Culturing the Child, 1690-1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by Anne Lundin University of Wisconsin-Madison Ruwe, Donelle, ed. Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. Lanham, MD: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2005. Academia is fond of talking about paradigms and their shifts. This notion of a profound change in the worldview held by a discipline, a body of knowledge, is grounded in the sciences and social sciences. A humanist, I prefer the concept of myth, any set of shared beliefs derived of images, heroes, truth, and fable, as revelatory to our understanding of conflicted values, perceptions, and assumptions. While we continue to invent myths as a way of explaining a changing world to ourselves, certain myth-makers or breakers seek in their life's work to challenge our ways of thinking, to do no less than change the world. Mitzi Myers (1939–2001) was that kind of hero. Myers came to children's literature from her English study of eighteenth-century women writers, many who also wrote books for children, works derided in the history of children's literature as dreadfully conservative and unenlightened. Through close readings of text in context, through decoding of textual practices, through the shapeliness of her prose, Myers celebrated the cultural work of these matriarchal women writers in their own quotidian, domestic, alternative Romanticism. In what Myers called "missed opportunities and critical malpractice," the child reader was universalized, essentialized within polarities of primer and pleasure, which marginalized women writers whose guiding metaphor was education more than entertainment (41). Through her own writing she modeled the expansive scope of women's writing of those Rational Dames she made familiar. In cultural studies, the researcher/writer must move beyond the old maps to discover where new boundaries lay, a task requiring historical research as well as theoretical exploration. She was gladly a bibliographer. Intent on "culturing" the field, Mitzi Myers raised a whole generation of scholars to think more critically how cultures construct themselves through acts of literacy, of literature. Amid a cloud of witnesses honoring her legacy is this festschrift published by the Children's Literature Association, edited by Donelle Ruwe, with the apt title, Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers. That the Children's Literature Association sponsored the publication indicates the high regard scholars hold for her contributions to this field; indeed, some of her finest work appeared in the pages of Children's Literature Association Quarterly and Annual. I would like to see her obituary reprinted, reiterating her inestimable contributions in the development of this scholarly organization, among others. The collection of essays seeks to pay tribute to Mitzi Myers's monumental contributions to the field of women's studies and children's literature. While the editor acknowledges her "multiple legacies" (vi), other fields [End Page 405] could have been mentioned, including her alliances with librarians and educators, her passion for teaching language, and her affinities with young adult literature. That Myers could write an eighteen-page entry on "Literature for Children" in the most recent Encyclopedia Americana speaks of her diversity. The article covers the years 1690 to 1914, from Fontaine's Bible to L. T. Meade's school stories, suggesting the enormous breadth of her knowledge and interests. The reader could misread the time span as reflective of Myers's scholarly interests, which defy closure. Her approach, as she once wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn on the history of young adult heroism, was to look less "toward what we have now than parallels and continuities with what we had before" (21). Thus, a range of years means little unless those years go farther back than forward. The editor organized the festschrift around three concerns dear to Myers: Creating the Contexts of Children's Literature; Reading the Rational Dames; and The Politics of Pedagogy and the Child. These divisions make sense in terms of Myers's vast bibliographic and historical interests and research; her close readings and...