Abstract: This article focuses on the formally innovative ways that Katherine Rundell's The Girl Savage (2011) and David Almond's My Name Is Mina (2010) represent alternative education. This innovation is interpreted as essential to texts that partially succeed in resisting a mainstream education that is associated with dominant ideology and the realist form of linear narrative.

Reviewed by: Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin Rhonda Brock-Servais (bio) Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States, by Sara Austin. The Ohio State UP, 2022. In a mere 150 pages of text, Sara Austin's book demonstrates how "the role of monster in children's culture, as objects of both fear and identification," has changed since the 1950s in the United States (1). The text includes an introduction, four chapters that proceed chronologically, and a conclusion. The author grounds her ideas in three texts: The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by Jack Halberstam, and "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Much of the Introduction is spent introducing the ideas of these thinkers: "Monstrous Youth takes Halberstam's, Cohen's, and Thomas's claims about monstrous bodies and the cultural connections between monsters and children as a foundation for the role of monsters in children's culture, specifically the cultural role that monsters assume when standing for certain types of child or adolescent bodies" (4). Austin moves on to differentiating her own thinking by explaining how this book extends the thinking of others "by exploring how the monster as a figure in gothic and horror texts becomes a metaphor for identity and difference within children's culture" (11–12). She then lays out three points that will be shown in variations throughout the chapters that follow: "Monster texts are used to frighten children by policing borders of identity, to instruct children on the preferred embodiment of their historical moment, and to present opportunities for child autonomy by excluding adults from the marketing and consumption of certain texts" (4). The introduction further details the author's choices with regard to structure, as well as the primary argument for each chapter and the cultural products that will be under examination; these include books (both chapter and picture) as well as comics, games, films, and toys. Moving into the body of the text, the reader knows exactly what to expect. Each chapter has [End Page 233] a number of subheadings, usually focused on a close examination of a cultural artifact. Chapter 1 centers on teen experience in the 1950s, using the concept of Enfreakment, a process detailed by disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: "Enfreakment works to separate the viewer from the exhibited, and to construct the viewer as a normal body through comparison [and] … is a necessary step in creating cultural as well as textual monsters" (19). The author expands the use of this term to include teen and child bodies that are othered or made threatening. The chapter uses EC Comics and American International Pictures (AIP) to demonstrate how fears of social change "led to adult attempts to suppress these materials in hope of preserving the status quo" (21). Ironically, this caused teens (and teen-centric narratives) to align themselves with the monster and created "one of the most potent symbols within youth culture" (21). The discussion of EC Comics foregrounds much that has already been said about the social panic of the 1950s and Fredric Wertham's The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and just how much of the appeal of horror comics came from how completely adults reviled them. This section puts together the comics and Enfreakment as follows: "using enfreakment as a means to draw in teen readers may have worked because this group felt largely out of place in early 1950s society, and the comics assured them that, even if they were a distinct class from children and adults, they were not, in fact, monsters" (28). Austin then focuses on juvenile delinquency and argues that the adult fear that young readers would align themselves with the monster of the comics resulted in "the adoption of the monster as a symbol of agency and defiance in children's and young adult culture" (30). The great irony here is that by positioning adolescents "as either vulnerable or grotesque," adults helped to create circumstances where the monster came to be a symbol of adolescent...

This article focuses upon toy soldiers and masculinity. I examine H.G. Wells's fascination with these toys in his war-gaming manuals, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson's toy soldier poems. I focus on the toy's complicity in a broad cultural fantasy of masculine embodiment that denies both corporeal pain and maturation.

Reviewed by: Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature by Ainsley Morse Krystal Howard (bio) Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature, by Ainsley Morse. Northwestern UP, 2021. Ainsley Morse's Word Play offers a thought-provoking and detailed study on the intertwined relationship between experimental aesthetics in unofficial Soviet poetry and official Soviet children's literature. Examining the avant-garde origins of the "childlike aesthetic as it appears in literature and art of the Soviet era" (18), Morse notes that Soviet children's literature was very often written by experimental writers, "[s]craping by as children's authors," who "meanwhile wrote unpublished adult poetry that was both densely philosophical and rife with childlike elements." Morse explains that this was not an uncommon practice, as writing children's literature and translations "became established from the early Soviet period as an economic and political refuge for writers unable (or unwilling) to publish in other areas" (5). Her study examines several writers who fit this model and places them into historical context among other Soviet writers. While she notes that the central subject of her study is "marginal in relation to mainstream Soviet literature," the groundbreaking poetry she examines reveals "the [End Page 301] subtle interrelations among Soviet institutions, aesthetics, and politics during the given period" (6). The first half of the book provides the historical and formal contextualization necessary to understanding what Morse terms the "childlike aesthetic," as well as Soviet poetry and Soviet children's literature. The introduction, "Living Backward: The Childlike in Unofficial Poetry," and prologue, "The Dictionary as a Toy Collection: The Avant-Garde Origins of the Childlike Aesthetic," provide a definition and explanation of the childlike aesthetic, noting that its origins can be found in "well-established modernist and avant-garde interest in primitivism: children were appreciated … for their apparent ignorance … and for their apparent proximity to the mythic origins of human perception" (7). Morse argues that in Soviet-era children's poetry, the childlike aesthetic can be seen in both the formal and stylistic presentation and the language and worldview of the child (8). Emphasizing the presence of the childlike lyric speaker, Morse further identifies elements such as lexical inventiveness, antilogic, naïveté, silliness, and nonsense as prominent in the childlike aesthetic. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 examine early Soviet children's literature and experimental poetics, the OBERIU (an acronym for The Union of Real Art) poets, and later Soviet experimental unofficial poetry and children's literature, respectively. In chapter 2, "Detki v kletke: OBERIU as the First Unofficial Children's Poets," Morse notes that the OBERIU poets were a collective of young men who came together in the mid-1920s and were "the Russian avant-garde formation most directly involved in children's literature." She also argues that they can be "considered, in hindsight, the 'first Soviet underground'" (48). The three members central to OBERIU poetics—Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky, and Nikolai Zabolotsky—employed the following "childlike elements" in their work: "unmotivated wordplay, made-up words (linguistic zaum, per Janecek), and disrupted grammar and syntax; apparent naïveté; absurdism, nonsense, or meaninglessness …; humor (dark, juvenile, and generally silly); and literary and behavioral buffoonery" (49). The childlike aesthetic was often much more evident in these poets' unpublished adult writings than in their poetry for young readers, possibly because of the substantial editing of the latter. Chapters 4 through 8 each provide a case study featuring a single significant poet and children's writer—Vsevolod Nekrasov, Leonid Aronzon, Igor Kholin, Oleg Grigoriev, and Dmitri Prigov—who published children's literature but also wrote unpublished poetry that utilized the [End Page 302] childlike aesthetic. While the early chapters in the book are useful in assisting a reader unfamiliar with Russian or Soviet-era literature, the case studies in the second half of the book are particularly interesting in their illustration of Morse's overarching arguments. These chapters include close readings and comparisons between the authors' children's poetry and unofficial or unpublished adult poetry. Chapter 4, "Vsevolod Nekrasov: We All Come from Childhood," examines "the centrality of truth telling and the exposure of falsity in Nekrasov's work." Morse argues that Nekrasov's focus...

This article situates Kipling's "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" (1894) in relation to the "Great War" that Britons waged against snakes in late-nineteenth-century India. It argues the tale is informed by two (linked) recognitions: that Britons may prove incapable either of "mastering" this species of the subcontinent's fauna or of protecting their children within the imperial realm.

Children's texts about the WWII evacuation of British youth to the countryside or abroad illuminate changing ideas about childhood and children's literature. They elucidate beliefs about children's psychological robustness, the place of work in young people's lives, and what it means to be a child citizen in wartime.

The textual structure and material form of the first volumes of Children's Literature point to Francelia Butler's rebellion against traditional academic criteria and her critical vision's range from medieval to contemporary children's literature. An interest in orality and performance extended the journal's reach and impact, reinforced by institutional intersections across disciplines.

Reviewed by: Victorian Coral Islands of the Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel by Michelle Elleray Alisa Clapp-Itnyre (bio) Victorian Coral Islands of the Empire, Mission, and the Boys' Adventure Novel, by Michelle Elleray. Routledge, 2020. (Series: Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present) An outgrowth of the author's dissertation, Victorian Coral Islands represents research across the globe, from archives in New Zealand, England, Canada, and the US, all of which provide useful historical documents to enrich chapters focused on a handful of British boys' midcentury adventure novels and stories. The book's introduction and five chapters explore, in order, the Juvenile Missionary Magazine (1844–87), chapter 1; Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready; or The Wreck of the Pacific (1841–42), chapter 2; R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857), chapter 3; two novels by W. H. G. Kingston, Little Ben Hadden; or, Do Right, Whatever Comes of It (1870) and Kidnapping in [End Page 304] the Pacific, Or, The Adventures of Boas Ringdon: A Long Yarn in Four Lengths (1879), chapter 4; and, to end, Robert Louis Stevenson's late-century response, the novella The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and Quartette (1894). Taking a postcolonial approach, Elleray looks closely at the books' island locales as sites of colonialist pressure. She focuses upon the socially marginalized characters of these stories: the young, the working-class sailor, and the Pacific Islander convert, arguing that each needs special attention, particularly the latter, who has been limited to stereotypes of either the cannibal or the maiden (3). Her specific analysis is of empire and missionary culture. Using the concepts of "articulation" and "entanglement," she suggests both are "deeply imbricated, such that an analysis of one is not fully intelligible without reference to the other" (6), a form of Stuart Hall's concept of articulation; further, they are also "entangled" (a concept borrowed from Nicholas Thomas), which "emphasizes the accidental and the unresolved, the destructive and the generative" (6) within these institutions even as they remain "resistant to efforts to render them separate or distanced" (7). Recognizing that her three focal authors were all Christian evangelicals of some kind, favorite authors of the Sunday school reward book enterprise, Elleray emphasizes the importance of focusing on such fiction when many children's literature scholars like J. S. Bratton only examine late-century boys' adventure fiction as supposedly part of the trend away from didactic evangelical literature (7). Elleray is not the first scholar to examine fiction of the Coral Islands, but she is one of the first to examine it in the context of children's literature. These islands were important to Britain's South Pacific colonialist outreach. Invoking the theory of Michel Foucault on "heterotopia"—places where a change of identity occurs such as the Polynesian village (13–14)—she points to these islands as that important site for Britain's cultural imagination, a garden of Eden yet inhabited by "fallen people" needing the intervention of Christian missionaries (16). In focusing on the Coral Islands, Elleray also builds on the work of Ann Elias's Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (2019) and Rod Edmond's Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (1997). Using their concepts, she reminds us of the symbolism of coral, a grouping of which is called a "colony" and the expansion of which is referred to as "colonizing" (4). Further, she unpacks the then-science of small coral polyps forming the basis of entire islands, which became symbolic of the smallest of children and their impact on the colonial enterprise of the nineteenth century. [End Page 305] Chapter 1, "The Juvenile Missionary Magazine: Agency and Discipline," first examines the importance of the John Williams, a missionary ship first launched in 1844 thanks in large part to the monetary donations of children and which continued to be used by missionary magazines as an important trope for children's agency in the missionary movement (34). Likewise, the concept of coral polyps became not only a useful metaphor for Victorians of the power of spiritual fortitude, as captured in the journal The Coral Missionary Magazine (42), but...

Lydia Maria Child's Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1835) acted as a primer on good and bad political revolutions. Child was eager to protect the legacy of the American Revolution while also rejecting violent revolt. Child's attitudes towards revolutions were influenced by race and American exceptionalism, which this article seeks to examine.