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Animality and Children's Literature and Film, by Amy Ratelle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Children's Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg, by Zoe Jaques. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Amy Ratelle's addition to the Critical Approaches to Children's Literature series published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford, and Zoe Jaques's addition to the Children's Literature and Culture series published by Routledge and edited by Phillip Nel both forge new ground in children's literature criticism by connecting children's literature to the theoretical movements in posthumanism and animal studies. Ratelle's text is a fascinating blend of animal studies theory, literary analysis, and relatively obscure histories of human-animal interaction and legislation that argues that "Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity" (4). Jaques similarly contends that children's literature and posthumanism "have the unique potential to offer a forward-focused agenda that unites the possibilities of fantasy with demonstrable real-world change" (6) and that posthuman tensions have been present in canonical children's texts but have largely been ignored in academic criticism that has been more concerned with issues surrounding childhood and not humanness as such. Both Ratelle's and Jaques's texts attempt to fill sizable gaps in the field by connecting new theoretical frameworks to historically significant children's texts.
Jaques uses a variety of posthuman thought (mostly from the subfields of animal studies and feminist ecocriticism) to illustrate the numerous ways children's texts have always already been deeply invested in investigating humanist and posthumanist philosophies. In doing so, she attempts to "demonstrate the messy, confused, unstable, and dynamic ways in which the human and the more-than-human have been, and continue to be, conceived" (21). Jaques opens by providing a brief (arguably too brief) introduction to the posthumanist thought she relies on throughout the rest of the book. Jaques is mostly building on work by Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Jacques Derrida, but she also responds to the significant body of children's literature scholarship that deals with anthropomorphized animal characters. Jaques succinctly explains posthumanist discourse as a discourse that "both exposes and ironically establishes boundaries between the human and the non-human, to facilitate a dialog as to how...