From Eden to Suburbia: Perspectives on the Natural World in Children’s Literature

Abstract

Books with a focus on the natural world are written for young readers with a variety of purposes, but broadly speaking constitute a spectrum measured by the degree of emphasis and/or explicitness falling on information or advocacy. At any point along the spectrum, therefore, the positionality of children, whether as participant characters and/or as implied audience, is a key concern of text. Children are apt to be thought of as nature-associated, both because they seem more overtly to display organic embeddedness than do adults, and because they are commonly attributed with an affinity with nature-associated, indigenous peoples pursuing traditional lifestyles. Historically, moreover, the child body has been deemed 'irrational', lacking in discipline and uncontrolled, and hence it is constructed as being much closer to nature. By seeking to invert, or at least evade, the culture-nature hierarchy of Western rationality, nature writing has the potential, through form and function, to valorize the situating of (or the 'already situatedness' of) those bodies within pro-environment discourses. But because the natural world has been coded very differently in the past, other possibilities still exist. As Richard T. Twine reminds us, the intersection between the mastery of nature and nature-associated peoples takes place in organically embedded bodies (Twine 2001, p.32).