| Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature New York: Routledge, 2004. ISBN: 0-815-33841-4 Review by Anette Øster, Ph.D student at the Centre for Anne Lundin's Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature is a historical analysis of how children's literature has been canonised. Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature is divided into three chapters: Chapter 1: “Best Books: The Librarian”, Chapter 2: “Best Books: The Scholar” and Chapter 3: “Best Books: The Reader”. The canonisation is thus described from three different perspectives: the librarian's, the scholar's and the reader's. The three chapters are structured historically with the main emphasis on the period from the latter half of the nineteenth century up through the twentieth. Anne Lundin gives a historical account of how children's books have been received and how their reception has been imparted to others. She shows how the construction of a canon depends to a large extent on who is constructing it, but she also points out that a canon is very often influenced by personal preferences and childhood reading experiences. In Chapter 1: “Best Books: The Librarian” Lundin describes the great significance of the librarian for the canonisation of children's literature and the dissemination of children's literature in general and a canon in particular. Anne Lundin argues that the librarian's role in the promotion of children's literature has been overlooked and in this regard explains how a number of mostly female librarians from the second half of the 19th century onwards have made it their task to canonise and promote good children's literature. Lundin writes about the librarians' canon: “Their canon was geared toward ‘best books' from an adult perspective, and with a female slant of that.” (p. 4) The canon was and is influenced by what is thought to be suitable reading material for children at any given time; it is rarely based on any considered documented criteria, but independently based on the respective librarian's attitudes and judgements. However, Lundin makes the important point that the pioneers' canon was rooted in cultural rather than individual ideas. Thus the books were selected according to educational considerations. Chapter 2: “Best Books: The Scholar” is Lundin's account of the scholar or researcher's role in the canonisation of children's literature. It is built around a selection of 20th century reviews of what have become known as “touchstones”. This section of the book shows how the touchstones in children's literature have been judged by the academic world and are an interesting study of critiques of children's books. It might have been more enlightening if Lundin had chosen fewer books and had found more opinions of individual works. Equally, it would have been beneficial if Lundin had commented on the reviews instead of letting them stand without comment. I also have some reservations about chapter 3: “Best Books: The Reader”. The problematic nature of this field is inherent as, on the face of it, it is difficult to make any statements about readers' reception of a particular work and so there can be a tendency to rely on one's own reading experiences or public figures' pronouncements. However, Lundin looks at the significance of reading for the individual and draws on her own experiences. Lundin argues that reading is a social practice and a private experience. She talks about reading books and literature's enormous influence on the reader. Lundin asserts that “books not only speak of other books as a common landscape, but also of other places, lived, remembered, read, re-created. […] Landscape, then, may be the construction of stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, which arise from frameworks of national identity, ideology narrative tradition, and the imagination.” (p. 115) The idea of seeing the canonisation of children's books from these three points of view is interesting and innovative; unfortunately, Lundin's presentation is very subjective. The strength of the book is the first chapter, in which Lundin reveals what pioneers the first librarians really were when they sat down to construct a canon. One of Lundin's points is that “Children's literature is an intersection of two powerful ideological positions: our ideas about childhood and our ideas about literature, ideas often conflicted beyond own knowing.” (p. 147) This is a discussion which is not only interesting with respect to the canonisation of children's literature, but also with respect to children's literature as a field of research. Anette Øster |