3
History, Culture and Children’s Literature
Tony Watkins
Until the late 1970s, there was (outside Marxist criticism) a generally accepted view of
the nature of history and its place in literary studies. Perkins (1991) points out that
during most of the nineteenth century, literary history was popular and enjoyed prestige
because it produced a more complete appreciation of the literary work than was
otherwise possible. It functioned, too, as a form of historiography, revealing the ‘“spirit”,
mentality or Weltanschauung of a time and place with unrivaled precision and intimacy’
(Perkins 1991:2). For much of the twentieth century, especially in Renaissance studies,
history was seen as outside literature and as guaranteeing the truth of a literary
interpretation: ‘History...was the single, unified, unproblematic, extra-textual, extra-
discursive real that guaranteed our readings of the texts which constituted its cultural
expression’ (Belsey 1991: 26). In the traditional literary view of history and culture, there
was no difficulty in relating text to context: history was singular and operated as a
‘background’ to the reading of a work of literature (‘the foreground’); and culture was
something which the work reproduced or expressed, or could be set against. Literary
history was ‘a hybrid but recognizable genre that co-ordinated literary criticism,
biography, and intellectual/social background within a narrative of development’ (Buell
1993: 216).
Such notions have, until recently, remained the dominant ones behind the histories of
children’s literature. Thus, John Rowe Townsend, in the fifth edition (1990) of his
standard one-volume history of children’s literature, Written for Children, writes ‘While I
have tried to see children’s literature in its historical and social contexts, my standards
are essentially literary’ (xi). However, in the 1970s, there was ‘a Turn toward History’
(Cox and Reynolds 1993:3) in American adult literary theory as it began to move away
from the dominance of deconstruction. The consequent reconceptualisation of history
and its relationship to literature had its roots in the work of such theorists and critics as
Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Edward Said and Frank Lentricchia. In the 1980s,
new terms associated with literary history (including ‘the new history’, ‘cultural poetics’
and, especially, ‘the New Historicism’) entered the critical vocabulary through the work of
such critics as Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose and Jerome McGann.
The ‘new historicism’ is distinguished from the old by a lack of faith in the objectivity
of historical study and, instead, an emphasis on the way the past is constructed or
invented in the present. Felperin quotes the opening paragraph of Catherine Belsey’s
The Subject of Tragedy (1985):