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Politics and Ideology in Children's Literature, edited by Marian Thérèse Keyes and Áine McGillicuddy. Dublin: Four Courts, 2014.
Readers interested in politics and children's literature should find much of interest in this new collection of essays, published by the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature. The editors' introduction begins with a useful and appropriately brief overview of analyses of the ideological character of children's literature (9). Appropriately brief, because the essays don't engage directly with theories of ideology or any other particular focus. Rather, they are loosely related in that each in some way focuses on "how children's literature can advocate or contest particular world views" (10). The lack of a narrow focus might be considered a weakness of this collection, but I found much in the individual essays that was thought provoking, even when I was not familiar with the individual texts they focus upon.
The first essay in the collection, which also opens the section on ideology and subversion-Clémentine Beauvais's "Little Tweaks and Fundamental Changes: Two Aspects of Sociopolitical Transformation in Children's Literature"-for example, provides a promising framework within which to consider a wide range of radical literature, not only for children but for a wider audience. Beauvais, rather than considering literature in terms of the particular political ideology advocated (i.e. "'Green', 'Marxist', 'anti-racist', 'queer'" [20]), considers books in terms of "the scope of the . . . transformation encouraged": "local, gradual changes . . . and those that advocate complete restructuring of whole 'worlds'" (21). Beauvais analyzes a picturebook by Jesus Cisneros and José Campanari, ¿Y Yo qué Puedo Hacer?, which exemplifies texts informed by an existentialist perspective that envisions social change on a "microcosmic, individual scale" (23). She contrasts this with another picture book, Révolution, by the French artist Sara, informed by Marxist utopian hope in the possibility of radical social change. Beauvais argues that these contrasting approaches to social change correspond with different ways of envisioning the figure of the child: viewed as like an adult in that each is limited as a person; or "glorified as a child, for being a vector of absolute change" (21). Beauvais's essay is one of the shortest in the collection, and left me wishing for additional examples to clarify her fascinating...