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

[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?)