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Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 15 (2001)

Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 15

(2001)– [tijdschrift] Literatuur zonder leeftijd–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Children's Literature Research in the United Kingdom
Peter Hunt1.

We vroegen Peter Hunt, hoogleraar aan Cardiff University om een overzicht te maken van Brits onderzoek op het terrein van jeugdliteratuur. Hij schetst in onderstaand verhaal ‘the tip of an iceberg’.

 

There is no central register of children's literature research in the UK, but increasingly it is possible through the internet, to make a remarkable number of links to work in many disciplines. But, despite electronics, it is not easy decide what constitutes either research, or the subject of children's literature itself. When I embarked on this brief survey, Nancy Chambers, editor of the important children's literature journal Signal wondered how it is possible to define research when you cannot define the subject?

In traditional academic disciplines, research is relatively easy to define, but with children's literature, interest ranges from the professional (those concerned with literacy, librarianship or the handicapped reader, for example) through the commercial, to the academic, and the specialist amateurs.

But I should stress that the distinction between the amateur and the ‘professional’ in research does not imply that the amateur is any less rigorous; if there any comparison of quality to be made here, the enthusiastic amateurs are likely to produce better work than professional academics. They are not bound, as an MA or PhD student is in the UK, by an very tight deadline (indeed, horrifying as it may seem, a commonly accepted unofficial definition of a PhD is ‘what you can write in three years’), and Universities are penalised by the state funding councils if their students do not complete their work in the given time. Equally, researchers in academia, quite apart from an exponential increase in numbers of students that they have to deal with, are locked into a culture of ‘short-termism’: university funding is linked to publications, and annual output.

And so, where is the research in the UK? Is it thriving? If we take a very broad view of our subject, and regard ‘children's literature’ as a matrix of related

studies, then the answer to the second question is ‘yes’. Thus we might find at one point on the matrix a company such as Book Marketing Ltd2. which runs private research projects for publishers and retailers and continuously monitors the book market (annual non-subscribers' report, £ 85); at another, the National Literacy Association3. has recently completed a project called Right to Read, ‘aimed at encouraging and supporting the reading skills of children in public care’; at another, Emma Laws, of the Renier Collection of Children's books at the Victoria and Albert Museum, working on miniature libraries for an MA in the History of the Book at the University of London; and at another the latest issue of Green Hedges Magazine Online (www.EnidBlyton.org), contains explorations into the minutiae of Enid Blyton's life and work.

Given this range, this article is only a sampling, and, I suspect, the tip of an iceberg.

Four projects

In the UK, funding for academic projects is centralised, and competition for grants from the government's Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) is fierce, and the conditions rigorous. It is impossible to say whether children's literature is fairly represented in the funding, but four notable projects may be mentioned here.

Caroline Archer of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading is completing a two-year project on Typographic Design for Children, which typifies the links between the scholarly and the pragmatic in children's book studies. The books studied are ‘part of a planned series for those learning to read’ and have been invisible to historians. The project included both a descriptive study of books from the British Library, the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, and the Parker Collection in Birmingham Reference Library - in which it was demonstrated that their typography reflected the attitudes of adults - and also empirical studies on the effect of different typefaces on readability.

At Homerton College, University of Cambridge, Morag Styles4. is completing an AHRB- and British Academy-funded project on how children read pictures in multimodal texts.

The Hockliffe Project (www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/Hockliffe) is based on the Hockliffe Collection at De Montfort University, which comprises over a thousand children's books from 1685 onwards, with a majority published between 1760 and 1840. All the texts have been microfilmed, are being digitised and will be available on

the World Wide Web during 2001-2. The images are accompanied by full bibliographical records and short essays by the AHRB-funded research fellow, Matthew Grenby. This is an interesting beginning to the detailed bibliographical description of the huge untapped resources in British Libraries. (Dr Grenby is also working on topics such as children's literature and charity, and children's literature and the French revolution).

History of a different kind is addressed in the work of Josie Dolan, the AHRB-funded research fellow working in the Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media (CIRCL) at The University of Reading (www.rdg.ac.uk/circl/). The project is related to a major research project at CIRCL on ‘National and Cultural Identity in Children's Literature and Media’ which has included meetings of international research groups and a Conference (April, 2001). Dr Dolan's work, on ‘National Identity in Children's Broadcasting 1930s-1950s’ uses the BBC Caversham Archives, and is an example of the way in which the concept of texts for children extends into non-print media.

Following this line of research might lead us to studies in children and television; Máire Messenger-Davies, for example, at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, has been working on a BBC-funded project, to be published by Cambridge University Press, ‘Dear BBC’: Children, Television Storytelling and the Public Sphere. Dr Messenger-Davies is at present working on the regulation and consent of children appearing on television, a project funded by the Broadcasting Standards Commission, Consenting Children? The Use of Children in Non-Fiction Television Programmes.

If this seems a long way from the children's book as such, one might question whether we have always been dealing with children's media and children and storytelling, and these are natural adjuncts to the study of texts. The Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, at the University of London Institute of Education (IOE) (www.ccsonline.org.uk/mediacentre/home.html) centres its wide range of research around the idea that ‘the media have now taken the place of the family and the school as the major socialising influence in contemporary society’ and that we need to ‘find new ways of empowering young people, both as critical consumers of media and as producers in their own right’. Children and text are repositioning themselves in the cultural matrix. At the London School of Economics, which is, like the IOE, a world-class research organisation, a major report has been produced, ‘Young People, New Media’ (1999) (http://lito.lse.ac.uk/young_people/) focussed on screen-based media - and the fact that, ‘for the first time... more households in Britain contain televisions than books’.5.

Individual research

A rapidly increasing number of University English Departments are allowing students to take PhDs in children's literature topics: to give examples of two: at the University of Nottingham, Rowena Edlin-White is working on Kate Douglas Wiggin; at Cardiff University, Ann Alston is working on Family and the loss of the father, and Sebastien Chapleau on aspects of fantasy. Academic staff are also involved in individual research, for example Pam Knights at the University of Durham on ‘vocation’ plots, and Judy Simons at De Montfort University on Angela Brazil, but correspondents have pointed out that such work is often ‘unfunded and isolated’.

Much of academic small-scale research is channelled into dissertations at MA level, at institutions such as the University of Nottingham, the University of Surrey - Roehampton, the University of Reading, University College Carmarthen and (although this degree has now ceased) the University of Warwick. To take just one example - and this list could easily be replicated - at the University of Surrey - Roehampton (www.ncrc.ac.uk/ma_dissertations/index.html), recent dissertations have included work on Dolls in Children's Literature (Susan Bailes), the Development of the Concept of Self-worth in books for adolescents (Beverly Cusden), and studies of Penelope Lively, Robert Westall, and Andre Norton.

At University College, Worcester there are several higher degrees in progress, including work on the postmodernist work of Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, and on narrative, cd-roms and special needs education.

Individual research is perhaps the most difficult to locate, but the forthcoming Symposium on Religion, Children's Literature and Modernity in Europe, at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven6. will involve several British Researchers. These include Pat Pinsent (Catholic Fiction for Children between Vatican I and Vatican II), Mary Cadogan (Protestant Publishers of Children's Literature in England, ca. 1860-1960), Michael Taylor (Evangelical Publishing in the 19th century), Sandy Brewer (Visual Culture of London Missionary Society), Chris Routh (Visual interpretation of Bible Stories), David Rudd (C.S. Lewis) and Ann-Marie Bird (Philip Pullman). The work of Ann Lawson-Lucas7. on Italian Literature, notably on the adventure novels of Emilio Salgari and on Pinocchio has received not only an AHRB grant, but also strong Italian endorsement.

Research on authors

Britain is perhaps especially rich in societies dedicated to specific authors (some of which are listed in The Children's Book Handbook, published by the Book Trust (www.booktrust.org.uk). Among these are The Beatrix Potter Society, whose exemplary scholarship, presented at its biennial Study Conferences, is published in its Beatrix Potter Studies8.. The 2001 edition has as its theme Working on the Beatrix Potter Jigsaw, Twenty Years of Research and Discovery (publication, September 2001). Other original research published by the society includes the Linder Memorial Lecture: ‘Aesop in the Shadows’ by Peter Hollindale, which links Potter as artist and natural scientist, appeared in 2000.

As another example, The Arthur Ransome Society (www.arthur-ran some.org/ar/), tends to concentrate on smaller-scale - but no less rigorous research published bi-annually in its journal Mixed Moss (see, for example. Paul Flint's speculative account of the career of Commander Ted Walker in Mixed Moss 3, 7, 2000). But the society's publishing arm, the Amazon Press, has produced annually (for subscribers only) a distinguished series, including the annotated first draft of [The] Swallows and [The] Amazons (1997) There have been other erudite research by members, such as Roger Wardale's distinguished sequence on Ransome's life, the latest of which is Arthur Ransome and the World of Swallows and Amazons (Hebden: Great Northern Books, 2000). And, as with all such societies, there is detailed individual work afoot. Kirsty Nichol Findlay is working on Ransome's association with the poet Edward Thomas, and Ted Alexander, who is the society's bookseller9. has spent three years on research into Ransome's life in Russia and the Baltic states.

The Lewis Carroll Society (which has the advantage of dealing with a ‘canonical’ writer) ‘encourages all kinds of research’ and publishes articles in The Carrollian, a contents list for which is published at their web site (http://aznet.co.uk/lcs)

The Children's Book History Society produces a Newsletter of often dazzling variety and bibliographic profundity.10. Its members' work ranges from Michael Dawson's research on Vojtech Kubasta, the Czech designer of pop-up books, and Julia Hunt's definitive examination of Ernest Nister's movable books, Ann Thomson's work on her collection of Peter Parley Annuals and Tales, to Folly

Magazine, edited by Belinda Copson and Sue Sims11. which concentrates (not exclusively) on girls' school stories. Folly magazine has published a good deal of original research on neglected writers such as Nancy Breary and Helen Dore Boyleston, and carries an occasional series on specialist children's literature collections.

Practical application

In fields of study commonly and closely linked to children's book, research is often related to practical applications. For example, in education and literacy, there have been notable developments, such as the Fabula Project (www.faublaeu.org) at the Reading and Language Information Centre, University of Reading12. which supports bilingual literacy, allowing teachers and children to create bilingual storybooks. Free software and documentation can be downloaded from the site.

The Reading and Language Information Centre also works on ‘small, low-key’ research projects, for example, into children's multicultural books. The British Dyslexia Association (www.bda-dyslexia.org.uk) publishes, among many pamphlets, ‘What Can Children Read’, which provides links to publishers who produce books which are (generally) ‘high interest - low vocabulary’. The National Association of Special Educational Needs (NASEN) has a website (www.nasen.org.uk) which includes a research database and an on-line research journal, and which touches on children's literature at the point of literacy and reading.

There are several organisations that promote reading, which, although modest about their research, undoubtedly base their work on more than intuition (for example. the Scottish Book Trust: www.scottishbooktrust.com). There is also a good deal of individual research input, often school-based, into this field. Sandra Williams is typical of several researchers who combine an interest in literature and in literacy: her article on the Oxford Reading Tree reading scheme, which suggests that it ‘constructs a passive, failing reader’ appears in English in Education (5, 2, Summer 2001).

At least some research appears in book form, and Sheila Ray's article ‘Books About Children's Books 2000’ (Signal 95, May 2001, blz. 112-130) lists nearly 50 books on the field originating and published in the UK. Again, the range of material seems to stretch the seams of any possible category, including as it does, items as diverse as K. Bakewell and P. Williams's, Indexing Children's Books (Society of Indexers, Sheffield), What the Big Boys Read (Cheshire Education Library Service, Winsford) and Lois Keith's Take Up Thy Bed and Walk:

Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls (Women's Press, London). Among the books listed by Ray, the two-volume The Encyclopedia of School Stories (Ashgate) is an example of extensive and meticulous work that perhaps could not have been produced from an academic background. A lively and fascinating account of the both dogged and inspired research work by Sue Sims, Hilary Clare and Robert Kirkpatrick for this project can be found in the Children's Books History Society Newsletter (70, July 2001, 10-23).

Other books variously rumoured or reported to be in progress include (and the titles may be, at best, approximate) Adrienne E. Gavin's biography of Anna Sewell (due 2003), Stephen Thompson's Children's Literature and Critical Theory, Julia Briggs and Dennis Butts's A History of Popular Reading for Children, Jean Webb and Debby Thacker's New History of Children's Literature, and Tony Watkins's on Children's Literature in Theory. Adrienne Gavin and Christopher Routledge have recently published Mystery in Children's Literature (Palgrave), which contains a number of critical essays by IRSCL members.

Umbrella discipline

If there is a single trend to be perceived from all this disparate activity, it may be the rapid development of ‘Childhood Studies’ as an umbrella discipline, under which ‘children's literature’ may shelter and mingle with other disciplines. The Centre for the Social Study of Childhood at the University of Hull (www.hull.ac.uk/cssc), for example, is concerned with the social lives of children and with childhood as a social institution; among its current projects is the study of Children's Literature in Saudi Arabia.

On the whole this survey has presented an optimistic picture, although it is clear that more needs to be done in terms of both linking scholars, perhaps through increased awareness of eachothers' existence. However, the development of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature at the University of Surrey - Roehampton, with its rapidly growing resources, and the Centre for the Children's Book at Newcastle Upon Tyne13., which is now producing publications such as Carey Fluker Hunt's Tales for the Telling: A Journey Through the World of Folk Tales: The Education Pack suggest that public interest will grow, and with it, high-quality research.


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