Clare Bradford, The Middle Ages in Children's Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015.
Reviewed by: Molly Brown (molly.brown@up.ac.za)
A new book by Clare Bradford, author of Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian
Children’s Literature (2001), Unsettling
Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007), and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s
Literature: Utopian Transformations (with Kerry Mallan, John Stephens and
Robyn McCallum, 2008), is always something to look forward to in children’s
literature circles and The Middle Ages in
Children’s Literature certainly lives up to expectations. As
always, Bradford's extensive knowledge of her field is immediately apparent.
She discusses no fewer than 59 children's books, refers briefly to many
more and leaves one in no doubt that even these represent only a tiny
fraction of what she has read.
The texts focused on in this slim but dense volume range from picture
books for the very young to sexually-charged YA fairy fantasy. The book is
divided into thematic chapters that contrast and juxtapose works for readers
from three to sixteen-going-on-thirty. In choosing to do this, Bradford somewhat
daringly resists the tendency to rigid age categorization that is so much a
feature of most research into children's literature and opens the door to
new perspectives on the relationships between fiction for beginner readers
and novels for their much older siblings or selves.
As regular
readers of the excellent Palgrave Macmillan Critical Approaches to Children’s
Literature series know, works within it reflect contemporary approaches to
children’s and young adult literature, film and media. In keeping with this
focus and with Bradford’s other work, The
Middle Ages in Children’s Literature is theoretically informed while
remaining accessible to the general academic reader. This is achieved largely
because Bradford uses her introduction and opening chapter to show that she is
not only familiar with current debates within medievalism studies, but that she
is able to summarise them clearly and concisely before applying them
illuminatingly to a range of well-chosen primary texts. In fact her
introduction and opening chapter, “Thinking about the Middle Ages”, could
profitably be read by anyone anxious to understand contemporary literary
medievalism and the academic debates around it. Bradford, who is probably best
known for her work on postcolonial approaches to children’s literature, also
intriguingly points out that the “fields of children’s literature studies and
medievalism studies have much in common” (4), since both can be perceived as
occupying relatively marginalised positions in relation to the more
well-established or traditional disciplines of literary and medieval studies.
Yet Bradford argues that while the two newer areas of scholarship may be and
all too frequently, are dismissed as light weight, these growing areas of
specialization require researchers to adopt nuanced interdisciplinary
approaches to understand the social functions and ideological agendas that
inform the operations of both children’s books and representations of the
medieval in the contemporary world. The importance of this assertion is
underlined by the way in which the rest of the book shows that the socialising
and pedagogical agendas so readily apparent in works for children all the more clearly
demonstrate the truth of Bradford’s
claim that “rather than drawing unproblematically on a “real Middle Ages”
for settings, characters and other elements of fiction, children’s authors
engage with versions of the Middle Ages that are themselves mediated and
contingent” and that these “ texts engage with the afterlife of the past by
reimagining ancient stories, and by interpolating spectral visitations and
anachronistic intertextual references into their narratives” (6-7) in ways that
foreground the complexity of contemporary attitudes to and engagement with the
past.
After her
incisive opening chapter, Bradford goes on to examine both temporality and
spatiality in relation to medievally-themed books for younger readers. The
second chapter on temporality draws on the work of Elizabeth Grosz, who
suggests that past and present are not discrete entities but constantly bleed
into and recontextualise each other, as well as that of Caroline Dinshaw, who
uses the concept of asynchrony to describe how the human desire for other ways
of being may disturb concepts of linear and measurable time, freeing the past
to interact in complex and suggestive ways with the present moment. Texts
discussed in some detail in this chapter include Neil Gaiman’s award-winning The Graveyard Book (2008) and Charlie
Fletcher’s Stoneheart trilogy (Stoneheart,
2006; Ironhand , 2007; Silvertongue, 2008), both of which use
fantasy settings that combine and contrast the medieval with other periods. The
chapter also briefly discusses time travel tropes, novels featuring medievalist
video games and contemporary reworkings of Arthurian material, all of which
could easily have been expanded into chapters in their own right.
The third
chapter concentrates on spatiality, which like temporality, is the focus of
considerable critical attention in the field of contemporary literary studies.
In fact the two are very difficult to separate since as Bradford admits, time
and space are unthinkable without reference to each other. Employing the terms
linked to what has been described as the “spatial turn” in literary and
cultural studies in the second half of the twentieth century, Bradford shows
how medieval spaces and artefacts continue to resonate in contemporary
children’s literature and uses the work of Michel Foucault and David Harvey to
show that medievalist spaces and places in work written for children are
“inescapably hybrid” (63). The chapter also looks closely at the manor house
and its functions in works as disparate as Edith Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods (1901), Lucy Boston’s The Stones of Green Knowe (1976) and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (2004), showing how the
“protagonists of these novels inhabit their own time and space while calling on
the symbolic resonances of ancient buildings, artefacts and gardens” (70). The
second part of the chapter then illustrates how the current reinvention of the
gothic reconceptualises the past in line with modern sensibilities. The final
section on transnational medievalisms then entertainingly explores the
transformations of the medieval in works written in countries like Canada or
the United States in which physical traces of the European Middle Ages are few
and far between. Interestingly, of course, American and Australian scholars,
such as Bradford herself, are particularly active in medievalism studies and
one wonders if the peculiarities of contemporary constructions of medievalism
are not more vividly apparent to those working in spaces less cluttered with the
material remnants and cultural echoes of the historical medieval period.
Chapters
four, five and six of The Middle Ages in
Children’s Literature concentrate in Bradford’s own words on “medieval
embodiment” (9). Chapter four considers the extraordinary prevalence of non-normative
or disabled bodies in medievalist fiction and film. The idea that a medieval
setting may make it easier to allow disabled characters to escape the role of
inspirational sidekick and take centre stage as protagonists in their own right
is one I had not considered before and I found it very plausible. I was also
utterly convinced by her argument that “medieval texts, at a remove from
modernity offer a less perilous context in which to represent disabilities”
(106) in that events that might result in disability can be reassuringly
distanced. Chapter five, titled “Monstrous Bodies, Medievalist Inflexions”,
uses monster theory in general and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the monster as
the herald of change and futurity in particular to explore the roles of dark
fairies, vampires, dragons and werewolves in current young adult fantasy. In
examining works by writers such as Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, Melissa Marr
and Stephenie Meyer as well as films like John Ajvide Lindqvist”s Let the Right One In (2007) and Sue
Bursztynski”s Wolfborn (2010),
Bradford is able to show that such texts disrupt unthinking binaries and
instead require “a radical reconfiguration of the distinction between normality
and monstrosity” (131). Chapter six, “Medievalist Animals and their Humans”,
uses Bruno Latour’s version of actor-network theory to explore new literary conceptualisations
“of the alliances, networks and exchanges which exist between humans and
non-humans” (134). The chapter raises pertinent issues in relation to the way
children’s books can encourage resistant readings of modernity, though I found
myself wishing that Bradford had linked her conclusions a little more clearly
to the rise of postmodern concerns with multiple perspectives and eco-conscious
decision making.
The final
chapter deals with comic presentations of the Middle Ages, a topic also
recently explored in Louise D’Arcens’s lively Comic Medievalism:Laughing at the Middle Ages (2014) . The chapter
brings together a wide range of texts including Babette Cole’s picture book
parody, Princess Smartypants (1986),
Terry Deary’s non-fictional Horrible Histories series, DreamWorks’s animated
film How to Train Your Dragon (2010),
Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy The Wee
Free Men (2003) and Catherine Jinks’s historical novel Pagan’s Crusade (1992). In considering all of these, Bradford
deftly demonstrates that while there are different modes of comic medievalism,
most of them do not simply make fun of the past, but instead use humour to
denaturalise and interrogate both past and current practices, raising questions
such as “what constitutes masculinity, what the past means in the present and
the ethical implications of laughing at the Middle Ages” (179).
Given the
scope of this wide-ranging study, it is perhaps inevitable that the reader
should occasionally feel that provocative issues are raised but not fully
explored or that limiting discussion of a complex work to one small aspect such
as the central character’s relationship with his horse is to give a
frustratingly limited perspective on it. I would also have liked to see a
slightly longer introduction that did a little more to help readers to see how
the different chapters speak to each other and how the work as a whole
challenges dominant conceptions of medievalism in children’s literature as
either nostalgic, jingoistic or both, but these are minor quibbles about what
is a magisterial overview of a large and complex field. In Bradford’s all too
brief conclusion, she quotes Umberto Eco’s assertion that the Middle Ages
constitute a time and place “in which we still live” (181) and her book
methodically teases out the complexities of this contention while also
reinforcing its validity. The Middle Ages
in Children’s Literature undoubtedly deserves a place on the bookshelf of
anyone seriously interested in either children’s literature or medievalism.
Molly
Brown
University
of Pretoria (South Africa)
