The Limits of Agency for Children’s Literature Scholars

Abstract

The Limits of Agency for Children’s Literature Scholars Sara L. Schwebel (bio) Public libraries, independent bookstores, and bigbox chain stores all have clearly designated sections of children’s literature, as does the New York Times best-seller list. But among those who study the texts so classified, the term “children’s literature” has proved much more slippery. In fact, since the 1970s, a central preoccupation of children’s literature scholarship has been defining the boundaries of the field. Perry Nodelman’s monograph The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature is just one (albeit a particularly compelling) example of this phenomenon. Despite its limitations in failing to account for teen-authored texts, co-authored picture books, and co-created children’s theatre, a definition of children’s literature like the one proposed by Nodelman is useful. It presents the idea that children’s literature is the only literary “genre” produced by one population for another, thereby capturing the overarching prominence of adults in the industry and raising the question “Where are the children in children’s literature?” If children’s books are written, published, purchased, prized, promoted, and taught by adults, what does this grown-up influence mean for child readers? Can young people resist or reimagine (consciously or unconsciously) the messages or meanings of these texts? Through their interactions with authors via fan mail, school visits, and social media, can young people shape the production of books written and published for their peer group and for future generations of children? In recent years, both children’s literature and childhood studies scholars have yoked questions of this sort to the concept of agency, a theoretical term that dominated historical studies between the 1970s and the 1990s, sparking an interpretative revolution centred on previously ignored populations by way of previously discounted sources. In the wake of this turn, women’s history, Black/African American history, and Native history, among others, flourished—and continue as vibrant subfields today. All of these [End Page 278] fields drew attention to their respective subjects as actors in history and all were connected to liberatory movements outside the academy. But while these subfields flourished, the history of childhood lagged. (Childhood Studies emerged later and is now a growing field; it differs from the history of childhood in that it is dominated by social scientists whose work focuses on the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, periods for which a wider variety of sources are available, including interviews with contemporary children who in fact might be co-researchers.) Historians have found the interpretation of sources produced by children of the past, when they exist at all, complicated, often to an even greater degree than those produced by other ignored historical actors. This does not mean that children’s agency did not or does not exist, but rather that evidence of this agency is particularly difficult to locate and particularly challenging to interpret. In short, the issue of sources frustrates a search for children’s agency, particularly in a traditional, paper-based archive. Consider historian Jill Lepore’s nuanced reading of Benjamin Franklin’s first letter to his favourite sister, Jane. On the brink of their respective, gendered adulthoods, a just-turned twenty-one-year-old Benjamin (now, on his birthday, officially “at Man’s estate”) cautions fourteen-year-old Jane to behave with virtue, borrowing from a host of letter-writing conventions, not least of which his theme (virtue), to do so. Benjamin writes cautiously, even cryptically, knowing that his letter to Jane will be read by their parents. His youthful missive has been saved through the generations because of his subsequent fame. And because it commenced a lifelong correspondence with his sister, it can be read within a rich personal as well as historical context, something Lepore does with a particularly adept eye and skilful hand. Doing so facilitates interpretation of the letter, but the adolescent Jane’s response to her brother’s words can only be surmised: in fact, the first of Jane’s handwritten letters to Benjamin still extant was penned when she was forty-five (Lepore 39–46). Historical sources authored by young people are limited, particularly before the mid-nineteenth century and...