Clark, Beverly Lyon 1948–

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Clark, Beverly Lyon 1948–

PERSONAL: Born December 6, 1948, in Pittsfield, MA; married, 1969; children: two. Education: Swarth-more College, B.A., 1970; Brown University, Ph.D., 1979.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Wheaton College, 26 E. Main St., Meneely 311, Norton, MA 02766-2322. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, editor, and educator. Wheaton College, Norton, MA, lecturer, assistant professor, associate professor, professor of English, 1977–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Phi Beta Kappa award; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship; Outstanding Academic Book award, Choice, for Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Melvin J. Friedman) Critical Essays on Flannery O'Connor, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1985.

Talking about Writing: A Guide for Tutor and Teacher Conferences, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1985.

Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror-Worlds of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1986.

Lewis Carroll, Starmont House (Mercer Island, WA), 1990.

(Editor, with Melvin J. Friedman) Critical Essays on Carson McCullers, G.K. Hall (New York, NY), 1996.

Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Margaret R. Higonnet) Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1999.

(Editor, with Janice M. Alberghene) Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1999.

Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2003.

(Editor) Louisa May Alcott: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature and the Norton Critical Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

SIDELIGHTS: Beverly Lyon Clark is a professor of English and author. In a biography on the Wheaton College Web site, Clark explains that she has two main scholarly interests: one involves the relationship between feminist theory and the criticism of children's literature, and the other, how children's literature was positioned academically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has written or edited book-length works on both of these topics.

Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America derives from Clark's interest in the place of children's literature in the academy. The book is an "exemplary contribution to children's literature studies," commented reviewer Cathryn M. Mercier in Horn Book. Clark seeks to trace the changing attitudes toward children's literature over the previous century and a half; to identify those changes that allowed the phrase "kiddie lit" to come into existence as a derogatory term; and to understand how modern readers and scholars are beginning to reevaluate children's literature and to find greater worth in it. She notes how in earlier times, little distinction was made between books and literature for adults and works intended for children. "Nineteenth-century literary critics did not segregate literature for children from that for adults; indeed, they often celebrated writers who cultivated a cross-generational appeal," reported liana Nash in the Women's Review of Books. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, readers and critics had begun to see children's literature as a separate category of written works. Clark suggests that the emergence of the United States as a twentieth-century superpower coincided with a maturation of tastes that made necessary a distinction between "high" and "low" literature. Good literature became the province of the elite and the mature, while bad literature was widely accepted and celebrated by the lower social classes and the masses at large. In the early twentieth century, children's literature came to be associated with the lower echelons of literature and was not recognized even as a vehicle educating children. Clark also notes that the venue of "good literature" was occupied mostly by male writers who represented rugged individualists struggling against the strictures of society. This view stood in opposition to the more cooperative women's world seen as being exemplified by children and domesticity. "Readers familiar with feminist literary criticism will find Clark's observations familiar, but her application of this material to children's issues is fresher," Nash commented. To place children's literature in its proper modern perspective, Clark encourages serious study of the genre in academic settings and in the hands of readers, Mercier noted. Nash concluded that Clark's "thorough documentation of the vagaries of the reception of 'kiddie lit' proves that our negative valuations of youth culture deserve rethinking."

Clark told CA: "It took me a while to turn to children's literature in my scholarship. I'd unthinkingly imbibed the prejudice against it common in college English departments. But I did include a chapter on Lewis Carroll in my dissertation. And when I was offered a chance to teach children's literature to undergraduates, I figured why not. (My ready acquiescence was a symptom of my lack of respect for the field. What could be so hard to teach about children's literature?) Needless to say, my attitude has since changed drastically. Now I love nothing better than to make a case, whether implicitly or explicitly, for the importance and indeed seriousness of literature for children and young adults."