“A kind of literary amnesia” about Violence

The Boston Globe’s recent interview with Michelle Ann Abate, professor of children’s literature at Ohio State, included this discussion of violence in books for young readers:

IDEAS: You went back and reread children’s books from throughout history for your research. Did those books become more violent and realistic over time?

ABATE: It’s actually the opposite of that. I was also surprised by the level of specificity and by the sensational nature of what I was reading. We tend to think of today’s young adult books as being more realistic. But the earlier books were incredibly graphic and violent. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes,” which was first released as a magazine serial in 1912, is a great example. There are tons of killings—people killing people, people killing animals, animals killing people. All of them are really gruesome and gory. The same thing’s true of “Alice in Wonderland” and a bunch of other classics, books that would never be challenged today. These examples are all conveniently forgotten when there’s a public outcry about a particular book for being so graphic and so violent. It’s almost a kind of literary amnesia.

IDEAS: It sounds like you’re talking about “The Hunger Games.”

ABATE: It’s funny—“The Hunger Games” gets so much bad press for promoting violence. But actually the books are doing the exact opposite. The entire first book is a cautionary tale about the horrors of violence and the senselessness of killing. It’s not glorifying violence, it’s condemning it with very little ambiguity. When you have a parent or a school board complaining about these books, in many cases they haven’t read the books themselves, or they’re picking out a chapter, a page, a scene.

The Tarzan books don’t seem to be written for children, but then neither did Suzanne Collins write The Hunger Games for all ages.

Abate is author or editor of half a dozen books of literary criticism, including Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism, and Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, with Kenneth B. Kidd.

First Glimpse of Barsoom

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom books and I have never had a close encounter. But they were clearly significant to artist Ty Templeton, which he’s been exploring in his Bun Toons series and commentary. In 1975, at the age of twelve, young Templeton came across a John Carter comic book and quickly discovered its appeal.

Baum and Burroughs

Publicity for the upcoming John Carter movie has brought a little new attention to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s friendship with L. Frank Baum. Yesterday the New York Times stated:

The Barsoom novels are a little like the Oz novels of Burroughs’s friend and eventual California neighbor L. Frank Baum, whose estate, Ozcot, was not far from Burroughs’s Tarzana. Both are partly reflections of how the authors saw the United States at the time. But even more, they’re escapes from it, written by relatively late bloomers who found in writing a fulfillment that had earlier been denied them.

Baum and Burroughs did have a lot in common, including an upper-class upbringing and education, a series of jobs and moves in early adulthood, and sudden and lucrative success in writing popular fiction. They probably even knew the same neighborhoods in Burroughs’s home town of Chicago; Baum’s publisher for Father Goose and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Geo. M. Hill Company, was on the same block as one of Burroughs’s apartments.

At the same time, Baum was nearly twenty years older, so he probably saw himself as a mentor for this newcomer to the literary world and to California. They met late in 1916, sixteen years after Baum’s biggest hit had come out and four years after Burroughs’s appeared in magazine form. (Tarzan was first published as a novel in 1914.) Thus, the two authors probably had little literary influence on each other.

Baum introduced the young writer to a gentlemen’s lunch club he’d co-founded called the Uplifters, which Burroughs described as a “select group of millionaires, clerks, and other celebrities, all members of the Los Angeles Athletic Club.”

Baum became seriously ill in 1918, which curtailed his social activity, and he died in 1919. Thus, the two authors weren’t friends for long. Burroughs bought his Tarzana estate, much larger than Baum’s Ozcot house and garden, a few months later. By then he was earning large amounts from both press and the movies.

Dr. Greystroke, I Presume?

And from Twilight we move to another exploration of the border between the wild and the civilized, between animal instinct and noblesse oblige. Profs. Michelle Ann Abate and Annette Wannamaker are soliciting essays for a collection tentatively titled From King of the Jungle to Cultural Icon: Tarzan at 100. Their CFP says:

Since its debut in serial format in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ narrative about an orphaned white boy being raised by a band of black apes in the African jungle has become a transnational literary classic, frequent cinematic, film and comic book icon and powerful--as well as problematic--cultural archetype. This collection will allow critics from a wide range of disciples to explore the past place, present status and future importance of Tarzan in popular print, visual and material culture.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Tarzan and (de)construction of gender, boyhood, masculinity and sexuality
• Homosocial and/or homoerotic readings of Tarzan
• Primitivism, race, and colonialism in Tarzan
• Tarzan in popular print and visual media: comic books, graphic novels and video games as well as cinematic, theatrical and television adaptations of the Tarzan story
• Tarzan as convergence culture [buzzword alert! This refers to Henry Jenkins's notion for the overlap of old and new media, audiences and storytellers.]
  
• Tarzan on the Internet
• Tarzan and/as children’s literature
• the life of William Charles Mildin, the supposed factual model for Burroughs’ fictional character
• the Disneyfication of Tarzan
• Tarzan and the origins, history and evolution of the “boys’ book”
• Tarzana, California
• Changing visual representations of Tarzan
• Tarzan and the feral boy story, both past and present
• the presence of Tarzan in non-Western literatures and cultures
• Tarzan Clubs, fan culture, and “the cult of Tarzan”
• Johnny Wëissmuller [shouldn't that be Weißmüller?] as the popular face of Tarzan
• Tarzan’s influence on other texts, parodies of Tarzan, and allusions to Tarzan
• Tarzan as myth and icon
• Tarzan and British identity, nationalism and culture; Tarzan and American identity, nationalism and culture

Proposals should be 1-2 pages in length (roughly 250-500 words). Please send abstracts plus a CV electronically as Microsoft Word attachments to Michelle Ann Abate or Annette Wannamaker.

The author’s name, email and postal address should appear in the message that accompanies the submission. Proposals should conform to the Modern Language Association bibliographic style. See the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed., for procedures regarding in-text citations and Works Cited. Deadline: November 1st, 2009.