The Nimble Critic (1999)

The Nimble Critic Gillian Adams (bio) McGillis, Roderick . The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children's Literature. New York: Twayne, 1996. I want to begin with two caveats. The first is that I am not an unbiased critic when it comes to the work of Rod McGillis; I have admired it for many years. The second is that, judging from the introduction, The Nimble Reader was begun at least as early as 1990-1991, the last work cited (and only briefly referred to), is 1994, and I only find two citations from 1993; thus I would guess that the final draft went to the publisher toward the end of 1994. I know Rod expected that the book would come out earlier than it did. Thus much of the thinking here is almost ten years old, and does not, on the basis of his more recent work, represent where Rod is now, critically speaking. I will refer to that work toward the end of this review. When I first read The Nimble Reader, in the fall of 1996, I found it splendid, and I wished it had been around when I was in graduate school, falling asleep over Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature and other weighty tomes. But the first thing that strikes me now, after intervening years of consciousness raising, is what is missing: there is only one brief reference to a writer of color, Virginia Hamilton, and that is to a phallic interpretation of M.C. Higgins the Great (156). I know that Rod is now well aware of the literature of parallel cultures; a trip to South Africa in 1995 made a major impression, and both the too-brief Canadian section (333-43) that he wrote for Peter Hunt's Children's Literature: An Illustrated History (1995), which is the only section that takes real account of minority literatures, and the special 1997 issue of ARIEL on Postcolonial/Postindependence children's literature he edited with Meena Khorana, demonstrate an acute consciousness of the literature of the other and of cultural diversity. But in The Nimble Reader, with the exception of a work addressed in one chapter, Harriet Childe-Pemberton's little-known "All My Doing; or Red Riding-Hood Over Again" (1882), the texts that Rod uses to demonstrate how various critical approaches work, with one small exception, are all by white men: E.B. White's Charlotte's Web, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and to a lesser extent Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Horace Burdick, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and Grimm's Fairy Tales (if the major tellers are women, still the tales are filtered though males). In addition, these are all fantasies, except for the Childe-Pemberton story, which is arguably not intended for a child audience. Although, aside from that work and the Van Allsburg, it can be argued that these are texts that everyone knows well, still the choice of texts seems strange when women who write children's literature outnumber men. Thus this book seems to me to reflect a time when many of us, with the best of intentions, were less aware of the implications of gender and were ignorant of, or at least not much interested in, books not in the white establishment canon of "classic" children's literature. Rod cites in his introduction (viii) and later in the body of the book other omissions: stylistics ("which examines an author's style by paying close attention to linguistic patterns"), speech-act theory ("which examines verbal performances"), new historicism ("a form of history writing that takes account of all aspects of culture and cultural production"), postcolonial theory ("an examination of cultures and emergent cultures following in the wake of imperialism"), and textual studies (155). It is ironic that two of the three last-cited critical approaches are so widely used by children's literature critics today and that the third, at least in respect to the material text as embedded in a cultural matrix, has enjoyed a renewed critical interest.1 But I want to turn to what this book does do, and does particularly well. First of all, it is...