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This chapter explores how proletarian or revolutionary children's literature produced under the aegis of the Communist Party set precedents for popular children's literature produced in the 1940s and later by leftists. Building on models imported from the Soviet Union and Europe, as well as literature written early in the 20th century for Socialist Sunday Schools and often incorporating themes, principles, and aesthetics from progressive education, proletarian children's literature was limited in its audience because of its sectarian tone. However, it represents a conscious attempt to make children's literature part of a radical party program, and it often foregrounded scientific, historical, and anti-racist themes that would recur in later, more mainstream work by radicals. The chapter gives particular attention to the magazine of the Communist Young Pioneers, the New Pioneer, which published the work of several individuals who would later become writers or illustrators of popular books for children, among them Syd Hoff (writing here as A. Redfield), Helen Kay, Ben Appel, William Gropper, Myra Page, and Ernest Crichlow. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti, by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, a book that was arguably proletarian in its subject matter but written for a popular audience.

This introductory chapter opens with Howard Fast's Tony and the Wonderful Door (1952), which Fast wrote and self-published when he was blacklisted from most media because of his association with the Communist Party. Fast's tale, about a boy who can travel through time, is likewise an entry point for exploring the questions of why and how radicals, including those suffering from blacklisting, were able to publish children's books at the height of the McCarthy era. Although it is true that children's literature tends to support the dominant power structure, in the mid-20th century, children's literature became a key outlet for the Old Left, or people radicalized in the 1930s and marginalized in the 1950s. The Old Left's prominence in the children's literature field in the years following World War II points to their broader influence on American culture during a period usually seen as closed off to dissent.

This introduction proposes that Golden Age children’s authors and members of the cult of the child were at best ambivalent and often hostile to the growing cultural pressure to conceive of children as a separate species from adults. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the “Child of Nature” paradigm, figures such as Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame conceived of children as socially saturated, highly acculturated beings—and, unlike Dickens and other chroniclers of childhood writing primarily for adults, these and other children’s authors refused to assume that precocious exposure to the civilized world would doom the child to a depressing fate. Contemporary reviews of Golden Age children’s classics and 19th-century discourse about the cult of the child reveal that Golden Age commentators recognized this: ironically, the two groups most strongly faulted by recent critics for portraying childhood as a static, remote, and idealized state—children’s authors and members of the cult—were censured in their own time for failing to promote a Romantic ideal of primitive simplicity.

The introduction to Between Generations establishes a thorough critical and literary framework for understanding the import and history of adult-child collaboration. It first provides a concise account of children’s literature scholarship that takes on the vexed concept of child agency, from the 1980s to the present, and outlines the book’s methodology in locating and interpreting accounts of adult-child collaboration—a methodology that takes into account real and fictive collaborations as well as what the author calls hybrid collaborations. These hybrid collaborations are new models of authorship grounded in relationships between real adults and children, but adults fictionalize those relationships or describe them using language associated with powerful social constructions of childhood. Disentangling complex representations of collaborations—approaching them with the skepticism children’s literature demands but also with open-mindedness to the possibility of a child’s creative agency—is a complex but productive practice that is at the center of Between Generations.

This chapter examines Golden Age authors for children who invited young people into roles of authority through creative collaboration. It traces how Charles Dickens, William Brighty Rands, J. M. Barrie, and others consulted children, real and imagined, as experts who might support or critique the expectations of adults, upending traditional adult-child relationships to entertain the possibility of child agency—especially in topsy-turvy children’s literature plots. While the upside-down logic of the child in charge was a quaint notion for many Victorians, a survey of real and imagined child authorities reveals that adults considered complete child autonomy undesirable or impossible. Authors, librarians, and book reviewers therefore did not cede power to children but negotiated shared authority—a partnership between generations in which adults recognize children as experts and adapt to their perspectives. Such partnerships introduce anxieties about how to access children’s voices in their most pristine form.

This chapter surveys the children's literature detailing genius-level exemplarity and performance. The association between genius and childhood was already implicit in the image of innate genius in the eighteenth century, gearing it essentially to youth. From the start of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, child prodigies and the childhood of genius—though not necessarily the same thing—became the focus of new forms of attention that subjected them to particularly intense scrutiny in three major areas: children's literature, experimental psychology, and, in the middle of the twentieth century, the popular press. The chapter first examines Charles Baudelaire's claim that “genius is simply childhood recovered at will,” before turning to the subject of famous children as well as children's literature.

This chapter reconsiders literary didacticism by demonstrating the ways in which the Robinsonade novel for young readers has evolved from the anxious moralizing of earlier examples into a more socially instructive vehicle for engaging young readers with contemporary socio-political and cultural issues, such as gender politics and global post-colonial concerns. Unlike much scholarly material on the Robinsonade genre, which tends to concentrate on texts produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of this chapter is on post-1900 works of Robinsonade fiction. The chapter also embraces a much wider definition of what has historically been understood within the Robinsonade as an ‘island’ or ‘islanded’ location.

Children’s literature in Korea emerged in the early twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule. This literature was marked by what Korean writers called the child-heart, the conflation of nature and culture whose shaping and interaction was deeply implicated in colonial modernity. The Introduction argues that what made children’s literature possible was a combination of internal and external factors, including influences from Japan and educational and psychological theories of childrearing from the West. Children’s literature was recognized as important enough to warrant censorship, and as key to shaping ideologies of gender and politics. The movement of the child from the periphery of culture to the center and the interest in visual culture combined to produce a range of visually compelling magazines for children. Writers conveyed their visions of the past and present, and their future aspirations at a time of growing uncertainty about the fate of the Korean nation.

This chapter explores how Golden Age authors partnered with children in storyteller-auditor collaboration and represented those partnerships in their fictions. Moving from translations of the Grimms’ fairy tales to popular story collections by Mary Molesworth, Mary Cowden Clarke, and Margaret Gatty, the chapter reveals how storytelling scenes—both real gatherings that inspired these authors and fictional and illustrated moments of narration in their texts—were enriched by intergenerational collaboration based on active listening and critical response and provided opportunities for child agency. These creative partnerships are best read alongside shifting understandings of the relationship between children and language, and therefore the chapter traces theories of children’s language acquisition from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, from Rousseau’s Émile to establishment of the field of Child Study at the fin-de-siècle.

This chapter describes the educational role of Sikh children’s literature (such as the Amar Chitra Katha comic books) and its influence on the development of a Sikh identity among the young. It concentrates on the material aspects of this literature—the books, their artistic depictions, and the specific manners chosen to express Sikhism—that condition the reception of the Sikh tradition by a child, even by one too young to read. The examples presented provide warnings against going off the moral course set by the Gurus. The concept of the Khalsa as a normative identity is presented so ubiquitously that no child can be oblivious of it. Sikhism is expressed through the use of cross-cultural motifs (such as the use of the overtly Christian ‘halo’, the motif of Madonna and Child etc.) that bring Sikhism closer to children growing up in the West. Since the situation for Sikhs in twenty-first-century America is far different than it was thirty years ago, the author points to over-simplification in this literature as being delimiting, and how the continued use of these texts—and the implications of their use—needs to be examined more critically.

Between Generations argues that the Golden Age of children’s literature was marked by critical interest in child agency, creating ideal cultural conditions for the emergence of intergenerational collaboration. However, an investment in children as creative actors persists long past the nineteenth century. This conclusion details two twentieth-century collaborations: the professional partnership among Arthur Ransome, Katharine Hull, and Pamela Whitlock and the photography collaboration between photojournalist Timothy Archibald and his son. These examples underscore the utility of collaboration as a critical lens for present-day scholars of the Victorian period and of childhood more generally. Collaboration is a valuable analytic that suspends in productive dialogue the tension between real children and figurations of childhood. It not only reframes the Golden Age—redefining the roles adults and children fulfill in the creation of children’s literature and in the construction of childhood—but also expands how scholars might think about adult-child relationships writ large.

Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical foundations of this book, drawing on children’s rights law (in particular, the Convention on the Rights of the Child), human rights law, human rights education research, and literary theory about children’s books and reading in the lives of children. The chapter explores the role of children’s literature in disseminating human rights principles and reveals children’s literature as a rich source of rights discourse, one that is accessible even to young children. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan provides a case study. The authors also discuss how children’s literature can be a powerful means of explicating human rights norms and educating children on their own rights and their responsibilities toward others in a democratic society.

The introduction begins the book’s discussion of why some children and young adults are drawn to horror. It attempts to define the term “horror,” especially in relation to children’s literature and culture, and seeks to consider the ways in which frightening elements emerge in children’s literature and culture. It also provides an overview of the essays included in the volume and how they are in conversation with one another.

This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects such as books, pictures, and toy theatres. Despite their association with the innocent joys of childhood throughout the nineteenth century, the tales of the Arabian Nights were neither written nor designed for children. It was their abiding attraction to children that led to their designation as children’s literature, and also to their continued use as metaphors for adult fantasies and constructions of childhood. As the time and space of childhood were increasingly associated with the time and space of these Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights came to operate not only as a souvenir of childhood, but as metonymic of childhood itself: exciting, unpredictable, and culturally and temporally other.