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She respects both the material and the needs of her readers." Her voice is calm, perceptive and economical. She doesn't do any of that, and since she is often talking about children's literature, that is very appropriate. "Much American criticism, especially by academics, is always striving for effect, and using jargon to impress people. Now it seems conservative and appeals to girls who are rather old-fashioned and feminine because women have changed so much."ĭavid Lodge says Lurie's critical style is classically English.
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For instance, Little Women was quite radical when it came out and appealed to girls who were tomboys and rebellious. Lurie says that in her criticism she tries to explore "the relation between the writer and the book, what the book is saying to adults and what it is saying to children, and its relation to what is going on in the world, which of course changes. It gave sustenance for those of us who think of ourselves as progressive thinkers in the academy to recover the classics." But Lurie's book showed how works like Tom Sawyer and Little Women challenged the traditional order. "And when Don't Tell the Grown-ups was published, it seemed that the right, particularly in America, had captured the classics of children's literature as moralistic and conservative. "First, her prose is so lucid that cats and dogs can understand it," he says. Jerry Griswold, a professor of literature at San Diego State University and a specialist in children's literature, says that while Lurie is not seen as a strictly academic figure - "she doesn't appear in obscure scholarly journals that are read by 100 people worldwide" - she has been influential in the field. The book follows on from her 1990 collection of essays, Don't Tell the Grown-ups, in which Lurie asserted that many children's classics were essentially subversive. Gore Vidal went further, referring to her as "the Queen Herod of contemporary fiction".įor more than 30 years Lurie has taught a children's literature course at Cornell University where she is Whiton Professor of American Literature.This year she published a collection of essays, Boys and Girls Forever, in which studies of children's classics are linked under a thesis that the authors have "in some sense remained children themselves". Christopher Isherwood claimed she was "perhaps more shocking than she knows - shocking like Jane Austen, not Genet". She has a reputation for social observation and a steely-eyed treatment of her characters. Lurie is best-known for witty and astute comedies of manners like Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates (1974) and most recently The Last Resort ( 1998 ). All of the approaches used on adult classics are now used on children's classics, sometimes with ridiculous results." But now you go to conferences and hear papers based on Lacanian psychology and Marxist analysis. Only trainee teachers or school librarians studied children's literature with an emphasis on how children could learn to read or behave well from these books. Miner's disappointed assessment of the status of children's literature studies in the early 80s was pretty close to the mark, Lurie says, but adds that over the past few decades the subject has become rather more seriously regarded: "There was a time when there was almost no critical writing about children's literature except for articles on things like Lewis Carroll's interest in maths. The killer line asks, "Do we really need a scholarly study of playground doggerel?" Miner is angry and upset, but she is also forced to acknowledge that in most English departments her subject is, perhaps aptly, "a step-daughter grudgingly tolerated in the chimney-corner while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman's table". Before boarding her flight she buys a magazine and is horrified to find in it an article attacking her and her work. A lison Lurie's 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Foreign Affairs opens with Vinnie Miner, "an ivy-league college professor who has published several books and has a well-established reputation in the expanding field of children's literature", embarking on a trip to England to study playground rhymes.