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Enid Blyton, according to David Rudd, is the all-time bestselling children's author; her work includes three popular series-the Noddy books, the Secret Seven, and the Famous Five. Yet her books are not as well known in the United States as they are in the United Kingdom or Commonwealth countries. To examine this book, Marilynn Olson chose a nontraditional format. She asked two friends, Kathleen Ashley and Angela Ingram, who study English literature and who read Blyton as children, to assist her in a roundtable-style analysis.
KA: David Rudd's study takes up the question of why there has been so little serious attention given to Blyton, the bestselling children's author. Despite consistent denigration by adult readers, especially critics who claim that Blyton's books are racist, sexist, and colonialist as well as being badly written-children from many cultures continue to read Blyton with enthusiasm.
In examining the "adult/child divide" in Blyton's reception, Rudd employs a mix of interpretive approaches that he hopes will illuminate other "mysteries" in the field of children's literature. He says he uses tools provided by cultural studies, though it's a more eclectic form than the cultural studies currently practiced in the United States. After his own methodological statement in chapter two, Rudd combines biographical and literary historical analysis to trace Blyton's career as a writer in chapter three. He surveys and critiques the traditional literary approach to Blyton's fiction in chapter four, then focuses on three of the series (Noddy in chapter five, the Famous Five in chapter six, and the Famous Five and Malory Towers in chapter seven), with special attention to issues of sexism and racism. In these intensive series analyses, he combines textual and historical analysis with techniques of ethnographic research on actual Blyton readers. Data were generated through questionnaires and interviews with adults and older children and through other approaches with the younger children.
Foucaultian discourse theory provides Rudd's overarching theoretical language, one especially suited to children's literature, which is "itself a neglected byway of literary studies, often trapped in the interstices of literature, education and librarianship"; Foucault "treats literary texts as evidence, just like any other material," and is interested in "everyday transient writing" (12). Using Foucault, Rudd can relate textual analysis to production history and the...