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

[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?)