Abstract
With the advent of twenty-first century Caldecott winners like The Hello Goodbye Window and the Newbery award-winning Next Stop on Market Street, the literature used to construct childhood in the U.S. increasingly reflects the multicultural realism of the republic. The We Need Diverse Books movement has organized around changing representations accessible to young readers and stressing authorial voices from potentially marginalized populations. Simultaneous with this has an exclusion of problematic authors, most publicly manifest in the 2018 ballot decision by the membership of the American Library Association’s Association for Library Services for Children (ALSC) to expurgate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name and reinaugurate its honor for lifetime achievement in children’s literature as “the Legacy Award.” More insidious are the changes to text and image themselves, as subsequent generations of editors have reacted to shifting public sentiment and altered the original editions to make them more palatable. This paper focuses on Caddie Woodlawn by Carole Ryrie Brink, the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the text and illustrations of Abraham Lincoln by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. In the current politicized American climate, parental and professional nostalgia keep these problematic representations around in sanitized form. From alteration of original lithography to shifting emphases in illustration, the discussion focuses on the evolving editions of these works and postulates how some of the design and production decisions publishing houses have made to update older works sometimes goes well beyond reflecting changing social norms to create an ought-world challenging historicity.
Presenters
Wendy StephensAssociate Professor, College of Education and Professional Studies, Jacksonville State University, Alabama, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Children's literature, Illustration, Culture, Diversity
