Timeline concepts and historical applications

Children's Literature Timeline

LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN: A SELECTIVE TIMELINE

Charles Perrault. Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe: Les Contes de ma Mere l'Oie. (Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose.) France.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Kinder- und Haus-marchen. (Children's and Household Tales.) Germany.

Hans Christian Andersen. Eventyr Fortalte For Born (Fairy Tales Told To Children.) First and Second Volumes. Denmark.

Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter (Shock-Headed Peter). Germany.

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Britain.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women. U.S.A.

Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. U.S.A.

Carlo Collodi. Le Avventure di Pinocchio. (The Adventures of Pinocchio.) Italy.

1900. L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. U.S.A.

1926. A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh. Britain.

1937. J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit. Britain.

1944. Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Langstrump. (Pippi Longstocking.). Sweden.

1952. E.B. White. Charlotte's Web. U.S.A.

1957. Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat. U.S.A.

1963. Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are. U.S.A.

1964. Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Britain.

1970. Judy Blume. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. U.S.A.

1976. Mildred D. Taylor. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. U.S.A.

1997. J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Britain.

2005. Stephenie Meyer. Twilight.

Any timeline of western children's literature is obliged to be selective. Because so much of children's literature derives from the tradition of folktales and folklore, it derives from unwritten forms of storytelling, and in many places and cultures stories for children remain unwritten. Folktales tend to be dramatic, with clear-cut morality and little in the way of deep characterization, and are generally located in far-off fictional kingdoms. Their stories downplay sex or complicated relationships, and instead offer a form of narrative which is at once mythic and archetypal, while at the same time remaining suitable for young readers. I have begun my own timeline with the two magisterial collections of children's fairy-tales -- the first in France by Charles Perrault in 1697, the other in Germany by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm -- that represent the emergence of a modern children's literature out of the folk tradition of oral storytelling. To this day many parents will tell their kids their own versions of some of the tales collected by these men: we have Perrault to thank for "Little Red Riding Hood," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Cinderella" (among many others) while the Grimms collected German versions of those three, in addition to other classics like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Rapunzel," "Hansel and Gretel," and "Rumplestiltskin." The publication of Perrault's collection came over a century before the Grimms', but the Grimms took an academic and antiquarian approach to their material, making note of which tales they recorded had already been recorded by others (uncluding Perrault). The timeline given does not genuinely mean that there was no literature for children before Perrault -- it was simply not "literature" per se, it was folklore or tales.

But to look at reactions in the wake of the publication of the Grimm's collection, we can see an interesting trend taking place. Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark would go on to produce numerous volumes of folktales not unlike the Grimms -- Andersen's collections offer such famous folktales as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Little Mermaid," "The Princess and the Pea," and "The Ugly Duckling" -- which the reader might well have assumed were collected like the Grimms' or Perrault's, but which were in fact invented by Andersen on the model of existing fairy-tales. Andersen to some degree represents the imitative response to the collected folktales of the Grimms; I have included Heinrich Hoffmann's notorious Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter or Shock-headed Peter) in order to recall the way in which children's literature was often more broadly conceived: as manuals of strict moral instruction, issuing dire warnings to small children about the potentially disastrous or fatal consequences of their misbehavior. The title character is merely an insufficiently tidy boy -- but soon he will become filthy, with long overgrown fingernails and a wild mane of hair. Hoffmann gives obviously moralistic lessons intended to improve children's behavior, often with a gruesome warning -- Little Johnny Suck-A-Thumb in Hoffman's book will end up having his thumbs cut off.

If Hoffmann's work sounds both moralistic and bizarre, it is. I do not include it as a model of "good" children's literature but rather because it represents so often the things that adults believe children's literature needs to be: morally improving or educational. On this score, we might leap ahead to compare Hoffmann with someone like Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel). The Cat in the Hat was written as part of a campaign to produce educational literature for the youngest readers, with a simple vocabulary that had been selected in advance by a panel of education experts. Seuss promptly took what is essentially a curriculum plan, and turned it into a rhyming romp, milking the limited vocabulary for as many rhymes and as much sheer verbal amusement as he could manage. To some degree Hoffmann represents the old educational paradigm -- fear and disgust, a cautionary tale -- and Seuss represents the new paradigm, in which the goal is to produce something that children will actually read and like (without realizing that it is solidifying their vocabulary skills in the guise of telling a story).

These are basically the major trends over the course of the timeline: it begins with the collection of extant oral storytelling, then moves into imitation of that sort of storytelling (with all its sexlessness and supernatural devices), until finally the question is asked whether all these stories are providing a child with anything more than escapism. The urge to tame children's literature and make it serve "useful" educational functions may have come as a reaction to the escapism and flights of fancy and supernatural goings-on in many of the original stories.

But there are different ways to accomplish the task of writing books for children that do teach. Mildred Taylor's Newbery-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is read by many children every year. (My youngest sister recently had to read it in high school.) Taylor is writing a novel with a child protagonist, but she does not write down. Taylor is also an African-American woman, and she writes about African-American characters in a time period when tremendous social change was affecting the African-American community. Taylor manages to teach tolerance simply by being herself and endowing her characters with realistic and relatable stories, and actual depth and complication in their characterization. And coming to the present day, it now seems like the world's major writers of children's literature -- Joanne Rowling in the U.K., Stephenie Meyer in the U.S.A. -- are women. This represents a step forward, in terms of trying to accomplish gender parity in the arts, although it is also close to women's traditional role as child-rearers. But it is a massive step forward to combating the strain of Antifeminism -- and "depiction of negative female stereotypes" (Russell 202) -- that has been part of the ineherited corpus of folk tales and stories.