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Hawthorne's Children Mariko Turk Hawthorne's Literature for Children, edited by Monika M. Elbert. Spec. issue of Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 36.1 (2010).
The Spring 2010 special edition of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review brings together ten new essays that engage with the pedagogical, historical, racial, political, and gender issues of Hawthorne's works for children. They also address questions of authorial intention, Hawthorne's public and private lives, and the ever-shifting place of children's literature in popular and academic culture. This collection is a valuable addition to the growing body of critical work focusing on Hawthorne's writings in this genre, a subject that previously claimed only one published booklength study, Laura Laffrado's 1992 Hawthorne's Literature for Children.
Laffrado provides the collection's second essay, "Hawthorne 2.0," a critical history of Hawthorne's works for children. I mention her contribution first because it contextualizes the collection as a whole. While Monika M. Elbert's introductory essay, "From the Editor's Gable," provides insight into how Hawthorne's children's works were received by critics and reviewers of his own day, as well as describing the concerns of the new essays, Laffrado details the developments and shifts in literary criticism that led to the possibility of a special issue on these writings. She traces criticism of Hawthorne's children's works from their positive reviews upon publication, to the mid-twentieth century's neglect of them as "subliterary" (32), to the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries' growing interest in them, to future directions for research made possible by the increased "digitized availability" of the works (42). Laffrado notes that the continued revision of the American literary canon allowed Hawthorne's children's works to move "from the places that they had long occupied on the margins toward the center of academic considerations" (36). She also observes that while earlier criticism "reflected a perceived requirement to appraise the literary value of the children's works," recent critical responses "rightly eschew such obligatory evaluations" (36). For instance, previous critics often used Hawthorne's description of writing children's books as "drudgery" as proof that the works held little claim to serious scholarship. Laffrado deals with the "drudgery" quote in a footnote, and suggests that this and other similar remarks may have been somewhat "overread as a result of their neat fit with academic biases of the time regarding...