Cover not available
Part of
Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 5] 2015
► pp. 267–284

Chapter 11. Surrealism for children

Paradoxes and possibilities

| Kansas State University

This chapter addresses what an avant-garde for children might look like, and what it might do. It is called “Surrealism for Children: Paradoxes and Possibilities” because the very notion of an avant-garde for children strikes the author as both paradoxical and not, and as both possible and impossible. In making this claim, the author argues with – and revises – his own analysis in The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks (2002), which took for granted that an avant-garde for children was both possible and critically viable. What he once accepted as a certainty, he now thinks of as an intriguing question. The answer resides among the three main (and overlapping) areas around which the paradoxes and possibilities of a Surrealist children’s literature circulate: knowledge, experience, and audience.

Published online: 29 July 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.5.12nel
References

Primary Sources

Aaronson, Marc
1998 Art Attack: A Short Cultural History of the Avant-Garde. New York NY: Clarion Books.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Louise
1963 A Child’s Guide to Freud. Illus. Whitney Darrow, Jr. New York NY: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Billout, Guy
2002 Something’s Not Quite Right. Jaffrey NH: David R. Godine.Google Scholar
Browne, Anthony
1997 Changes. London: Walker Books (first published 1990).Google Scholar
1999 Voices in the Park. London: Picture Corgi (first published 1998).Google Scholar
Carvalho, Bernado
2010 Trocoscópio. Carcavelos, Portugal: Planeta Tangerina.Google Scholar
Horvath, Polly
2012 Mr. and Mrs. Bunny — Detectives Extraordinaire! By Mrs. Bunny. Translated from the Rabbit by Polly Horvath. Illus. Sophie Blackall. New York: Schwartz & Wade.Google Scholar
Jackson, Shelley
2010 Mimi’s Dada Catifesto. New York NY: Clarion Books.Google Scholar
Johnson, Crockett
1955 Harold and the Purple Crayon. New York NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
1960 A Picture for Harold’s Room. New York NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Johnson, D.B
2012 Magritte’s Marvelous Hat. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Krauss, Ruth
1960 Open House for Butterflies. Illus. Maurice Sendak. New York NY: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Lester, Mike
2000 A Is for Salad. New York NY: Putnam & Grosset.Google Scholar
Mansbach, Adam
2011 Go the Fuck to Sleep. Illus. Ricardo Cortés. New York NY: Akashic Books.Google Scholar
Queensland Art Gallery Children’s Art Centre
2011 Surrealism for Kids. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art.Google Scholar
Raimondo, Joyce
2004 Imagine That: Activities and Adventures in Surrealism. New York NY: Watson-Guptill Publications.Google Scholar
Seuss, Dr
1957 The Cat in the Hat. New York NY: Random House.Google Scholar
1993 Fox in Socks. New York NY: Random House (first published 1965).Google Scholar
1983 On Beyond Zebra! New York NY: Random House (first published 1955).Google Scholar
Tan, Shaun
2007 The Arrival. New York NY: Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine (first published 2006).Google Scholar
2008 The Lost Thing. Sydney, Australia: Hachette Livre (first published 2000).Google Scholar
Timmers, Leo
2012 The Magical Life of Mr. Renny. Translated by Bill Nagelkerke. Wellington, New Zealand: Gecko Press (first published 2010).Google Scholar
Travers, Pamela L
1962 Mary Poppins. Illus. Mary Shepard. New York NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (first published 1934).Google Scholar
Tullet, Hervé
2011 Press Here. Translated by Christopher Franceschelli. San Francisco CA: Chronicle Books (first published 2010).Google Scholar
Van Allsburg, Chris
1981 Jumanji. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Wiesner, David
1992 June 29, 1999. New York NY: Clarion Books.Google Scholar
1991 Tuesday. New York NY: Clarion Books.Google Scholar
Willems, Mo
2011 Beligerent Bunny in “Olive Hue Show Mutts”: An Intoxicatingly Hard Reader. Sketchbook Vol. 18. Mo Willems (self-published).Google Scholar
2004 Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale. New York NY: Hyperion Books.Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Matthew T
2008 Experimental literature for children. Unpublished talk.
Atkinson, Nathalie
2011 The best 27 from 2011. National Post 31 December 2011 Weekend Post, 15.Google Scholar
Bürger, Peter
1984 Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Dove, Rita
1999a Rita Dove. In For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most, 70-75. New York NY: Grosset/Putnam.Google Scholar
1999b On the Bus with Rosa Parks. New York NY: W.W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Gablik, Suzi
1991 Magritte. New York NY: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Lurie, Alison
1990 The cabinet of Dr. Seuss. The New York Review of Books 20 December 1990: 50-52.Google Scholar
Marcus, Leonard S
2011 Touchy: Picture books and the feel of the page. The Horn Book Magazine 86(7) (Nov.-Dec. 2011): 34-38.Google Scholar
McCloud, Scott
1994 Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York NY: HarperCollins (first published 1993).Google Scholar
Nel, Philip
2002 The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks. Jackson MI: University Press of Mississipi.Google Scholar
2012 Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature. Jackson MI: University Press of Mississippi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reynolds, Kimberley
2010 Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan (first published 2007).Google Scholar
Shortsleeve, Kevin
2011 The cat in the hippie: Dr. Seuss, nonsense, the carnivalesque, and the sixties rebel. In The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, Julia L. Mickenberg & Lynne Vallone (eds), 189-209. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Tigges, Wim
1987 An anatomy of nonsense. In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, Wim Tigges (ed.), 23-45. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Tønnessen, Elise Seip
2013 Nye medier, nye modaliteter, ny estetikk (New media, new modalities, new aesthetics). Nordisk barnelitteratur - et nytt kunstforskningsspørsmål? [ Nordic Children’s Literature – A New Research Question? ] Norsk barnebokinstitutt, Oslo, Norway. 25 August.
Tzara, Tristan
1992 Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. Translated by Barbara Wright. New York NY: Calder Publications/Riverrun Press.Google Scholar
Ware, Chris
2013 Foreword. In Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, Volume One: 1942-1943, Philip Nel & Eric Reynolds (eds), 7-9. Seattle WA: Fantagraphics.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Dorkin, Andrew
2021. Humouring Futurity: Avant-Garde Poetry for Children?. CounterText 7:3 ► pp. 350 ff. DOI logo
Palo, Annbritt & Anna Nordenstam
2023. An Artist and a Writer: YA Literature by Anna Höglund. Children's Literature in Education 54:1 ► pp. 110 ff. DOI logo
Ridderstrøm, Helge
2021. Patafysikk for begynnere. Barnelitterært forskningstidsskrift 12:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.