Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood.

New York and London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-3882-1

Review by Lois Kuznets

As I point out in an earlier, longer review of The Poetics of Childhood in the ChLAQ, Professor Natov's title may suggest a theoretical emphasis less characteristic of her text than are her careful, close readings of many, many individual works: classics of children's literature as well as international fiction and poetry intended for a more mature audience . The "poetics" in this title owes more to phenomenological critical works like Bachelard's Poetics of Space, with their emphases on imagistic language, than it does to traditional rhetorical treatises. And the use of "childhood," rather than "children's literature," has a special significance as well, referring as we find it does here, to the concept of early life experiences shared by young and old.

Natov indicates early on that the poetics of childhood "involves the images that cluster around childhood, the voices and tones, the smells and textures that make up the larger landscape that recalls to us our earliest states of mind" (2) and further explains, "Its focus is those works that provide a shared area where adult and child come together. . . as the world of childhood belongs to adults in memory as well as to children temporally" (3).

What emerges from this focus is a critical work that spreads broad as well as digs deep. In my earlier review I note that classic works of children's literature and modern ones as well all are analyzed here. However, significantly, Natov's choices of works which combine them is eclectic and sometimes startling: Wordsworth and Blake combined with Opal Whiteley's Diary; The Runaway Bunny and Little Bear combined with Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Autobiography of My Mother; The Secret Garden and Tom's Midnight Garden, combined with Gertrude Stein's The World is Round; The Shrinking of Treehorn and The Zabajaba Jungle, combined with Nabokov's Lolita and Lessing's The Fifth Child.

These are only a few of linked texts examined in the first six chapters entitled respectively "Constructions of Innocence," "Carroll and Grahame: Two Versions of Pastoral," "The Body of the Mother," "Childhood and the Green World," "The Dark Pastoral," and "The Antipastoral."

The seventh chapter, where Natov explores "The Contemporary Child in Adult Literature," focuses principally on two post-colonial novels: Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Finally in the eighth chapter, she turns to contemporary works for children and young adults bringing in another startling choice, Sapphire's Push, among "realistic" novels. She ends this final chapter with a number of fantastic works, culminating with the Harry Potter Series.

Above and beyond my respect for Natov's professional credentials as professor of English Literature at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and co-founder of the professional journal, The Lion and the Unicorn, I applaud Natov's range of choices and her ability to convince me that these choices were justified. She does so largely through her delicate and discriminating analyses of the imagery that she finds characteristic of the poetics of childhood. I also applaud her style, which is flowing. Rather than being anti-theoretical, she ably uses those psychoanalytical and feminist insights that characterize the theoretical stances she does employ.

Admirable also is her willingness to confront the dark images that contribute to the "poetics of childhood." I like her insistence that "the darker sides of childhood," "[the] unimaginable pain that is, horrifyingly enough, the truth of some children's lives" must be explored by authors and by understanding critics in order "to witness and acknowledge the child's experience" (220). She argues that children need to know "that they themselves are not tainted," that "[t]he story should also include a kind of chronicle of how one survives-and further, an indication of what one retrieves from such painful experience" (220).

Her Afterword includes a clarion call to us as adults and critics to see that "the literature of childhood represents a challenge to the world" to create "an inclusive society in which children can find a safe and creative way to live" (262).

In my summarizing review here and in my longer consideration elsewhere, I have had to ignore many of Natov's penetrating insights into particular works, but I hope that I have said enough to indicate that her text is not only a good read, but one "I would want to recommend to sophisticated academic readers, to share, in part at least, with their undergraduate and graduate students in children's literature classes" (Kuznets, 188). With The Poetics of Childhood, "a sterling contribution to the renowned Children and Culture Series, edited by Jack Zipes" (Kuznets, 186), Natov establishes herself as a major international scholar and critic.

See Kuznets, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 28, Fall 2003: 186-89.

Lois Kuznets