348 REVIEWS

retellings. While the myths necessarily show humans in direct encounters with
divine power or going through rites of passage, Hawthorne’s modifications often
seem aimed more at making them homely and domesticated than at heightening
the sublime.
In the book’s final chapters, Vránková addresses the presence of the sublime
in more recent children’s fantasy literature. Unfortunately, these latter chapters
contain numerous errors – not serious enough to damage her overall argument,
but sufficiently frequent to mean that the book cannot be recommended as
a reliable reference for dates or titles. (There are also a few more serious
mistakes – for example, the description of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising
sequence, set in contemporary Britain, as a secondary-world fantasy, and of
E. Nesbit’s Psammead as a ‘monster’ [111].)
For her discussion, Vránková adopts John Goldthwaite’s taxonomy, which
divides fantasies into open (set in this world), closed (set in a secondary world),
circular (involving a there-and-back-again journey from the mundane to the
fantastic), and broken (or postmodern). The strategies adopted by texts in these
broad categories have, of course, been discussed before (Farah Mendlesohn’s
monograph on the rhetorical structures of fantasy is a notable absentee here),
but approaching them from the perspective of the sublime at times casts them in
interestingly new lights, as, for example, when Vránková compares the function
of the old houses used in time-slip stories by writers such as Lucy Boston
and Philippa Pearce with the ‘ancient castle’ topos of the eighteenth-century
Gothic novel. Her observation that the trope of repetition in such stories leads
their protagonists to recognise ‘their personal responsibility for their life, or,
in Deleuze’s terms, for the way the life of their ancestors is being replayed’
(128) offers a suggestive variation on the familiar claims that fantasy can have
a therapeutic function or preserve communal memory.
The brief conclusion suggests intriguingly that literary versions of the
sublime for adults and children differ in fairly systematic ways: while children’s
literature subdues ‘the other to the demands of morality’, literature for adults
deals ‘with various forms of the exclusion of the other’ (151). This is too neat a
generalisation, but it is a provocative one, and it is in its willingness take on a
wide sweep of literature and make such provocations that much of the pleasure
of this volume lies.
Catherine Butler
Cardiff University, Wales
DOI: 10.3366/ircl.2020.0366

Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition. Carrie Hintz and
Eric Tribunella. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2019. 559 pages.
The second edition of Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction by Carrie
Hintz and Eric Tribunella seeks to update the 2013 text with an eye to more
contemporary debates, scholarship, and innovation in the field of children’s
literature studies. The authors aim to present a text that will serve as a tool
to help students from not only literary studies, but also associated fields such
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as library sciences and education, approach works that they may have a
nostalgic connection to with a critical eye. The text intertwines the study of
children’s literature and the study of the history of childhood, providing the
constant contextualisation that is necessary for a quickly evolving field. The
thirteen chapters are organised so that the text can be used as a whole for a
course modelled thematically rather than historically; chapters can also be used
separately from the rest of the textbook as needed. Each chapter includes an
introduction to key concepts and questions, a demonstration of what it means
to read ‘critically’, suggestions for further reading, an ‘Explorations’ section to
guide both discussions and assignments, and concludes with an ‘Approaches
to Teaching’ section that presents potential lesson plans directed at either
elementary- or secondary-school level.
Inevitably, in an effort to serve such a broad readership, there are places
where the book might be missing its goal of critical engagement. As a textbook
it is largely US- and UK-centric, and English-centric in terms of the history
it presents of both the field and the phenomenon of children’s literature. The
same is true of the scholarship with which it engages, thereby inadvertently
reiterating the structure and exclusionary nature of the canon of children’s
literature even as it presents information meant to encourage students to think
critically about various aspects of the canon and the selection of texts. Some
citation inconsistencies become a distraction from the instructional nature of the
volume, and the authors stop just short of direct engagement with controversies,
especially those regarding race and racism in representation or school violence
and mass casualties. This seems potentially disconnected from the increasingly
diverse backgrounds of students. An opportunity is lost to encourage students to
think more deeply on these matters via this approach of presenting various sides
to, say, reactions to the use of the ‘n-word’ under the heading of censorship. No
stance is taken in this text on the grounds that taking a stance might exclude some
readers. In fact, though, by not taking a stance, a stance is taken, risking further
marginalisation of views that the textbook also notes needs centring across the
field.
Hintz and Tribunella’s expansion has seen the reorganisation of the text,
with the addition of chapters on children’s literature and popular culture, updates
to the discussion of adaptations of children’s literature for theatre, film, and
television, and the addition of a glossary at the end of the text that collates bolded
key terms from the preceding thirteen chapters. The preface includes an itemised
list of chapters with short descriptions of each chapter’s focus. This is a useful
organisational tool, not only for teachers but also as a potential further reference
point for students who might be intimidated by the sheer volume of a text
dedicated to giving an overview of a field that has been developing exponentially
over forty-five years or so. The textbook emphasises its cross-field appeal through
reference materials useful not only for current students and instructors, but
also for future educators. These materials provide clear definitions of terms,
comparisons of various modes, and, notably, a table of fiction and nonfiction
pairings meant to assist with the incorporation of nonfiction in English literary
classrooms.
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In addition to these extra-textual sections that prove its functionality as both

a textbook and a handbook for constructing a course on children’s literature,
where the text excels is in demonstrating constantly how to write and think
critically about children’s literature. Hintz and Tribunella describe why it is
necessary critically to analyse children’s literature: ‘by examining what it is
about childhood that triggers adult nostalgia, we can learn about our most
potent and long-term fears, anxieties, pleasures, and desires’ (38). To perform
this framing of the subject, the text emphasises close reading and analysis,
consistently modelling critical writing by closing each chapter with a ‘Reading
Critically’ section that uses texts that are historically contextualised within that
chapter. While these writing samples are instructional in themselves, it is helpful
that the instruction for students breaks down exactly what these sections are
modelling. It begins with a short example of close reading contextualised by a
brief statement of how the scene functions in the book itself, to introduce the idea
of thinking critically about emotionally loaded and nostalgic moments, before
moving into an explanation about not only what reading critically is, but also
how it might be approached. The introduction also directly addresses common
assumptions about children’s literature, gives a primer in the practice of close
reading, and weighs the importance of considering various literary histories and
forms, historical and cultural contexts, and critical and theoretical concepts and
approaches. The introduction moves from how to conduct analysis to what might
be analysed. It prompts students to consider why it is necessary to engage in
such analysis with regards to children’s texts and demonstrates it in a way that
merges theory and praxis. To include this before the subject matter is more fully
engaged with is to provide students with the tools needed to succeed in the field
and move from nostalgic recall to analysis by deliberately making such transition
visible. Thus, the textbook capitalises on its categorisation as a ‘critical reader’
by supplying a roadmap to critical analysis in a way that is accessible to students
as a guide and to instructors as a pedagogical tool.
Michelle Anya Anjirbag https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4479-408X
University of Cambridge, UK
DOI: 10.3366/ircl.2020.0367

Rereading Childhood Books: A Poetics. Alison Waller. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 237
pages.
Why does a glimpse of a book read when young stop us in our tracks? And why
are we so profoundly affected by the remembered aura of a childhood story?
Childhood reading appears to be of a different order from that of the adult:
Walter Benjamin wrote of the intimate relationship of children’s reading ‘much
less to their education and knowledge of the world, than to their growth and
their power’ (259). Benjamin offered fleeting philosophical insights into these
numinous qualities, just as educational researchers have attempted to tackle
the question at source by recording children’s fragmentary responses to books
read. Alison Waller, using Benjamin’s metaphor of excavation as a leitmotif,
approaches this tantalising subject from the adult’s perspective: she explores