.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

But, thank you though! :)

[china_shop]

Hee! Sorry.

[clockworkflight.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure Five Children & It is a counter example - (as far as I can remember) whilst the children do have fantasy adventures, they still remain in their own world, which is probably more key than the genre or presence of magic.

The modern example which springs to mind is China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, where two (but mostly one) children from modern day London get sucked into a alternative version of the city. Possibly the particular way this backs up your point (though this be pushing it a bit) is that things which have been forgotten in actual!London, from discarded furniture through to bus conductors, find their way through - so they're not just in a fantasy world, but a world which includes remnants of a different time.

Oooh, also in His Dark Materials (I think The Subtle Knife, but long time since I've read them) you have an interesting variant - Will is initially the practical carer and protector, not of younger children but of his mother, and then escapes to a fantasy world.

[clockworkflight.livejournal.com]

Oh bugger, just actually read your post - I don't think those qualify on the holiday aspect.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Yes. I mean Ransome and Blyton come after Nesbit but they don't really borrow from her - they're nascent realism for children, but the trouble with that is that they're not very realistic, which is partly why they're not really in vogue any longer. I mean I think... OK, I just wrote about 300 not very coherent words and deleted them all. Your thoughts are useful! Mine are nuts. :P Mieville and Pullman are difficult texts for me because they don't really, um, agree with what I'm talking about (and in fact I haven't yet read Un Lun Dun, although I will when I get a chance!)

[clockworkflight.livejournal.com]

*nods*. I was just picking up on themes and running with them rather than making any kind of coherent argument. I'm having study deprivation right now...

[aimeesworld.livejournal.com]

1. I LOVE THE 10PM QUESTION.

2. I think it makes sense, although I'm reading while watching Doctor Who. The 'O' series might work but my brain isn't functioning at present.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

1. OMG IT WAS SO GOOD I BAWLED AND BAWLED AND BAWLED.

2. thanks for the reassuring :) O probably DOES work but the idea of re-reading it tonight makes me want to die (I do like Gee, but he's tiring) so, um, not gonna. :PPPP

[aimeesworld.livejournal.com]

1. SAME. FRANKIE TORE MY HEART INTO SHREDS.

2. I like the first two O books, but Motherstone exhausts me. Does Artemis Fowl work? There's the lack of parental involvement and the geeky, super genius hero. But I'm not sure if it's adventure-y enough.

Ugh, must read The Other Side Of Silence and post to Blackboard. I am not enjoying it.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I thought we were doing 24 hours! uh-oh.

[aimeesworld.livejournal.com]

We're doing both. I've read 24 Hours a couple of years ago and can quickly re-read, but OSoS is giving me grief.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Is there a "children's holiday adventure" genre besides the work of Ransome or Blyton, though (and School Friend comics)? There's a whole subset of "abandoned children" adventures that you would need to account for: the Boxcar children, Barbara Willard's The Richleighs of Tantamount, Walkabout - these are the ones that maybe morph into the "hyper realism" of Ivan Southhall et al. (I'm not familiar with the ones you mention). Or the "children who do stuff" like Streatfield, or HF Brinsmead... All of them have little or no involvement of parents.

More recently, though, there might be a sociological reason - children don't play outside any more. Because of real dangers in the real world, the "playing outside" aspect becomes "playing in a fantasy world."

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is, but again it's chiefly between 1930 and 1960 - there are some American ones as well but I don't know them well. Victor Watson in Reading Series Fiction calls them "camping and tramping" stories. There's also Malcolm Saville and M E Atkinson both of whom wrote series with large numbers of books in them - three or four authors doesn't sound like very much, but these authors all wrote a lot. Malcolm Saville wrote 90 books, Enid Blyton was astoundingly prolific, there are 21 books in M E Atkinson's Lockett Family adventures, and there are twelve and a half Swallows and Amazons books.

You're right about "abandoned children" fiction, because one of the earliest books I'm doing a throwaway mention of is L T Meade's A Little Mother To the Others, In Which four children get ditched by their useless father after their mother dies. It's not strictly a camping and tramping story and it's not a what-happens-in-the-holidays story because these children don't go to school, but it does give you children more or less alone, and that's where you get the motherly girl coming in. (Of course, in Meade it's all rather revolting passages of the older sister on her knees by the sickbed for days on end, never moving until the baby of the family is well again, and talks in very excited language about Iris' sacrifice blah blah ARGH.) I don't have a lot of scope to go into it, but you're right that it's really useful to mention it, so thanks heaps!

And of course you're right about why children don't play outside anymore, except what's interesting is that this was actually true in the 30s too - this is what I found so tremendously interesting about Nicholas Tucker's talk. Real childhood for many of the children reading these books would actually have involved the Second World War. Even for those it didn't, drowning, freezing, falling through the ice, starting fires, etc, are all real dangers that Ransome only hints at for drama and Blyton never acknowledges - which is why she has her mysteries, for her own fantasy danger. These books are so-called realistic fiction, but they are really no more realistic than Cooper or Garner (which is why they were such natural inheritors of the genre.) The difference is that they were tolerated, even adored, back then, while modern readers really would reject them (I mean, we still read the old ones, of course.) Or, you know, I'm tempted to say that today, right now, they might be very popular if someone wrote a new series, because there is a real desire for conservative happy stories which is what Ransome and Blyton and all their buddies are really all about - dream of a safe and idyllic England. I think that could be very popular today; I think it would have been very unpopular when everyone was reading Catcher in the Rye.

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

Re: the O series, above, this would be an interesting contrast because yes, it's in a fantasy world, it's a holiday adventure - but IIRC the physical dangers are emphasised, I remember people being hungry and muddy and scared a lot. You're never scared the Swallows or the Amazons are going to really get hurt but you're quite worried about Susan and Nick. Does that tie in anywhere?

(Also: what is it with this genre and people called Susan?)

[eavanmoore.livejournal.com]

I would suggest you consider John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began. teenagers go off camping in the outback and come back to discover that Australia has been invaded overnight and they're going to have to make their way to safety alone. to me this belongs in the same class as Hatchet, at least in your taxonomy.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love those books! And they really fit what I'm saying because these are books where children might most be expected to mimic their parents, and Ellie certainly thinks about what her parents do a lot, but there's no sort of mother/father thing going on with the group.