̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - illustration

Earliest-known children’s adaptation of Japanese literary classic discovered in British Library

sjr81 — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 09:38:47 +0000

Dr Laura Moretti, from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, came across an unknown children’s picture-book, dating from 1766, under the title of Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari ( ̽��ֱ��Fashionable Ise: ̽��ֱ��Origins of Utagaruta) while on a study trip with her students.

̽��ֱ��British Library copy, part of the collection belonging to Sir Ernest Satow, a 19th century British scholar and diplomat, is a picture-book adaptation of Ise Monogatari. Translated into English as ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise, it is one of the most important works in Japanese literature and was originally composed probably in the late 9th century following the protagonist, Ariwara no Narihira, through his many romances, friendships and travels.

̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise has since been adapted and reinterpreted continually down the centuries as part of the canon of Japanese literature.

“If we were to hazard a comparison, ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise could be seen as the equivalent of the works of Shakespeare in terms of canonical status in Japan but I had never heard of or seen a children’s adaptation before – no-one knew of this book,” said Moretti. “This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. No one ever knew if it had been rewritten for children – but now we know. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.”

Dr Moretti’s new book, Recasting the Past (Brill, 2016), presents a full-colour reproduction of the 18th century edition, alongside a transcription in modern Japanese, an English translation, and textual analysis. ̽��ֱ��publication of the 1766 adaptation of the Tales of Ise fills a gap in scholars’ understanding of the work’s history. Although much scholarship has taken place on the reception of Tales of Ise and its target audiences in different epochs, no one has previously explored the age of its readership.

̽��ֱ��1766 introduction by the publisher shows that the book was intended to be read by children and there are various clues to support this view. ̽��ֱ��main character Narihira first appears as a young boy at school, a portrayal which encourages young people to identify with him. ̽��ֱ��whole text is also written using mainly the phonetic syllabary which could be understood by readers with only two years of schooling. ̽��ֱ��story was also abbreviated to include only 13 of the original 125 episodes – making it easily accessible to a broad readership and was useful for introducing those with basic literacy to Japan’s cultural heritage. ̽��ֱ��book would have educated children in the narrative of ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise as well as the aesthetic quality of the poetry.

Moretti, though, counters the notion that only children would have read Utagaruta no hajimari, and argues that the text could also work as a substitute of the ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise for those adults with limited linguistic and cultural literacy.

Now, after several years of negotiating the necessary permissions to use the two complete extant copies (one held at the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the other at the Gotoh Museum, both in Tokyo; alas the British Library copy has only one volume of three) and to finish the transcription, translation and textual analysis, Utagaruta is available again for readers to enjoy – more than 250 years after it was first printed.

While graphic novels and comic books such as manga remain hugely popular in Japan and across the world today, instances of books where images and text are interdependent abound in pre-modern and early-modern Japanese literature. In this specific case, Moretti shows that the primary function of images was to complement the prose by filling in the gaps left by the narrative. Images set the scene for the story and helped to characterize the protagonists by depicting their dress and physical appearance.

Moretti believes that studying this children’s adaptation can give a contribution to the study of children’s literature in general, discovering aspects that might not be apparent in other cultures.

“Utagaruta no hajimari, for example, is trying to draw children into the world of the adult, rather than shield them from it by introducing children to sex and appropriate romantic behaviour,” she said.

“A vast number of early-modern Japanese picture-books that adapt canonical literature awaits to be studied. This research is the first step in the foundation of this field of study. If appropriately developed, it has the potential to shed light onto new sides of children’s literature as well as to advance in the understanding of how early-modern Japanese graphic prose functioned.”

A chance discovery in the British Library has led to the discovery and reproduction of the earliest-known children’s adaptation of one of Japan’s greatest works of literature.

This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.

Laura Moretti

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Bunnies in children’s books: from Alice in Wonderland to Peter Rabbit

jeh98 — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 08:45:02 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Dr Zoe Jaques (Faculty of Education) is a lecturer in children’s literature. Her research spans fiction for children from 1800 to the present, and in particular how children’s fantasy participates in questions of what it means to be human. Here she answers questions about rabbits in children’s fiction.

What is the first fictional rabbit that comes to mind?

̽��ֱ��first rabbit that springs to my mind has to be Lewis Carroll’s albino bunny from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (simply because I’ve been so involved in the 150^th anniversary celebrations of the text this year).

He sparks Alice’s journey into Wonderland, and she encounters him many times. What piques Alice’s interest is that, like so many other literary bunnies, the White Rabbit has anthropomorphic action and curious attire (this rabbit, she notes, sports a waistcoat and carries a pocket watch). Tenniel’s original illustration of him is probably the best known, although Walt Disney’s animated version gives Tenniel a run for his money. Like Tenniel’s, the 1951 Disney White Rabbit wears a jacket and carries an umbrella, but he gains trousers to cover a bare rabbit bottom.

Other illustrators have invested the White Rabbit with all manner of additional traits; from Arthur Rackham’s slightly eerie looking version from 1907, through to Ralph Steadman's 1967 rendering of him as ‘today’s commuter’ or Helen Oxenbury’s more kindly, portly gentleman bunny of 1999. What is clear in most iterations of Carroll’s White Rabbit is that he is not to be regarded as a pet even if his white coat and pink eyes are suggestive of the domestic.

A hare features in Aesop’s fables, although these tales don’t really become associated with a child audience until the late 17th century. Certainly rabbits are mentioned in 18th century lesson books for children, but Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit has to be an early example of a rabbit character in texts specifically for a young audience.

Are rabbits universally popular in children’s literature?

Certainly they are popular in British children’s fiction; rabbits feature prominently in A A Milne’s ‘Pooh’ books, Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit series, Ivy Wallace’s ‘Pookie’ stories, Richard Adams’s Watership Down, and, of course, Beatrix Potter’s tales. But they also have a broader heritage; one might argue that the Peter Rabbit stories owe a great deal to Br’er Rabbit in the African-American folktales adapted by Joel Chandler Harris in the late 19th century. Beatrix Potter even illustrated eight scenes from the Br’er Rabbit Uncle Remus stories in the same years as she began her first sketches of Peter.

̽��ֱ��contexts of the tales are entirely different, but certainly Potter’s Peter recalls Br’er Rabbit in action, attitude and even gait. While Br’er Rabbit moves with a ‘lippity-clippity’ pace across the American south, Peter goes ‘lippity-lippity’ through the English country garden.

̽��ֱ��US also gives us a host of other infamous bunnies: from 1910, Howard R Garis wrote the Uncle Wiggily Longears stories, about an elderly rabbit with a cane; the toy-rabbit-made-real is the poignant motif of Margery Williams’s 1922 ̽��ֱ��Velveteen Rabbit and Margaret Wise Brown produced a number of bunny picturebooks. Walt Disney was also something of a pioneer when it came to the rabbit – Mickey Mouse began life as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. So although these rabbits might be distinct from their British cousins, there is certainly an Anglo-American interest in anthropomorphising the rabbit in narrative.

Why have some rabbits become so much a part of British culture?

There is something captivating about the rabbit, but this is not an exclusively western phenomenon. Chinese, Japanese and Korean folklore include tales of the Moon Rabbit, as does Buddhist tradition. ̽��ֱ��peculiarly British charm of Beatrix Potter’s tales made them immensely popular from the moment of their publication; more than 56,000 copies of ̽��ֱ��Tale of Peter Rabbit were printed in its first year of commercial sale.

Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Beatrix Potter’s tales appeal to a particular notion of childhood which may or may not have a great deal to do with real rabbits. Alice’s curiosity, piqued by spying the White Rabbit, and Peter’s charming disobedience make for two particular compelling but also class-conscious child characters.

̽��ֱ��interest in rabbits, and anthropomorphising them as characters, is perhaps rather a curious phenomenon in British culture. Rabbits occupy an almost untenable position as animals that we eat, experiment on, own as pets and make into characters in children’s books, all within the same cultural context. They are one of the few mammals to occupy all of these distinct subject positions simultaneously.

Some of this awkwardness emerges in Potter’s Tale of Peter Rabbit when Peter is threatened by the consumptive appetites of Mr McGregor (or, more truthfully, his wife, who had baked Peter’s father in a pie). This ‘accident’ is a light-hearted threat, but nevertheless it exposes the multifarious ways in which the rabbit is deployed – from a foodstuff, to a domesticated creature, to an anthropomorphic character aligned with the child reader – in British culture.

Do rabbits always play the rascal in children’s stories?

̽��ֱ��naughty rabbit is a popular motif, although the rabbit has broader associations, including as an arbiter of moral good. ̽��ֱ��Easter bunny, originally a hare, was once known for his judgments on children’s behaviour at Eastertide and handing out gifts accordingly.

Rabbits in children’s fiction sometimes assume a rather saccharine sweetness (the Flopsy, Mopsey and Cotton-tails, perhaps, when compared to the Peters). ̽��ֱ��toy rabbit of Margery Williams’s tale navigates this line quite effectively. ̽��ֱ��velveteen rabbit is no rascal, but he isn’t insipid either, and his tale of becoming a ‘real’ rabbit is marked by its frank depiction of a child’s waning affections (which might well apply to a toy rabbit or a pet one).

Rabbits are also associated with luck: Disney’s Oswald is a ‘lucky’ rabbit, Br’er Rabbit proves himself a lucky escape artist (as, of course, does Peter), and the ‘lucky’ rabbit’s foot’ is a tradition that exists in many cultures (although not so lucky for the rabbit in question).

What do rabbit characters do for us: are we really trying to see from an animal’s point of view?

Many texts, especially those written for children, assume the point of view of an animal. ̽��ֱ��animal autobiography has a long history, made most famous by Anna Sewell in her 1877 Black Beauty, but including earlier texts such as Francis Coventry’s ̽��ֱ��History of Pompey the Little (1751) or Dorothy Kilner’s ̽��ֱ��Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783).

There is something compelling about the notion that certain humans are able to talk to animals in their own language, but it is also a practice in everyday communication with pets and young children. We ‘converse’ with babies and pets, assuming both sides of the conversation and translating the actions of the child, dog or cat into a response.

On the one hand, these acts of translation might be considered reductive, in that they communicate an animal or child voice only through a human adult. But they also bespeak an interest in reaching across a divide to ‘know’ another person or creature. ̽��ֱ��representation of animals in literature works in much the same way: often animals are made to parrot human concerns. Black Beauty, for example, is as much concerned with the subjugation of women as it is with equine husbandry.

I would argue that it is impossible to ‘use’ an animal only as a symbol of something else. Animal representation automatically stimulates reflection upon real animals and their relations with human readers or viewers, even if that is not the primary purpose of the narrative.

Why do we sometimes depict animals in clothing?

We might argue that there is a merely a romantic charm to it. There is a gaiety to a text like William Rocoe’s ̽��ֱ��Butterfly’s Ball (1807) where animals are dressed up as humans to indulge in the delights of parties. Something similar occurs in the messing about in boats of Kenneth Graham’s ̽��ֱ��Wind in the Willows (1908), although this text is also invested in moments of parody and nostalgia. ̽��ֱ��same impulses inflect narratives of toys coming to life or of miniature communities like those in Mary Norton’s ‘Borrower’ books.

But dressing animals as humans also offers a playful engagement with the boundary between the human and the animal – a line which is both well established and rather strange, given that humans are, of course, just one of many mammals. By imagining ways in which non-human animals can be human-like, this boundary becomes much more permeable. Although dressing as a human might have little to do with animal subjectivity, it brings humans and animals into closer contact. It clouds the distinctions between humans and animals, and indeed between animal species.

Humans are the only animals which can ever be ‘made naked’, and clothing animals introduces some rather awkward and demeaning constructions of the animal which can dislocate the creatures from their natures for distinctly human ends.

Why are animals rather than human characters often used in moral tales?

There is a pervasive critical view that ‘using’ animals makes a moral a little more palatable. Although dressing an animal up might bring human and animal closer in some ways, there is still a distancing that can ‘lighten’ narrative didacticism. Animals also provide a ‘veneer’ for distinctly human narratives; although I would argue that the animality of the protagonists is never entirely lost. Political satires such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) or autobiographical tales such as Han Christian Andersen’s ̽��ֱ��Ugly Ducking (1843) operate in exactly this fashion.

I think one of the main reasons why animals are deployed in children’s fiction so readily – whether in morality tales of otherwise – is because of the sense that there is a special closeness between children and animals that is lost in adulthood. Authors of children’s books have capitalised on this connection.

̽��ֱ��animal story is almost entirely reserved for young readers, with the exception of the occasional satirical text in which animals play a part but are rarely the focus. Part of the civilising process of growing up seems to be the putting away of childish things – towards an acceptance of a boundary between human and animal with the former in a position of dominance over the other. This is perhaps why there are far fewer young adult fictions concerned with animals. It is a pity that the possibilities of the animal story are not more readily available to an adult audience, too.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: S is for an animal that was the foundation of pre-industrial wealth and the subject of paintings by a visionary member of the 'Ancients'.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: illustration of the White Rabbit from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by John Tenniel (Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library); illustration of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby, drawing by E.W. Kemble from ̽��ֱ��Tar-Baby, by Joel Chandler Harris (Wikimedia Commons); illustration of Peter being chased by Mr MacGregor from ̽��ֱ��Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (Wikimedia Commons); illustration from ̽��ֱ��Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (Wikimedia Commons); cover of the novel Black Beauty, first edition 1877 (Wikimedia Commons); illustration of Peter being dressed by his mother from ̽��ֱ��Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (Wikimedia Commons); illustration of the tortoise and the hare from Aesop for Children by Aesop, illustrated by Milo Winter (Wikimedia Commons).

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, R is for Rabbit, as we talk to Dr Zoe Jaques about the bunny's crucial place in the history of children's fiction.

̽��ֱ��interest in rabbits, and anthropomorphising them as characters, is perhaps rather a curious phenomenon in British culture

Zoe Jaques

Illustration of Peter Rabbit from ̽��ֱ��Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Alice through the ages: revisiting a classic at 150

amb206 — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 08:14:19 +0000

Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece was first published in July 1865 and has never been out of print. Its remarkable appeal is marked this week by a programme of events based at Homerton College, Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��five-day celebration includes a conference, film-screenings, performances and a children’s tea party. Some events are open to the general public.

Wonderland Week at Homerton College has been organised by a small team led by Dr Zoe Jaques and Professor Maria Nikolajeva from the Faculty of Education. Jaques’ research explores the ways in which Alice in Wonderland is “more than just a book”. Alice was based on a real-life girl, Alice Liddell, but became an icon of girlhood subject to constant transformation.

In the accompanying audio slide show, Jaques discusses representations of Alice – right from the John Tenniel drawings used to illustrate the first edition to portrayals by contemporary illustrators such as Barry Moser, Anthony Browne and Helen Oxenbury. She shows how Alice’s age and looks have been skilfully reimagined to fit with changing audiences.

A five-day programme of events at Homerton College, Cambridge, will celebrate the publication, 150 years ago, of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Here, Dr Zoe Jaques, a lecturer in children’s literature, explores images of Alice from the first edition onwards.

Alice through the ages

An illustration from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by John Tenniel

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Image permissions courtesy of Walker Books. Any use of the images included in this article is strictly prohibited under copyright law and appropriate image licenses from relevant copyright holders must be arranged before including these images in any published works.

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