| The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature Hardback, xxi + 242 pages, £36.99 and US $63.95 Review by Bridget Carrington, PhD student at Roehampton University, London This publication is a collection of 23 of the hundred or so papers presented at the 13 th Biennial IRSCL Congress held in York, UK in 1997. In her introduction, the editor, Ann Lawson Lucas – formerly Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull, and translator of the OUP Adventures of Pinnochio , concedes that this collection ‘cannot adequately convey the breadth of diversity or the depth of common ground' but intends that it should ‘provide an impression of all the dominant themes and approaches which were present in the conference program'. To this purpose she has grouped the papers within seven themes arranged in an order reflecting the chronology of the works discussed, although the book is essentially concerned with the representation and mediation of the past in children's literature, and not with the history of children's literature itself. Lucas's introduction, persuasively written and easily read, offers an overview of the succeeding chapters, emphasizing the relatively short time in which the application of critical theory to literature for children has been carried out, and summarizing both the importance of examining the range of possible approaches and the content of the fictional depiction of history and the past in general, and the relevance of doing so within the context of children's literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular. Entirely logically, Lucas's organization of the papers begins with considerations of the application of literary theory together with an investigation of fashions in criticism and publishing and the pressure this exerts on writers and readers. The positioning of these three essays on theoretical approaches immediately offers enormously important areas for discussion, particularly the issues surrounding narrational objectivity, and reflect the modern realization that the importance of children's literature to the infinitely vaster canon of literature in general can only be fully appreciated when it is rigorously examined in the light of that same theoretical criticism applied to literature as a whole. This exposition of theory particularly pertinent to historically based literature permits readers better to interrogate the papers about the literature itself which then follow. The four chapters of Part II are concerned with adapting archetypes from fact and fiction, and examine different fictional representations of Jeanne d'Arc, Afonso Henriques and the genre of the Robinsonnade, which reflect as much of the political climate and ideology of the writer's times as they do that of the historical figure and period written about. G.A. Henty looms large in the third theme, ‘Adventures in History' which contains two papers, the first of which examines his work in the context of Victorian and Edwardian constructions of history, the second comparing With Clive in India with Pullman's The Tin Princess , papers which both illuminate and invite further investigation. Four chapters on colonial and postcolonial writing form Part IV, respectively arguing the diminution of Lofting's own anti-imperialist attitudes in his characterization of Dolittle, discussing the representations of indigenous peoples in the children's literature of their countries, slavery and the Irish potato famine, and focussing on the difficulty of presenting these topics for children. Review: The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature 2 With the fifth theme the book reaches World War II, and here three papers consider the complexity of intention and reaction in literature concerned with warfare. ‘On the Use of Books for Children' argues that the creation of the German National Myth lies largely within contemporary children's literature, extrapolating the thesis into an examination of what modern German children's literature on the subject tells us about modern Germany. Our reaction to the unabridged publication of Anne Frank's diary is debated in the second paper, while the third compares ‘The Autobiographical Representation of History in Text and Image in Michael Foreman's War Boy and Tomi Ungerer's Die Gedanken sind frei ' , revealing that therein lies a commentary not only on the past depicted, but equally on our own times. Time-slip stories, modern and postmodern, feature in Part VI, with perennially popular authors such as Boston, Pearce and Nesbit, whose treatment of time, place, identity and changing values are under consideration in the first paper, Pearce and Boston appearing again, together with Aiken, Farmer and Lively in the second, an examination of the importance of memories (particularly women's memories} in recreating the past in the consciousness of the present. Gender issues form the final theme in this book, from Dan Dare and the Eagle – so typical of post Second World War gender stereotyping - through an empathetic interpretation of the shift in gender roles in the course of Le Guin's writing of the Earthsea saga, to ‘Witch-figures in Recent Children's Fiction'. The Afterword, concerned with the future of children's literature, is tantalizingly entitled ‘The Duty of Internet Internationalism: Roald Dahls of the World Unite!', and puts forward a very personal view of the future of the genre, and of the place of criticism in the field of children's literature, apparently arguing that its creation, position and importance should place it above and beyond criticism Written by a recent recipient of the IRSCL Honor Book Award, this is a surprising and contentious thesis, and one that will certainly invite discussion, but it is perhaps slightly misplaced in a volume such as this. Well served by annotation and bibliographical detail, The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature is a valuable, though far from exhaustive, collection of current work in this area, and one which offers differing but equally valid critically informed perspectives on a particularly popular and rich area of children's literature. Bridget Carrington |