kinds of cultural work, from satisfying authorial fantasies to legitimating or
subverting dominant class and gender ideologies... It would want to know how and
why a tale or poem came to say what it does, what the environing circumstances
were (including the uses a particular sort of children’s literature served for its
author, its child and adult readers, and its culture), and what kinds of cultural
statements and questions the work was responding to. It would pay particular
attention to the conceptual and symbolic fault lines denoting a text’s time-, place-,
gender-, and class-specific ideological mechanisms... It would examine ...a book’s
material production, its publishing history, its audiences and their reading
practices, its initial reception, and its critical history, including how its got
inscribed in or deleted from the canon.
Myers 1988:42Myers has also argued that ‘Notions of the “child”, “childhood” and “children’s literature”
are contingent, not essentialist; embodying the social construction of a particular
historical context; they are useful fictions intended to redress reality as much as to
reflect it’ (Myers 1989:52), and that such notions today are bound up with the language
and ideology of Romantic literature and criticism (Myers 1992; see also McGann 1983).
These ideas have been applied by Myers to eighteenth-century children’s authors such
as Maria Edgeworth. The child constructed by Romantic ideology recurs as
Wordsworth’s ‘child of nature’ in such figures as Kipling’s Mowgli and Frances Hodgson
Burnett’s Dickon in The Secret Garden (Knoepflmacher 1977; Richardson 1992) and, as
one critic points out, ‘many children’s books that feature children obviously wiser than
the adults they must deal with—like F.Anstey’s Vice Versa or E.Nesbit’s Story of the Amulet
—would have been unthinkable without the Romantic revaluation of childhood’
(Richardson 1992:128).
The same crises in the humanities which resulted in radical questioning of the nature
of history and the emergence of new historiographies of culture, including literary New
Historicism, also brought forth cultural studies. It is difficult to define the field of
cultural studies very precisely because, as Brantlinger argues, it has ‘emerged from the
current crises and contradictions of the humanities and social science disciplines not as
a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda, but as a loosely coherent
group of tendencies, issues and questions’ (1990: ix). Nevertheless, there are several
points of similarity between the new literary historicism and cultural studies and their
relevance to the study of children’s literature. For example, it is possible to see such
works as Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, not only
operating as versions of the English and American national myth with their landscapes
representing the ‘real’ England and the ‘real’ America, but becoming sites for ideological
struggle and appropriation by, for example, the ‘culture industries’ (Watkins 1992).
In Keywords, Raymond Williams describes culture as ‘one of the two or three most
complicated words in the English language’ (Williams 1976:76). Culture is an
ambiguous term: a problem shared, perhaps, by all concepts which are concerned with
totality, including history, ideology, society, and myth. ‘Cultural studies’ is an equally
ambiguous term, but most commentators would agree that cultural studies is
‘concerned with the generation and circulation of meanings in industrial societies’ (Fiske
THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES 33