| International Companion Encyclopedia Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2004. 2 vols. Review by Elisabeth Rose Gruner, Associate Professor of English & Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Richmond, USA. The first International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature came out ten years ago, before I became involved in Children's Literature studies. Reviewing the revised edition, then, I come to it fresh, never having encountered the first edition. This new version, more than double the size of the first, collects in two volumes over 100 articles covering the breadth of children's literature from nearly every imaginable perspective. If nothing else, the presence of the books on library shelves should be enough to put to rest the canard that no important work is done in the field, or that children's literature is not "serious." One might most usefully approach the volumes as five separate books: "Theory and Critical Approaches," the first, collects essays introducing neophyte and reminding the experienced scholar of the most important approaches to children's literature. David Rudd sets the tone with his essay on "the conditions of possibility in children's literature," focusing on the concept of hybridity, a concept that threads through the rest of the collection in useful ways. The second, "Forms and Genres," provides a somewhat eclectic collection of essays both analytical and descriptive of the varieties of children's literature, while the third (opening the second volume) focuses on "Contexts." "Applications" follows, with a focus on pedagogical and practical concerns. The heart of the book for many readers will be the last section, a collection of over 40 essays on national literatures for children, arranged alphabetically from Africa to the USA. Few readers, obviously, will approach the volumes as this reviewer did, moving purposefully from introduction to index. Few should. Most, in fact, will start in the index, looking for a specific author, nation, or novel in preparation for teaching or starting a new research project. Such readers will be rewarded by the breadth as well as by some surprises: a search for Ursula LeGuin leading one to an essay on bibliotherapy, for example, or discovering that "postmodernism" is discussed, among other places, in the essay on Korean children's literature. (And why not? I'm obviously far too ethnocentric; the encyclopedia is a wonderful cure.) Such an approach would no doubt also elide some of the gaps in the volume: how is it that Disney, with 16 mentions in the index (combining Disney films, Disney Corporation, and Disney Channel), does not come up in the essay on folk and fairy tales, for example? The first two "books" are, at least to me, the most accessible, helpful, and at the same time slightly mystifying. The essays in the "Theory and Critical Approaches" section provide one of the most helpful overviews of the state of literary criticism today that I've encountered. While one might quibble slightly with some of the choices--an essay on feminist criticism but not on gender or queer theory? an international encyclopedia without an essay on multiculturalist approaches to children's literature?--the essays included are without exception helpful and provocative. One quickly gets a sense of the important critical "camps" (could we label them Jacqueline Rose and Alison Lurie?), the departures therefrom, and some of the stakes of the arguments. Definitions of the child and childhood, questions regarding the "universal" child, the history of children's literature, and the importance of literary criticism thread through the section. Again, David Rudd's opening salvo in this section should be required reading for all students of children's literature, and Perry Nodelman's essay on Mr Gumpy's Outing , which is really an essay on "Picture Books and Illustration," is a classic of its kind: the exemplary reading that opens up all the significant questions. There is a slight tone of defensiveness in some of the essays: my own research suggests that, for example, neither narrative theory nor stylistics is quite as neglected as the essays on these two approaches suggest. And, for the doggedly linear reader, I might suggest that Emer O'Sullivan's essay on "Comparative Children's Literature," focusing as it does on some of the central questions an "International" encyclopedia might raise, should come earlier in the volume. The second "book," "Forms and Genres," seems to me a somewhat eclectic potpourri of essays on the many varieties of children's literature. Some of the essays tend toward genre history--those on school stories, pony stories, historical fiction, and the varieties of fantasy, for example. Others provide an analytic overview of the field without essaying a comprehensive history--the essays on children's poetry and on horror seem exemplary essays in this mode. One salutary effect of the compendious approach is to complicate the usual divisions in children's literature: we find the field divided not simply between picture book and novel, or fantasy and realism, but fruitfully cross-pollinated between "high" and "low" culture, pre-readers, young children, and teenagers, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Because the essays themselves can be somewhat idiosyncratic takes on a field, and the reasons for selection are not always clear, the section does not feel as comprehensive as it first looks. What makes "pony books" a genre or form, for example, and not "dog stories"? But it is fruitless to complain about what is not in the volumes when so much is. The third section, "Contexts," provides essays on the conditions of children's book publishing: not only writers, but designers, librarians, award-givers, and reviewers get their due here. Peter Hunt thoughtfully gives authors the last word in this section in his essay, "What the Authors Tell Us," which provides a compendium of children's authors speaking about their craft. "Applications" may be most useful to the teacher and the librarian. While much of the encyclopedia aims directly at the academic literary critic, this section recognizes how much work in children's literature takes place outside the sometimes rarefied field of literary criticism--a salutary reminder for the critic as well as a useful resource for others choosing books for children. The final section, "National and International," begins with six contextualizing essays (on the "world" of children's literature, translation in theory and practice, postcolonialism, culture, and children's literature organizations) before embarking on the nearly fifty essays on the traditions of children's literature arranged by nation and/or continent. These essays provide the beginning researcher in multinational children's literature with the tools to do further research. Those of us in English-speaking countries--especially in England and the US--are in the enviable position of exporting far more children's (and adult) literature than we import, but this can leave us ill-equipped to discuss the field as a whole. (Emer O'Sullivan notes that Great Britain "imports" only three per cent of its children's books, and the US only one per cent (v. I, 22).) The breadth and scope of these two volumes begin to remedy that lack. Elisabeth Rose Gruner |