Along the "Paragraphic Wires": Child–Adult Mediation in St. Nicholas Magazine

Abstract

Through an examination of two of St. Nicholas’s most popular departments, “Jack-in-the-Pulpit” and “The Letter-Box,” this paper explores the way the magazine and its editor resist conventions of adult-child separation and encourage instead generationally hybrid subjectivities, from the ambiguously aged “Jack” to the literate and literary child’s disidentification with childhood.

Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star as Counter-Narrative for American Indian History-Telling

“…"Rather than conceive of the child and adult as lives and identities a world apart, St. Nicholas invite[d] its readers and contributors, regardless of age, to imagine themselves as members of hybridized community, capable of inhabiting and communicating" and learning together in a "medial" space cutting across what might otherwise be separate "sociological interiors." 9 Related to such age-bridging family literacy practices, as Robin Cadwallader and LuElla D'Amico have observed, was a gendered conception of girlhood and writing/ reading about girls that would also have been a significant influence on Goodale Eastman's Yellow Star. Noting how texts like Louisa May Alcott's Little Women encouraged their "contemporaneous readers" to resist pinpointing girls' precise ages and instead maintained a sense of girlhood identity for characters even into courtship and marriage, Cadwallader and D'Amico emphasize that the literary figure of the "girl" in American culture of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century cast such characters as a "construct," one serving as "a site of possibility" and "represent[ing] hope for new ideas and new ways of seeing the world" via an agency "inextricably intertwined with national identity."…”

The Case of Children's Literature: Colonial or Anti-Colonial?

“…Another approach used by children's literature scholars is to treat what Rose has said as a rule to which specific texts might be regarded as exceptions. Thus, Michelle H. Phillips (2009) argues that the children's magazine St Nicholas departs from 'normal' conditions of textual production for children because, in contrast to Rose's view of a model where 'the adult comes first ... and the child comes after' (Rose, 1984, pp. 1-2), the child-adult interplay which characterised the production of St Nicholas was conducted along democratic and collaborative lines.…”