A Journey into the Anglo-Canadian Past, the Multi-Cultural Canadian Present, and the Global World of Contemporary Crossover Fiction: Three Studies of Children’s Literature Beckett, Sandra L. Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2009 Galway, Elizabeth. From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the Construction of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2008 Reimer, Mavis, ed. Home Words: Discourses of Canadian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008

Is there “politics” concerning children’s books? This question may appear oxymoronic, but it isn’t. Can that “politics” be meaningful and add something new and vital to the study of Canadian children’s literature on both the national and the international stages? The politics of children’s books in Canada is not only rich and deep, but varied and complex. In fact, each of the following three studies has a unique focus on the children’s literature of our nation and the “politics” that help define its character. Elizabeth Galway’s From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood provides perspective on the early sense of nationalism and Canadian identity in post-colonial children’s literature in English. Home Words, a collection of essays edited by Mavis Reimer, is focused on how Canadian children’s literature reflects the “politics” of interrelationships between racial and ethnic groups that make up Canada and how that affects their view of Canada as “home.” Finally, Sandra Beckett’s Crossover Fiction explores not only the phenomenon of crossover literature and how it has played a most welcome havoc with the boundary between children’s fiction and adult fiction worldwide, but also the “politics” of writing, editing, publishing, and selling a crossover book, not just nationally, but internationally. The full title of Elizabeth Galway’s book is From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the Construction of the Canadian Identity. Professor Galway explores children’s literature from 1867 to the first decade of the twentieth century with an unwavering focus on the growing sense of nationhood as it appears in all its guises in children’s novels, poems, stories, and magazines. In the introduction, we are reminded that there were only about three and a half million people and four provinces in Canada in 1867 and that Canada stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific only as of 1873 (11). Commensurate with this new country’s scant population was a small corpus of literature for children, written in English by authors in Britain, America, and Canada. As Galway’s careful study of this literature shows, the sense of Canadian nationhood in them was young, fragile, and contradictory. Many English-Canadians in post-colonial Canada still perceived Britain as their “motherland,” yet as late as 1903 Britain had the wherewithal to rule in favour of the United States in the Alaska Boundary dispute. This was considered by many Canadians as sacrificing Canadian interests for a better relationship with the United States and consequently made some Canadians rethink their views about their mother country (12). It is nevertheless emblematic of the contents of From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood that the book cover illustration pictures Canada as a toddler in bib and tartan, holding a bayonet, and standing on a small table between a happy Uncle Sam whose trousers bear the stripes of the American flag, and a matronly Britannia with a stout plumed helmet, and an apron of bold pattern, the Union Jack, both hovering on each side of him with their hands held out protectively, ready to catch or prop him up. Galway underscores the didactic nature of post-colonial Canadian literature for children in English and its role in reflecting Canadian nationalism. “It is frequently within the ranks of children’s literature that one finds the clearest expressions of Canadian nationalism . . . Because the adult plays an enormous role in the process of providing reading material for children, the lessons inherent in this literature act as a barometer of the ideology and principles of the society that produces and consumes such works” (6–7). Here is a verse from one of Galway’s examples of didacticism and patriotism, from “The Land of the Maple” by …