Containing Childhood
Containing Childhood
Space and Identity in Children’s Literature
Contributions by Miranda A. Green-Barteet, Kathleen Kellett, Andrew McInnes, Joyce McPherson, Rebecca Mills, Cristina Rivera, Wendy Rountree, Danielle Russell, Anah-Jayne Samuelson, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Andrew Trevarrow, and Richardine Woodall
Home. School. Nature. The spaces children occupy, both physically and imaginatively, are never neutral. Instead, they carry social, cultural, and political histories that impose—or attempt to impose—behavioral expectations. Moreover, the spaces identified with childhood reflect and reveal adult expectations of where children “belong.”
The essays in Containing Childhood: Space and Identity in Children’s Literature explore the multifaceted and dynamic nature of space, as well as the relationship between space and identity in children’s literature. Contributors to the volume address such questions as: What is the nature of that relationship? What happens to the spaces associated with childhood over time? How do children conceptualize and lay claim to their own spaces?
The book features essays on popular and lesser-known children’s fiction from North America and Great Britain, including works like The Hate U Give, His Dark Materials, The Giver quartet, and Shadowshaper. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach in their analysis, contributors draw upon varied scholarly areas such as philosophy, race, class, and gender studies, among others. Without reducing the issues to any singular theory or perspective, each piece provides insight into specific treatments of space in specific periods of time, thereby affording scholars a greater appreciation of the diverse spatial patterns in children’s literature.
This collection is thought-provoking and timely as we have spent the past three years reimagining the shape of our spaces in the pandemic.
While adults strive to contain children in what they see as 'safe' spaces, children push boundaries and claim spaces they can call their own. In this collection of scholarly essays,. the authors analyze middle-grade and young-adult literature to demonstrate how space and identity are inextricably inked, and how children’s l1iterature describes and creates various types of spaces for children to claim and explore. Russell (York Univ., Ontario) has assembled a diverse collection of essays that analyze works of classic and contemporary l1irterature from the UK and the US. The essays examine spaces that range from personal and geographic to racial and gendered. and show how chi1ldren shape their identities within these spaces. Simi1lar ideas are explored in Knowing Their Place? Identity and Space in Children’s Literature, ed. by Kerri Doughty and Dawn 'Thompson (2011), though this earlier collection focuses more on diverse authors (!Indian and Native American in particular). The current collection expands on the earlier text: the essays address different types of space and analyze different works of literature. There is room for both collections, which complement each other well.
This collection, with a diverse range of contributors addressing a broad selection of texts for middle and young adult readers, builds on—rather than replicates—existing work. It provides a useful contribution to the growing field of geographies and mobilities of childhood.
Containing Childhood is erudite, engaging, and original. The new ideas in this collection highlight the intersections between personal and geographic spaces, as well as social, political, economic, racial, gendered, and conceptual spaces, while raising necessary and timely questions about the ways we participate within them. The result is a sophisticated and thoughtful reflection on the ideas of boundaries, liminal spaces, and identity.
Danielle Russell is associate professor of English at Glendon College (York University). She is author of Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison.
