David Rudd

While the Theory Wars are seen to have had a huge impact on English (among other disciplines) in the latter part of the twentieth century, children’s literature studies is often depicted as free of such internecine battles. However, there was a period, beginning in the 1980s with Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), that many children’s literature critics felt obliged to tackle poststructuralist ideas, whether it was to reject them (and be labelled “liberal humanists”) or accept them (as did the Reading critics). This article reconsiders this contentious period, seeking to go beyond the often acerbic rhetoric and, as a result, argues that, in lumping together these poststructuralist critics, important differences in their positions have been lost. This article re-examines the period and assesses the legacy that has been inherited.

This article examines two twenty-first century films, Juno (2007) and Boyhood (2014), arguing that they are refreshingly different from most previous “coming of age” movies in the way that they avoid the usual clichés associated with such films. Whereas many earlier movies tend to make a single event the turning point in young characters’ lives, these two films deliberately wrong-foot the audience by steering round such predictable scenarios, and give a more credible depiction of characters in their ongoing dealing with the comings and goings of age, whether they are young or old. It is suggested that the films achieve this both in terms of their content and also in their structure, seeking to prioritize the fabula over the sjuzhet. They also have endings that are more “feminine,” avoiding the traditional, climactic male ending.

This article explores the two film adaptations of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Mel Stuart’s 1971 Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Tim Burton’s (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Warner Bros., Burbank, CA, 2005). It champions Robert Stam’s approach to adaptation, which looks at the way a text positions itself in relation to earlier texts in the light of the surrounding cultural environment, arguing that this is a more flexible and “adaptable” approach than earlier favoured models, such as Geoffrey Wagner’s influential tripartite approach. It is argued that these adaptations, despite some attempts at political correctness (especially regarding the Oompa-Loompas) have been at the expense of the feminine, which has been marginalised.

It is argued that there are several problems with Peter Hollindale’s concept, “childness.” First, it is suggested that the term not only has too much semantic latitude, but that its definitional attributes are themselves incompatible, pulling in different directions: from the pragmatic and empirical to the more figurative and aspirational. Linked with this point is a second one: that despite Hollindale’s avowed claim that his term is ‘extremely flexible, and … historically, socially and culturally determined’ (pp. 76-7), it ultimately defers to a biological essentialism.
Thirdly, and as a result of this, the term fails adequately to address many key issues in children’s literature criticism, despite Hollindale’s otherwise exemplary and perceptive readings of texts. Finally, it is suggested that the key issue, of how childhood is seen to be constructed, confers on the child an unwarranted voluntarism that neglects questions of power (i.e. of socialisation and colonisation) probed by others, resulting in a rather Romantic conceptualisation of the child – and, indeed, of “childness.”

This article reconsiders Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 50 years after its initial UK publication, and over a hundred years since Dahl’s birth.
It suggests that the book has often been misinterpreted, in that the work is more critical of modern capitalism than is often recognised, capturing a post-World War II shift in sensibilities from a culture of hard work and deferred gratification to one that celebrated consumerism and instant enjoyment. The article explores this idea by taking a psychoanalytical perspective, drawing largely on the work of Jacques Lacan, especially his notions of the superego, enjoyment and desire. It suggests that Dahl was one of a number of writers (Anthony Burgess and Marshall McLuhan are also discussed) who responded to this shift in capitalist relations, not simply in terms of the content of his work but in the way in which he wrote.

The word ‘chum’ is, according to the OED, frequently linked with ‘chamber’; that is, a chum is someone with whom one might share sleeping quarters. Certainly, for many adventurous Blyton heroes, this is the case: the Famous Five, the four Adventure series children, the Adventurous four, the Secret Island four and other Blytoneers all share caves, cellars and other locked rooms, let alone trees and camp-fires. However, one also finds, included in these spaces, those who, superficially, would not seem to qualify. Thus, in The Secret Mountain (set in Africa), we find Mafumu, a ‘black boy,’ ‘snuggled down beside Jack, who did not even wake when the black boy lay almost on top of him’ (92); or Ragamuffin Jo, a gypsy waif, sharing the Famous Five’s sleeping quarters. In this chapter, these unlikely bedfellows will be considered alongside other foreigners in Blyton’s work; for, more than most writers, she has been accused of xenophobia and outright racism — accusations that, I will suggest, are based on rather uninformed and selective readings of her work.

This chapter argues for a less technologically driven notion of “virtual reality,” suggesting that our own on-board computers, our brains, are already engaged in a process of simulating the world around us, rather than being “naturally” immersed within it. Thus we are always at one remove from what Lacan calls the Real; hence the phrase “virtual reality” verges on the tautological. From a Lacanian perspective, humans are unique in their dislocation from the Real, taking up a position in the Symbolic, an order of signs. The rest of the chapter explores how works of art, and literature in particular, can easily be seen to function as “virtual” (immersive and interactive) worlds. The chapter concludes by noting that fantasy literature, in particular, despite its less than realistic appearance, often aspires to go beyond the “virtual,” to lay claim to accessing a world both “Real” and “virtuous.”