Penny Brown (2)

Lady Wombat says:

Brown ploughs new critical ground as she surveys French literature for children written before the “golden age” of European children’s literature, the first such survey to be published in English. While the contours of French children’s lit follow those of European children’s lit in general, events specific to France –“the enforced ending of the dominance of the Jesuits in secondary schools in 1762, which left schools in chaos; a poor level of literacy (elementary education did not become compulsory until after 1870); and the impact of the French Revolution” (7) – influenced it in culturally-specific ways. While Brown discusses books of the Revolutionary period in one chapter, she makes little reference to the former two culturally-specific influences on French children’s lit, focusing instead on describing major works and limning the outlines of large-scale developments in the field.

In her opening chapter, Brown discusses pre-18th century French literature for children. What we today would consider “children’s literature” did not exist in the period; thus, the chapter looks at some of the earliest types of writing produced for the young, or available to them, and “suggests how some of this material was influential in the growth of a literature specifically designed for them” (10). Such literature includes:
School books, primarily in Latin, but some in French, primarily teaching religion
Books children from wealthy families might have read at home
Chapbooks from the Bibliothèque bleue
Two imports: Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), which was imitated by later French encyclopedia and illustrated textbook producers; and Erasmus’ De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), the first livre de civilité, or courtesy book, aimed at a child audience, which also served as a model for later French writers
Plays written by teachers and performed by students
Conversations and Proverbes by Mme de Maintenon, written for the schoolgirls at Saint-Cyr
Works of Fénelon, written for the grandson of Louis XIV. Fairy tales, fables, one influential novel Les Aventures de Télémaque

Chapter 2 discusses two 17th century texts aimed at both adults and children that influenced later French children’s literature: La Fontaine’s fables and Charles Perrault’s fairy tales (with a brief mention of the fairy tales of Mme D’Aulnoy)

Chapter 3 focuses on moral texts published specifically for a child audience in France during the late eighteenth century. Brown argues against their dismissal by previous critics, and that her “detailed examination of a number of texts will reveal a not inconsiderable degree of diversity and innovation in the approach to writing for the young that has, in effect, been obscured in most discussions of this period” (86). I’m not sure that her survey approach can sustain such a claim, but her argument that such texts are worth reading is certainly on target. She opens the chapter by considering theories on education and children’s reading in the period, then discusses the works of Mme le Prince de Beaumont and Mme d’Epinay, which took the form of dialogues between adults and children aimed at teaching moral lessons.

Chapter 4 describes “the move towards the longer fictional narrative in which moral or didactic tales were embedded, and the ways in which fictional modes common in literature for adults were adapted to a young readership” (129). She discusses Mme de Genlis as the first writer to incorporate domestic realism in her moral tales; the novel in letters of Mme de La Fite; the imitators of Fénelon’s Télémaque, in the princely education/travel narrative mode; and concludes with a brief consideration of early French robinsonnades.

Chapter 5 focuses on moral works for children that included a performative element: Berquin’s L’Ami des enfans and L’Ami des adolescens, which included plays for children to perform; and writers in the genre of the théâtre de l’éducation, plays for children imitating the théâtre de société of aristocratic and bourgeois adult culture. These works include Mme de Genlis’s Théatre à l’usage des jeunes personnes and Alexandre-Guillaume Mouslier de Moissy, Les Jeux de la petite Thalie, ou Petites Drames, dialogues sur des proverbs.

Chapter 6 gives a broad overview of books produced for children between 1789 and 1799, works rarely examined by literary critics. On the one hand, books of the period continued to draw on previous genres: the moral tale; the novel of letters; novels of conversation. But new genres grew: more exemplary biographies were published for children, including a few that focused on child protagonists; many short-lived periodicals appeared for children in the period; and textbooks changed to reflect the political climate The most innovative developments seem to have taken place in textbooks, which reoriented history and geography to reflect Revolutionary ideology. The chapter ends by discussing the work of Ducray-Duminil, whom most focus on as a writer for adults, but whom Brown, suggests can be also thought of as writing for the young.

Chapter 7 gives another broad overview, this time of the types of books that were published 1800-1830 in France. It also looks more closely at the most popular titles of the period. Genres: abécédaires; exemplary lives; fairy tales; travel narratives; compilations of exemplary anecdotes and extracts; natural history; courtesy book. Major authors: Mme de Campan and her plays; Jean-Nicolas Bouilly and moral tales. She concludes by arguing that the period’s books for children were “relatively unmarked overall by the social and political upheavals of Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Restoration, thus uncoupling the instruction of the young from an overt political agenda” (246).

Brown is prone to anachronistic judging (terming something “problematic” because it doesn’t reflect current-day ideas about childhood or what is appropriate for children’s literature), making what little analysis she does in this volume open to question. Her writing is also occasionally marred by infelicitous sentence structure (lots of “ands” to link independent clauses, rather than the sophisticated sentence structure one would expect from a senior scholar). Still, the volume proves valuable, not only for introducing the works of a country and of a period little known by English-speaking scholars; Brown’s work also calls attention to our language-based blinkers when we study early children’s literature. French books were translated into English, and vice versa, as were books from Germany; many literate people read in more than one language. Thus, to develop a true sense of where (and why) innovations in the field developed, we need to look beyond the borders of England. Her book, which focuses on description of one country’s early literature for children, is a good start, but it makes me eager to see other scholars move beyond simply showing us the lay of the land. What would the field of early British children’s literature look like if we started to analyze the works themselves, and in the context not only of social, cultural, and political history, but also in the context of literature of other countries?… (mehr)