Children's literature that refers to children's literature - Clémentine Beauvais

I want to talk today about a phenomenon I've noticed in children's and YA literature, and which seems to me to be on the rise: what I'd call 'lateral' intertextual and intervisual references in children's literature. Namely, children's texts that refer 'sideways' to other children's books, rather than 'up' to 'adult', clasical, 'real' literature, as used to be more common.

Children's literature has always tried to establish and consolidate its own status as worthy of existence and respect, and since hardly anybody helps it in that endeavour, it's had to help itself. One of the ways a text can inscribe itself into a prestigious literary family tree is to refer to (more) prestigious literary relatives. And so, since its early days, children's books have generously referred to 'adult' literature, especially to classics.


Those referential networks have been quite varied. Adaptations, rewritings, abridged versions - children's books have been, historically, often 'indebted' to adult classics. Among the first novels considered to be 'for children' is Fénelon's Télémaque, which was, of course, a rewriting of the Odyssey. Today, there are still many children's and YA books that align themselves with classic texts generally seen as being for adults. 

Not all do so for educational reasons (and there's nothing wrong with those that do, of course, I hasten to say). Plenty of children's books use 'adult' literature as a playing field, referring to canonical texts and authors discreetly, in intertextual games of varied levels of irreverence. Daniel Pennac's Kamo series, for instance, play with Wuthering Heights in an extremely erudite way, but there is no pressure whatsoever to go read the 'source' text - that said, when you do read it later in life, you arguably enjoy the experience even more for all the moments of retrospective understanding. The same could be said, on this side of the Channel, for Philip Pullman's rewriting of Paradise Lost, His Dark Materials.

Frequently, too, children's literature has established relations of a more parodic, pastichey or satirical nature with the 'prestigious' texts it references. In that tradition of children's literature, the intertextual or intervisual references to more canonical fields are sweet-and-sour: respectful sometimes, mocking often. From Lewis Carroll's 'How doth the little crocodile' to the whole works of Anthony Browne, those references have come in to question what one, as a child (or indeed adult) is supposed to like. Children's literature, of course, sets tastes - reading tastes, aesthetic judgments - and for a long time it took seriously its guiding role as an introduction to 'real', grown-up art. But then it decided it could do more than that, and critique from the inside the very concept of 'real', grown-up art. References here range from well-meaning and humorous to brutally acerbic.






All those references, however, whether respectful or irreverent, remain 'upwards' winks, towards that Other, Higher Literature that children's books have always looked up to in spite of themselves, hoping, secretly, to be helping children to reach it some day... They are also, of course, ways for authors to legitimise their own statuses - sure, I write for children, but look, I'm a real writer, I'm well-read, I know the canon.

Just in case it sounds like I'm being critical of my peers, let me plead absolutely (and unashamedly) guilty to that erudite crime, since a very large number of my children's books are extremely referential - and mostly to that Higher Literature, the literature that grown-ups consume and approve of.

More recently, children's literature has started playing with other webs of references, closer to itself, but still classical: the canon of children's literature. It is quite common to see references in children's literature to Peter Pan, Jules Verne, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, and, of course, fairy tales, Aesop's fables, nursery rhymes. For instance, Thomas Taylor's Malamander is full of delightful intertextual references to Peter Pan. Those glances are more 'sideways' than 'upwards', but they still look 'up' to a canon.

But I've also been intrigued to see an increasing number of authors and children's books that make explicit, joyful and unashamed references to other contemporary, non-canonical authors and books. In other words, we now see children's literature establishing itself as a worthwhile field of references, weaving itself its own web of self-referentiality, finding itself worthy of winks. No inferiority complex anymore: it's about celebrating children's literature in children's literature, severing the links to that Other literature, that Great literature, and finding oneself quite satisfied with what's left.



I started to notice this first in picturebooks - with French author-illustrators such as Gilles Bachelet and Claude Ponti, whose explicitly referential work started to feature other contemporary characters: Bachelet, for instance, references Pomelo, the pink elephant of Ramona Badescu and Benjamin Chaud's contemporary series.

Gilles Bachelet, referencing two pieces of children's culture at the same time, one canonical, one less so

I then started to notice it everywhere. In L’écrivain abominable, a French MG novel by Anne-Gaelle Balpe, the eponymous 'abominable writer' of the title (an evil children's writer) is called Roland Dale (pronounced, in French, 'Dahl'). In a recent MG novel by Paul Martin, Violette Hurlevent et le Jardin Sauvage, the wild wolves' names are of famous picturebook illustrators, including 'Sendak' and 'Nadja'. I've caught myself doing that in my own books, too, with references to other children's authors and their works, and in turn I've found my works, to (I'm not going to lie) my great delight, here and there referred to in the works of other children's authors in France.

I think that those 'lateral' winks are in part due to the fact that children's literature has become a field of its own, where authors read each other abundantly, know each other, keep a close eye on what's being published, and genuinely enjoy that vast and varied production. I'm not sure the same happens as much in 'adult' fiction, in part because the emotional investment and intellectual interest in one's contemporaries' books seems to me - admittedly from the outside - to be on the whole lower.

Through this recent-ish move, children's and YA literature is establishing its own field of knowledge and references and, to some extent, theorising itself as well as its reading and writing practices. Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, which I actually recommend to my undergraduates as one of the best 'theoretical' works on fanfiction, refers to many teenage series, as well as to the whole extended universe, reading habits and creative offshoots of YA fiction-reading.

Those references are arguably anecdotal in comparison to the ocean of 1) non-referential works and 2) works that reference classic, adult literature or canonical children's literature, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them intensifying and normalising, as children's and YA literature increasingly asserts its own status as an artistic field of its own, full of contemporary vitality, and worth referring to. And adult literature, which already refers to canonical children's literature and to works such as Harry Potter, will look no longer downwards, but sideways, at us.

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).