Book 2.0 - Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2013

A succinct history of the rise of synthetic phonics and the fall of literacy, from the late 1970s to 2012 in the UK. Includes discussion on how government reports, from the 1975 Bullock Report to the 2009 Rose Report, contributed to the ascendance of phonics as the only legislated method of reading instruction.

This paper discusses the six pages of free-form drawing in the middle of Maurice Sendak’s Bumble-Ardy, in terms of Japanese Nobel laureate Kenzaburô Ôe’s idea of ‘reiterative divergence,’ by which ‘meaning emerges [within a text] from the progression of slight variations’. I contextualize my cross-cultural borrowing by discussing Ôe’s analysis of Sendak’s Outside Over There, and exploring its revelatory and interpretive functions within Ôe’s novel, The Changeling. Beginning from the premise that Sendak is affirming his art as a mode of self-expression and self-revelation for which he has created both private and cultural symbols that he repeats and varies, I reference Sendak’s published interviews in an attempt to identify areas of significant personal interest—such as death, music, art, the purpose and function of artistic expression, sexuality and love. I also provide textual evidence for the claim that Outside Over There provides the Ur-text for this centre cut of Bumble-Ardy; As an example of reiterative divergence as a mode of critical explication, I advance an original interpretation of Outside Over There, suggesting that the central meaning of the text lies in Ida’s need to come to terms with the loss of her father, a mirror image of Sendak’s own yearning for a ‘lost’ daughter.

This article traces the process of composition of the opera version of Where the Wild Things Are, libretto and set and costume designs by Maurice Sendak and music by Oliver Knussen. The article looks in particular at how elements in early drafts of Where the Wild Things Are – especially motifs in a version entitled Where the Wild Horses Are – which were deleted from the published text of Where the Wild Things Are were reintroduced into the opera. The article also compares the early lives of both Sendak and the composer Knussen, and reflects on their shared tastes in music for children and the success of their collaboration.

This article explores the visual research undertaken by an illustrator in response to a manuscript written for children by the author, Linda Newbery, published by David Fickling Books in 2010. In response to the text, the illustrator documents the variety of forms in which imagery for publication is researched and created, with emphasis on the role that the sketchbook can play as a research tool for the illustrator.

Based on archival research, this essay traces the travels and transformations in a little known, religious flap book The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, circulating as both a published and home-produced text for around two hundred years. Composed as a strip with flaps that could be turned up or down either with or against the grain of the narrative, it contains simple rhymes with crude woodcut images. Directed to a wide audience, including children, it was first published in England during the Civil War, and occasionally re-published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century it traveled to America, was reworked into a book format and repurposed as a literacy text for a gendered child audience. It continued to be published for another hundred years. In both counties children made their own versions as domestic activities.

In focusing on the interaction between various mediations of the fairy tale, Zipes refutes dichotomies of print vs oral controversies that scholars – especially Willem de Blécourt in Tales of Magic, Tales of Print (2011) and Ruth Bottigheimer in Fairy Tales: A New History (2009) – have been promoting to paint a misinformed history of fairy tales as having literary (rather than oral) origins. Zipes changes the terms of the debate by arguing that researchers should turn their attention to recent sophisticated and innovative theories of storytelling, cultural evolution, human communication and memetics to see how fairy tales enable us to understand why we are disposed towards them and how they ‘breathe’ life into our daily undertakings.

Night Thoughts, the Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne, Robert Fraser (2012) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 496 pp., ISBN: 019958140, h/bk, £30.00