Literary Criticism:The handsomely produced Irish Children's Writers and Illustrators 1986-2006 contains substantial pieces on 10 contemporary authors and three illustrators, all of them Irish by birth, background or affiliation, who represent, as the editors say in their introduction, "a snapshot of excellence in Irish children's literature in English at the turn of the 21st century".
Initially commissioned as part of a series for Inis: the Children's Books Ireland magazine between 2001 and 2004 when Valerie Coghlan and Siobhán Parkinson were joint editors of that magazine (they have since taken over editorship of Bookbird, the international journal of the International Board on Books for Young People), they were updated for this publication and furnished with a comprehensive index. They offer sustained accounts of each author's or illustrator's work, foreground common features, and situate them (in some cases) within a wider context.
The full-colour illustrations lend added value to the pieces on the illustrators.
Those featured are: Eoin Colfer, Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick, Maeve Friel, PJ Lynch, Sam McBratney, Elizabeth O'Hara, Mark O'Sullivan, Siobhán Parkinson, Niamh Sharkey, Matthew Sweeney, Kate Thompson, Martin Waddell and Gerard Whelan. In their introduction the editors reflect the development of Irish children's literature in English leading up to and after the "boom" in the 1990s when 10 publishers for children were active in the Irish market (currently there is only one), tracing the factors which facilitated the sudden growth and the gradual decline in publishing but also pointing to the "golden age" of children's literature now occurring in the universities and other academic institutions, and to the remarkable growth in the numbers engaged in the study of children's literature in Ireland today.
Divided Worlds: Studies in Children's Literature, consisting of commissioned articles and selected papers from the conference of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature (ISSCL) in 2005, bears witness to this development. This third publication of the ISSCL maintains the high standard of scholarship and breadth of scope established by the previous volumes. Like them it includes an erudite introduction by co-editor Mary Shine Thompson who, in the introductions, has sought to identify the parameters of contemporary children's literature studies and its place in literary and Irish studies.
Her reflections in this volume on the notion of "division", from the negative association with the imperialistic "divide and rule" to the pragmatic and neutral denotation of ordering and classifying knowledge, are stimulating, and her case for the range of "divisions" addressed in the articles constituting a common theme is spirited (geographical divisions, divisions within readerships, genres, fragmentation of childhood along political and national lines), but the title is too general to create a meaningful focus and the link between it and some of the articles is tenuous.
WHAT MOST OF the essays do have in common, however, whether they address British (Rosemary Sutcliff, Mark Haddon), Japanese-Canadian (Joy Kogawa), Italian (Luigi Bertelli, Gianni Rodari) or Irish literature (from the fiction of Katherine Tynan, Maria Edgeworth and Somerville and Ross through Irish primary readers and Our Boys magazine to modern Ulster fiction), is that they are framed within the academic discourses of cultural studies, most of them addressing either theoretical questions or combining textual analysis with a study of historical contexts which recognise post-colonial tensions and social and gender inequity; they analyse the "political divisions, the class structures, the gender and other identity issues that impact on the experience and articulation of childhood" (Thompson). It is a commendable addition to the growing number of publications in the field.
The collection closes with a strong piece by Celia Keenan, Divisions in the World of Irish Publishing for Children: Re-Colonisation or Globalisation, in which she addresses the policies governing the recent production of Irish books and attendant issues of identity. Looking closely at the work of such authors as Maeve Friel and Eoin Colfer, she registers a qualitative change before and after their migration from Irish to British publishing houses, an elimination of culturally specific references, a loss of country and loss of culture, and she makes a strong case for indigenous publishing of material specifically relevant to the Irish market.
AS FAR AS the work of Colfer is concerned, she offers a glimmer of hope, not in this volume but in her piece in Irish Children's Writers and Illustrators, in which she registers recent changes in his work and speculates that "perhaps Ireland may be found again in the Artemis universe".
Emer O'Sullivan is professor of English literature at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, in northern Germany. Her Comparative Children's Literature (Routledge 2005) won the Children's Literature Association Book Award 2007
Irish Children's Writers and Illustrators 1986-2006 Edited by Valerie Coghlan and Siobhán Parkinson Church of Ireland College of Education Publications and Children's Books Ireland, 168pp. €15
Divided Worlds: Studies in Children's Literature Edited by Mary Shine Thompson and Valerie Coghlan Four Courts Press, 224pp. €55