Literature for children and young people: Outrageous pranks, great adventures

Professor O'Sullivan, what is your favorite children's book at the moment?

The French picture book “When Mama was still a good girl” by Valérie Larrondo and Claudine Desmarteau. An incredibly funny and cleverly made book! It draws on the picture book's own potential as a multimedia medium: there is an incongruity between what is told in pictures and text. A mother tells her daughter how well-behaved she was as a child. 'Of course I never stuck a finger up my nose' says the text. But the picture shows the mother as a child picking both nostrils in a grotesquely comical manner. This principle runs through the whole book. The text thus reacts parodistically to pedagogical children's literature. It tells how the child should otherwise be and behave correctly. However, this is undermined by the pictures, which show that the mother was anything but well-behaved. 

So can picture books tell two stories?

That is precisely their potential. There are endless ways in which images and text can interact. Take the famous Struwwelpeter, a book that some experts classify as black pedagogical. The pictures celebrate the child's desire to disobey, but the text tells the parents' message. Children who are not yet able to read look at the drawings and understand that their parents are reading them something different from what they see. Fidgety Philipp, for example, sits with his upper-class parents at a richly laid table, tilts and pulls the tablecloth, dishes, sausage and wine to the floor. The boy lands underneath. An almost unheard-of prank for the time! In the 19th century, the gap between children and parents was far greater than it is today; for the children reading at the time, this outrageous act will have triggered a laugh of liberation.  

So are children's books a reflection of their time?

Children's books can be used to read a society's image of childhood at a given time: what was considered acceptable to tell children, what was assumed, how much children understood at all or what they perhaps found funny. Children's literature and children's media reflect what a society wants to communicate to the next generation. That is why children's literature is not only a subject of research in literary and media studies, but also an important cultural science subject.

Since when have societies been using children's literature to shape the future?

Literature actually aimed at children first appeared in Western and Northern Europe in the second half of the 18th century, i.e. during the Enlightenment. This is also linked to the rise of the middle classes: Children were released from work and there was enough money to educate them on a broad basis. Not only aristocratic but also middle-class children learned to read and were discovered as an audience. To this day, books are essential for literacy. Reading research comes to the conclusion that novice readers in particular benefit most from books. The materiality of the book and the opportunities it offers for interaction play a major role in this.

What did you like reading the most as a child?

Enid Blyton! 

The books were published in the 1950s, but are still read, listened to and filmed today. Why has Enid Blyton been so successful for generations?

Enid Blyton had an unconditional child's eye view of the world. There is something empowering about the stories. The children solve all the puzzles themselves and receive high praise from their parents at the end. It is important that they are recognized by the authority figures. But they are the ones who solve the cases, and they are put in situations where they can prove themselves without parents, like in the classic boarding school stories or vacations with relatives. Think also of Harry Potter, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland or Emil and the Detectives. This is the great imagination of reading children. The absence of parents makes it possible to do things that would otherwise be forbidden. Let the adventure begin!

And wasn't Enid Blyton ahead of her time with the character of George?

In “The Five Friends”, there is the timid Anne, who plays with dolls and has to be protected by her brothers. She is a traditional, even stereotypical girl figure. The character of Georg or Georgina, on the other hand, is subversive: she behaves like a boy and wants to be treated like one. For around 20 years, this non-conformism has also been recognized by gender-interested literary research.

Thank you very much for the interview!