Critical Approaches

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature
Series Editors: Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature is an innovative series concerned with
the best contemporary scholarship and criticism on children’s and young adult
literature, film, and media texts. The series addresses new and developing areas
of children’s literature research as well as bringing contemporary perspectives to
historical texts. The series has a distinctive take on scholarship, delivering qual-
ity works of criticism written in an accessible style for a range of readers, both
academic and professional. The series is invaluable for undergraduate students in
children’s literature as well as advanced students and established scholars.
Titles include:
Cherie Allan
PLAYING WITH PICTURE BOOKS
Postmodern and the Postmodernesque
Clare Bradford, Kerry Mallan, John Stephens & Robyn McCallum
NEW WORLD ORDERS IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
Alice Curry
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS IN YOUNG ADULT FICTION
A Poetics of Earth
Helen A. Fairlie
REVALUING BRITISH BOYS’ STORY PAPERS, 1918–1939
Margaret Mackey
NARRATIVE PLEASURES IN YOUNG ADULT NOVELS, FILMS AND VIDEO
GAMES
Kerry Mallan
SECRETS, LIES AND CHILDREN’S FICTION
Andrew O’Malley
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, POPULAR CULTURE AND ROBINSON CRUSOE
Christopher Parkes
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CAPITALISM
Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914
Amy Ratelle
ANIMALITY AND CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND FILM
Karen Sands-O’Connor & Marietta Frank
INTERNATIONALISM IN CHILDREN’S SERIES
Hazel Sheeky Bird
CLASS, LEISURE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BRITISH CHILDREN’S
LITERATURE, 1918–1950
Michelle Smith
EMPIRE IN BRITISH GIRLS’ LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Forthcoming titles:
Victoria Flanagan
TECHNOLOGY AND IDENTITY IN YOUNG ADULT FICTION
The Posthuman Subject
Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

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Seriality and Texts for
Young People
The Compulsion to Repeat
Edited by
Mavis Reimer
Nyala Ali
Deanna England
and
Melanie Dennis Unrau
Introduction, Selection and Editorial Matter © Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali,
Deanna England and Melanie Dennis Unrau 2014
Individual chapters © Contributors 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35599-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN 978-1-349-47037-2 ISBN 978-1-137-35600-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137356000
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Seriality and texts for young people: the compulsion to repeat / edited by
Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England and Melanie Dennis Unrau.
pages cm.—(Critical approaches to children’s literature)
Summary: “Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen original,
scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth. Each
begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition and explores
what that means for a range of primary texts, including popular narrative series for
children, comics, magazines, TV series, and digital texts. Contributors featured include
internationally recognized scholars such as Perry Nodelman, Margaret Mackey, and
Laurie Langbauer, and the essays cover texts such as the Harry Potter novels, Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, and Anne of Green Gables. The introduction provides a framework for
the detailed explorations, reviewing some of the most important contemporary theories
of repetition, pointing to some key criticism on series, and speculating on the signifi-
cance of the series form for the field of young people’s texts”—Provided by publisher.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-349-47037-2
1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. 2. Repetition in literature. 3. Young
adult fiction—History and criticism. I. Reimer, Mavis, editor. II. Ali, Nyala,
editor. III. England, Deanna, editor. IV. Unrau, Melanie Dennis, editor.
PN1009.A1S359 2014
809'.89282—dc23 2014026139
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Dedicated to the memory of
Dr. Eliza T. Dresang
(1941–2014)
whose presentation about young readers of series texts
set this collection in motion
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Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Series Editors’ Preface x
Preface and Acknowledgements xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: The Compulsion to Repeat 1

Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and
1 Off to See the Wizard Again and Again 34
Laurie Langbauer
2 “Anne repeated”: Taking Anne Out of Order 57
Laura M. Robinson
3 Kierkegaard’s Repetition and the Reading Pleasures of
Repetition in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving
Castle Series 74
Rose Lovell-Smith
4 Harry Potter Fans Discover the Pleasures of Transfiguration 95
Eliza T. Dresang and Kathleen Campana
5 Girls, Animals, Fear, and the Iterative Force of the
National Pack: Reading the Dear Canada Series 111
charlie peters
6 “But what is his country?”: Producing Australian Identity
through Repetition in the Victorian School Paper, 1896–1918 129
Michelle J. Smith
7 Serializing Scholarship: (Re)Producing Girlhood in Atalanta 149
Kristine Moruzi
8 “I will not / be haunted / by myself!”: Originality,
Derivation, and the Hauntology of the Superhero Comic 166
Brandon Christopher
9 Michael Yahgulanaas’s Red and the Structures of
Sequential Art 188
Perry Nodelman
vii
viii Contents
10 The Beloved That Does Not Bite: Genre, Myth, and

Repetition in Buffy the Vampire Slayer 206
Debra Dudek
11 Roy and the Wimp: The Nature of an Aesthetic of Unfinish 218
Margaret Mackey
12 MP3 as Contentious Message: When Infinite Repetition
Fuses with the Acoustic Sphere 237
Larissa Wodtke
13 The Little Transgender Mermaid: A Shape-Shifting Tale 258
Nat Hurley
Index 281
List of Illustrations
1.1 Frank L. Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz

Illust. John R. Neill 42
6.1 “State Schools’ Demonstration Before the Duke and
Duchess of Cornwall and York” 138
7.1 “Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union” 160
8.1 Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu, Superman: Birthright;
Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, “Superman” 171
8.2 Alan Moore and Shawn McManus, “The Burial” 180
8.3 Alan Moore and Ron Randall, “Abandoned Houses”;
Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, “Swamp Thing” 181
9.1 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga 189
9.2 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga 200
ix
Series Editors’ Preface
The Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature series was initiated in

2008 by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford. The aim of the series is to
identify and publish the best contemporary scholarship and criticism
on children’s and young adult literature, film, and media texts. The
series is open to theoretically informed scholarship covering a wide
range of critical perspectives on historical and contemporary texts from
diverse national and cultural settings. Critical Approaches aims to make
a significant contribution to the expanding field of children’s literature
research by publishing quality books that promote informed discussion
and debate about the production and reception of children’s literature
and its criticism.
Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford
x
Preface and Acknowledgements
Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat is the result
of an international, invitational symposium on the topic of Narrative,
Repetition, and Texts for Young People that took place in June 2011
at The University of Winnipeg in Canada. The symposium was hosted
by a graduate class in Cultural Studies, which was studying theories of
repetition alongside narratives for young people. Participants developed
their presentations into full, scholarly essays after the symposium, mak-
ing use of the lively, cumulative discussions to hone their arguments.
A selection of those essays is published here. The process of develop-
ment of this project has meant that the essayists in this collection have
made use of one another’s work, with the result that there are overlaps,
resonances, and tensions among the chapters.
In addition to Mavis Reimer, who taught the course, the editors of
this collection and the authors of the introduction were all among the
graduate students who first wrestled with a number of major philo-
sophical and theoretical statements about the principle of repetition as
part of their course, then acted as facilitators and respondents for the
presentations at the symposium. Those students who elected to carry on
with the project collaborated with Reimer to bring the essays together
into a book collection. They worked closely with the logic of the essays
as editorial readers, and returned to the theoretical formulations to
frame an introduction that asks whether repetition is an obvious fact
or an impossible idea, or somehow both at once, and what any of this
might have to do with texts designed for an audience of young people.
The editors would like to acknowledge their colleagues who were
unable to follow this project through to completion: thanks to Justin
Girard, Angela Sylvester, Amalia Slobogian, Nicole Necsefor, and Jocelyn
Sakal Froese for their contributions to our thinking. Thanks, too, to
the participants whose scholarly contributions and lively presence
at the symposium were critical to the developing conversations but
whose finished work will appear in other contexts: Kate Behr, William
Ganis, Kevin Mitchell, Andrew O’Malley, and Catherine Tosenberger.
The support of the Office of Research Services at The University of
Winnipeg and the Canada Research Chairs program of the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada made it possible for the
Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures to host the
xi
xii Preface and Acknowledgements
symposium and to prepare this collection. Larissa Wodtke and charlie

peters, in addition to authoring chapters in this volume, have provided
research, administrative, and technical assistance throughout the pro-
ject. Thanks to Kevin Mitchell for his initial exploratory research for
the symposium and to Josina Robb for her work with the manuscript.
The images from Superman: Birthright, The Saga of Swamp Thing #28,
The Saga of Swamp Thing #33, and The House of Secrets #92 are used with
the permission of DC Comics. The images from Red: A Haida Manga are
used with the permission of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.
Notes on Contributors
Nyala Ali holds a Master’s in Cultural Studies from The University of

Winnipeg. She has been published in Networking Knowledge: Journal of
the MeCCSA-PGN. Her current research interests include graphic novels,
girlhood studies, and the intersection(s) between music fandom studies,
gender, and critical race theory.
Kathleen Campana is a PhD student in the Information School at the

University of Washington. She has a background in school and corpo-
rate libraries. Her current research focuses on the information behaviour
and environments of children and youth, with a focus on the role that
technology plays in their environment.
Brandon Christopher is Assistant Professor of English at The University

of Winnipeg where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and early mod-
ern literature and culture. Along with publications on early modern
administration and early modern drama, he is currently at work on a
monograph entitled Shakespeare and Comics/Comics and Shakespeare.
Eliza T. Dresang, Beverly Cleary Professor for Children and Youth

Services, University of Washington Information School, is widely recog-
nized for her Radical Change theory; she received the 2007 American
Library Association/Scholastic Publishing Award for “unusual contribu-
tion to the stimulation and guidance of reading by children and young
people.” Professor Dresang passed away in April 2014.
Debra Dudek works at the University of Wollongong, Australia as a Senior

Lecturer in English Literatures, as an Associate Dean (International), and
as Director of the Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies. She has pub-
lished internationally on children’s literature in Papers, Jeunesse: Young
People, Texts, Cultures, Children’s Literature in Education, Ariel, and Keywords
for Children’s Literature.
Deanna England has an honours degree in Psychology and a Master’s

in Cultural Studies from The University of Winnipeg where she now
holds the position of Graduate Studies Officer. She is a regular contribu-
tor to the University of Venus blog, a collaborative venture hosted on
the Inside Higher Education website.
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
Nat Hurley is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film

Studies at the University of Alberta, where she specializes in the fields
of American Literature, Children’s Literature, and Queer Theory. She
is the editor of a special double issue of ESC: English Studies in Canada
on “Childhood and Its Discontents,” co-editor (with Steven Bruhm) of
Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, co-winner of the Foerster Prize
for best essay in American Literature, and winner of the F. E. L. Priestley
Prize for best essay in ESC: English Studies in Canada.
Laurie Langbauer is a professor of English at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill. She recently completed a book, Youth and
Prolepsis: Teenage Writers in Britain, 1750–1835. Her work on young
authors appears in PMLA, RaVon, and elsewhere.
Rose Lovell-Smith is a senior lecturer in the English Department at

the University of Auckland. Her research and teaching interests include
children’s literature, illustration of fiction for older child readers,
nineteenth-century fiction, feminist writing, oral narratives and the
fairy tale, self-writing, and women’s fiction generally.
Margaret Mackey is a professor in the School of Library and Information

Studies at the University of Alberta. She teaches, researches, and pub-
lishes in the field of multimodal literacies. Her most recent book
is Narrative Pleasures in Young Adult Novels, Films, and Video Games
(Palgrave 2011).
Kristine Moruzi is an associate lecturer at Deakin University. She

completed a Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University
of Alberta in 2012, where she examined representations of Canadian
girlhood in literature published between 1840 and 1940. This project
builds on her monograph Constructing Girlhood Through the Periodical
Press, 1850–1914 (2012).
Perry Nodelman is Professor Emeritus of English at The University of

Winnipeg. The author of three books and more than 150 essays and
chapters in books on various aspects of literature for young people, he
has also published a number of children’s novels.
charlie peters is an independent scholar who has taught courses at

The University of Winnipeg, where she has been an editor of Jeunesse:
Young People, Texts, Cultures and an associate of the Centre for Research
in Young People’s Texts and Cultures. charlie’s research interests include
ontology, nineteenth-century literature, representations of indigeneity,
and cultures of childhood.
Notes on Contributors xv
Mavis Reimer is Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and

Cultures, Professor of English, and Dean of Graduate Studies at The
University of Winnipeg. She is lead editor of the scholarly journal
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; co-author, with Perry Nodelman,
of The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (3rd ed., 2003); collaborator on
the picture book Pıˉsim Finds Her Miskanow (2013); and editor of the
collection of essays Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in
Canada (2008), among other contributions to the field.
Laura M. Robinson is an associate professor and Head of the English

Department at the Royal Military College of Canada. She has published
articles about Canadian children’s literature, Canadian women writers,
and The L-Word, in addition to many articles on L. M. Montgomery’s
work. Her current project examines Montgomery’s depiction of
friendship and sexuality.
Michelle J. Smith is a research fellow in the Centre for Memory,

Imagination and Invention at Deakin University, Australia. She is the
author of Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls,
1880–1915 (Palgrave 2011), and co-editor, with Kristine Moruzi, of
Girls’ School Stories, 1749–1929 (2013) and Colonial Girlhood in Literature,
Culture and History, 1840–1950 (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a contributing editor at Geez magazine. Her
academic work has been published in the Journal of the Motherhood
Initiative for Research and Community Involvement. Her new poetry collec-
tion is Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (2013). She has an MA from
The University of Winnipeg.
Larissa Wodtke is Research Coordinator at the Centre for Research in

Young People’s Texts and Cultures at The University of Winnipeg and
Managing Editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures.
Her research interests include digital media and humanities, memory
studies, and the intersection of music, labour, and politics.
Introduction: The Compulsion
to Repeat
Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and
There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people:

while series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for chil-
dren and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth
century,1 the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the
development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people.
The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-alone,
high-quality texts of literary fiction. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in
the Willows (1908), for example, has occupied critics in the field far
more often and more significantly than all of the 46 popular novels
about schoolgirls with similar plots that were published by Grahame’s
contemporary, Angela Brazil (beginning in 1904 with A Terrible Tomboy).
Literary fiction such as Grahame’s tends to be defined in terms of its
singularity – the unique voice of the narrator, unusual resolutions to
narrative dilemmas, intricate formal designs, and complicated themes –
often specifically as distinct from the formulaic patterns of series fiction.
Yet, curiously, scholars typically use examples from literary fiction
to illustrate the common characteristics of books directed to young
readers: it was Grahame’s book, and not Brazil’s books, that appeared
in the Children’s Literature Association’s list Touchstones as one of the
“distinguished children’s books” the study of which “will allow us to
better understand children’s literature in general,” according to Perry
Nodelman, who chaired the committee that produced the list (2).
Traditionally, few titles from series appeared on lists of awards, hon-
ours usually decided by professional readers. Kathleen Chamberlain has
demonstrated, in fact, that one group of professional readers – children’s
librarians in the United States in the early twentieth century – established
1
2 Seriality and Texts for Young People
their cultural authority through their campaigns against series literature

for young people as worthy of inclusion on library shelves, much less
on prize lists. Since the mid-1990s, this exclusion of series from prizes
has been less prevalent, although award-winning titles – such as, for
example, Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (which won the Guardian
Children’s Fiction Prize in 1996) or Kenneth Oppel’s Sunwing (which
won the Canadian Library Association’s Book of the Year Award in
2000) – are often titles in limited, “progressive” series, a type of series
defined by Victor Watson as sequential narratives “in which a con-
tinuous and developing story is told in instalments” (“Series Fiction”
532). Over the same period of time, the interest in series books among
common readers has exploded. Beginning in the 1980s, there was an
exponential increase in the titles from series for young people dominat-
ing the bestseller lists, with such American series as Choose Your Own
Adventure (1979–98), The Baby-sitters Club (1986–2000), Goosebumps
(1992–97), and Animorphs (1996–2001) leading the way. Mapping the
“political economy” of children’s literature at the end of the twentieth
century, Joel Taxel reports one of his informants in the book business as
characterizing the decade of the 1990s as being all about “series, series,
series” (168). Indeed, in the spring of 1994, when The New York Times
produced lists of children’s bestsellers for the first time since 1978, edi-
tors found that a major change was that the most popular books on the
new lists were series titles, “overwhelmingly, the new ‘Goosebumps’
series” (Lipson).
While most of the popular American series of this period are what
Watson calls “successive” series, “in which the characters show few
signs of growing older or changing in any significant way” (“Series
Fiction” 533), it was a “progressive” series that confirmed the enhanced
status of the series in publishing for young people. J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series (1997–2007) – a blockbuster, international success
discussed by Eliza Dresang and Kathleen Campana in this volume – has
reconfigured the field of young people’s texts and cultures. Rebekah
Fitzsimmons observes that “[t]he phrase ‘Harry Potter effect’ has been
used to explain everything from the books’ effect on the [New York]
Times [bestseller] list … to Scholastic stock prices … to children’s reading
habits …” (102n1). In her historical survey of “the convergence points
between children’s literature and the bestseller list” (80), Fitzsimmons
focuses on the radical restructuring of the Times lists in 2000 that was
provoked by the popularity of Rowling’s series and outlines the ways
in which this restructuring “made visible” the roles of such a list “as
a mechanism for book promotion and management” (80) and as an
Mavis Reimer, Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau 3
instrument of category maintenance (particularly categories of class

and age). Seriality has long been suspected by taste-making critics of
exploiting children’s untutored desires, as Laurie Langbauer demon-
strates in her essay on the Oz series in this volume; a consequence of
the extravagant popularity of the Potter series seems to be the unsettling
of the authority of those tastemakers (cf. Fitzsimmons 103n5). Indeed,
the credentialing system of prizes for books for young people appears to
have been inverted in response to the contemporary popularity of series
texts: one of the results of the high praise accorded to David Almond’s
1998 literary novel Skellig by professional readers,2 for example, was the
production and distribution of a prequel, My Name is Mina, in 2010.
In the twenty-first century, to talk about seriality is necessarily to talk
about texts in multiple forms and modes. The essays by Debra Dudek,
Margaret Mackey, and Larissa Wodtke in this volume explore the trans-
mutation of texts for young people across media platforms and the
ways in which such shifts affect the marketing of texts to young people
and the reception of those texts. To find new audiences through the
use of new media is an obvious objective of films produced as spin-offs
from print series, films which are themselves typically produced in
series. Publishers clearly assume that the effect can also be reversed,
that film series can secure readers for print series: the trilogy of films
based on C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series (2005, 2008,
2010), for example, renewed interest in those post-World-War-II books
and resulted in the rerelease of the novels with covers featuring the
Pevensie children as depicted by the movie franchise.3 Television series
for young people have developed along parallel tracks, often defining
the shared textual heritage of a generation of young people and inspir-
ing the production of supplementary print and film series. Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, the subject of Dudek’s essay, is one example of such a
multiplying text. Buffy was a film (1992) before it was a television series
(1997–2003), a series which spawned a second television series (Angel,
1999–2004), a series of novels, a card game, magazines, role-playing
game books, video games, and a series of comic books, among other
cultural objects. Indeed, there are so many and so many kinds of Buffy
texts that fans simply refer to the whole interconnected system as “the
Buffyverse.”
Critics of texts for young people have begun to respond to the mar-
ket trends, although it is still common for scholars to begin essays on
series texts by noting the general critical dismissal of these narratives
by other scholars. For example, writing about A Series of Unfortunate
Events in 2010, Danielle Russell observes that, despite the popularity of
series texts with readers and the “sheer volume of series fiction” (36),
critical responses to series texts remain, as they have been since the
nineteenth century, “often condescending, if not condemning” (22).
Our analysis of prize lists and criticism since the 1990s suggests the
emergence of a more nuanced picture. Undoubtedly there is a residual
tendency for some adults to assume that series books are low-quality
reading for the young, but recent conferences in the field are likely to
feature many papers on popular series beside papers on literary texts,
and an increasing amount of the space in scholarly journals is taken up
by such discussions. To take one specific example, in the 1990 issue of
the annual Children’s Literature, eight of the nine scholarly articles focus
on literary texts,4 while the ninth considers the centrality of the idea of
home to children’s literature, using examples from five literary child-
ren’s novels as evidence.5 Series texts appear only in the book review
section, where an essay considers three recently published critical
studies about historical series books; by way of introduction, reviewer
Anita Susan Grossman observes that the research represented by the
studies “serves a real need … created by decades of silence … about
these books,” but also regrets that most of the writers who address series
books are not “literary scholars, and much of their prose has a fanzine
quality” (173–74). In contrast, of the nine scholarly articles published
in the 2012 annual, six focus on series texts and their authors, and,
of those six, three are about popular contemporary series, including
Fitzsimmons’s account of “the Harry Potter effect.”6 Journal editors
know that essays about popular series attract readership, not an insig-
nificant matter in an era in which articles, disaggregated from the issues
in which they originally appeared when they are uploaded to Internet
databases, can be an important source of revenue. For example, read-
ership metrics from Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures reveal that
the most frequently downloaded article from that journal, by a large
margin, is an essay about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.7
Nevertheless, despite the amount of discussion about series texts,
relatively little has been said about the principle of seriality itself as an
aspect of the meaning of these texts. Of the 53 volumes and essays about
The Twilight Saga indexed in the Modern Languages Association data-
base as of March 2013, for example, none lists seriality or repetition as a
subject term. Many of these studies note the popularity of the series and
the archetypal resonances of the Saga’s plot and characters – both ideas
that imply forms of repetition – but much of the scholarly discussion
focuses on the conflicts that might be said to be the manifest content
of the Saga, most obviously, on the central problem of Bella’s choice
between vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black as hetero-

sexual male partner. What is characterized as the Team Edward–Team
Jacob contest in the marketing organized to promote the purchase of
such spin-off merchandise as necklaces, shirts, buttons, and tote bags is
seen, not surprisingly, as a more complicated and significant choice by
the scholars. For the most part, however, scholarly work on The Twilight
Saga is interested in the same issues as those exploited by the commer-
cial campaigns, and does not explicitly consider how the repetitions
and variations of the scene of Bella’s choice – staged over a sequence of
texts across a span of time – might frame, open, or limit the meanings
of that choice.
The relative lack of attention to seriality as a formal principle is true
not only of the study of series texts directed to audiences of young
people but also of the study of series texts generally. Shane Denson
observes that cultural studies has been “less interested in the seriality of
popular forms than in the popularity of serial forms,” with research “char-
acteristically directed towards understanding what kinds of (typically
innovative, unforeseen, and subversive) things audiences were doing
with mass-produced series” (1). The emergent theoretical and critical
work on series, according to Denson, moves away from audience stud-
ies to what he considers to be “larger questions” “about the discursive
construction and sociocultural negotiation of value in, through, and
around serial forms”; about the relation of serial forms to industrial
and post-industrial forms of production; and about the roles of various
media “in shaping the narrative and aesthetic characteristics of serial
entertainments in particular and, more generally, the modern lifeworld
that informs and is informed by them” (1–2). The context of Denson’s
comments is his summary of the proceedings of a graduate student
conference that took place in Amsterdam in 2011 under the title “To be
continued”: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective,
one of a cluster of conferences that have occurred since the beginning
of the twenty-first century on repetition and serial forms.8
It is the objective of this volume to begin to explore the ways in
which investigating seriality as practice and form in the field of young
people’s texts might point not only to the meanings of particular
series texts but also to the cultural functions of series texts for young
people and, more generally, to the ways in which young people’s texts
function within culture. We hope that this volume will help to shape
a critical conversation in the field. Clearly, it would have been possi-
ble to organize the conversation in a variety of ways – historically, by
national context of production, by genre, or by medium. We chose,
rather, to begin by asking, what principle or principles distinguish

series texts from literary texts? The characteristic that presented itself
as the most obviously distinctive is the extent of repetition supported
by the serial form.
There is a widespread understanding among critics of series texts that,
as Denson puts it, “a system of repetition and variation” is “the basic
stuff of seriality itself” (5). Catherine Sheldrick Ross, reviewing a cen-
tury of “dime novels” and series books for children, for example, notes
that “a key problem of seriality” is “how to achieve both continuity
and variety” (200). Scholars who study series fiction for young readers
often emphasize repetition rather than variation in their descriptions.
Watson, for example, locates the importance of series fiction for young
readers in its demonstration of “the most important reading-secret of
all,” namely that the “profoundly private pleasures” of fiction “are
repeatable and entirely within the reader’s control” (Reading Series
Fiction 1). In her annotated bibliography of teen series, Silk Makowski
uses the analogy of performance to suggest that single texts of fiction
are like “one-night stand[s],” while series aim to provide the reader
with “that same grand experience night after night, week after week,
year after year, ad infinitum” (2). At the beginning of an article that
eventually explores the differences inherent in repetition, Jane Newland
summarizes Makowski’s observation by detailing some of the ways
in which series fiction can be said to provide “more of the same” for
young readers in its “repetition of theme and character, coupled with
a coherent storyline across the multiple volumes” (“Repeated” 192).
Elsewhere, Newland asserts that the repetitions of series shape the char-
acteristic reading style of “the series reader,” a style which she defines
as “surfing” the texts in search of “links” that occur “in the form of
repetitions” (“Surfing” 149–50). Suman Gupta uses a depth metaphor
derived from painting to describe the reader’s experience of repetition
in series, specifically in the Harry Potter series: as “[p]ast explanations
are repeated and expanded” through the series, the “picture comes
together … retaining all the layers of past efforts” (96).
Repetition is not found only in the texts of narrative series, of
course, being generally regarded as one of the principles through which
language generates meaning. J. Hillis Miller begins his study of the
“recurrences” in seven Victorian and modern novels, for example, by
observing that “[a]ny novel is a complex tissue of repetitions and of
repetitions within repetitions, or of repetitions linked in chain fashion
to other repetitions” (2–3). Peter Brooks claims that “the constructive,
semiotic role of repetition” (25) is at the heart of narrative attempts to
make meaning of the world. If “[n]arrative is one of the large categories

or systems of understanding that we use in our negotiations with real-
ity, specifically, in the case of narrative, with the problem of temporal-
ity” (xi), he argues, then plot, which organizes narrative in temporal
sequence, must be understood to be at the centre of narrative, and plot,
in Brooks’s words, is “the active repetition and reworking of story in
and by discourse” (25). Miller’s and Brooks’s analyses are informed by
structuralist methods, methods that study the “[r]elational regularities”
of a system in order to describe its underlying structure or “grammar”
(Rowe 27): whether in anthropological studies of cultures or aesthetic
theories of art, structuralists use the metaphor of language to organ-
ize their observations of the patterns of meaningful repetition in sys-
tems. The role of repetition in language systems has been considered
at another level by rhetoricians, with many of the figures of speech
they identify based on repeated, inverted, and transposed elements.
Repetitions in language are not only persuasive but also pleasing. The
resonance and memorability of poetry, for example, are consequences
of its patterned language: rhythms, rhymes, assonance, and allitera-
tion, among many other common poetic effects, are built on repeated
sounds. These repetitions are notable in poetry for children, and in the
form Joseph T. Thomas Jr. calls children’s “own” poetry, the “poetry
of the playground,” made up of skipping-rope rhymes and other
chants. This oral mode, “a carnivalesque tradition that signifies on
adult culture, even while producing poetry that rewards repeat listen-
ings” (152), includes sometimes sophisticated elements of parody and
double-meanings.
The function of repetition as mnemonic aid in oral forms is one way
to account for its centrality to children’s literature, which, like poetry,
is often assumed to derive from oral traditions, specifically, in the case
of children’s literature, from fairy tales and fables. In addition to the
volume of work on versions and revisions of the most popular fairy tales
for young people, there has been considerable interest among critics in
retold stories as a special feature of the field. Introducing a collection
of essays on adaptations, for example, Benjamin Lefebvre observes that
“textual transformations have for a long time been the norm rather
than the exception” in children’s literature (2). He provides a long list
of types of transformed texts, from series written by corporate authors
to adaptations, remakes, and extensions of classic texts, recontextual-
izations of familiar characters in new texts, and textual franchises that
include films, toys, and other commodities (2). John Stephens and
Robyn McCallum similarly begin their study of retellings for young
people by noting “the volume and persistence of retold stories as part of

the domain of children’s literature” (ix), a persistence they see as symp-
tomatic of the function of children’s literature “to initiate children into
aspects of a social heritage” (3). From the perspective of these critics, it
would appear that series fiction might be said to be an intensive version
of all children’s literature. Nodelman’s observation of the “apparent
sameness” of so many literary novels for children (“Interpretation”)
would seem to corroborate this view: this observation was the begin-
ning of his articulation of the argument that children’s literature is a
distinct genre, with characteristic plots, stylistic elements, and themes,
and with a shared situation of enunciation (Nodelman and Reimer).
Glenna Davis Sloan, developing a program to put literature at the centre
of the development of literacy in an era when basal readers were the
norm in many primary classrooms, also emphasized the repeated pat-
terns of children’s literature. For Sloan, these texts are part of a larger
“interrelated body of imaginative verbal structures,” which she sees as
most clearly defined in Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypes: propos-
ing correlations among natural seasons and literary genres, modes, and
tropes, Frye demonstrates, she notes, that literature is “a coherent struc-
ture in which works are related to each other like members of a large,
extended family, with a family tree traceable to the earliest times” (35).
Also using Frye’s metaphor of the family of stories, Anita Moss and Jon
C. Stott produced an anthology of interrelated tales – beginning with
folktales, hero tales, and myths – intended to give students of children’s
literature and schoolteachers a basis for understanding the recurrent
patterns of story and for developing literature curricula for primary
schools.
Introducing the program for literacy education Sloan built on his
own theories of archetypal repetition, Frye approvingly cites her oppo-
sition to a “‘skills and drills’ approach, which frustrates and stunts all
genuine imaginative growth” (Frye xv). Similarly, Moss and Stott are
careful to position the “frameworks” provided by an understanding of
repeated story patterns as a context for the enjoyment of each story as
unique (5). While the vocabulary of these educators might obscure the
fact, repetition is central to most pedagogical methods, invoked as a
demonstrably effective practice in establishing and confirming desired
attitudes and behaviours in learning subjects. Consider the many ver-
sions of repetition that appear in educational manuals and teaching
guides as descriptors of learning processes and outcomes: dictation, drill,
imitation, inculcation, tracing, transmission, copying, memorization, prac-
tice, quotation, reinforcement, routine, schema, habit, mimicry, recitation,
recognition, reiteration, remembering, representation, reproduction, and

replication are just some of the most common. Despite the long list of
repetitive activities used to secure and to test the effectiveness of teach-
ing, repetition as a pedagogical technique is more often assumed than
theorized by contemporary educators, no doubt at least partly because
of the negative association of repetition with rote learning evident in
Frye’s preface: the Oxford Dictionary of Education, for example, glosses
rote learning as “[l]earning which does not necessitate understanding,
but is undertaken systematically and mechanistically, usually through
repetition” (Wallace). Contemporary (Western) practices of education
are also based on repetition, philosopher Claire Colebrook points out,
but on the repetition of method rather than content, a method that
produces a kind of thinker she describes as “the monitor of originality
who identifies the new as the simple other of repetition” (48). In other
words, we may have systematically taught ourselves not to recognize
the many ways in which we are formed by repetition.
Historically, texts for young people have been bound up with educa-
tion systems and pedagogical theories. The idea of a separate literature
for children began, arguably, in schoolbooks. In the English-language
tradition, it became a recognizable enterprise distinct from schoolbooks
in the mid-eighteenth century, as changing ideas about childhood and
the education proper to childhood took root. As articulated by English
philosopher John Locke in his influential Some Thoughts Concerning
Education, these ideas were grounded in “a concern for the development
of the individual child” (Cunningham 59). Paradoxically, because the
end of education is the individual’s ability to reason autonomously and
not to be governed by the opinion of others, the child must be encour-
aged, in Locke’s words, to “submit his Appetite to Reason,” and “by con-
stant practice,” to settle this reasonable behaviour “into Habit” (314).
Not only is reason made reliably available to a child through repeated
use (or practice) but also repetition (in the form of habit) is the basis for
the emergence of autonomy.
Encouraging children to learn the habit of reason was also the basis
of Locke’s view of effective practices for teaching them to read and of
identifying desirable reading material for them. A child should not be
“driven” to learning to read, nor rebuked “for every little Fault,” nor
“shackle[d] and tie[d] up” with rules, but, rather, provided with “Stories
apt to delight and entertain a Child, [which] may yet afford useful
Reflections to a grown Man” (258, 259). Writing in 1693, Locke regrets
that he knows no books beyond Aesop’s Fables that meet these criteria,
but, by the 1740s, the publisher John Newbery was supplying books for
the express purposes of both delighting and instructing young people.

Peter Hunt observes that the “tradition of didacticism, which holds that
children’s books must be moral and educational” is not only longstand-
ing but also persistent (5). These assumptions about print texts have
been readily transferred to discussions of television shows, films, and
other media texts aimed at youth.
Given the close association of pedagogy and texts directed to young
people, it might seem little wonder that repetition generally, and series
and serials specifically, should figure so largely in this system: simply
put, seriality must be an effective teaching tool, for series texts are a
concentrated form of repetition. Indeed, this assumption underlies both
the alarms about the dangers of series texts raised by some professional
readers and the sometimes grudging acceptance of series texts as primers
for learning readers by other guardians of the young. But the agreement
that repetition is an obvious effect or category of experience forecloses
the ongoing theoretical inquiries into a complex phenomenon.
The most conventional narrative series, serials, and sequels for young
people are characterized by a constant narrative presence, a common
set of characters, the same or similar settings, recurring plot structures,
and familiar themes. While such groups of narratives might be said to
be the strongest example of seriality in young people’s culture, other
kinds of serial productions – such as magazines or TV shows – also rely
on repeated elements to be recognizable as related texts. Even in the
case of narrative series, however, the ways in which series repeat are not
always obvious, as Rose Lovell-Smith demonstrates in her discussion in
this volume of the Howl’s Moving Castle series by Diana Wynne Jones.
The problem of repetition – what constitutes repetition, whether
repetition is possible or impossible, and why the answers to these
questions might matter – has preoccupied analysts, theorists, and phi-
losophers since at least the mid-nineteenth century and the publica-
tion of Søren Kierkegaard’s novella Repetition: An Essay in Experimental
Psychology (1843). Historians of philosophy generally agree that it was
in this text that the notion of repetition “in its modern form” first
appeared ( Jameson 135). In Kierkegaard’s novella, the narrator, the
ironically named Constantin Constantius, repeats a journey he previ-
ously took to Berlin, and, in the course of recalling his memories of the
first journey, formulates what Fredric Jameson calls “the philosophical
paradox of repetition,” namely, that repetition “can as it were only take
place ‘a second time,’” that there is “no ‘first time’ of repetition” (137).
Kierkegaard puts it this way: “what is has been, otherwise it could not
be repeated, but precisely the fact that it has been gives to repetition the
character of novelty” (52). Alenka Zupančič contends that the discovery

of this modern notion of repetition – that is, the view of repetition “as
an independent and crucial concept” and “as fundamentally different
from the logic of representation” – was one of the “events that inaugu-
rated so-called contemporary philosophy and gave this designation its
specific meaning” (27).
In the course of articulating this distinctive view of repetition and
of disarticulating repetition from representation, philosophers and
theorists since Kierkegaard have considered a wide range of effects
and affects commonly associated with repetition. Among these are the
experiences of repetition as consolatory, repetition as confirmatory,
repetition as unsettling, and repetition as a setting in motion. In the
section that follows, we rehearse a number of important theoretical
explanations of these effects of repetition and point to some of the ways
in which critics of series texts, especially series texts for young people,
have taken up these formulations in their studies. While these theories
are well known to scholars of children’s literature, by reviewing them
together under the rubric of repetition, we hope to provoke our readers
to look again at how these ideas might permit new readings of seriality
in young people’s culture.
II
One of the obvious senses in which repetition is consolatory is that it

provides us with confidence in the world that supports human life. As
philosopher Marc Rölli observes, “many of our everyday experiences
are embedded in a structure of repetition: we believe in the world, we
believe that the world will continue to exist even when we close our
eyes” (98). That “the everyday” is the “special province” of the series
form is the opening observation of Langbauer’s book-length study of
the series in Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction (Novels 2).
Recalling the comfort she felt in reading series during her unsettled
adolescence, she reframes her youthful response through this theo-
retical understanding: “those linked novels that are part of extended
series seem to mirror and carry properties often defined as essential to
everyday life: that it’s just one thing after another, going quietly but
inexhaustibly on and on” (2).
The confidence in the continuing existence of an inexhaustibly
meaningful world was a focus at a larger scale of many of the theories
of archetypes, myth, and ritual developed at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth century. For these theorists,
recognizing the operations of repetition (in the sense of cyclical return)

enabled an understanding of human beings as connected to a whole
system of life. For example, Mircea Eliade, who followed in this tradi-
tion, observes that the conceptualization of time as linear is the cause of
modern anxieties. In Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return,
he maintains that rituals are expressions of the human longing to
escape linear or secular time and vehicles of the return to sacred time in
which each new year is not only a reenactment of the mythical begin-
ning of the cosmos but is the beginning of the cosmos, since ritual or
sacred time flows in a closed circle. The sacred for Eliade, Douglas Allen
says, is the “permanent, universal, dynamic structures of transcendence,
expressing what is transhistorical, paradigmatic, meaningful” (307).
Theorists of myth and ritual influenced such literary critics as Frye,
whose work in turn has been so influential in general for critics of chil-
dren’s literature. In critical work on series texts for young people, more
specifically, the emphasis on the capacity of serial fiction to develop
spacious and meaningful textual worlds in which readers can find
themselves at home might be aligned with the view of repetition as con-
solatory. It is this feature that seems to nurture the fan clubs that have
long flourished around serial texts. The girls’ school stories popular
from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century are an
instructive case study. Elinor Brent-Dyer, for example, wrote 59 books
in the Chalet School series beginning in 1959, with the first fan club
started by her publisher in the same year. Two fan clubs with “enthusi-
astic” worldwide memberships continue to organize themselves around
the series (Sims and Clare 75), building a virtual female-centred world
that corresponds to and extends the “world of girls” created within
the texts but unavailable to many girls and women in everyday life.9
Contemporary practices of online fandom have multiplied opportuni-
ties for young series readers “to engage actively with texts,” Catherine
Tosenberger notes (185), quoting Henry Jenkins’s metaphor for fandom
as an “egalitarian, cross-generational space ‘outside the classroom and
beyond any direct adult control’” (186).
Relieving anxiety (if not achieving consolation) through the man-
agement of memory is fundamental to Sigmund Freud’s theoretical
explanations of the struggle for mastery. “[A] person is only condemned
to repeat something when he has forgotten the origins of the compul-
sion,” according to Lacanian scholar Dylan Evans (167). In “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud explicates this “compulsion to repeat”
(19) as resulting from a trauma, with the patient’s symptomatic repeti-
tion of the traumatic event as the attempt to overcome or master it by
reducing the level of stimulation or excitation incited by the original

event. As Samuel Weber explains, in this sense, “the repetition compul-
sion” might be said to serve “the pleasure principle by providing the
I … with the sentiment of being prepared for that which in the past
actually overwhelmed and traumatized it” (6). The example Freud uses
to illustrate this possibility is his grandson playing fort-da, a game Freud
initially understood as the child’s expression of distress whenever his
mother left him. Freud goes on to speculate, however, that “the child
turned his experience into a game from another motive”: “At the outset
he was in a passive situation – he was overpowered by the experience; but,
by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an
active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery”
(“Pleasure Principle” 16). Freud believed that patients could overcome
repeated, compulsive behaviour and ultimately be liberated from the
trauma that provoked such behaviour through the “talking cure” of psy-
choanalysis,10 a repetition of the trauma in words rather than behaviour.
Some critics of series texts have understood striving for mastery as
one of the activities that is encouraged by the serial form and that is
particularly significant for young people. Two critics of The Twilight
Saga, for example, have discussed Meyer’s books in these terms. Heather
Anastasiu observes that adolescence is a liminal period during which
young people experience and rehearse transformations of various kinds.
Through the Twilight novels, she suggests, “adolescents are able to
explore their fears and desires in a safe place” via identification with the
heroes of the narratives (50). For girl readers, identification with Bella
can “empower” them “to embrace their emerging sexuality” and to
explore romance in the “non-threatening place[s]” of the fantasy series
and the fan fiction communities attached to the series (50). Rachel
DuBois, beginning from a similar assumption about readers’ position-
ing in relation to the narratives, suggests that, by identifying with the
characters, readers experience “a series of recursive emotional crises
throughout the reading and rereading process,” but that this process
“feels manageable because of the promise of a happy ending” (132).
Through repeated episodes of rereading, readers confirm Freud’s theory
of mastery by playing an active role in reducing the tension produced
by narrative moments of trauma and uncertainty. David Rudd suggests
that series can take the form of traumatic repetition because the central
child characters do not achieve mastery: using Enid Blyton’s Famous
Five series as example, he observes that, while the children satisfy-
ingly solve the mysteries posed in each book, they are denied complete
victory because they require the affirmation of adult others, others who
are positioned as oppressive keepers of the symbolic order at the begin-

nings of their adventures. This is a compromise that can only be allayed
by “engag[ing] in another adventure, … mov[ing] once again from
being passive, marginal beings into the realm of active agency” (94).
Karen Coats proposes that the series form itself should be understood
as “of the order of the symptom” of cultural trauma, with each book
in a series “a repetitive gesture or phenomenon” that calls us “to pay
attention to something we cannot see, or have forgotten or denied”
(198). Coats distinguishes between two different serial responses to
cultural trauma: the first, the modern response, is exemplified for her
by the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Nancy Drew series, which cultivates “a
stance of … ‘knowingness’ with respect to the world” (186), attempt-
ing to keep from readers the knowledge “that human reason will not
save us” (187); the second, the postmodern response, is exemplified by
R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, which “adopts a playful stance regard-
ing world-making and boundary-crossing” that “calls into question
the status of the rational world” (192).
Freud’s essay on the “unpleasure principle” falls into two parts. In the
second section of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud explicitly turns
to consider the origins of the “compulsion to repeat” that, as Weber
puts it, “seems to take over [or override] the role of the pleasure prin-
ciple in determining psychic activity” (5). In his attempt to solve his
perplexity, Freud introduces the notion of the death drive. The death
drive, he speculates, is a “more primitive element” than the pleasure
principle and “the most universal endeavour of all living substance,”
that is, “to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (“Pleasure
Principle” 62). The condition that Catherine Malabou calls “the pure
neutrality of inorganic matter” (43) is the ultimate lowering of tension
and, therefore, the ultimate achievement of pleasure.
Brooks, in his engagement with psychoanalytic theory in thinking
through design in narrative, proposes that “[t]he desire of the text is
ultimately the desire for the end, for that recognition which is the
moment of the death of the reader in the text” (108). If we apply this
observation to series texts for young people, we might conclude that
such texts offer repeated opportunities to rehearse the cycle of begin-
nings, trauma, mastery, and death, perhaps providing young readers a
training ground not only for the experience of the vicissitudes of human
life but also for its ultimate consolation, its ending in the quiescence
of death. Both Langbauer (“Ethics”) and Kim Hong Nguyen discuss
Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events as this kind of therapy
for readers – whom they characterize, respectively, as adolescents and
Generation Xers without hope, and post-9/11 mourners. Nguyen writes,

“this text teaches its readers to find their own situated means to come to
terms with loss and to mourn the series of unfortunate events in which
we, too, may be embedded” (280).
That repetition can be more than consolatory and also an experience
of the confirmation or consolidation of beliefs and assumptions seems
evident from its centrality to pedagogical practices. In studies of texts
and cultures, the most important approaches to the question of repeti-
tion as confirmatory have been developed through Marxist theories of
production and reproduction.
Karl Marx opens Capital (the first volume of which was published
in 1867) by observing that “[t]he wealth of societies in which the
capitalist method of production prevails appears as an ‘immense
accumulation of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as
its elementary form” (125). The image of a pile of things gestures to
a specific kind of repetition that he finds at work in capitalism. Since
he contends that the representation of commodities obscures their
fundamental nature, Marx’s first concern is to determine the values
that lie beneath the appearance of the commodity: these he identifies
as use-value, the “usefulness of a thing” (126); value, or “the human
labor embodied [or congealed] in commodities” (Harvey 18); and
exchange-value, “the necessary mode of expression” of value in the
marketplace (128).
But while exchange-value is “the most immediate economic relation
under capitalism” (Bottomore 155), it is the production of surplus-value
that allows for capitalist accumulation. Surplus-value is understood by
Marx as the difference between the amount of labour-power the worker
needs for subsistence and the amount of labour-power the worker has
contracted with the capitalist; in this relation, a surplus is regularly
extracted and appropriated by the capitalist, so that, over the long term,
all capital is made up of surplus-value created by the worker. The rela-
tion between labour and capital “is veiled by the wages system and is
not readily discernible when the analysis focuses only on the individual
worker,” as David Harvey notes (247–48), but, taken as a class and
repeated over an extended period of time, “the worker” can be seen to
produce the “objective wealth” that is the “alien power that dominates
and exploits him” (Marx 716). Marx concludes that, “seen as a total,
connected process,” “[t]he capitalist process of production … produces
not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and
reproduces the capitalist relation itself” (724). Commenting on this
passage, Étienne Balibar observes that, “[o]n the plane instituted by the
analysis of reproduction, production is not the production of things, it

is the production and conservation of social relations” (269).
It is on the plane of the analysis of reproduction – or the analysis
of the production of ideology – that Marxist theories have been most
influential for cultural and textual critics. Ideological analysis some-
times focuses quite narrowly on what Susan Himmelweit describes as
“processes outside that of [economic] production itself, which are seen
as necessary to the continued existence of a model of production,”
such as, for example, “ideological processes which justify the freedom
of the individual to exchange and own property” (Bottomore 418). The
dominance of serial publication of novels during the Victorian period
has been explained as such a necessary process by a number of mate-
rialist critics. As Langbauer notes in reviewing this work, “the mode of
part-publication not only reflected the ideological assumptions of the
time but did the work that installed and consolidated that ideology,”
with the “most important ideological work” of the serial being “to pro-
duce and determine an audience” that could “afford to buy fiction on
[an] installment plan” and thus enter “an effective arena for ideologi-
cal schooling” (Novels 9). In her essay in this volume, Michelle Smith
finds that the School Paper created just such an arena for producing
national citizens from the generations of Australian schoolchildren for
whom the serial was required reading. In cultural studies, the workings
of ideology have also been theorized more broadly. Sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu has extended the idea of capital to include social, cultural,
and symbolic capital as channels through which the dominant classes
maintain their priority; and theorists such as Pierre Macherey, Raymond
Williams, Stuart Hall, and Jameson have developed the terms of Marxist
critique to describe not only the ways in which cultural objects and
texts encode ideologies that sustain the dominant interests of a society,
but also the ways in which, as Douglas Kellner puts it, texts “can rework,
exhibit and possibly disturb ideologies” (98).
Criticism on series texts for young people has often addressed the
way in which these texts sustain the dominant interests of market capi-
talism. Richard Flynn, for example, argues that L. Frank Baum “delib-
erately aroused the cupidity of the child consumers” he addressed in
his Oz books, and that the sequels that continued to be produced after
Baum’s death remained true to this original economic motivation (124).
In his reading of the Goosebumps series, Nodelman demonstrates that
both the behaviour of the protagonists of the novels and the themes
of the marketing copy affirm characteristics that are “‘normal,’ even
desirable, … in the market-oriented consumer society contemporary
children are growing up in,” namely, to “be egocentric, be fearless,

be a winner” (“Ordinary Monstrosity” 123). Dan Hade observes that
the corporate owners who now dominate the field of children’s book
publishing invest in series because these books are easily turned into a
“brand” that can be extended across many kinds of merchandise: “[i]n
this world there is no difference between a book and a video or a CD or
a T-shirt or a backpack” (512). In her essay in this volume, Mackey notes
that “narrative franchises” are a significant generator of repetition in
young people’s cultures. Discussing Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean
franchise, Carolyn Jess-Cooke comments that Disney not only extends
narratives spatially “across several mediums, commodities, texts, and
cultural events” (208–09), but also temporally, by removing titles from
circulation and rereleasing them several years later, a serialization strat-
egy through which Disney “facilitates generational memory-making
and transference” (220).
Nodelman remarks about the Goosebumps books that books in series
are like other collectibles, in that each “looks similar enough to the oth-
ers to be part of what is clearly a set, but is different enough to make
the set incomplete without it” (“Ordinary Monstrosity” 118), com-
ments that recall Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the impulse of collect-
ing in The System of Objects. Using both Marx and Freud as theoretical
pre-texts, Baudrillard describes collecting as a symptom of the seriality
of consumer culture. We obsessively collect objects without use-value,
Baudrillard notes, since it is never enough to own just one object: “a
whole series lies behind any single object, and makes it into a source
of anxiety” (92). At bottom, collection is a narcissistic process, “[f]or
what you really collect is always yourself” (97). It is from this observa-
tion that Kristine Moruzi begins her reading of Atalanta, a Victorian
serial for girls, in this volume. The collection is always incomplete for
Baudrillard, and so, necessarily, is the project of the self. While a collec-
tion might allow the consumer to imagine that he or she is in control of
such uncontrollable factors as death and the passage of time (managed,
as Baudrillard ironically notes, through the pastime of collection), such
accumulation is never sufficient.
Like Baudrillard, Judith Butler conceptualizes repetition as integral to
the ways in which subjects are formed. More explicitly than Baudrillard,
she also theorizes the way in which repetition, while seeking to consoli-
date identity, fails to do so and becomes rather an undoing or unsettling
of identity.
Building on the notions of feminine and masculine sexual dispositions
articulated by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” Butler argues
that “gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of

a prohibition [against homosexuality] that proves to be formative of
identity,” an identity that “is constructed and maintained by the con-
sistent application of this taboo” (Gender Trouble 63). In subsequent
work, she situates gender in the realm of performance: instead of func-
tioning as a cultural expression of one’s sexual dispositions, gender is
“a stylized repetition of acts” (“Performative Acts” 270). Gender, rooted
in repetition, is temporally oriented, relying on the cumulative mani-
festation of stylized, social acts. Butler turns to anthropologist Victor
Turner to explain that “social action requires a performance which
is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperienc-
ing of a set of meanings already socially established” (“Performative
Acts” 277). In short, repetition in a social context is necessary for the
performance of gender.
The understanding of gender as socially constructed is well estab-
lished within the criticism of series books directed to young people.
From the beginning of the popularity of this form within the field,
series books were divided into the categories of boys’ books and girls’
books by writers, publishers, marketers, and reviewers: both the pro-
duction and the reception of the books, in other words, instantiated
the re-enactments of a socially established set of meanings. The field
also presents many opportunities to consider the relational but uneven
quality of traditional gender roles, in the paired, but not quite parallel,
series for boys and for girls that continue to be published. An obvious
example is the production of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series
by Stratemeyer, about which much has been written. Perhaps because
there was a robust, historically informed discourse about gender in
the field of children’s studies long before Butler’s work appeared, she
has not been much used to date by critics working with series texts.
M. Sean Saunders, however, points to Butler’s description of the
“chain of interpellating calls” through which gender is constructed as
particularly useful for the reading of seriality in his analysis of Martine
Bates’s Marmawell trilogy (42).
For Butler, these repetitions do not succeed. In the second move of
her theory of performativity, Butler theorizes the way in which the
repeated performance of one’s gender necessarily exposes the cat-
egories of “man” or “woman” as unstable constructs. Although these
repeated acts do congeal to produce gendered bodies, they also produce
the illusion of coherence, and so point to gender as “a kind of imita-
tion for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that
produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence
of the imitation itself” (“Imitation” 313). In this reading, Butler clearly

invokes and extends the modern notion of repetition introduced by
Kierkegaard: there is no first time of repetition, no original time that
is re-presented in performance. In particular, “there is no ‘proper’ gen-
der, a gender proper to one sex rather than another, which is in some
sense that sex’s cultural property” (312): the notion of gender, then, is
located on a spectrum of the queer. Nat Hurley’s analysis in this vol-
ume of transgender youth who are seeking new scripts for personhood
assumes and builds on Butler’s theoretical formulations.
For Butler, repetition is associated with the negotiation of selfhood
through the destabilization of socially constructed gender categories,
and, so, with a striving to preserve an open-ended notion of what
constitutes the self. Repetition is both a cultural and a countercultural
act: because culture tries to make use of repetition, counterculture can
subvert dominant culture through parody and insubordination (inten-
tional failures to repeat). While Tosenberger does not cite Butler in her
study, the young writers of slash fan fiction she discusses clearly exploit
the repetitions and gaps in Rowling’s series to insert their encounters
and experiments “with alternative modes of sexual discourse, particu-
larly queer discourse,” into conversations about the Potter texts (186). It
seems fitting that the theory of performativity Butler developed – both
the centrality of the performance of repetitions and the constitutive
failure of repetition – has been borrowed and modified by theorists and
critics to think through many other kinds of identity categories. In this
collection, for example, Brandon Christopher’s and Laura Robinson’s
essays demonstrate the adaptability of Butler’s theory of performativity
to readings of genre.
Butler’s use of Freud as a basis for her notion of the subject as process
suggests the continued importance of his explorations of the human
subject for contemporary philosophy and theory. This is also true of his
investigations of the place of repetition in both the constitution and
the unsettling of the self. At the same time as Freud was complicating
his early theories of the primacy of the pleasure principle in psychic
life through his observations of the “traumatic neuroses” he saw in the
patients he treated after World War I (“Pleasure Principle” 12), he also
developed his analysis of the uncanny. For Freud, the uncanny arises
from the encounter with a double. It is an experience “related to what
is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” and causes “feelings
of repulsion and distress” (“The Uncanny” 219), but also an experience
provoked by “something which is secretly familiar, which has under-
gone repression and then returned from it” (245). The uncanny, in other
words, is that which is experienced simultaneously as familiar and as

strange, a return of the repressed that undoes the distinctions between
the imaginary and the real, such as, for example, “when a symbol takes
over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes” (244). In her chapter
in this collection, Langbauer explores such an uncanny moment in the
Oz series when the Tin Man comes face to face with his own severed
head, one of several pieces he will find of an earlier, organic iteration
of himself. Judith P. Robertson, conceptualizing the uncanny as “that
interior place in which one can get lost in signs of strangeness,” sees
the Harry Potter series as built on the repetition of moments when “the
familiar ground of the self gets lost … going unsecured precisely in order
to find or remake itself” (204).
In her genealogy of the uncanny in poststructuralist thought,
Anneleen Masschelein suggests that the uncanny is not only a category
of psychic life but also, more generally, of cultural life: among its impor-
tant functions in culture has been “to signify the fundamental difficulty
or even the impossibility of defining concepts as such” (55) and to dis-
turb “the ideological closure of definitions and concepts” (62). Reading
Joseph Delaney’s The Wardstone Chronicles, Chloe Buckley suggests
that keeping questions open might be one of the functions of the fantasy
series form. In the case of Delaney’s series about the young witch Alice
Deane, Buckley concludes that “[t]he witch child is uncanny because
it reveals what ought to have remained hidden: there is no real child”
(85). In constructing the figure of the child, we “conjure that object into
existence”: “we always invent the child, never discover it” (106).
It is the unresolvable ambiguity of Freud’s theories of repetition –
simultaneously a figure of the struggle toward mastery, a sign of the
desire of organic life to return to the state of the inorganic, and evidence
of the haunting of the present by the past – that recommended his
phrase “the compulsion to repeat” (“Pleasure Principle” 19) to us as the
title of this introduction and the subtitle of this volume.
While much of Marx’s analysis focused on the dynamics of economic
and social life under the system of industrial capitalism current at the
time of his work, he also, importantly, posits a moment when the pre-
sent is no longer haunted by the past, when the terms under which
human beings labour will be transformed into a new life. This new life
will set into motion new conditions of production from which new
forms of social consciousness can be expected to emerge. In the theories
of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, both of whom were engaged by
Marx’s ideas, the new is the inevitable companion of the movements
of repetition.
For Derrida, repetition, or iteration, is not a consolidation but a

setting in motion of meaning. Like Butler and other poststructuralist
thinkers, Derrida was fascinated with repetition, but, in his case, with
the fundamental repetitions of language. Indeed, according to Derrida,
iteration makes language itself possible, whether that language is spo-
ken or written. This is the argument in Of Grammatology and, in abbrevi-
ated form, the essay “Signature Event Context” as well, explains Leslie
Hill, for “repetition always brings … something different, singular, and
other” (27). No matter how often you come across a word, even one as
ubiquitous as the, there is always something different about it, whether
that difference has to do with inflection, placement, or the circum-
stances of your encounter with the word. And yet, it is also the case
that the word is not anchored to a first instance or origin, so that its
repeatability is its ability to break with any context and its citationality
is its generativity.
Derrida’s interest in repetition is both theoretical and methodologi-
cal. Theoretically, Derrida shows that language is not possible without
repetition and that it generates the contexts for language use: “Every
sign … spoken or written … can be cited, can be put between quotation
marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engendering
an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimit-
able” (“Signature” 12). In terms of his methodology, Derrida repeatedly
adopts the rhetoric of other philosophers. As Colebrook points out, this
practice enables “a new position” to emerge “that displays the impossi-
bility of the commitment to absolute origins” (45). By extensively citing
others, Derrida disrupts authorship and other kinds of authority, too,
including that of the intentional subject. A strategy beyond intention,
deconstruction employs and implores a tactics of risk: playfully inter-
vening in “the general displacement of the system,” Derrida’s decon-
struction demonstrates that “there are only contexts without any center
or absolute anchorage” and that this applies to everything, including
the self (“Signature” 21, 12).
Derrida’s theory of citationality has not been much used by critics
of series texts for young people, although Christopher’s discussion of
the construction of narratives of origin in comic books in this vol-
ume suggests how productive his ideas and methods might be for the
exploration of seriality.
In contrast, the theories of Deleuze have proven to be of considerable
interest in the field. A contemporary of Derrida’s, Deleuze also affirms
the setting in motion that infinite difference makes possible. Is the
repetition of the same possible? Deleuze says no. He argues in Difference
and Repetition that the same is an effect of an underlying, masked

repetition of the always-different (or of absolute difference). The very
possibility of the same thing happening twice is an illusion. The only
thing that is sure to repeat – in what Deleuze argues is the true form of
eternal return and the ultimate death drive, beyond-beyond the pleas-
ure principle in a death not only of the self but of the possibility of
identity – is difference.
If we were to ask a group of children to bring us their teddy bears,
we could line them up: Sam’s bear, Aubrey’s bear, Katie’s bear, and so
on. We could even line them up in a progression, from smallest to
largest or darkest to lightest, so that each bear would be closest to the
other bears that are, in one respect at least, most similar to it. The bears
would illustrate several of Deleuze’s observations about repetition. First,
repetition as sameness is impossible: even if Sam and Aubrey have the
“same” bear, the differences of time and space, plus wear, tears, smells,
missing eyes, and so on, make their resemblance imperfect. Second,
the concept “teddy bear” is what seems to repeat: this is the repetition
effect. Third, the “spirit” of the repetition – what generates its move-
ment from one bear to another – is difference, not sameness. Fourth,
the differences between the bears are “difference without concept,”
external to the identity-concept of “teddy bear” (the logic of the Same
sees only bear, bear, bear) but internal to what Deleuze would call the
Idea – the “eternally positive differential multiplicity” (Difference 288) –
that affirms all of the variations in what a teddy bear (blue, dirty, eyes
closed, floppy, not-bear) might be. Fifth, repetition is not static but a
form of movement; the series smallest to largest, for example, illus-
trates an evolutionary trajectory that is produced from one repetition
(difference) to another.
If we think of repetition as sameness, any difference from a stand-
ard of what a teddy bear should be is perceived as negative, as lack.
Representation assumes that concepts, identities, and selves remain
stable. It seeks to contain difference through the “four iron collars”
of identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance, always forcing a
relation with the standard, the origin, or what is apparently the same.
“Every other difference, every difference which is not rooted in this
way, is an unbounded, uncoordinated and inorganic difference: too
large or too small, not only to be thought but to exist” (262). From
the perspective of repetition-as-difference, however, difference is
affirmed as productive excess: Gordon C. F. Bearn has observed that,
for Deleuze, “swarms of untamed difference are the beating heart of
repetition” (447).
Deleuze’s later work on “becoming” with Félix Guattari develops the

affirmation of difference and of multiplicities he began in Difference and
Repetition while further unhinging repetition from series and evolution-
ary trajectories (cf. Ansell Pearson 10, Parr). In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari model a movement of becoming that never hap-
pens in a series like a line of teddy bears. Instead, the teddy bears are
a pack of multiplicities (because each one is different), infecting one
another through proximity and symbiosis. Change occurs through
involution rather than evolution, through contagion and mutation,
following the unpredictable and erratic “lines of flight” of becoming,
which James Williams equates with the roll of a dice, a movement of
creative destruction that follows two conflicting principles: “Connect
with everything” and “Forget everything” (5). For example, if a child
adds a toy that is not a teddy bear to the “pack,” the logic of the Same
would insist that Fern’s sheep does not belong. In a Deleuzian affirma-
tion of difference and becoming, however, the sheep enters the assem-
blage and becomes the agent of a deterritorialization: the teddy bears
become-sheep, the sheep becomes-teddy bear, and all of the toys are
changed.
The preference for sameness is at the root of all forms of domination
and violence – racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and xenophobia –
and it is for revolutionary purposes that Deleuze engages in a “concep-
tual war” against representation (Zupančič 28). To embrace Deleuzian
repetition is to take on the problem of how to mobilize the affirma-
tion of difference for social change. Interest in Deleuze’s work is not
confined to academics, but has also been taken up by activists in such
popular applications as the rhizomatic (leaderless, grassroots) theories
and tactics of the recent Occupy movement (Nail).
In critical studies of series texts for young people, a Deleuzian read-
ing can attend to the differences even in the most formulaic of series.
Newland, for example, has used Deleuzian theory to validate series
reading by arguing that “repeated and repetitive series reading is not
a reading of the same but a reading of and for difference” (“Repeated”
202), and by emphasizing the “rhizomic” out-of-order readings that
she sees as characteristic of series readers (“Surfing”). Kevin Mitchell
finds an example of an anti-capitalist, productive series in the text of
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (a text often taught to young peo-
ple in secondary schools) and the film adaptation by David Fincher.
Tyler Durden, the anarchic alter ego of the unnamed narrator, is “a
manifestation of repetition with a difference” (116), the remainder of
difference generated through the humdrum repetitions of the narrator’s
everyday life. A Deleuzian reading of any series, according to Mitchell,

“understands the series to be multiple, heterogeneous, open, and above
all in ceaseless motion” (127). Philip Thurtle and Robert Mitchell use
Deleuzian theory to argue that comic books as a genre function through
a “logic of the anomalous” that exposes the difference inherent in the
repetitions of everyday life (296). Focusing on the role of the disaster
in comics, they observe that, in comic books as in real life, there is
always the potential for the power grid to shut down, for a terrorist
to attack, or for an informed person literally to stand in the way of an
injustice – in other words, for the new to arise. In this volume, charlie
peters explores the possibility that assemblages of cross-temporal and
cross-species communities might resist the force of the nation-state,
through her reading of several of the novels in the Dear Canada
series. As these readings suggest, Deleuzian theories of repetition offer
openings for creative criticism and scholarship on series texts and the
socio-cultural-political work of becoming.
III
We have already shown in our review of theories of repetition and the

critical engagement with them in textual scholarship that the work of
many of the essayists in this collection speaks to and extends the exist-
ing criticism on series texts. As well as both taking up and combining
the observations of various of the theorists featured here in their analy-
ses, the writers in this volume introduce other critical and cultural theo-
rists as they consider the implications of repetition in relation to a set
of serial or series texts for young people they have defined or selected.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, then, we end this introduction with
an orderly overview of the essays that follow.
The first five chapters deal with repetitions that occur across narra-
tive series for young people. Laurie Langbauer’s essay focuses on the
figure of the Tin Woodman in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. Langbauer
uses Walter Benjamin’s work on mechanical reproduction and Freud’s
writing on the uncanny to explore the relationship between series texts
and modernity, arguing that the mechanical man functions not only as
a metaphor for serial fiction but also for the recently mechanized realm
of human subjectivity.
The second chapter, by Laura M. Robinson, focuses on a series con-
temporaneous with Baum’s work, L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green
Gables. Robinson performs a reading of Montgomery’s series “out of
order” – in the order in which the books were written rather than in
the order in which publishers usually present the series. Borrowing

Butler’s description of gender performance as a site of trouble,
Robinson sees these three texts, written at least 15 years after the others
and inserted into the chronology of Anne’s life, as Gothic self-parodies,
undermining the idealized pastoral, and the happy Blythe family, of
the other books.
In Chapter 3, Rose Lovell-Smith draws on Kierkegaard’s descriptions
of true repetition as impossible but of approximate repetition as pleasur-
able, as blessing. Series texts for young people, she proposes, are exam-
ples of this kind of pleasure. In tracing repetitions in Wynne Jones’s
Howl’s Moving Castle series – a series which seems on the surface only
to resist repetition – Lovell-Smith finds evidence of both the impossibil-
ity of repeating and the inherent pleasure in repetitions that take the
reader by surprise.
In her presentation on Harry Potter at the symposium that was the
beginning of this collection of essays, Eliza Dresang spoke about con-
temporary series fiction as a closed system in which intratexual refer-
ences within series are more significant than intertextual references
to classical or canonical texts, many of which are likely to be lost on
most young readers. In Chapter 4, Dresang and her writing collaborator
Kathleen Campana theorize a special kind of intratextual repetition,
which they call “transfiguration,” that contributes to the pleasure of the
Harry Potter series by prompting readers to reread the books or parts of
them. Although Dresang and Campana conceptualize different experi-
ences of reading as discrete groups of readers, their categories might also
be understood as overlapping experiences for readers.
In Chapter 5, charlie peters argues that it is fear that binds a nation
together. She draws on theories from Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari
to highlight the role that the repeated anticipation of state violence
plays in three fictionalized “diaries” of young girls from Scholastic’s
Dear Canada series, the three narratives which she studies having,
in fact, been penned by Carol Matas, Perry Nodelman, and Maxine
Trottier. peters demonstrates that the child functions as timekeeper in
the fearful processes of nation-building.
Chapters 6 through 10 track repetitions within serial texts for young
people. Michelle Smith explores the role of the Australian School Paper,
which replaced Irish and British school readers as compulsory read-
ing for Australian children in the time leading up to and following
Federation in 1901. Referencing Greg Urban’s theory of metaculture,
Smith argues that the serial nature of the Paper was more effective
as a nation-building tool than a textbook could be, because of its
combination of repetitive and changing messages about Australian

nationhood.
In Chapter 7, Kristine Moruzi also undertakes a study of a Victorian-
era educational serial. Unlike the School Paper, however, Atalanta was
a British serial intended for an elite group of wealthy, educated girls.
Moruzi uses Baudrillard’s theory of collecting to show how readers of
Atalanta used the serial to collect a desirable self. Especially through the
Scholarship and Reading Union Pages, readers could materialize their
scholarship and demonstrate an acceptable educated femininity.
Chapter 8 is Brandon Christopher’s study of performative citations
in comic books, specifically Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid and Sandman,
Mark Waid and Leinil Yu’s Superman: Birthright, and Alan Moore’s Swamp
Thing. Christopher adapts Butler’s theory of performativity to genre,
arguing that genre, like gender, is a kind of imitation for which there
is no original. Using the Derridean language of citation and author-
ity, he shows that comics creators rely on citations to construct an
origin for their narratives, then use the repeated citation of this origin
to lend authority to their narrative – either by distancing their comic
from other iterations of the story, as in the example of Waid and Yu’s
Superman, or through “hauntological” returns to earlier versions of the
same story, as in Moore’s Swamp Thing.
In Chapter 9, Perry Nodelman takes Michael Yahgulanaas’s “Haida
manga” Red as an example in order to discuss the repetitions in
sequential art – including comics, graphic novels, television series,
series fiction, and other texts made up of separate additions to a
sequence of earlier sections. Nodelman argues that the nature of repeti-
tion from one unit (a comic-book panel, a novel in a series, a TV epi-
sode, and so on) to another is recontextualization. As he runs through
a series of contexts in which the panels of Yahgulanaas’s Red can be
read, he shows how the experience of seriality unfolds as a “returning
to what seemed to be over” for reader/viewers. Finally, building on his
own previous work with the generic characteristics of children’s litera-
ture, Nodelman draws a relation between popular texts and texts for
young people; in both, there is an impulse to serial redoing that resists
closure (or the end of childhood).
In Chapter 10, Debra Dudek considers the changes effected to the
vampire genre through the relationship between Buffy and Angel in the
television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel. Dudek
argues that the Buffy series introduced to the vampire genre a version
of Eliade’s sacred time, representing the vampire Angel as capable of
seeking justice through repetition with a difference born of remorse,
love, forgiveness, and the potential to change. Dudek extends Tim

Kane’s analysis of the Malignant, Erotic, and Sympathetic Cycles in the
vampire genre to describe a new cycle in the genre; her “Beloved Cycle”
encompasses Buffy and the series that have come after it, including
Twilight, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, and others.
The final three chapters are concerned with seriality in relation to
other forms of repetition (adaptation, dematerialization, and circula-
tion) in the field of young people’s cultures. In Chapter 11, Margaret
Mackey tests Peter Lunenfeld’s theory of a digital-era “aesthetic of unfin-
ish” through a case study that compares the Roy Rogers TV series of the
1940s and 1950s with the contemporary web-comic-turned-book-series
Diary of a Wimpy Kid. In their corporate sponsorships and “narrative
franchises,” and in their successful commercialization of relatively new
media, these two hit series (especially, but not exclusively, enjoyed
by boys) exhibit more similarities than one might expect. Mackey
concludes that the modern aesthetic of unfinish characterized by
solutions (including a clearly defined masculinity) and represented by
Roy Rogers laid the groundwork for a postmodern, digital aesthetic
of unfinish characterized by dissolutions and represented by the
Wimpy Kid.
In Chapter 12, Larissa Wodtke takes the MP3, a textual mode affili-
ated with youth culture, as representative of the expanded possibil-
ity of repeatability afforded by the Internet. Wodtke uses Marshall
McLuhan’s work on mechanical-visual culture and on acoustic space
to track the disruption to twentieth-century commercial models of
music distribution caused by the advent of the dematerialized MP3.
The MP3 is a sign of things to come in the realm of cultural pro-
duction and consumption, Wodtke argues, a challenge to consumer
capitalism and, perhaps, a movement toward a gift economy and the
commons.
The collection closes with Nat Hurley’s chapter on the widespread
adoption of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Mermaid”
among transgender youth, especially transgirls, and their parents. In
such tidy versions as the Disney film, “The Little Mermaid” becomes,
paradoxically, a story about being special despite being different.
Hurley uses Urban’s work on cultural circulation and, in particu-
lar, the concept of “rogue circulation” to argue that there are more
complex interpretations of this story available than those normally
emphasized by doctors and parents. The versions of the tale that
recount the mermaid’s painful transition to having legs, Hurley
argues, emphasize knowledge and agency, offering transyouth a tale
in which the protagonist knowingly negotiates the complications and

the implications of her own bodily unfolding.
Taken as a group, the essays in this volume demonstrate the historical
and continuing importance of the principle of repetition and the prac-
tice of seriality within the system of young people’s texts. A clear line of
argument that runs through a number of chapters is that series and seri-
als often seek to produce the child subject they address as a “normal”
subject, and to solicit the child to participate in this self-production,
often through the inherent pleasures of repetition. Because young peo-
ple are typically positioned as learning subjects, such texts can be read
as manifesting core cultural imperatives. A second thread that can be
traced through these essays is an account of the many ways in which
repetition as reproduction, replication, or reiteration can and does fail.
It is at some of these moments – when generic closure is resisted, when
consolidated formations are deterritorialized, when sequence is disor-
dered, when difficult knowledge is admitted – that the heady possibili-
ties of change can be glimpsed.
Notes
1. Deidre Johnson identifies the first series for children as Jacob Abbott’s Rollo
books, the first of which was published in the United States in 1835, but
observes that the new form was not widely taken up by writers for juveniles
until the 1860s (150).
2. Skellig won the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award, the Carnegie
Medal, the Lancashire Children’s Book of the Year Award, and the Stockton
Children’s Book of the Year Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the
Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. It has also subsequently been named a
New York Times Bestseller, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Booklist Books for
Youth Editors’ Choice – Top of the List, a HornBook FanFare, a School Library
Journal Best Book, and an ALA Notable Children’s Book.
3. Naomi Hamer, in “Re-mixing Lucy Pevensie through Film Franchise Texts and
Digital Fan Cultures,” discusses the “trans-media storytelling” of Lewis’s texts.
4. These are Margery Williams Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit, Jamaica Kincaid’s
Annie John, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, William Steig’s Dominic and
Abel’s Island, Michel Tournier’s Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit, and E. B. White’s
Charlotte’s Web, with two essays about James Barrie’s Peter Pan.
5. These are Randall Jarrell’s Animal Family, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers,
Penelope Lively’s House in Norham Gardens, Paula Fox’s One-Eyed Cat, and
Ann Schlee’s Ask Me No Questions.
6. In addition to Rebekah Fitzsimmons’s study of the effect of the Potter
series on children’s publishing, these essays consider Kate Douglas Wiggin’s
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in the context of ideas of the New Woman;
attitudes toward sexuality and female friendship in the journals of L. M.
Montgomery, best known as the author of the Anne of Green Gables series;
gender in Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark House series; challenges to American

“frontier thinking” evident in Aaron McGruder’s comic strip and television
series The Boondocks; and the ethical paradigms of the Harry Potter series.
7. Larissa Wodtke, the Managing Editor of Jeunesse, supplied these statistics on
6 March 2013. The essay is Rachel Hendershot Parkin’s piece about Meyer’s
conflicts with her readers over ownership of the story.
8. Recent conferences on seriality and repetition include two sister conferences
at the University of Florida in March 2007 called, respectively, World
Building: Seriality and History, and World Building: Space and Community;
a conference entitled Serial Forms held in June 2009 at the University of
Zurich; the inaugural conference of the research unit Popular Seriality:
Aesthetics and Practice that took place in April 2011 at the University of
Göttingen; the International Symposium on Narrative, Repetition, and Texts
for Young People at the University of Winnipeg in June 2011; the University
of Toronto’s May 2013 Department of English graduate conference enti-
tled Repetition with a Difference?; and another conference called Popular
Seriality at the University of Göttingen, this one in June 2013.
9. Mavis Reimer has explored the metaphor of world commonly used to discuss
school stories in her essay “Traditions of the School Story.” A World of Girls
was the title of L. T. Meade’s first girls’ school story (1886). Many critics have
commented on the resonance of this title for girls’ school stories in general,
with Rosemary Auchmuty using it as the title of her study of the genre. See
also Reimer’s essay about Meade entitled “Worlds of Girls.”
10. This phrase was coined by Josef Breuer’s patient “Anna O.,” who also
described Breuer’s particular method of therapy as “chimney sweeping.”
These descriptions are cited by Breuer in the book he co-authored with
Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria (1895); “talking cure” was later adopted by
Freud in his “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1909) to refer more broadly
to psychoanalytic practice.
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1
Off to See the Wizard Again
and Again
Laurie Langbauer
This paper focuses on L. Frank Baum’s character the Tin Woodman. It

considers repetition in children’s series fiction by reading the Oz series
through some well-known theorists of repetition and serial production –
Walter Benjamin on mechanical reproduction, Sigmund Freud on the
uncanny – along with work on the uncanny by Ernst Jentsch and
Masahiro Mori. It locates series fiction in relation to other popular
forms of the early twentieth century that work through repetition:
dime novels and comic strips. These different forms of seriality were
widely read and enormously popular. That was their threat. Children’s
series fiction during the machine age was also scapegoated as debased
because it was popular. For the first sixty years or so of its reception,
various social critics, educators, and librarians dismissed the Oz series
in particular as cheap, repetitive, perfunctory, too accessible and com-
mon. That response arose from a cultural ambivalence throughout the
industrialized twentieth century about art in general as increasingly
technologically produced and mechanically delivered.
As a character, the Tin Woodman cuts to the heart of that response
and exposes children’s series fiction as working within a complex cul-
tural register. The Oz series captures the ambivalence that led to its own
dismissal, but it also counters that dismissal by emphasizing the poten-
tial of mechanical reproduction. The emphasis on mechanization and
repetition in Oz at one and the same time reflects its serial impulse and
advances series fiction as the epitome of modern literary possibilities.
The theorists I cite wrote at different moments during the twentieth
century: in 1936, Benjamin responds retroactively to changes in print
technology in the nineteenth century that established newspapers
34
Laurie Langbauer 35
and periodicals as central modes of technological production. Mori,

in 1970, turns to robotics rather than print technology to reflect on
contemporary mechanical means of representation. Yet both are con-
nected by an interest in mechanical reproduction as part of an industrial
(rather than an informational) understanding of technology.1 Freud and
Jentsch offer the uncanny as a tool to register the ambivalence within
the suspicion that industrialism turned people into machines: a simul-
taneous dis-ease about and inescapable familiarity with mechanization
as the route to modern identity.
The Oz series is rich in representing not just the horrors but also the
generative nature of modern identity. The Tin Man is an apt symbol for
the complications of art and identity, which, at the time Baum wrote,
were increasingly understood as mechanically reproduced.2 He is apt
because he is himself (in part) a mechanical man and also one whom
Baum could not stop reproducing, repeating again and again in vari-
ous avatars. The Tin Man has remained a generative source of artistic
responses to mechanization, an iconic figure spinning off references to
technology in movies, television, comic books, and sculpture, includ-
ing the question of whether depicting technology as heartless tells the
whole story.3
Late twentieth-century theorists of the visual emphasize the rep-
resentational potential of mechanized reproduction. The rise of the
newspaper comic strip at the beginning of the twentieth century, for
instance, testifies to how mechanical repetition translates into modern
“sequential form.”4 The art critic Craig Owens sees Allan McCollum’s
oeuvre (various series of nearly identical objects) as reflecting the serial
impulse of twentieth-century visual culture. Owens argues that it dem-
onstrates that a “serial mode of production” is not simply an element
of mass-produced forms, but “the dominant model for art” in general
within late capitalist consumer society (118). Seriality reflects on mass
production by providing only “the illusion of choice”: it promises that
the “next” it is always about to offer is meaningfully unlike what has
come before (that is, it progresses through sequence), but it actually
proffers only a “limited gamut of differences,” Owens claims, not
sequence so much as recurrence or replication (119). Yet Owens finds
that foregrounding such iterations exposes their productive charac-
ter: rather than being “melancholic” or “diminished,” McCollum’s
foregrounding of assembly-line production “restores to repetition its
critical – even revolutionary – power” (120). Seriality is revolution-
ary not just in de-privileging the individual, but in revalidating the
repetition that also underlies the popular.
Mechanical reproduction is a strategy of art in the modern machine

age to which some fine artists tie their products, but many also reflect
on that element within popular forms. In fact, “serial production
does not recognize the fine art/mass culture distinction (and is partly
responsible for its dissolution)” (Owens 119). In Owens’s analysis, when
revealing its own machinery, the series’ self-referentiality transforms the
loss of meaningful difference into its most significant distinguishing
characteristic. Likewise, the Tin Man reflects on Oz’s serial character,
asserting the mass cultural identity of children’s series fiction as one
important arena for complicating the supposed certainties that underlie
value and meaning.
As a reflection of industrial times, seriality constitutes rather than
diminishes artistic possibility. To the philosopher Giorgio Agamben,
the repeated visual images that make up another modern twentieth-
century form, moving pictures, provide a “strategic” metadiscourse
about mechanized repetition (313). The modern image “is no longer
something immobile” (314) but repeats, Agamben asserts, and from
that repetition takes its “force” and “grace” (315): “Repetition restores
the possibility of what was, renders it anew; it’s almost a paradox. To
repeat something is to make it possible anew” (316). Standardization,
the loss of difference, becomes a structural element rather than a
liability. Precisely because each instalment calls up what has gone
before – the previous always gesturing to the next iteration, the next
always recalling the prior – this linkage “opens up a zone of undecid-
ability between the real and the possible,” in which “you understand
that yes, everything is possible” (316), including the horrific but also
exceeding it (“everything is possible” is Hannah Arendt’s phrase about
the horrors of the Holocaust). Repeated images keep possibilities ongo-
ing and open. Defining serial publication as “a single work distributed
incrementally in time,” art critic Victor Brand captures this potentiality
in a nutshell: as a modern principle of art, serial publication relies upon
“the notion of futurity” (28). What defines the series is the constant
promise of “the next one” (29).
In the Oz series, those meta-images are characteristically images of
mechanical men. They stand for automatic repetition and they explicitly
gesture to the future. Benjamin, Freud, Jentsch, and Mori explore how
mechanical men provide an illusion of choice that actually enables new
possibilities; they look like people, but not quite, unsettling bounda-
ries between the animate and inanimate, the human and mechanical.
By simultaneously defamiliarizing the category of art and the identity
of people, they point to how meaning is made. Comics scholar Tim
Laurie Langbauer 37
Blackmore, writing about the early comics of Winsor McCay, observes

that Baum’s world is “full of polished surfaces which cover complex gear
mechanisms” (34). Popular forms such as comics and series fiction not
only depend upon such clockwork; they let the gears show through.
Art, in its inventiveness and gadgetry, makes the familiar strange but
also the uncanny pleasurable. During the first half of the twentieth
century, pundits in venues such as the New York Times, North American
Review, or Bookman often denied the value and often the pleasure of
forms associated with seriality: how could anyone enjoy something
so repetitive and rote as dime novels, comic strips, and juvenile series
fiction? Only seldom did the debate consider these forms as sophisti-
cated, self-aware, and self-questioning. And, if a supposedly bankrupt
form “admits of this doubt,” Freud writes about what seems comic,
“the reason can only be that it has a façade – in these instances a
comic one – in the contemplation of which one person is satiated while
another may try to peer behind it. A suspicion may arise, moreover,
that this façade is intended to dazzle the examining eye and that these
stories have therefore something to conceal” (“Jokes” 105–6). The
significance they conceal may lie in what seems most apparent – the
form in which they were conducted, the rote repetitions that, writing
in 1924, both Ernest Brennecke and Gilbert Seldes admired as sophisti-
cated analysis encoded into their very form. To these critics, and (they
argued) more to the point to their artists, the value of comics was their
winking self-knowledge.
In comics, in dime novels, in series fiction like Oz, the queasy ambi-
guity of mechanical doppelgängers and the luridness of pulp illustra-
tions engage the eye and direct it to what is right in front of it – not
some hidden content but the open secret of form itself. Oz seems to
be about mechanical men – and it is – but it is also about itself as a
series, about seriality itself. Mechanical men are part of the story, but
they also embody the machinery that makes the story work. Benjamin
claims that new approaches such as psychoanalysis discover new ways
to see, and his observations might apply to new mass forms like series
fiction as well. Each helped “isolat[e] and ma[k]e analyzable things
which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream
of perception” (235). Like Baum’s green-coloured spectacles, as a new
apparatus through which to perceive, optics like seriality change the
character of what has been before our eyes all along, revealing the
ways we bring meaning to it.5 Mechanical men in Oz supply the instru-
ment that reveals seriality as fundamental to the meaning of art in the
modern age.
II
Repetition and ongoingness seem to be the hallmark of the cultural

presence of Oz. Baum strung out the first book (1900) into a series of
14. After Baum’s death, the series was extended to a total of 40 books
produced by different writers. It continues still in seemingly endless
unauthorized sequels and modern avatars. Oz’s character was defined
as much by its look as its content. William Wallace Denslow illustrated
only the first Oz book, but he determined how we would continue to
see Oz by influencing subsequent illustrators – John R. Neill the most
long-standing – and by designing the costumes for the wildly successful
musical spin-off (1902), which was just the first of Oz’s multimedia
reproductions, including early movie travelogues and a series of silent
films. The 1939 MGM movie, indebted to Denslow’s earlier costumes, is
the best known in this series of ongoing visual stagings.
Enduringly popular with readers, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was
initially heralded by reviewers as charming and original, but “as
the series continued,” Suzanne Rahn writes in her summary of Oz’s
reception, “and began to seem repetitious, reviews became few and
perfunctory … [and] no longer bothered to distinguish between one Oz
book and another” (xi). Anne Carroll Moore, the influential children’s
librarian at the New York Public Library from 1906–41, notoriously
swept all the Oz books off her shelves in the 1930s, and librarians
throughout the country followed suit. They thought that series fiction
(mass-produced, commercial, interminable, formulaic, and repetitive)
had no redeeming value and would harm any children exposed to it. In
1948, South Carolina libraries put Oz at the top of a list of “books not
to be purchased, not to be accepted as gifts, not to be processed and not
to be circulated”: “These ‘series type’ books are … unwholesome for the
children” (“Books” 3) and their presence “indicates … lack of interest in
[children’s] welfare” (4).6
By Oz’s centenary in 2000, Rahn observes, critics had generally come
to see Oz in particular and series fiction in general as deserving of analy-
sis, because the critical climate had changed to recognize how popular
literature revealed the ways in which changing historical context deter-
mines changing value. But that did not necessarily mean a revaluation
of the popular. In a 1996 essay, Richard Flynn still finds in Oz’s serial
identity the destructive by-product of mechanical reproduction: it stim-
ulates ongoing avidity for endless new instalments, enforcing the logic
of planned obsolescence. Rereading (Flynn cites Roland Barthes) should
radically refuse consumerist logic (125), but, by selling new instalments
Laurie Langbauer 39
that take over its logic, “the purveyors of child-culture … condition the
marginalized desire for repetition (rereading) into the more acceptable
desire for serial commodities (the sequel)” (125).
Flynn’s essay is a modern statement of a persistent condemnation of
Oz and series fiction: the worry that its purveyors corrupt children into
benighted consumers by recycling the same empty product. When it
comes to their profits, those purveyors cynically believe that “[s]erial
consumption is a small price to pay for [children’s] ‘real happiness’ – a
small trouble, and well worth taking” (125). “[T]he window-dresser had
deliberately aroused the cupidity of the child consumers” (124), Flynn
accuses Baum, converting children’s desire not into “real” happiness but
“a kind of brand loyalty” that perpetuates Oz’s line of goods (124). Oz’s
critics indict it for the logic of modern advertising that delivers nothing
more than its own self-perpetuating greed.
That seriality capitalizes on and exploits children remains a criti-
cism that, if anything, relies on evidence of children’s ongoing desire
for serial fiction as confirmation. But focusing on the symbolic range
of the mechanical reproduction within such new forms points to
another way entirely to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the series
form. Freud, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” for instance, supplies
a different perspective by highlighting images of the mechanical.7
E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1814 story “The Sandman,” in which the hero’s
love for the clockwork puppet Olympia reveals his repressed child-
hood terrors, demonstrates why we feel horror at involuntary rep-
etition. The jerky wind-up deformities of clockwork figures – like but
disturbingly different from us – point adults to our childhoods – like
but disturbingly different from what we have become. Automata,
machines that look like people, represent the return of the familiar
made strange, displaced just enough to uncover hidden workings –
involuntary drives within the psyche, unacknowledged mechanical
reflexes of being human. But this simple story is more complicated
because we do not always feel these connections as horrific. In “The
Uncanny,” Freud “feels impelled” to try to account for how a writer
“bribes us by the purely formal – that is, aesthetic – yield of pleasure”
(219), and, by considering that question, as he puts it elsewhere, to
consider the very nature of art (“Creative” 153).
In this “study of aesthetics,” as Freud calls “The Uncanny” (219), he
says he has been prompted by an earlier essay (216): Ernst Jentsch’s
“On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906). In trying to define the
structure rather than the essence of the uncanny, Jentsch argues that
in art or everyday life, “doubt as to the animate or inanimate nature
of things” provides a reliably uncanny effect (14). Given their underly-

ing “primitive” (13) desire to see the world as animate, people often
mistake machines for human: the fall of darkness, for instance, turns
familiar household objects into strange beings. Suspecting involuntary
reflexes at work within ourselves, we also have a propensity to see
people as machines. A corpse, a skeleton, or someone in an epileptic
fit exposes “the mechanical processes” underneath the supposedly
“unified psyche” that we assume we possess. The human form we
imagined to be “so meaningful, expedient, and unitary” is revealed as
“an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism” beyond sentient
control – revealing that the individual has always been a machine (14).
And yet, Jentsch asserts, these defamiliarizations, like those of poetry,
are not always horrific but sometimes pleasing. The degree to which
we reflect on sudden insights changes the uncanny from horrific to
valuable. Intelligent children who think too much set themselves
up for uncanny experiences because they have the metacognition
to recognize something unaccountable beneath what others gener-
ally see and ignore (9). Yet that same insightfulness also converts the
uncanny’s “dark feeling of uncertainty” (13) into “pleasant and joyful
feeling[s]” (10). By recognizing his artistry, we enjoy Hoffman’s thrill-
ing fantasies: art “manages to make most emotions enjoyable for us”
(12–13) by mobilizing pleasure through a “critical sense” about its
own workings (13). Like Jentsch, Freud acknowledges artistic pleasure
within the uncanny. Children do not seem disturbed by the idea of
their dolls coming to life, Freud points out – in fact they quite desire it
(“Uncanny” 233) – and in fairy tales many things happen that would
seem uncanny and harrowing in life but are lovely and fitting once-
upon-a-time (246). A writer like Oscar Wilde, who “begins to amuse
himself by being ironical about” this effect, transforms it out of the
horrific (252).
In the literary history of automata, Hoffman’s “Sandman” is coun-
terbalanced by Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay “On the Marionette
Theatre.” Kleist’s storyteller asserts that we “could learn a great deal” by
watching with admiration as marionettes dance (22). Rather than sim-
ply lay figures of horror, marionettes are full of grace: in this respect,
“it would be almost impossible for a man to attain even an approxi-
mation of a mechanical being” (24). Kleist’s text asks us to imagine a
perfect automaton, set free in its ascendant lightness from any human
touch of corporeality, assumed “entirely over into the world of the
mechanical” (23). Hélène Cixous interprets Kleist’s essay as a medita-
tion upon the possibilities of joy, a way to reinterpret humankind’s
Laurie Langbauer 41
fall: “Everything was transformed when they consciously wanted the

joy they already had … ‘they wanted to possess what they already pos-
sessed’” (36). Wanting what you already possess is, of course, the nar-
rative impulse of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, if not also of the series.
Paul de Man suggests an even more specific connection we could apply
to Oz: he focuses on the marionette’s limbs which, although “dead,
pure pendulums” (Kleist 24), turn out also to be their source of beauty
(de Man 285–90). They remind the storyteller of the gavottes of ampu-
tees, whose mechanical legs, supplied by a marvellous “craftsman”
(Kleist 23), invest their movements with unexpected grace. Baum too
is intrigued by this seeming paradox of mechanical animation: the Tin
Woodman, we learn, was once made of flesh until his axe, bewitched,
chopped off so many parts of him that his metal prostheses came
mechanically to reproduce his entire corpus (Annotated 95–102). What
seems to supplement actually embodies his selfhood, so that ordinary
capacities he may have possessed as Nick Chopper become remarkable
when figured in tin.
Superfluousness, a surplus of replication, characterizes Baum’s Oz
series. Dorothy’s companions famously wish for attributes that dupli-
cate what they already possess (brains, a heart, courage). The Wizard,
proclaiming his humbuggery all the while, gives them redundant
emblems, confirming their original possession somehow by replicat-
ing it. The need to restage such replications compulsively leads the
Tin Man in a late Oz book (the 1918 Tin Woodman of Oz, practically
contemporaneous with Freud’s “The Uncanny”) to meet another tin
man, the soldier, Captain Fyter, who just like the Tin Man has severed
away all parts of himself so that they too have been substituted by tin.
Even more uncannily, this double had also fallen in love with, and then
forgotten, the same lovely Munchkin whom the Tin Man loved and for-
sook when he chopped away his heart. In The Tin Woodman of Oz, both
the Tin Man and Captain Fyter go off to explore how much of a heart
the Wizard has given the Tin Woodman. They do so by confronting the
organic selves their metal forms mechanically replicate. Baum has them
come face to face with their earlier forms: initially the Tin Man’s severed
head and then with the other bits and pieces of themselves.
The Tin Woodman recognizes his head when he comes across it locked
in a cupboard, but the head insists that it has never seen the Woodman
before: “For my part, I’m not anxious to claim relationship with any
common, manufactured article, like you” (212, see Figure 1.1). The Tin
Woodman is not so sure about priority, however, or about identity for
that matter: “If you are Nick Chopper’s Head, then you are Me – or I’m
42
Figure 1.1 Frank L. Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz, Illust. John R. Neill (Chicago:
Reilly and Lee, 1918). Print.
Laurie Langbauer 43
You – or – or – What relation are we, anyhow?” (Tin Woodman 212). To

the Tin Man’s claim that “You belong to me. … You and I are one,” the
head refuses all coincidence or connection: “We’ve been parted” (215),
it states simply. Though the irrefutability of that statement is madden-
ing, it is not after all conclusive. “Actually,” Freud writes, “we can never
give anything up; we can only exchange one thing for another. What
appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or
surrogate” (“Creative” 145). Even what looks different can actually be
more of the same.
The Tin Man and his friends remain “puzzled” (Tin Woodman 214)
and “bewildered” (212) by this “fascinating problem in the nature of
identity” (Vidal 42); which self is which? Such existential vertiginous-
ness is never stabilized in Oz, but seems always ongoing, prompting an
open-ended series of never definitive substitutions. Even as the Tin Man
and his head are talking, his other seemingly de trop double, the Tin
Soldier, is opening all the cupboards, looking disconsolately for his own
lost head. He finds it ultimately on the top of a kind of Frankensteinian
creature, patched together from both their cast-off parts, who has
explicitly become their stand-in with the lover they both forgot. She
has settled for marrying these prior parts, but no replacement seems
adequate: she finds this surrogate insufficient, but does not really want
the Tin Man or Tin Soldier either. “Baum rarely knew when to quit”
(86), John Updike writes, recounting how a “giddying, virtually bacte-
rial multitudinousness came to characterize Oz as sequels multiplied”
(87). Images in Oz, he tells us, “cry out for extension and elaboration”
(86). As Osmond Beckwith, in “The Oddness of Oz,” puts it, “everything
is ‘over-determined.’ Nothing is ever simply demonstrated once” (81).
The insistent and excessive repetitions within each book are mirrored
by the repetitions from book to book that make up the series.
Gore Vidal, in defence of Oz against critics who thought the series
to be bankrupt, writes that he “never forgot how amazed [he] was” at
the Tin Man confronting his own head, largely because of the uncanny
replication of this representation (42). His astonishment came not just
from reading such a marvellous conceit but also from seeing it depicted
in John R. Neill’s illustration (42) – an image Neill actually pictures
twice. This doubling and the unsettling pairing of text and image shock
but also astonish him. This proliferation of unmoored priority underlies
a series impulse in which mechanical reproduction is literalized into an
image, both written and visual.
The uneasy coincidence of text and image provides another way to
think about children’s series fiction which also recognizes its pleasures,
rather than just its horrors. The Oz series grew out of a prior tradition
of illustrated mid- to late-nineteenth-century dime novels that predated
and helped to shape later juvenile series fiction – whose graphic covers
and (later) inside illustration were part of their draw. The influential
publisher James T. Fields asserted in a lecture at the Boston Athenaeum
in 1879 that dime novels were both popular and pernicious, filled
not just with “murders [but] pictures about murders” (“Mr. Fields”
C3). Included within these was a whole subgenre – inventor stories or
“Edisonades” – that featured mechanical men, men of iron or steel,
with detailed depictions of how they looked. Through these figures,
this tradition touted its own innovation. Dime novels too were a new
form of mass production, like newspapers, printed inexpensively and
distributed widely. These particular inventor novels based their plots
on increasingly innovative up-to-date mechanical men – first steam,
then electric – each topping the next. And not only were the mechani-
cal men an infinite succession, but they were the product of a series of
young inventors – eager new ones always at the ready to supplant earlier
and outdated pioneers, often taking over from their own fathers (see
DeForest, and Denning).
Dime novels were ultimately themselves supplanted by pulp maga-
zines, more attractive because they made better use of four-colour
separation in printing. Denslow’s illustrations for Oz employed the
same new visual technology of colour printing and that technology
also gave rise to another new form, the Sunday Supplement or Color
Comics Page. Critics worried at each stage about the commercialism
of these forms and their effect on children.8 Their promises of pleasure
were denounced in the terms that modern critics like Flynn still repeat:
“children become addicted” (“Perhaps” 12) based on a need that critics
insist could not ever be gratified and would only destroy any hope
of children’s “future happiness” in their unceasing desire for more
(“‘Comic’ Nuisance” 528).
Enjoyment of popular forms seemed to its critics involuntary and
addictive. Parents attempt to satisfy “the demand of childhood for
laughter, for brightness,” but, in the “frightful innovation” of the funny
pages, any “real funniness is lost in … monstrosity,” writes Ellen Kenyon-
Warner (“Comic” RB128). Kenyon-Warner was an educator of the early
twentieth century who wrote textbooks advocating reading as character-
building. She offers Pinocchio as a parable for the supposedly proper
development that reading permits: she hopes that such good stories will
convince children to stop being automata themselves (like that mari-
onette) and advance beyond the unthinking reflex that makes mesmer-
izing illustrations appear delightful. Pinocchio “becomes a marionette
Laurie Langbauer 45
through … the artist’s skill,” but he becomes “a real boy” through the
“moral awakening” of moving beyond “his own pleasure.” Similarly,
“youngsters tumble over one another in their eagerness to absorb the
highly colored smartness of the Sunday Supplement,” she writes, but
this anarchy ceases when they read “good” literature: “all wait on the
pace of the child who reads aloud; every boy has his place when called
upon; their marionette stage is past and they are real boys, amenable
to the law,” and they have “no need of discipline” (Kenyon-Warner,
“Good” L129). Children need to move beyond mere repetition, to
develop beyond the “cruel estrangement from books which takes place
in the lower grades of the mechanical school” (L129) so that they will
no longer get stuck in unthinking pleasure. Yet, I have been arguing,
popular art including the series and comics, rather than being unthink-
ing, might provide a different version of selfhood. Specifically, it might
provide a reflection upon how structure calls the self up: these popular
texts suggest that repetition is less a form of being stuck than a form of
being. They offer their mechanics as the very machinery that constitutes
the meaning of identity.
III
Contemporaneous critics denounced the Oz series in terms similar to

those that they used against the comics page, perhaps because Oz’s
attractions too were so openly, even happily, repetitive. Its illustrations
seemed almost flagrant in their replications. Thirty years before Moore
blacklisted the Oz series in the 1930s, in her first job in children’s ser-
vices at the Pratt Institute Free Library, she had singled out Baum and
Denslow by pointing to their use of illustration as particularly harmful.
When discussing the “artistic merit” of picture books, she wrote that
“most of the popular picture books of the time are unworthy of a place
in the hands of children. Such books as Denslow’s Mother Goose and
Baum’s Father Goose, with a score of others of the comic poster order,
should be banished from the sight of impressionable little children”
(Moore 4). Other critics agreed that Denslow’s illustrations “are good
examples of the Sunday-supplement style,” as Tudor Jenks (who was
himself a prolific author, often of children’s books, and a well-connected
editor and lawyer) put it (492–93). The books Baum and Denslow pro-
duced during their short-lived partnership seemed unexpectedly (or,
to Moore and Jenks, unfortunately) successful, but Baum and Denslow
succeeded because they recognized almost immediately the appeal of
the comics page, an appeal denied or combated by figures within the
literary establishment.
Moore’s characterization of “the comic poster order” neatly summarized

Denslow’s centrality within the debate about children’s pictures. Denslow’s
style epitomized radical changes in children’s book illustration from the
moment he first burst onto the scene with Father Goose: His Book, the
surprise bestseller he produced with Baum before The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz. Denslow was in fact so much copied that, a decade later, he had
trouble selling his work because by then his distinctive style could only
seem derivative of himself (Greene and Hearn 138). That style was the
result of his years as a newspaper sketch artist, mastering what repro-
duced best, given high-speed rotary printing processes that handled
line better than tone (Bonner). Rather than emphasize verisimilitude,
Denslow exaggerated formal elements, conveying information effi-
ciently through caricature and gesture. He used bold outline, economy
of mark, and artful page design that repeated formal elements and left
open negative space. As he went on to become a noted poster illustra-
tor, he exploited four-colour separation to add emphatic colour in flat
blocks (Greene and Hearn 17–18, 63–64). The fine arts now call this
combination of elements “art nouveau,” but at the time such graphics
looked to wary guardians of children’s welfare simply like the vocabu-
lary of advertising. Posters sold things. And so did the comics page.
Their bright colours demanded that viewers look, and made them
want to buy. In the 1890s, the magazine Youth’s Companion printed
the first full-page colour advertisement in the United States, prompt-
ing subsequent worries about the lure of colour to sway the desires of
impressionable young consumers (Thomson 24).9 Denslow’s virtuosic
manipulation of this artistry maximized those allurements.
This seemed to critics a specifically mechanical threat, a product of the
machine. Modes of reproduction prompted the invasion of the comic
supplement style into children’s fiction: “the harsh color and primitive
line [of most illustrated children’s books] are those of the cheap modern
process,” warned the librarians Lucy Ella Fay and Anne Thaxter Eaton
(Eaton later became editor for children’s books at the New York Times Book
Review) (315).10 “We sometimes speak of the illustrations of a book … as
[one of] its ‘mechanical features’; but this characterization … should not
be made at all,” writes Walter Taylor Field, another author of primers for
elementary students. Trying to hold the line against any valorization
of the mechanical, he advises that, instead of something that comes
from a machine, we understand that “the pictures of a child’s book are
an organic part of it” (458). After artists like Denslow had transformed
children’s illustration, critics deplored that children’s books seemed
invaded by a “characteristic American world of mechanisms,” as Henry
Laurie Langbauer 47
Beston (children’s author himself, though now best known as a natural-

ist writer) regrets (494). The Boston Herald even bowed to pressure and
substituted a children’s page with riddles and games instead of coloured
comics in hopes of stopping the momentum of the comics: “The comic
supplement … has had its day. We discard it as we would throw aside
any mechanism that had reached the end of its usefulness” (“Sounding”
630). But the problem with this mechanism was that it kept on replicat-
ing. “The series run on in long drawn out tenuity,” Frank Weitenkampf,
librarian of art and prints at the New York Public Library complained.
“The original pattern becomes stereotyped, standardized” (576). These
critics worried that people enjoyed what the critics considered the
mechanical look and structure of the comic page, and that they kept
wanting more.
As late as 1929, Eugene Wilford Shrigley, author of Our Community and
the Christian Ideal, flagged the newspapers’ announcement of the “inven-
tion of a mechanical man” as capturing “the age in which we live –
mechanical” (218). This interest in everything technological was, he felt,
typified by the “Sunday supplement style” (222). To Shrigley, the comics
exemplified the modern malaise of “ideas ready-made, mechanically
distributed, and unduly standardized” and this standardization proceeds
“ad infinitum.” He regretted that readers regarded comic strips as truly
“comic” (“or tragic,” he corrects them) (224). They mistake the comics
as comedy, he thinks, only because they interchangeably swap “happi-
ness with speed, human nature with contraption” (228). Mechanical
men and comic pages are simply different versions of the replacement of
the human by the mechanical. Shrigley, like Weitenkampf, regrets that
readers are not bothered by what these two critics consider stereotype
or cliché (two terms, as Weitenkampf knew, actually introduced by print
technology). Readers instead embrace what the critics consider inad-
equate duplicates, attracted by the wind-up gadgetry simulating the real.
In fact, newspapers had been heralding the attractions of such rep-
licated human contraptions for more than a generation. In 1868, they
announced that Zadoc Dederick had patented and displayed a “steam
man” in Newark, New Jersey. And that Thomas Winans patented his
Newark “steam king” the next year (Hoggett). For decades after, notices
ran of other impresarios such as “Professor Moore” or “Captain Rowe,”
who hawked mechanical men with names like “Hercules, the Iron
Giant,” “the Parisian Steam Man,” and a whole host of other knock-offs
(“Amusements” 6; “Ninth and Arch” 4; “New Mechanical” 626). Edward
Ellis, noted dime writer, almost immediately turned Dederick’s celebrated
steam man into a novel because his publishers recognized free publicity
when they saw it. As an attraction, the book The Steam Man of the Prairie
(1868) turned out to last longer and pay better than the actual steam
men themselves. “I know of a person who devoted twenty-five years
and a large fortune … in constructing a steam man. … [but] soon found
that the public demand for steam men was very small indeed” (“Patent” 3).
The novel was so successful, however, that it reinvigorated the vogue for
steam men; patrons paid because they thought they were seeing the
fictional steam men whom they believed to be real (“Wonderland” 7).
Ellis’s Johnnie Brainerd was perhaps the first “young inventor” but Ellis’s
idea was replicated many times, extended and serialized by imitators:
first, Harry Enton, who launched his Frank Reade series with Frank Reade
and His Steam Man of the Plains in 1876. Enton’s four Frank Reade stories
were then extended into the much longer Frank Reade, Jr. series written
by “Noname” (the pseudonym of Luis Senarens), beginning with Frank
Reade, Jr., and His New Steam Man in 1892.
The steam men were like juggernauts; their power, like trains, was to
plow, fast and hard, in a straight line across wide expanses. The harm-
fulness of the dime novel was understood as similarly full-speed and
remorseless: its victims “are innumerable. Perhaps they will go on mul-
tiplying to the end of time” (“Dime” 4). Critics thought that children
preferred “illustrated papers with cartoons,” just as they did dime nov-
els, because such “dimenology” was “simply … easier, requiring none of
the reflective faculties” (“What Young Folks” 2). Rather than lack self-
reflection about their form, however, dime novelists may have latched
with such dispatch onto plots about invention, focusing on mechani-
cal men in particular, because they felt hard pressed to fabricate plots
for the thousands of pages they turned out weekly. These writers were
themselves represented in the press as “literary automatons who assem-
ble the hundred million words necessary to meet the requirements of
the industry. … Painful experience has taught [the dime novelist] he is
but the amanuensis of the machine” ( Jones 44).
The Oz series grows out of a heritage of inventor series novels,
emphasizing how mechanical men symbolize serial structure. In The
Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People (1900),
written before The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum tells the story of “The
Cast-Iron Man.” Powered by steam, he too is able to do nothing but
plough ahead, trampling all in his path. In this character, Baum repeats
the dime-novel Steam Man. As victim of his own unrelenting forward
propulsion, the Cast Iron Man’s inability to stop echoes the narrative
impulse in the dime novel series which, despite cliffhangers at each
chapter’s end, unrelentingly pushes on from adventure to adventure.
Laurie Langbauer 49
Baum moves from the need to connect the discrete stories within
chapters forcefully through using an artificial figure in the Adventures
of Mo to a sustained narrative in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The
Tin Woodman’s appearance in Oz, however, continues Baum’s use of
mechanical figures to reflect on the inner workings of his form. With
his lighter, cheaper metal, Baum’s Tin Man both parodies and supplants
these earlier iron men. The tin that forms him announces him to be
patently a reproduction, a facsimile, a kind of model or even toy, the
very symbol of replication. Showing up later in the series, his duplicate
Captain Fyter only makes manifest an identity of replication already
encoded by his very form – a mirroring that I have been advancing as
the utility of mechanical men as a metaphor for art. Updike and Vidal
point to the self-reflection in this kind of sophisticated formal play to
account for their enjoyment of Oz, an attraction that I suggest could
underlie the enormous and ongoing popularity of this series – a very
different understanding of its gadgetry from the one adopted by its
early critics.
Tik-Tok, another Oz mechanical man, fashioned from copper, visu-
ally resembles Ellis’s original dime-novel Steam Man and retains a bit
of his clumsiness. Tik-Tok’s sameness as, and difference from, this
chain of images teases the boundary between repetition and signifi-
cant difference. Baum had written about a Clockwork Man as early as
his Father Goose, and even about a wooden prototype, Mr. Split (in
Dot and Tot of Merryland), who holds the key to all the wind-up toys.
Paul Abrahm and Stuart Kenter argue that Baum carefully explores the
conceivable range of mechanical replication – from automata such as
the Cast Iron Man or the later Iron Giant (who can only mechanically
raise and lower his deadly hammer), through robots such as Tik-Tok, to
cyborgs such as the Tin Man and Captain Fyter. The last three of these
argue endlessly about their ontological and epistemological differences,
however, precisely because those distinctions remain undecidable (“the
Tin Woodman is a human; the iron giant, machine; Tik-Tok, neither”
because “automata were pure body, but robots [like people] can possess
mind,” Abrahm and Kenter 69, 72). Because “in Tik-Tok’s case, [others]
have to decide whether or not he is alive,” Abrahm and Kenter suggest,
that renders “questionable the premise that he is not” (69). Tik-Tok’s
“talent for irony” and “self-reflective consciousness” (74), like the Tin
Woodman’s, emphasize an undecidability between the animate and
inanimate. Yet Tik-Tok, like the Tin Woodman, appears beloved and
welcome, not horrific. Their appearances assert their artistry: “My
body shone so brightly in the sun that I felt very proud of it,” the Tin
Man tells Dorothy of his new form (Baum, Annotated 100); “I do not
sup-pose such a per-fect ma-chine as I am could be made in an-y place
but a fair-y land,” Tik-Tok tells Dorothy (Baum, Ozma 62). The almost
compulsive proliferation of mechanical forms in Oz does not so much
worry their difference from the human or each other as emphasize their
aesthetics of mechanical form.
Tik-Tok operates as a “bridge” figure – recalling earlier images of
mechanical men but also looking human, with “its nonfunctional
hat, its moustache, its spats” (Abrahm and Kenter 71). That depiction
highlights the “anthropomorphic bias” in “graphic representations” of
robots that retain “the morphology of humans” (68). In 1970, Masahiro
Mori reflected, like Jentsch, on the horror that people might feel at the
sight of a momentarily too convincing prosthetic limb or robot when
it resolved into something mechanical. Addressing this threshold of
indecision and resolution, Mori theorized an “uncanny valley” between
the human and contraption. “I have noticed,” he wrote, “that, as robots
appear more humanlike, our sense of their familiarity increases” (33).
When machines get too close to looking real, however, that welcome
ends abruptly and we come up against an uncrossable abyss within
which their undecidability checks us: “I call this relation the ‘uncanny
valley’” (Mori 33). Like Agamben’s zone of possibility, however, this
valley points us to strategies of self-reflection. The machines that seem
most human are those which stop short of absolutely looking that way.
They retain and foreground signs of their art instead: “we feel it is beau-
tiful and there is no sense of the uncanny” (in “uncanny’s” meaning of
horrific or strange), Mori writes (35). Foregrounding their construction
makes these avatars familiar instead.
Once the literary partnership between Baum and Denslow ended,
they produced competing comic strips, which also retain the signs of
their art (in part by looking so much like each other) (Shanower; for
the complete run of both strips, see Maresca). Harry Cornell Greening’s
Percy (“Brains He Has Nix”), another comic-strip robot of the time
(1911–13), highlights the repetition compulsion that underscores the
repeating panel form of the comics: you push a button and, like the
logic of the comics themselves, this mechanical man does the same
thing endlessly, comically, until simultaneously the panels run out
and his desperate inventor manages to stop him. The next day, you
push the button again. Later children’s series depict the attractions of
their own straightforward formulas through mechanical figures too.
The Stratemeyer syndicate’s Tom Swift series continues the techno-
logical emphasis of Edisonade series fiction, featuring first Tom Swift
the father and then Tom Swift, Jr., his son. The plots of their novels
Laurie Langbauer 51
revolve around mechanical devices, including the mechanical men of

Tom Swift Jr.’s Tom Swift and His Giant Robot. In The Clue of the Dancing
Puppet, Nancy Drew finds the secret to this mystery inside one of the
initially terrifying life-size puppets; it turns out to be “a clever inven-
tion,” the design for a fuel cell that supplies an otherwise inexplicable
motive force that seems almost perpetual motion (Keene 174) – a force
which drives these puppets, but also the Nancy Drew series. In The
Crooked Banister, the robot, threatening or helpful depending on how
they program him, actually solves the case.
The mechanical man, through the prospect of its endless duplication,
specifically signifies seriality. Mechanical men embody the way new
forms of art – comic strips, series novels – provide the “new structural
formations of the subject” that Benjamin identifies (236). We might
expect them to embody the kind of dissolution that Benjamin describes
when quoting Pirandello on the mechanical reproduction of the film
actor onto the screen: “with a vague sense of discomfort he feels inex-
plicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality” (229). Mechanical
men in Oz, however, do not reject or lament the emptiness of being
automatic, ongoing, and repetitive. They often reflect on the limitations
of their companions instead, whose flesh demands they eat and drink
and sleep. Benjamin shares with the Frankfurt School critics a suspicion
that popular texts manage and contain resistance, such as the resistance
modern people ought to offer to being turned into machines by capital-
ism, industrialism, or consumerism, but he hopes that such transforma-
tions will help society replace individuality with the collective. The Oz
series proposes something else: that machines construct as well as alien-
ate. Mechanical men like the Tin Woodman suggest that people have
been machines all along, or, like Tik-Tok, that machines make better peo-
ple. Though critics at the time often treated the series identity of the Oz
books as diminishing them, the Wizard of Oz series instead foregrounds
the repetitions of seriality as the very opportunity for modern being.
Notes
1. As historical distinctions, “industrial” and “informational” are shorthand for
different ways of organizing knowledge rather than discrete eras; they are
interconnected and simultaneous rather than discontinuous, both residual and
emergent. In 1962, Marshall McLuhan already anticipated insights wrought by
“informational” media: “As we experience the new electronic … age …, the pre-
ceding mechanical age becomes quite intelligible. Now that the assembly line
recedes before new patterns of information … the miracles of mass-production
assume entire intelligibility” (312). My essay is only interested in the infor-
mational by extension as the mode supposedly succeeding industrialism.
2. Though Joshua Bellin argues that the Oz of the 1939 MGM movie is
decidedly dystopian, he concedes that the Tin Man provides an “ambiva-
lent commentary on technology” (77); Gretchen Ritter argues that the Tin
Man reveals Baum’s ambivalence: “Baum appeared variously enthralled
with the magic of technology and wary of the social consequences of the
machine age” (181).
3. See Whitestone Motion Pictures’ 2010 Heartless (directed by Brandon
McCormick), the Sci-Fi Channel’s 2007 “Tin Man,” and Eric Shanower’s
1980s–1990s Oz graphic novel series. Archie Green discusses sculptures in
metal by trained and folk artists. To both Stuart Culver and William Leach,
that the Tin Man already has the heart he seeks suggests an allegory about
commodity desire.
4. Will Eisner’s famous term for the comic strip; see Eisner and Scott McCloud.
5. “A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of
the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective”
(Benjamin 235).
6. Oz criticism consistently misattributes this to Dorothy Dodd, supposedly
Florida’s head librarian, in 1959.
7. Even though Walter Benjamin denounces Fascism’s containment of the
revolutionary potential of repetitive forms like film (humankind’s “self-alienation
has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aes-
thetic pleasure of the first order” [24]) and finds that self-alienation explicitly
mechanical (“the dreamt-of metalization of the human body” [241]), never-
theless, once properly politicized through materialist critique, this technology
could provide “entirely new structural formations of the subject” (236).
8. “It is not probable that there is any reader … who would deliberately
bring dime novels into his home,” a review wrote in 1906, and yet “many
of the colored supplements of the Sunday papers … are placed freely in
the hands of children by well-meaning but thoughtless parents” (Friends’
Intelligencer 493).
9. At the Child Welfare Exhibit in 1911, founding member of the Fabian
Society Percival Chubb (then president of the Ethical Culture Society)
decried “the Sunday debauch in flamboyant color.” Comics extended news-
paper advertisements and commercialism in ways “unwholesome and ruin-
ous to children”: “the interest of the child is everywhere nudged with things
that concern his elders – beautifiers, beverages, and the like,” according to a
1911 New York Times article (“Comic … Evil”). An artist replied that “over-
production” degraded the comics page and the modern fine arts in general
(“Comic … Denounced”).
10. See “it is vulgarity at its worst that thrusts its impertinent tongue at us in the
comic supplements, in crude violence of color” (“Vulgar” 307) and “let the
Sunday newspaper put its paint-pot away and resume the sober garb of an
earlier, more self-respecting age” (“Casual” 396).
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2
“Anne repeated”: Taking Anne
Out of Order
Laura M. Robinson
At the end of Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Ingleside,

the last published novel in her famous Anne of Green Gables series, a
middle-aged Anne turns from her window to face into her home, to
look inwards rather than outwards. Montgomery writes: “In her white
gown, with her hair in its two long braids, she looked like the Anne
of Green Gables days … of Redmond days … of the House of Dreams
days” (277). This ending falls somewhat flat, is “curiously unconvinc-
ing” in Gillian Thomas’s words, because it comes too easily after the
tales of cruelty and domestic violence that pepper the novel, and after
Anne’s depression over her husband’s apparent lack of interest in her
and apparent interest in an old flame (Thomas 27). Anne listens to
her husband snore and her children breathe in their sleep: “‘What a
family!’ Anne repeated exultantly” (277), are the final words of the
novel. Intriguingly, Anne has not previously said those words, so the
verb “repeated” is potentially misleading, inviting the reader to read
that phrase on its own: “Anne repeated exultantly.” These words would
lead readers to believe that Anne says that phrase repeatedly, and yet
she does not. Prior to the ending, the words are spoken only once by
her husband Gilbert’s old girlfriend in an earlier chapter, disparagingly,
about the size of Anne’s brood. Anne repeats them with a difference,
not with contempt this time but with triumph. That the novel presents
this phrase far from its earlier iteration encourages the reader to inter-
pret the line as if Anne herself, and not her words, repeats exultantly.
Arguably, she does.
That Montgomery resurrects in this final moment an unchanging
Anne-in-braids who could be from the very first or third or fourth novel,
an “Anne repeated,” speaks to an intratextuality and repetition that
approaches the parodic. Daniel Chandler distinguishes intratextuality
57
from intertextuality: “Whilst the term intertextuality would normally

be used to refer to allusions to other texts, a related kind of allusion
is what might be called ‘intratextuality’ – involving internal relations
within the text” (Chandler). Intratextual and repeated self-references
occur across the eight published books in Montgomery’s Anne of
Green Gables series. Montgomery’s Anne of Ingleside, standing before
her window, is both like and unlike all the Annes who have gone
before, including the Annes in that very novel. The intratexual repeti-
tion of the image of Anne is nominally the same, like Anne repeating
the other woman’s earlier exclamation, but the meaning is very differ-
ent. The fact that the intratextual repetitions never repeat themselves
exactly suggests that the repetitions in series necessarily approach
parody by continually destabilizing the meaning of the earlier version.
Montgomery’s late additions to her Anne opus – three novels which
are replete with self-reflexivity, repetitions, and allusions to the earlier
books – can be read as a parody of the series. Intriguingly, the order
in which Montgomery wrote the books does not parallel the chronol-
ogy of Anne’s life. She inserted Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of
Ingleside, which she wrote after a fifteen-year hiatus from the series,
into earlier time periods of Anne’s life, periods just before and after
Anne’s marriage. Her posthumously published The Blythes Are Quoted
refers to various times in Anne’s married life, as the different narrators
and voices relate tales from Anne’s community; moreover, the novel
contains Anne and Walter’s poems and vignettes about the Blythes
written in dramatic form. When examined as a group, outside of the
chronology of Anne’s life, the darkness and despair of these three
later novels become more obvious, thus inviting the reader to read
backwards, to reinterpret the original Anne(s). Using the mode of the
monstrously Gothic, the self-parodies of the later novels expose the
cruelty, domestic violence, and injustice faced by the disenfranchised
that the idealized pastoral mode of the earlier novels obscured. Most
interestingly, while all of the books in the Anne series might be said
to have contained these social critiques all along, as some critics have
argued,1 reading backwards brings them into the foreground.
My reading of the Anne series contributes to an ongoing discussion
about the studies of series, such as that of Paul Budra and Betty A.
Schellenberg in their volume, Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, by theo-
rizing the often contradictory work of serial fiction. Using Montgomery’s
series as my case study, I suggest that books in a series both valorize and
dismantle their own enterprise with each new iteration. Ultimately,
Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series suggests that serial fiction
Laura M. Robinson 59
can offer a critique of earlier texts while at the same time trading on
their popularity.
Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series
L. M. Montgomery is most famous for her eight-novel Anne of Green

Gables series, inaugurated by the novel of that title in 1908. With
encouragement, even coercion, from her publisher and a public
clamouring for more, Montgomery produced several Anne books in
relatively short succession. The books follow the orphan who found a
home at Green Gables in the first novel through teaching, college, mar-
riage, and into motherhood: Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island
(1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), and Rilla
of Ingleside (1921). A collection of short stories, Chronicles of Avonlea,
appeared in 1912 and contained stories with very oblique references
to Anne; neither regular nor scholarly readers usually consider it as
part of the series. Related to Chronicles is another collection of short
stories, Further Chronicles of Avonlea, which L. C. Page published in 1920
without Montgomery’s permission; the publication became the subject
of a legal battle between Montgomery and her American publisher. As
Carole Gerson has shown, particularly in her article “Dragged at Anne’s
Chariot Wheels,” Montgomery did not want to continue writing about
Anne and took a hiatus from her redheaded heroine after her war novel,
Rilla of Ingleside. Fifteen years after leaving Anne, however, Montgomery
returned to her in 1936, publishing Anne of Windy Poplars that year and
Anne of Ingleside in 1939. Gerson explains:
Montgomery’s decision to write again about Anne in these last

two books derives from many factors: her economic precariousness
brought about by the Depression, the purchase of a new home, and
a switch in her English publisher … her publishers’ and readers’ con-
tinuing requests for more Anne books; and, above all, the popular
success of the 1934 talking-film version of Anne of Green Gables. (155)
In Anne’s life, Anne of Windy Poplars fits between Anne of the Island and
Anne’s House of Dreams, showing Anne after university but before mar-
riage, while Anne of Ingleside follows Anne’s House of Dreams, relating the
narrative of Anne’s young motherhood. Montgomery did not stop there,
however. She packaged together a final work entitled The Blythes Are
Quoted, a hodgepodge of poems, vignettes, and short stories loosely cen-
tred on Anne’s family. Benjamin Lefebvre reports that this manuscript
was delivered to her publishers on the day Montgomery died. While

an edited and, arguably, Montgomeryfied version was published as
The Road to Yesterday in 1974, Montgomery’s publishers obviously did
not see the value in publishing this volume in the original, as it only
appeared in its entirety in 2009 (See Lefebvre, Afterword, for a detailed
discussion of the changes [511]). I am naming it a Montgomeryfication
because the changes ensure that The Road to Yesterday conforms to read-
ers’ expectations of a light-hearted Montgomery by removing most of
the darker elements of the original novel, such as Anne and Walter’s
war poetry.
Readers since 1939 likely would have read the Anne books in the
chronological order of Anne’s life. Indeed, a popular Seal Books edi-
tion collects the volumes in a boxed set numbered from one to eight.
Some critics read them in this order as well: Kathleen Ann Miller, for
example, refers to the “last two Anne books” as Rainbow Valley and
Rilla of Ingleside (138). Other critics have acknowledged Montgomery’s
original order of writing and often refer to the “original six.” Thomas,
for example, explores the disappointing diminishment of Anne over
the series and focuses primarily on the five novels that immediately
followed Anne of Green Gables. She does so, in part, because Anne of
Ingleside and Anne of Windy Poplars “touch on much darker themes
than the previous Anne novels” in her view (25). Both Perry Nodelman
and Marah Gubar have summarized critics’ disappointment with the
series as it progresses. Nodelman sees critics as mistakenly “dismiss-
ive” of the later books, summarizing their various assessments: Anne
becomes less interesting, the books are unsatisfying, the quality of the
writing diminishes, and the connections between the texts become
disjointed (76). The critical work of Cecily Devereux might be taken as
an example of the dismissive approach to the sequels. She writes that,
even though it narrates Anne’s stint as a Principal of a school, Anne
of Windy Poplars “does little more than fill in the gap Montgomery
initially left between Anne’s engagement to Gilbert Blythe … and
their marriage” (119–20), particularly as readers of the original six
novels “know that the heroine’s ‘ambition’ is not to be a teacher or
a principal or a writer” (120). Arguably, Anne’s writing, introduced in
Anne of Green Gables, is present throughout the novels. Montgomery’s
downplaying of the depiction of Anne’s desire to be a writer may be
reflective of her acknowledgement of the limitations on women in this
time period, limitations she exposes even in her Emily trilogy about
a young girl developing as a writer. Emily may achieve authorial suc-
cess, but the final narrative climax is her reunion with and marriage to
Teddy. Like Emily, Anne needs to reconcile her writing ambitions with
the contemporary cultural expectations for women.
The final two published additions to the Anne series, when examined
individually, convey a troublesomeness that counters some critics’
claim that the books become steadily more disappointing. Elizabeth
Epperly regards the later two books as problematic, perhaps, in part,
she writes, because they are neither children’s nor adult’s books. She
reads Anne of Ingleside as a novel “at odds with itself” (Fragrance 138).
Nodelman believes that the later books, rather than disappointments,
“become richer” (78), and he points out that, in Anne of Ingleside,
both Anne “and her creator are highly conscious of [Anne being less
magical] – and very worried about it” (77). Both Nodelman and Gubar
acknowledge that the feeling of coherence in the series is belied by
the actual structure and content of the novels. Nodelman considers
the structure of Anne of Ingleside in order to understand how it fits
into and varies the themes and structures of the earlier books (93).
He writes that the “variational unpackings of the original Anne …
make the Anne books seem like children’s literature even when they
centrally involve the worries of an aging mother” (93, italics added).
Similarly unpacking the repeated structure and content of the series,
Gubar writes:
Yet each successive Anne book highlights the fact that finality is
never truly final since the series as a genre invites almost endless
additions. Even as the multiple volume format stresses continu-
ity, it invariably creates gaps, interstices between installments, and
Montgomery dramatizes this empty space internally via postpone-
ments and delays, as well as by incorporating – and returning to fill
in – actual gaps in the narrative. Although marriage inevitably caps
the halting progress of Montgomery’s heroines, it stands revealed
as a desultory move, a tacked-on storybook convention that cannot
adequately conclude the life stories of these singular characters. (64)
Both Gubar and Nodelman acknowledge a productive troublesome-

ness to the Anne books. Gubar’s analysis, however, does not fully take
into account the chronology of the writing of the novels.2 A different
perspective emerges when the books are read in the order in which
they were written. By returning to Anne after a fifteen-year hiatus,
Montgomery’s late novels operate as self-conscious parodic repeti-
tions of the earlier ones; both extending and undermining the mes-
sages of female empowerment and agency, these later novels make
uncomfortable their own happy endings and, thus, by extension, the

happy endings of the earlier novels.
Anne troubled
Judith Butler’s gender theory provides a way to understand how

Montgomery’s series might produce itself as parody. Discussing the way
in which identity is constructed through repeated iterations of itself,
Butler contends that identity is thus never self-identical. In other words,
in order to create a sense of identity, we must repeat ourselves endlessly;
we perform our identities over and over, creating an effect of coherence.
Butler writes,
paradoxically, it is precisely the repetition of that play that estab-

lishes as well the instability of the very category that it constitutes.
For if the “I” is a site of repetition, that is, if the “I” only achieves
the semblance of identity through a certain repetition of itself,
then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains
it. (“Imitation” 311)
Butler’s understanding of identity construction can help us to unpack the

self-referentiality of novels in a series. Each iteration of the series, each
individual novel, extends the identification with the earlier ones, yet,
necessarily and inevitably in Butler’s understanding, the individual utter-
ance fails to reproduce exactly the previous ones. This inevitable failure,
rather than being regarded as disappointing, can be regarded as pointing
to “sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifica-
tions” of such regulatory regimes as gender (Gender Trouble 31). In order
to illustrate her theory, Butler uses the example of drag performances.
Drag appears to be an imitation of a gender role, but, in fact, drag reveals
all gender to be a construction already: “The parodic repetition of ‘the
original’ … reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of
the idea of the natural and the original” (31). She suggests that drag
dramatizes “the signifying gestures through which gender is established”
(Gender Trouble viii). Identity is always troubled, in Butler’s view.
Butler’s work with gender can be co-opted as a way to understand
the repetition in series fiction. Repeating characters’ and earlier texts’
identities is necessary for a sense of coherence, but the repetition will
inevitably yield some type of difference. Moreover, the repetition with
a difference necessarily undermines the earlier texts even as it valorizes
them through the repetition. In the Anne of Green Gables series, each
novel after the first not only operates as a parodic repetition of that
first one, it also exposes the degree to which Anne of Green Gables itself
is not an original. As many critics have shown – Humphrey Carpenter,
Irene Gammel, and me, among others – Anne of Green Gables takes
shape within a tradition of girls’ stories. In other words, each book
in a series is a copy that exposes “the normal” or “the original” as,
in Butler’s words, “an ideal that no one can embody” (Gender Trouble
139). Butler explains further in Bodies That Matter that, “[b]ecause texts
do not reflect the entirety of their authors or their worlds, they enter
a field of reading as partial provocations, not only requiring a set of
prior texts in order to gain legibility, but – at best – initiating a set of
appropriations and criticisms that call into question their fundamen-
tal premises” (19). The later books in a series not only require the ear-
lier books in order to be understood, but they also potentially offer a
challenge or criticism of the preceding texts, as Brandon Christopher’s
article on superheroes in this volume shows. Perhaps this is why read-
ers who are ardent fans of a series so often find them disappointing.
It is little wonder, then, that publishers were not keen to publish
Montgomery’s dark and complicated The Blythes Are Quoted: argu-
ably, it is such a different iteration of Anne’s life that it destabilizes
completely the effect of coherence of the rest of the series, and makes
visible the instability of the iterations that preceded it.
The most productive aspect of examining books in a series through the
lens of Butler’s theories of performativity is her focus on parodic repeti-
tion, which she outlines most thoroughly in Gender Trouble. Since identity
is always endlessly repeated, the subject is arguably participating in self-
parody, since the self can never be repeated exactly. Butler writes about
the parody of drag: “The notion of gender parody… does not assume that
there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the par-
ody is of the very notion of an original” (138). Montgomery’s later Anne
of Green Gables books both invoke and displace earlier Annes through
their parodic repetition. In her definition of parody in the modernist era,
Linda Hutcheon calls parody “repetition with a difference” (32), points
out that it necessarily carries ironic inversion, and contends that self-
reflexivity is its hallmark: “A critical distance is implied between the back-
grounded text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance
usually signaled by irony” (32). Close scrutiny of the later novels suggests
that Montgomery appears aware of the parodic effects of her repeated
returns to the narrative of her famous heroine, but this is besides Butler’s
point: whether Montgomery was or was not intentionally parodying her
previous works, her repetitions of earlier iterations are necessarily parodic.
One way to understand how parody operates in a series is with

reference to what Rose Lovell-Smith has elsewhere termed “recall writ-
ing,” the way in which texts refer to the content of earlier works in
the series, as “the source of some of the particular pleasures of sequel
reading” (32). She writes:
Sequels and series, as well as having an obvious appeal to the learn-

ing reader who seeks repeated and predictable pleasures, also offer
much in the collaboration of more adventurous young readers and
a creative author. A sequel necessarily provokes acts of memory of
what has already happened and thus reproduces through reading the
experience of remembering oneself as more childish. (37)
In addition to the pleasures for readers inherent in recall writing, which

involves a reiteration of the reading self, this type of intratextual refer-
ence is also deeply self-conscious; each novel is highly self-aware of its
position as one in the series.
In her analysis of the recall writing in Anne of Avonlea, Lovell-Smith
does not engage with the parodic effects of this novel as the sequel to
Anne of Green Gables. Read through Butler’s theoretical formulations,
however, the intratextual references of the sequels, in addition to
creating pleasure, also inevitably deconstruct their “original.” Indeed,
the backward deconstructive reading that inevitably revises the past
may be a significant part of the readerly pleasure of series reading. The
complications of recall and parody are particularly evident in the case
of Montgomery’s series because the origin sometimes occurs after the
repetition. Anne of Windy Poplars (published in 1936) employs recall
when Anne writes to Gilbert: “I hope when we find our ‘house of
dreams,’ dearest, that there will be winds around it” (13). These words
evoke, of course, Anne’s House of Dreams, written 17 years earlier, even
though the events of that novel have not yet occurred in Anne’s life
at the point in time when she uses the phrase in her letter. Anne of
Ingleside fairly crackles with allusions to the “earlier” works. From the
opening pages where Anne returns to visit Marilla, becoming “Anne of
Green Gables once more” (2), to her visit with Elizabeth when “they
relived the old Windy Poplars life” (57) to multiple references that
foreshadow, after the fact, Rilla of Ingleside, Montgomery’s last pub-
lished novel, Anne of Ingleside (1939), displays an intense awareness
of itself as one iteration in the series as a whole and invites the reader
into a parodic revision.
The writer writing the writer
Montgomery’s self-reflexive intratextual references gesture to the

parodic by “repeating with a difference” an earlier text, in Hutcheon’s
words. Montgomery’s novels generate further self-reflexivity by creat-
ing metafictions, thereby focusing attention on the process of writing.
Rather than downplay Anne’s writing ambitions, as Devereux asserts,
Montgomery’s later novels return to Anne’s writing quite extensively,
highlighting the heroine as writer. Anne of Windy Poplars is the only
epistolary novel in the series, narrated primarily through a series of
letters to Gilbert. Anne’s writing is not only thus paramount, but
the novel also draws attention to the use of parody through Anne’s
tongue-in-cheek borrowing of the letter-writing style of Aunt Chatty’s
grandmother. She signs one missive, “your obedient servant,” for
example, and cites one of the grandmother’s letters as her model in
the postscript. Throughout Windy Poplars and the novels that follow,
characters frequently ask Anne if she writes, either wanting her to write
their stories or to refrain from doing so, thus reminding the reader of
the heroine as writer. When Anne hears about the misadventures of
the Tomgallon clan, she thinks, “The Curse of the Tomgallons! What
a title for a story!” (234). In fact, it could be the title for the episode
the reader has just read, an episode that the novel parodies with the
self-conscious formulation of a Gothic title. Anne’s writing is doubled
here. While the reader does not see her sitting down to write a story, the
entire narrative is the result of Anne’s writing. Montgomery manages
to highlight Anne as writer at the very moment she places the actual
story writing offstage.
In Anne of Ingleside, references to Anne’s writing still abound, but
the novel is also self-conscious about the degree to which Anne creates
the content of the narrative, conflating heroine and writer in a differ-
ent manner than Windy Poplars did. Anne muses on her matchmaking
success, for instance, listing couples from throughout the series. The
most frequently cited passage from this novel centres on Anne’s son
Walter eavesdropping on a quilting bee. After raising the events of
Peter Kirk’s funeral in discussion, the women become silent about their
obvious horror, which provokes Walter to ask Anne about it. When the
quilters realize that Walter has overheard their conversation they are
discomfited, worried that their tales were “too terribly unfit for the ears
of youth” (211), surely a self-consciously ironic comment in a novel
in a children’s series. Indeed, when Anne revisits Peter Kirk’s funeral
in her memory, she decides against telling Walter the story the reader
has just read: “It was certainly no story for children” (222). In scenes
such as this, Montgomery’s last published novel reveals a startling
self-awareness that directs the reader to read against its own generic
traditions.
The Blythes Are Quoted highlights Anne’s self-reflexive writing to an
even greater extent. Anne’s poems appear in small vignettes; she reads
them aloud to her family and then they all comment. In this way, Anne’s
writing infuses the text and confounds the divide between author and
character, especially because many of these poems were published by
Montgomery elsewhere. It also demonstrates a keen awareness of poten-
tial readers’ responses. Characters in the stories comment on Anne’s
writing, and Gilbert points out that Anne writes more after Walter’s death
than she had before (375). Moreover, Gilbert also declares: “I believe I did
an ineffaceable wrong in marrying a woman who could write like that
and spoiling her career” (117). That sentence resonates on multiple levels.
First, Gilbert acknowledges that Anne can write well, a compliment about
her own skill that the writer thereby directs to herself. Second, Gilbert
suggests that marriage can ruin a woman’s writing career, which invites
the reader to consider Montgomery’s own circumstances as author. Before
she was a successful writer, she agreed to marry Presbyterian minister
Ewan Macdonald. She did not particularly want to marry, but needed to
do so: not only was she about to be ejected from her childhood home
on the death of her grandmother, she also wanted children and compan-
ionship. Macdonald suffered ongoing bouts of mental illness and was
not particularly pleased with his wife’s fame, as Mary Henley Rubio has
documented in her 2008 biography of Montgomery. Montgomery’s own
married life did not serve her writing career well.
Repeating the past with a vengeance
Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne of Ingleside, and The Blythes ultimately resituate
the rest. Hutcheon writes, “[p]arody … is both a personal act of superses-
sion and an inscription of literary-historical continuity” (35). In re-placing
and revaluing what has gone before, The Blythes Are Quoted not only
trades on the iconic Anne but also demolishes readers’ expectations of the
beloved redhead. Discussing how Montgomery experiments with form in
The Blythes Are Quoted, Lefebvre suggests that, “arguably, Montgomery’s
strategy in this final novel could be to sabotage her reader’s apprecia-
tion for their favourite characters and for the recurring themes in her
work” (“‘That Abominable War!’” 117–18). Using Beate Müller’s descrip-
tion of parody as “a most useful critical tool for laying bare encrusted
literary … conventions” (6), I propose that Montgomery can be seen

to be overturning her own established conventions in these last books.
Her motivations for doing so are not clear. About The Blythes Are Quoted,
Epperly speculates that, “perhaps by undercutting and alternating per-
spectives, Montgomery was also defying critics of her work – modernist
or anti-Victorian or anti-Edwardian – who continued to misread her as
some predictable, pre-war, naive romantic with only one way of writing”
(Foreword xiii). Ultimately, whatever her intentions, Montgomery inevi-
tably and necessarily encourages a parodic reassessment of her past works
in this last novel that repeats with a difference.
In The Blythes Are Quoted, Montgomery undermines Anne’s happy
family at Ingleside through parodic repetition. The title refers to the
way everyone in the community of Glen St. Mary constantly quotes the
Blythe family. This motif allows Montgomery, albeit somewhat clumsily,
to weave the Blythes through a series of unrelated stories, a strategy she
used to a lesser extent in 1912 in Chronicles of Avonlea. The repetition of
Blythe quotations serves to annoy many characters in the novel. “I’ve
heard the Blythes quoted in this manner until I’m tired of it,” complains
one character (66). Another thinks, “If he mentions a Blythe again I’ll
throw that pitcher at his head” (494). Delightfully, one cannot help
but feel that the author herself is commenting on her irritation at the
need to hook her unrelated stories together with her iconic heroine. The
pleasure in the characters’ frustration with the chronically mentioned
Blythes is perhaps the feeling of a connection with the author, or the
echoing of the readers’ experience of hearing over and over about the
Blythes across the series. Montgomery simultaneously, then, connects
her final novel to her own literary history as well as breaks new ground.
Lefebvre points out that Montgomery revised many recently published
short stories for inclusion in this collection and “attributed forty-one of
her own poems to Anne and to Walter” (Afterword 517).
The biggest shift for Montgomery in this final novel, however, and the
parodic inversion through which one can read backwards, is her use of the
Gothic. Anne of Green Gables exploited the Gothic parodically, as critics
such as Miller have pointed out. In comparing Montgomery’s use of Gothic
to Jane Austen’s, Miller highlights “Montgomery’s participation in a liter-
ary tradition of women’s Gothic, one that fosters an intertextual dialogue
among women writers that centres on issues of female writing and reading
practice” (130). Importantly, Miller emphasizes that Montgomery’s use
of the Gothic changed over the course of her life. Miller points out that
the early Anne of Green Gables books parodied the Gothic in such scenes
as the Haunted Wood episode in Anne of Green Gables, when Anne must
walk alone through a wood that she has populated in her imagination
with numerous spectres. Similar to Catherine of Jane Austen’s Northanger
Abbey, Anne maps onto an ordinary wood her own Gothic imaginings to
humorous effect. Miller suggests that, in these early novels, Montgomery
uses the Gothic to demonstrate the need for the heroine to rein in her
imagination in order to learn to think rationally. Setting the Gothic in
contrast to realism, Miller suggests that the Haunted Wood episode is a
“somewhat bizarre intrusion of the Gothic into Montgomery’s primar-
ily realistic text” (129). Arguably, however, Anne of Green Gables and the
books that follow it are primarily pastoral works in which nature and a
simple, rural life are idealized. They are not, in short, entirely realistic.
The tension in Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books is not so much
between realism and Gothic, as Miller suggests, but between the pastoral
and the Gothic. The pastoral reflects an impossible ideal, whereas realism
engages with some of the gritty darkness of everyday life.
Thus, Montgomery overturns her own conventions in the later books.
In the earlier, pastoral books, Montgomery parodies the Gothic, as Miller
argues. Even in the Gothic-strewn Anne of Windy Poplars – which features
a Spook’s Lane, a cursed family, a seafaring captain who resorts to canni-
balism, and graveyard confessions – the bitter Katherine Brooke is cured
of her anti-social ways by a visit to the idealized natural setting of Green
Gables. The Blythes Are Quoted decisively reverses the conventions of the
earlier novels. If the earlier Anne books can be described as pastorals with
dabs of Gothic as parody, The Blythes Are Quoted must be seen as Gothic,
leavened occasionally with moments of pastoral optimism. Throughout
almost every story and vignette, death, ghosts, the uncanny, unloved
children, murders, alcoholism, adultery, unwed mothers, criminals, pov-
erty, and hidden identities defy readers to connect these tales to those of
the halcyon Green Gables days. Looking backwards across the series from
the vantage point of The Blythes Are Quoted, Anne of Ingleside, and Anne of
Windy Poplars, the powerlessness of the lives of women and children and
the injustice of marriage embedded in the earlier books becomes clearer
and clearer. Montgomery’s late novels use the Gothic, then, to parody her
earlier novels. In so doing, she exposes them for the pastoral idylls they
are. The golden world they depict is impossible, these late novels argue;
they present an “ideal no one can embody,” to return to Butler’s words.
Incoherence and social injustice
In The Blythes Are Quoted, multiple stories of domestic abuse and

unhappiness undermine the vignettes of the happy Blythes listening
to Anne’s and Walter’s poetry (much of which is itself quite distress-

ing). In one story, Isabel endured “years of torture” from Geoffrey Boyd
who was “hellishly cruel” (467, 468). The narrator reminds the reader
that “[d]ivorce in those days, in the Maritimes, was a naked tragedy”
(469). Isabel’s birth mother, Ursula, murders Geoffrey, an act unknown
to anyone but the third-person narrator. The only way to escape the
unhappiness of marriage, it seems, is through murder or death. The
economic pressures to marry are also highlighted. In “Here Comes
the Bride,” one character muses, “a professor’s salary is better than
an old maid’s pension, no doubt” (409), while another character who
divorced her philandering husband thinks, “Sometimes I think I was a
fool to divorce him. A home and a position mean a good deal” (419). In
a discussion about women marrying for money, a character remarks, “of
course, long ago there wasn’t anything a woman could do” aside from
marrying (346). All these moments of abuse, economic pressure, and
lack of choice come to bear on the oft-quoted Blythes. The character
Alice in the story “Some Fools and a Saint” points out that the Blythes’
marriage, too, is called into question: “they are said to be happy, though
once in a while …” (43).
The themes of trauma and discontent that are woven throughout The
Blythes can be traced backwards through the preceding novels. While
Anne of Ingleside is surprisingly grounded in realism compared to some
of the other books in the series, some of the moments are dark indeed.
Tales of cruel husbands and unhappy marriages haunt the pages, par-
ticularly when the quilting bee meets. The women discuss a wife who
justifiably murdered her husband and a husband who refused to speak
to his wife, for example. One quilter demonstrates her perpetual unhap-
piness when she bitterly mentions that she has asked God for some-
thing every day for 20 years to no avail; while the reader never knows
what it is, the rest of the women “could all guess what she had asked
for” (210). Peter Kirk is the most striking example of exaggerated abuse
in the novel, as he tortured and humiliated one wife to death. When the
first wife’s sister came to laugh at his funeral, the second wife stood up
to thank her for her public complaints about him, betraying far more
hatred of her dead husband than the sister-in-law felt. The reader is left
to imagine what she endured. This incident heightens Anne’s despair
when she thinks that Gilbert has grown bored with her and infatuated
with an old girlfriend. Gilbert’s moping and neglect turns out to be con-
cern for a patient, and all happiness is restored by the end of the novel.
Thomas argues that “the idea that some marriages can be unfulfilling or
destructive is scarcely allowed to intrude on Anne’s world” (28); to the
contrary, Anne’s world seems to be filled with possibilities for despair.

Indeed, Montgomery’s Gothic content invites the reader to deconstruct
the dominant happily-ever-after narrative.
Reading backwards from The Blythes Are Quoted exposes the social
injustices at the heart of the story of the vulnerable orphan Anne,
whose life before Green Gables was beset by violence, alcoholic foster
parents, and dire poverty. Reading backwards through the lens of the
later novels encourages a darker reading of the earlier ones. Brandon
Christopher makes a similar argument in his article in this volume:
“Rather than allowing the past to haunt the present … the present
haunt[s] the past, retroactively recontextualizing previous events within
the context of the narrative …” (182). Montgomery’s Gothic inversion
of her earlier texts has a similar effect; no longer does the reader have
to “read between the lines” as Marilla does in Anne of Green Gables, to
understand the despair that children and women might confront in
their daily lives (92). What is a quiet murmur in the early novels begins
to roar in the later ones.
As Budra and Schellenberg suggest in their study of sequels, the
sequel “presents a heightened image of the particular cultural moment
which it inhabits” (7, original italics). Fifteen years had passed since
Montgomery wrote her troubled home-front novel, Rilla of Ingleside.
In that time, as historians such as Veronica Strong-Boag and Lillian
Faderman have documented, there was a backlash against women,
encouraging them back into domestic roles. After World War I, women
achieved greater economic freedoms, they won the vote, the nature of
marriage shifted from a practical and economic partnership to a roman-
tic one,3 the Great Depression shattered North America, and another
world war hovered on the horizon. In Montgomery’s life, similar seis-
mic changes occurred. As Mary Rubio details in Lucy Maud Montgomery,
by this time period in the writer’s life, her mentally ill husband had
retired; her literary works, while still popular, were being dismissed as
outdated by the Canadian literary establishment; her son Chester was
proving an unreliable cheat in all areas of his life; her dearest friends
had died; and she was being stalked by a female fan. Needless to say,
Montgomery experienced, and expressed in her journals, much despair
at this time in her life. Miller also notes these changes and their inter-
section with Montgomery’s use of the Gothic: “As Montgomery’s world
became increasingly complex, her faith in reason alone to explain her
social surroundings proved inadequate. … she became aware of the dark
side of life, the terror of personal secrets, and the power of the Gothic
imagination” (138). Montgomery’s dissatisfaction with her life as she
ages mirrors the violence and disillusionment that manifests in the later
Anne of Green Gables books.4 The writer herself seems no longer able to
access the natural beauty of the world of Green Gables.5
The later books in the Anne of Green Gables series restore Anne as a
writer and expose the economic dependence of women and children.
These books thus reveal the impossibility of the idealized world of
Green Gables at the very same moment as they attempt to repeat that
world. In the final image of the 1936 novel, Anne of Windy Poplars,
Anne heads off to her future marriage to Gilbert, a marriage that has
already been written in 1917 in Anne’s House of Dreams: “as Anne drove
away from Windy Poplars the last message from it was a large white
bath-towel fluttering frantically from the tower window. Rebecca Dew
was waving it” (258). The tower window, a Gothic symbol if ever there
was one, belongs to Anne’s bedroom in the house. Perennial old maid
Rebecca Dew is waving a goodbye she could not say in person because
of overwhelming emotion. Her goodbye can also, of course, be inter-
preted as the symbol of surrender, the waving of a white flag from a
tower window demonstrating the surrender of the single woman, a
goodbye to the world of girls and women who live together in Windy
Poplars. This is a move reminiscent of the final words of Anne of Green
Gables, when Anne whispers, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the
world,” lines from Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes.” Browning’s Pippa,
an innocent fourteen-year-old silk winder, on her one-day-a-year vaca-
tion, naively passes by criminal activities, prostitution, and corruption.
Read backwards from the later novel, it becomes clear that Montgomery
deploys Browning in her first novel not to parody the poet, but to par-
ody her own work. While Anne refuses to see the dark side of the world
in which she lives, from Anne of Green Gables onwards, Montgomery’s
novels certainly do see and show the darkness. The Anne of Green
Gables series, with its parodic repetitions, demonstrates an awareness
that Anne herself is an ideal that is, ultimately and perhaps tragically,
impossible to repeat.
Notes
1. See Mary Rubio’s “Subverting the Trite” for the now classic argument that
Montgomery levels a challenge to her patriarchal society at the very same
moment that she appears to reinforce it.
2. Gubar’s otherwise excellent article is marred by problematic chronology. Anne
of Ingleside is identified as the final Anne book in the chronology of Anne’s
life (53). I suspect that the sentence should read Rilla of Ingleside; however,
Gubar also predicates part of her argument on her claim that, 15 years after
leaving Anne, Montgomery returns to Anne’s pre-married life with Anne of

Windy Poplars. Montgomery, however, also revisits Anne’s married life in Anne
of Ingleside in 1939.
3. See James Snell for a discussion of the changing face of marriage from 1900
to 1939 in Canada.
4. See Waterston’s Magic Island for a reading of Montgomery’s fiction through
her life narrative.
5. See the final years of her journal entries for a clear understanding of her des-
cent into despair. There is only one entry for 1941: “Such an end to life. Such
suffering and wretchedness” (Rubio and Waterston 349). For 1942, the sole
entry reads as follows: “Since then my life has been hell, hell, hell. My mind
is gone – everything in the world I lived for has gone – the world has gone
mad. I shall be driven to end my life. Oh God, forgive me. Nobody dreams
what my awful position is” (Rubio and Waterston 350). Some members of
Montgomery’s family believe that she committed suicide.
Works cited
Budra, Paul, and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds. Introduction. Part Two: Reflections on
the Sequel. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1998. 3–18. Print.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York:
——. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
1990. Print.
——. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin.
New York: Routledge, 1993. 307–20. Print.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s
Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Print.
Chandler, Daniel. “Intertextuality.” Semiotics for Beginners. n. pag. 2002. Web.
Devereux, Cecily. “‘Not one of those dreadful new women’: Anne Shirley and
the Culture of Imperial Motherhood.” Words and Windows: A Look at Canadian
Children’s Literature in English. Ed. Aida Hudson and Susan-Ann Cooper. Ottawa:
U Ottawa P, 2003. 119–30. Print.
Epperly, Elizabeth Rollins. Foreword. The Blythes Are Quoted. By L. M. Montgomery.
Ed. Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: Penguin, 2009. ix–xiv. Print.
——. Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L. M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of
Romance. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1992. Print.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between
Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981.
Print.
Gammel, Irene. Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a
Literary Classic. Toronto: Key Porter, 2008. Print.
Gerson, Carole. “‘Dragged at Anne’s Chariot Wheels’: L. M. Montgomery and the
Sequels to Anne of Green Gables.” Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Ed. Paul Budra
and Betty A. Schellenberg. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1998. 144–59. Print.
Gubar, Marah. “‘Where is the boy?’: The Pleasures of Postponement in the Anne
of Green Gables Series.” The Lion and the Unicorn 25.1 (2001): 47–69. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York: Methuen, 1985. Print.

Lefebvre, Benjamin. Afterword. The Blythes Are Quoted. By L. M. Montgomery. Ed.
Lefebvre. Toronto: Penguin, 2009. 511–20. Print.
——. “‘That Abominable War!’: The Blythes Are Quoted and Thoughts on L. M.
Montgomery’s Late Style.” Storm and Dissonance: L. M. Montgomery and Conflict.
Ed. Jean Mitchell. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 109–30. Print.
Lovell-Smith, Rose. “Ending Only to Begin Again: The Child Reader and One
Hundred Years of Sequel and Series Writing.” Children’s Literature and the Fin de
Siécle. Ed. Roderick McGillis. Westport: Praeger, 2003. 31–39. Print.
Miller, Kathleen Ann. “Haunted Heroines: The Gothic Imagination and the Female
Bildungsromane of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and L. M. Montgomery.” The
Lion and the Unicorn 34.2 (2010): 125–47. Web.
Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004.
Print.
——. Anne of Ingleside. Toronto: Seal, 1983. Print.
——. Anne of Windy Poplars. Toronto: Seal, 1983. Print.
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Robinson, Laura M. “Anne and Her Ancestors: Self-Reflexivity from Yonge to
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Rubio, Mary Henley. Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Gift of Wings. Toronto: Doubleday,
2008. Print.
——. “Subverting the Trite: L. M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own.’” Canadian
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Snell, James G. In the Shadow of the Law: Divorce in Canada 1900–1939. Toronto:
U Toronto P, 1991. Print.
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3
Kierkegaard’s Repetition and the
Reading Pleasures of Repetition
in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s
Moving Castle Series
Rose Lovell-Smith
Everyone can testify that the pleasure of the text is not

certain: nothing says that this same text will please us
a second time.
Roland Barthes (The Pleasure of the Text 52)
Søren Kierkegaard published his Repetition. A Venture in Experimenting

Psychology in 1843, on the same day as Fear and Trembling.1 Both of these
works are pseudonymous, but they purport to be written by different
hands, a common Kierkegaardian strategy. The primary narrator of
Repetition is called Constantin Constantius: note this name’s emphatic
double reference to constancy, which might imply faithfulness, consist-
ency, or unchangingness; note also how the almost-doubling of the
name introduces movement into that sameness.2 Repetition is one of
what Kierkegaard called his “aesthetic” texts – by which is meant not
that this book presents a theory of aesthetics, but that it partakes of
the nature of literature – of narrative fiction, in fact. At least overtly,
this book is more an aesthetic object than a philosophical and religious
argument. Nevertheless, the ideas put forward therein are the point of
Repetition, and its narrative foreshadows an important later develop-
ment in Kierkegaard’s thinking by dealing with characters who are at
what Kierkegaard would later describe as the first, or “aesthetic,” stage
of personal and religious development.
Yet a point which emerges strongly from reading Kierkegaard’s
Repetition is that repetition is best known and valued by the feelings,
rather than the intellect.3 To give this book one’s assent is on the one
hand to accept that repetition poses philosophical problems, such as
whether a repetition is possible and, if so, what significance it has,
74
Rose Lovell-Smith 75
whether “repetition is a crucial expression for what ‘recollection’ was

to the Greeks,” and if it is true that “modern philosophy [teaches] that
the whole of life is a repetition” or not (131). But, on the other hand,
it is also to accept that “[r]epetition, … if it is possible, makes a person
happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy,” and that “[r]epeti-
tion’s love is in truth the only happy love” (131), a love which has
“the blissful security of the moment” (132). “Hope,” says Kierkegaard,
“is a lovely maiden who slips away between one’s fingers; recollec-
tion is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the
moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for
one becomes weary only of what is new. One never grows weary of the
old, and when one has that, one is happy” (132).
The first few pages of Repetition thus read something like a stirring
manifesto, in which the rewards promised to those who embrace rep-
etition are very great: “he who wills repetition is a man, and the more
emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being
he is” (132). Conversely, it is clear that the penalties for continuing to
live in hope, dread, or recollection – that is, anywhere but in the present
moment – while failing to “grasp that life is a repetition, and that this
is the beauty of life” are proportionately severe. A person in this condi-
tion “has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than
what will happen to him anyway – he will perish” (132).
Particularly striking is the way in which Kierkegaard’s language, meta-
phors, and his main and subsidiary narratives in Repetition put feelings
about repetition – always a polysemous and somewhat mysterious term
within the book – into the zone of erotic love. I do not myself find this
an inappropriate analogy for the kind of yearning I felt as a child for
another book by the same author, for another book in the same series,
for a sequel to, or repetition of, a beloved book; nor for the satisfied
delight I felt when such a book was discovered. On the contrary: if I had
been familiar with that kind of discourse, I might well have recognized
my feelings on discovering another possibility of repeating that earlier
experience of self-as-reader as rapture, and have called those books
blessings.4
With the spectacle of Harry Potter before us, no publisher with a chil-
dren’s list, certainly no academic who specializes in children’s literature,
is going to take series writing lightly. My paper opens with a brief dis-
cussion of some of the values and ideas at issue in Kierkegaard’s unusual
book, a book well described by biographer Joakim Garff as a “play-
ground” but also as “a noisy laboratory in which each individual concept
is made the object of more or less every possible sort of investigation”;
as “smiling,” but also as “fragmented” in form and “unsteady, replete

with sudden changes of direction” (232). Kierkegaard’s paradoxical play
with the concept of repetition assists me in the second section of my
paper, which accepts Kierkegaard’s assumption that repetition engages
our feelings and can be pleasurable in itself, investigates repetition as
essential to narrative, suggests that reading stories gives us pleasure
partly by disrupting our ordinary self-situating within an often anxious
awareness of the onward flow of time, rather as Kierkegaard thinks
that repetition does, and enquires whether reading – particularly series
reading or rereading – might not also be a route to a Kierkegaardian
repetition in terms of the restoration of a past or lost sense of selfhood
to the present self. Finally, I adapt these ideas to a discussion of the
particular case of Diana Wynne Jones’s trilogy for young readers which
began with Howl’s Moving Castle in 1986.5 This series – like other Jones
novels – often produces meaning by recalling pre-existing literary forms,
including the traditional fairy tale, “sword and sorcery” fantasy, and
romantic comedy, so there is much repetitive play at the levels of genre
and intertext. However, I am inclined to regard the re-experiencing of
elements encountered in reading one story by reading another story to
be at the heart of the paradoxical appeal of the series – which makes
Jones an especially challenging case of series success. For, as is typical of
Jones, her trilogy is both fantasy and a metafictional critique of fantasy,
both series and anti-series, and it lacks some of the obvious uses of rep-
etition familiar in series writing generally. I address these issues in the
third part of my paper.
How did repetition become a source of blessedness in Kierkegaard’s

religious thought? Kierkegaard’s praise of repetition derives from his
ideas about the individual’s relationship with God, ideas developed
at length in later writings, but only briefly and indirectly touched on
towards the end of Repetition. That a literary and a religious experience
of repetition might have things in common is suggested, however, by
Constantius’s account, in the first part of Repetition, of his experimental
return to Berlin to find out if his great enjoyment of an earlier visit to
that city is capable of repetition or not. The second visit is generally
not a success. But, in describing this visit, Constantius recalls his earlier
great pleasure in returning to the farce at a Berlin theatre night after
night: this farce seems to have been something like the Punch and
Judy puppet show, the fairy tale pantomime, or the Harlequinade that
traditionally followed a pantomime, that is, it was a performance where

much could never change, where entertainment derived from watch-
ing the reperformance of totally familiar characters, relationships, and
plots, but where every performance could also be expected to differ,
due to inserted topical references or individual actors’ impromptu
variations. Constantius’s disappointing return to Berlin, and to the
same Berlin theatre, therefore reminds readers that repeating a literary
experience, even so closely as to be watching the same actors perform
the same play, will be no repetition if the mood of the watcher has
changed – a point also made in Roland Barthes’s comment reproduced
at the top of this essay. The point is that subjective states, not external
realities, dictate the experience of repetition.
The major business of the second part of Repetition is an embedded
narrative: Constantius’s story of a “young man” who succeeds, with
Constantius’s advice, in giving up the woman he loves. The outcome
is the recovery by a young poet of what seems to be his true direction
in life. A final letter to the narrator by this “young man” recounts
to his “Silent Confidant” Constantius how “a repetition,” a recovery
of the self, has been received in return for his sacrifice: “I am myself
again. … The split that was in my being is healed. … Is there not, then,
a repetition? Did I not get everything double? Did I not get myself
again and precisely in such a way that I might have a double sense of
its meaning?” (220–21). This exemplary narrative of a genuine (rather
than failed) repetition suggests to me that one of the great pleasures
of series reading might also be a “repetition” which is, similarly, a
recovery of lost or past selfhood, the restoration of a past, enraptured
reading self to the present self. Also intriguing is the way experienc-
ing repetition somehow resituates the individual within the flow of
time, as time forms a kind of loop that adjoins a past moment and
the present moment. For Kierkegaard conceived of the entry of the
individual of faith into a personal relationship with God as producing
a comparable experience to the young man’s restoration of authen-
tic selfhood: in Repetition the young man’s final letter notes that to
achieve “repetition of the spirit” “in eternity … is the true repetition”
(221), and, as Gordon Marino notes, “[f]or Kierkegaard and all the
authors he dances on to his stage, the individual is a synthesis of …
time and eternity” (23).
In later Kierkegaardian thought, the source of a joyous discovery of
life as repetition, repetition as life, will be the famous leap of faith, the
choice to live in a personal relationship with God, to accept Christ’s
atonement for human sinfulness in the past as the crucial conditioning
fact of one’s own present. It is a leap because, as Peter Vardy particularly

notes in his introductory study of Kierkegaard’s thought, “Kierkegaard
firmly rejects all objective certainty with regard to the truth of
Christianity, in particular to leave room for faith and the gift of grace
by God: ‘depart from me, damned assurance. Save me, O God, from
ever becoming absolutely certain’” (62, quoting Kierkegaard’s Eighteen
Edifying Discourses 218).6 The “existential commitment” is thus “to
stake one’s whole life on something that cannot be proved to be true
and, indeed, which goes against reason” (Vardy 65). Note, too, as David
Roberts remarks, that “there is a coincidence – for [Kierkegaard] momen-
tous – between (a) Christ as the point in time where the Eternal offers
salvation, and (b) faith as the point in time where man’s relationship
to God is decisively determined” (81). Existence from this point means
living no longer in hope nor in recollection, but in repetition of human-
ity’s original and proper relationship with God; that is, a perpetual state
of becoming within the eternal, always joyfully present, and infinitely
repeated act or instant of salvation. Or so I conclude. I do not myself have
much understanding of how living in this state might be, but I imagine
that an individual’s experience of entry into a direct relationship with
God as repetition might resemble the experience described by John Donne
(a poet with a certain presence in Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle) in terms of
erotic (rather than divine) love in his “The Anniversarie”:
ALL kings, and all their favourites,

All glory of honors, beauties, wits,
The Sun it selfe, which makes times, as they passe,
Is elder by a yeare, now, than it was
When thou and I first one another saw:
All other things, to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to morrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
(13–14)
II
Kierkegaard’s – or Donne’s – paradox of repetition thus provides a

rewarding standpoint from which to investigate the experience of
narrative pleasure. The idea that stories, however listened to or read,
however experienced, are grasped as progressing at some fundamental,
underlying level through time in a self-evidently or straightforwardly

linear way from event A to event B, on to C, and so through to Z seems
to me to be evidently erroneous, or perhaps just very rarely interesting:
as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan points out in Narrative Fiction, the linear
unfolding of narrative text cannot always “correspond to the chrono-
logical succession of events” in a story, “and most often deviates from
it” (45–46). Only in “very simple narratives” does Rimmon-Kenan think
that chronologically ordered narration can exist (45). But story-telling
is often assumed to motivate and engage readers primarily by its rep-
resentation of chronological progress, by the impression given of time
unrolling as the story unrolls. The combination of a past-tense narrative
and a reader presently experiencing emotions born of their ignorance of
what is going to happen next – emotions like affection and anxiety or
fear for characters, gleeful anticipation of a character’s triumph, or per-
haps puzzlement, wonder, curiosity, intrigue, or suspense regarding the
probable fate of a character’s project or enterprise – all such experiences
of engagement seem to put emphasis on a story’s gradual unveiling of
events previously hidden by a story-time yet to be narrated. Engagement
in these processes is widely assumed to motivate readers to proceed
through a narrative to its end. Even Barthes implies such an underlying
model of narrative pleasure when he remarks that, “[o]f all readings,
that of tragedy is the most perverse: I take pleasure in hearing myself tell
a story whose end I know: I know and I don’t know, I act towards myself
as though I did not know” (47). But, as we see in Barthes’s paradoxes,
such a model of story-telling can only contradictorily accommodate the
desire to hear again, the need to reread – thrilling stories, even stories
with surprise endings, will be reread after the reader knows perfectly
well what the outcome is.
Repetition seems to be essential to enjoyment of at least some kinds
of stories. Is it perhaps essential to all stories? After all, the many kinds
of folktales now known to us once survived only by being repeatedly
retold. I suggest that stories perhaps do not primarily engage us through
their capacity to produce suspense and novelty, unanticipated devel-
opments and surprise endings. It must be the other things stories do,
including what they do to our experience of time’s passing, which most
please us.
Stories may even work for us because they are repetitive. Certainly,
very early Middle Eastern and European literary narratives – the Bible,
the Herodotean history, the Homeric epic – do not just exploit repeti-
tion on the small or local scale of rhetorical effect, but already struc-
ture narratives around repetition on a larger scale as well,7 as do other
assumedly once oral narratives of the Ancient World which we surmise

to be older in origin than the date of their writing down.8 Perhaps the
individual child’s earliest experiences of story can offer insights into
the functions of repetition in narrative. First, narratives do seem to
engage by acts of repetition: infants’ rhymes, songs, games, and stories
do not just repeat words, sounds, and rhythms, but mark verbal repeti-
tion by such repeated movements as rocking or jogging or the touching
of the child’s body; as in, “this little piggy went to market, this little
piggy stayed at home,” which ties touch to the rhythmical repetition
of a metaphorical term, the naming of each toe or finger on a child lis-
tener as a “little piggy” and thus as a main actor in a rather complicated
sequence of five tiny, but related, stories.
Stories for somewhat older small children are also repetitive. They
may be accumulative (The House That Jack Built, The Old Woman
and Her Pig, Chicken Little) and proceed by recitation to a final chant-
ing through of a story whose amassed length has become its main
point. In other cases repetition builds to a climactic change, as in The
Gingerbread Man, or The Great Big Enormous Turnip. Even an older
child’s story, one which develops a sequential thread, a story “arc,” may
still, within this larger structure, progress, and delay progress, via repeat
threefold repetitions, as in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three
Little Pigs, or The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Consider, too, Snow White’s
arrival at the home of seven dwarfs. All these stories have in common
that they enable the child to get a handle on the narrative future, to
anticipate (going beyond touching five concretely existing toes) an
abstract and invisible event known to be going to come next but which is
both predictable and meaningful because of what has already happened.
The threefold repetition of an event, for instance, is the shortest pos-
sible series which can, by setting up a pattern of near-exact repetition
in the first two cases, bring into being twin expectations that the third
case will be the same and that, based on the principle of variation, it
will (most probably) differ. Interest and excitement thus come to be
concentrated on a future anticipated only because of, or by means of,
the narration of the two previous cases in the past, involving both hope
and recollection in the listener’s active production of the narrative pre-
sent. The three brothers’ threefold tests by their father, the King, in the
Grimm fairy tale called “The Three Feathers” take part in this ancient
narrative proceeding, as do Goldilocks’ efforts to find a chair to sit in
that is “just right” for her.
Here I think we are getting to the heart of storying, a temporary
exit from time’s commonly structured passing, achieved by story’s
way of perpetually relocating us in a narrative present. For actively

encompassing a story’s past and future is always essential to listeners’
understanding and, therefore, to their engagement in what is hap-
pening. Narrative repetition has heretofore been analysed in terms of
the ways the passage of time is represented in fiction: Gérard Genette’s
analysis of “frequency” in narration, drawn on by Rimmon-Kenan,
discusses “the relation between the number of times an event appears
in the story and the number of times it is narrated (or mentioned) in
the text” (Rimmon-Kenan 57). But attention paid to “iteration,” the
re-narrating of the same event, should not preclude discussion of that
more basic affair, recurrence of the same (or of a very similar) event.
Such repetitions are fundamental to clowning, to farce, to folktales,
as, for example, in stories of the “trickster tricked” kind. In fact, in
both adults’ and children’s stories, similar things often do happen
repeatedly – to great effect. Consider the number of heads the Queen
of Hearts wants cut off in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the
number of bodies on stage at the end of Hamlet; or consider, in Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the comedy of the two Bennet parents’
reactions to two daughters’ unexpected engagements to two very
wealthy young men.
Kierkegaard’s paradoxical insistence, then, that repetition is bless-
ing (rather than just boring, as we might expect) makes his Repetition
a rewarding starting point for thinking about the pleasures on offer
to readers of that even-more-than-usually iterative literary form, the
children’s series. In a wondrous Appendix to her Enchanted Hunters:
The Power of Stories in Childhood, Maria Tatar presents 87 extracts from
writers’ recollections of childhood reading. From among a hugely sug-
gestive range of reactions, emotions, and retrospective deductions, a
significant number connect childhood reading to growth of the self:
examples include Sherman Alexie, on books as salvation: “I loved those
books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to
save my life” (206), or V. S. Pritchett, on self-recognition in reading:
“In all of Dickens, as I went from book to book, I saw myself and my
life in London” (210), or Penelope Lively, on dramatic self-extension
and self-exploration: “So I would usurp other parts, walling in vicarious
experience, … amending the script, starring in every episode” (216).
Harold Bloom makes a particularly comprehensive claim that reading
feeds a sense of self: “only deep, constant reading fully establishes and
augments an autonomous self” (221). But the comments of other writ-
ers including Joan Smith, Hazel Rochman, and Amy Bloom relate to the
theme of self-discovery through childhood reading, while Sven Birkerts’s
claim is that the achievement of reading in itself matters more than what
is read:
the real power of the childhood reading encounter [is] to be found

far less in the specific elements of story or character, and far more
in what is accomplished by the engagement itself. Creating a world
fully fledged from markers on a page is an attainment that feeds the
growing child’s sense of self in ways we cannot begin to guess at. ...
It throws wide the doors to inwardness, and nothing could be more
important. (225)
These writers’ recollections all support the idea that reading sustains
and develops selfhood. Recalling Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition as
self-restoration, I wonder if the memories of these adult readers can
help us understand the mysteriously obsessive requests of some chil-
dren to be read the same book night after night after night after night.
Perhaps these children need to relive an earlier reading so often because
it restores and confirms to them a recent past expansion of the self, a
growth-spurt of the soul caused by a certain book. Many recollections
in Tatar’s Appendix do, in fact, sound like conversion narratives or even
echo religious discourse, and occasionally a writer’s comment, like Walt
Whitman’s claim that “the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in
the highest sense, a gymnast’s struggle” (223), seems to echo an aspect
of both Kierkegaard’s strenuous theology and, for example, Vasiliki
Tsakiri’s reformulation of it: “For Kierkegaard, repetition is an action,
a deed” (132).
Repetition in reading, too, must really be an activity: as one example
of the many kinds of activity produced by narrative, consider the pat-
tern of interdiction (somebody is expressly told not to do something)
followed by transgression of the interdiction (but they do it anyway).
As well-trained narratees, even as children, we all feel that “the present
is big with future”9 after a main character has been laid under an inter-
diction, and wait eagerly and confidently for Bluebeard’s bride to open
the door to the forbidden chamber. But such activities of listeners and
readers are of many kinds, and a genre trains us to recognize the cues,
to get us “doing” the story. Detective fiction, with its planting of clues,
with its double movement of the narrative forward to the climactic rev-
elation of the murderer’s identity, and backward into the elucidation of
the past, is a good instance of the active and complex involvement in
reconstructing one’s own subjective idea of a narrative’s time-sequence
which is often required of a print-literature reader as a generic matter
of course. And narrative series, like genres, also train their readers to
recognize in advance and/or recall from the past certain specific narra-
tive signals: in Chapter 4 of this volume, Eliza Dresang and Kathleen
Campana draw attention to the apparently insignificant objects in
the Harry Potter series which later prove to have narrative or magical
significance.
Storying, then, a movement requiring participation of both narrator
and audience, must be constantly opening up possibilities of mental
engagement which confer on the listener that “blessed certainty of
the instant” (in Walter Lowrie’s translation of Repetition, 4) or “bliss-
ful security of the moment” (in the Hongs’ translation, 132) which
Kierkegaard values so highly as an outcome of repetition. And, keeping
in mind Kierkegaard’s parable of the “young man” and the effects of his
giving up of his love, the joyous eternal moment of repetition in narra-
tive must also be recognized to sometimes offer restoration of past read-
ing selves to the present self, an enrichment of reading we can surmise
to be very useful to children’s growth.
III
I turn now to Howl’s Moving Castle, a book which initiates a series by

acknowledging and interrogating repetition in the tradition of fairy
tales. Within just the first four sentences of the book, the reader hears
a self-conscious, humorous, and ironically inflected narrator evoking
fairy-tale sameness, predictability, repetition, and also evoking the trap
of recollection, the dangers of return:
In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and

cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born
the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first,
and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.
Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the
child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance
of success. (9)
The fairy-tale intertext is thus proffered here, from the beginning of

this series, as endangering, by pre-scripting, the subject: but also as an
important aspect of Jones’s repetitious narrative style, a kind of super-
added way of making dense the reading moment. Readers encountering
these opening sentences will be already engaged in all kinds of repeti-
tion, mentally rehearsing memories even as, confident in the principle
of variation, they reach out into what is to happen this time, in this text.
Such allusions reanimate past reading selves in the present, stimulate
the salivary glands of reading appetite.
This Jonesean density of effect persists into the expanding fantasy
world of the endangered subject, Sophie Hatter. A threefold narrative
of events concerning three (half)sisters and their widowed (step)mother
ensues, clearly an emanation from another much narrated world, our
own. These events involve us with familiar fairy-tale characters and
functions: sister, stepmother/blocker, bad witch/antagonist, transforma-
tion by enchantment, good witch, disenchantment. Interdictions, warn-
ings, instructions, taboos, and prophecies begin to reach out and exert
their shaping grasp on the narrative future while simultaneously exert-
ing the pressure of the intertext on the narrative present. Motifs, the
familiar “building blocks” of folk narrative, when recognized contribute
to constructing another typical Jonesean effect, a level of “metafictional
critical response” in the reader as well: as Farah Mendelsohn points
out, a Jones novel is always also an act of genre criticism (xiii). Thus, as
Sophie sets out to seek her fortune, readers will recognize the formulaic
nature of her three “encounters en route,” as well as registering, along
with Sophie, a variation on the formula of these encounters in a certain
lack of “magical gratitude” in those she has assisted (Jones, Howl’s 36).
The reader might also register a further departure from tradition in the
dawning suspicion that Sophie is not just a youthful protagonist victim-
ized by a witch: she is a witch. Additionally, one of Sophie’s encounters
en route is with a scarecrow, which opens up another intertextual space,
this time one bounded by The Wizard of Oz: for Sophie, like Dorothy,
sets off to see a wizard. Evidently the contemporary authored children’s
fantasy narrative, replicated across many media, is by now beginning to
generate its own motifs – in this case, “living scarecrow as incomplete
human being” – just as traditionally circulating oral narratives did, and
presumably for much the same reason; that is, to produce a repetition,
a reader’s joyful recognition and confident grasp of the implications
of the motif, such as a seven-headed dragon or a giant’s castle must,
I assume, have produced in youthful listeners in an earlier age.
Jones, however, as noted earlier, followed Howl’s Moving Castle by pro-
ducing something close to an “anti-series.” Recall of book one within
book two, Castle in the Air, and recall in book three, House of Many Ways,
of the two earlier volumes, is remarkably scanty on a first reading.10
Throughout the series, there is surprisingly little anticipation of later
volumes, too, although the Princess of High Norland, an important sec-
ondary character in House of Many Ways, does first feature in Castle in the
Air. Readers may recognize that all three book titles refer to a house, or
castle, and, on rereading, will notice that all three of these homes share
some odd qualities – instability, mobility, magical access to other places,
the potential to expand or contract in size. But such resemblances are
mostly concealed from the first-time reader because there is so much
to learn: each of the two sequels presents a new hero and/or heroine,
a completely new setting in another imaginary country close to Ingary
but not Ingary, a new assemblage of supporting characters, new villains,
new villainies, and a new and highly convoluted plot. Moreover, char-
acters already known to the reader from Howl’s Moving Castle, especially,
but not only, Calcifer, Sophie, and Howl, enter the second and third
volumes in quite unrecognizable disguises. A proliferation of unstable
identities and changeable personalities in the series has similar effects,
as do individuals in enchanted states, shape shifters, illusions, and
dismembered characters, elements of whose body or identity may have
been redistributed into other beings or even objects. The effect of such
techniques is to undermine one of the foundational, defining aspects of
series writing, that is, the persistence of characters and presence of some
ongoing narrative about them from one book to the next.
Jones has never been interested by genre stability.11 The main inter-
text of Howl’s Moving Castle is the fairy tale, as I have demonstrated,
but this is also an alternate-world fantasy, a portal-quest fantasy, a
double coming-of-age narrative for adolescents, male and female, and
a comic romance. Castle in the Air recalls The Thousand and One Nights
(one important pre-text is “The Ebony Horse” – although another is
the Grimms’ story of “The Shoes that Were Danced Through”) but it
also resembles Howl’s Moving Castle by telling a comic romance of true
love triumphant over many obstacles. Yet House of Many Ways hardly
deals in romantic love at all, instead offering a rather domestic tale of
densely interconnected families and generations and a heroine whose
passion is reading. House of Many Ways does leave an opening for the
reader to imagine a future in which Prince Peter, a future monarch, and
that inveterate reader, the baker’s daughter Charmain, will eventually
marry. But there is no developing romance between this rather young
pair of protagonists, unless quarrelsomeness is taken to be a sign of
romantic interest.
Jones’s imaginary lands – Ingary, Rashpuht, Strangia, High Norland –
prove to be equally unpredictably constructed. Castle in the Air begins
in an Arabian Nights setting in the orientalized city of Zanzib, and its
desert bandits, genies, djinns, and angels inhabit a Muslim-ish fantasy
universe rather than the English-ish kind of nowhere that is Ingary.
But in Castle in the Air Ingary is entered as a foreign land by the hero
Abdullah, to whom thatched cottages and bluebell woods and beer
drinking are very strange indeed. Playful reference to the real-world
experience of Muslim emigrants into England may be read in Abdullah’s
journey, but his journey is also something like a re-reversed repetition
of the reversed portal-fantasy of Howl’s Moving Castle, where Sophie
accompanies Howl and Michael through the mysterious black portal of
the castle and finds herself paying a surprise visit to Howl’s sister and
family in a contemporary suburban housing development in Wales in
our own world. The Swiss-ish homeliness of High Norland in House of
Many Ways, on the other hand, with its mountainous scenery and cosy
feel of security and prosperity, is allied with a slightly selfish inward-
lookingness, a homely smugness. In High Norland the plot partly turns
on the fraudulent theft and safe storage of immense wealth. But then,
High Norland also faces predatory and sexually threatening enemies
internal to its state and has to depend for its salvation on international
assistance. If we want to read allegories of this-worldly contemporary
politics into the Howl series, then, we must acknowledge that each book
is a different allegory. Moreover, in this, again unlike its two forerun-
ners, House of Many Ways lacks fictional intertexts; but it does allude
to library-based historical research in a humorous fantasy makeover
of this-worldly fashionable interest in genealogical or family-history
research.
Many things in all three of the densely populated plots of the Howl
books therefore remain incomprehensible on first reading, bringing
into view another aspect of repetition in series reading – the delight-
ful necessity of rereading. Every Jones ending, too, even when already
known, continues to satisfy. “Nothing says that this same text will
please us a second time,” says Barthes, but a series does promise to
please us a second time, and “Jones is one of the writers whose work
seems to have a lasting appeal for its readers” (Mendelsohn xiv). But in
her endings there is no consistent pattern. In this series, making use of
the same threefold repetition which the fairy tale uses, establishing a
precedent through two similar cases only to break with it on the third,
House of Many Ways not only fails to bring its two adolescent characters,
Charmain and Peter, into a romantic relationship, it also closes on a
happy assemblage of isolated individuals and unconventional couples.
The King of High Norland is a widower; his daughter, Princess Hilda,
prefers to remain single as her father’s companion; Aunt Sempronia and
Great-Uncle William are, like Calcifer, apparently isolates by choice;
and Peter’s mother, aka the Witch of Montalbino, is a widow. The only
married couples are Charmain’s parents, hardly seen together during

the entire book, and the explosively quarrelsome Howl and Sophie,
previously seen wrangling their way through marriage and new parent-
hood in Castle in the Air, and here encountered, still wrangling, under
conditions of considerable strain on their (or any) relationship, given
that Howl has magically disguised himself as a small boy of angelic
appearance and difficult behaviour called Twinkle.
Two significant relationships formed or maintained in this book are,
in fact, with dogs: between Castle in the Air’s cook, Jamal, and his dog
and between Charmain and the magical “enchanting dog” or Elfgift
called Waif, who sympathetically changes her own sex to female to
be more like Charmain on meeting her and selecting her as “Elfgift
Guardian” – a role Charmain proceeds to play without knowing she is
playing it. Neither one’s sex, nor one’s role as national saviour or “child
of destiny” character, are stable aspects of identity in a Jones fantasy
novel, then.12 Respectful and mildly affectionate bonds do also form
in this story between Charmain and her Aunt Sempronia’s Great-Uncle
William, and between Charmain and the royal family; and a connection
will also persist between Charmain and the royal library – this being
a relationship of at least equal importance to the others. And House
of Many Ways finally distinguishes itself from the preceding books by
concluding with more separations than newly formed bonds and by
ending with a departure, the departure from High Norland of Howl,
Sophie, their son Morgan, Calcifer, and the Moving Castle itself, a val-
edictory moment which it is hard not to read, now, as perhaps Jones’s
own valediction to her trilogy readers – or even to all her readers. I am
sorry there will be no further addition to the series.13
Was Jones herself a Kierkegaardian? I know of no evidence that she
read Kierkegaard, but anybody studying literature at Oxford in the
late 1950s and continuing into married life as the wife of an academic
in Oxford and then Bristol is unlikely to have been unaware of the
contemporaneous fashionable existentialism which owed so much to
Kierkegaard. Aspects of Jones’s works recall Kierkegaard: the way her
stories begin in the subjective states of human individuals, her disregard
for objectivity and realism, her tendency to invite philosophical reflec-
tion through narrative, and the ways that her narratives, always aware
of the tragic potential of human existence, are nevertheless built around
“the decisive character of action and the binding power of the past”
(Roberts 76). Jones’s admirable characters even display “existentialist”
qualities, I think; the seriousness and fervour they devote to existing,
the faith (though a faith neither religiously nor politically, but, rather,
individually grounded) they display in choosing to “leap” towards hero-

ism rather than away from it, choosing to act well for the mere reason
that they freely decide so to choose. When we first meet Howl, on the
other hand, he displays aspects of the Kierkegaardian aesthetic stage,
including his self-indulgence in cold-hearted love affairs, his posing
and vanity, his habits of emotional concealment and evasion, of living
behind closed doors. Like the aesthete, too, Howl is trapped by his own
past, as represented particularly by his contract with the fire-demon
Calcifer, which resembles Faust’s self-binding contract.14
Conversely, as the Witch of the Waste’s ageing spell shows us, ethi-
cal Sophie has already projected herself forward into her own “grey”
future.15 But the spell is Sophie’s awakening to self-awareness (another
significant existentialist moment): it shows Sophie to herself (literally,
in a mirror) and stimulates her to act. After freely choosing to leave
home, and with an apparently casual and unthinking heroism, Sophie
commits herself to “do for” the Witch of the Waste (Howl’s 33), seeks
Howl to straighten him out on the question of young girls’ hearts,
and goes on to redeem him from the imprisoning effect of dangerous
choices in his past. In the Miyazaki film of Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie
does this by literally time-travelling back into Howl’s youth, in a signal
disruption of the onward march of time. While Miyazaki took up and
built on the visually rewarding field of ageing and youthful appear-
ances, though, subverting chronology by memorable images of Sophie’s
premature ageing, or the collapse of the Witch of the Waste’s magically
faked perpetual youth, in Jones’s novel it is John Donne who provides a
literary past or backstory to Howl’s redemption. During this book, Howl
is endangered by a spell of the Witch of the Waste, a spell which will
destroy Howl only if, paradoxically, he succeeds in carrying out all the
impossible tasks assigned to the reader of Donne’s “Song” who is told
to “Go and catch a falling star, / Get with child a mandrake root, / Tell
me where all past years are” and so on (qtd. in Jones 127). Howl is saved
by Sophie, and self-recognition, self-discovery, a therapeutic recovery of
past selves accompany (perhaps produce) Howl’s and Sophie’s increas-
ing and mutual love, a love which finally binds them in a Donne-ian
ecstasy of unbreakable attention to each other in the last pages of the
book (the subdued reference here is surely to Donne’s “The Extasie”)
and launches them onward into their own unstable version of “happily
ever after” (Jones, Howl’s 301).
Moreover, in the two sequels to Howl’s Moving Castle, it is tempting to
find metaphors of the “leap of faith” in the books themselves. Abdullah
and Flower-in-the-Night in the first sequel, and Charmain and Waif
in the second, prove themselves to have comparable qualities as each

makes a momentously heroic “leap” towards their own future. Abdullah
buys a magic carpet and uses it, Flower-in-the-Night escapes literal
imprisonment by her past (her father, her rank, her family home) by
falling in love with Abdullah as decisively as he falls in love with her.
The overtaking of their imprisoned and narrow lives by an expanding
world of fantastic story – gruesome captivities, heroic journeyings, fero-
cious battles of wits, enduring love, all of which come complete with
standard fairy-tale demands of kindness, courage, faith, foresight, cun-
ning, and a crucial ability to recognize and act together with friends and
helpers – was foretold in prophecy from the beginning, and is, as we
discover, being produced by demonic and divine plottings on a higher
level. Abdullah’s fate is to have his dreams come true as he is toyed
with by a djinn of great power; but this mighty being, at once devilish,
human, and godlike, eventually reassigns to Abdullah and Flower-in-
the-Night the responsibility and power they have already won by their
own leaps, leaps made literally, involving, as they do, much magical
leaving of the ground for dizzying and dangerous high flying.
House of Many Ways, though not set “in the air” like the preceding
volume, continues to occupy high ground. The sulky and introverted
Charmain dares to write a letter to the King of High Norland offering her
services as assistant librarian, and makes another kind of choice, or leap
of faith, from a cliff in the alpine field outside her uncle’s magic window
to escape the Lubbock. She thus discovers that she can, indeed, work
magic, that she can, indeed, fly. Waif has sufficient faith in Charmain
to adopt her; Charmain realizes eventually that she loves Waif. But
Charmain’s most typically Jonesean unthinking choice of heroism occurs
when she races upstairs to rescue Twinkle from his perilous perch on the
golden roof of the royal palace. Charmain’s disregard of safety and self at
this moment initiates a co-operative relationship with Howl and Sophie
which will eventually save the kingdom from the Lubbocks who infest it,
breeding within human bodies, bleeding it dry of funds, and plotting its
overthrow. Her moment of choice is also Charmain’s crucial step towards
recovering the secret history and lost treasures of High Norland. But
then, the King of High Norland and his daughter perhaps demonstrated
equal ability to take a leap of faith when they so charmingly invited an
unknown high school student to come and help out in the royal library.
It is typical of Jones’s sense of her readership that Charmain’s decisive ini-
tial “leap,” her first adult act of self-discovery and self-responsibility, the
choice by which she begins to make her own life, should be the simple
act of writing a letter asking for a job. But then, again, would Charmain
have written that letter if her mother and aunt between them had not
already entrusted Charmain with a genuine responsibility, that of caring
for Uncle William’s home while he is ill?
Existentialism lost its authority as a philosophy of life because of its per-
ceived solipsism, its idea of human being as isolated and self-responsible.
Certainly this was Kierkegaard’s conception of life’s way; but then, to
Kierkegaard, all human being as it advances in becoming is also advancing
towards God. Jones’s protagonists, on the other hand, although embark-
ing on a fairy-tale adventure alone may be required of them, are not real
solitaries. Sophie manages never to really leave her own family behind
while taking on a new family as well; Flower-in-the-Night and Abdullah
lead a co-operatively managed escape effort of the many distressed and
abducted princesses with whom they are confined in Castle in the Air.
House of Many Ways is about family relatedness from the beginning. Jones
can be regarded, perhaps, as a rethinker of existentialism who success-
fully combines a lively sense of human sociability, interconnectedness,
and mutual responsibility with such central existentialist ideas as that we
alone are responsible for our authentic selves, and that our choices must
be made, in dread and anxiety, without certainty, on the basis of values
freely and responsibly chosen by ourselves. For, in the Jonesean comedy,
one’s most Promethean acts of solitary self-assertion inevitably turn out
to be everybody else’s business. Yet, by a sacrifice, by risking losing life
itself, as Howl does in battle with the Witch of the Waste, as Sophie does
when she sets out to confront the Witch alone, Jones’s protagonists do
indeed achieve a “repetition” in that their authentic selfhood is returned
to them: as Sophie’s youth is; as Howl’s heart is.
That repetition is delighted in and can be yearned for by the series
reader is recognized and strongly upheld by Jones’s teasing procedures
in writing this series, where the possibility of encountering series rep-
etition is generally withheld, to be triumphantly fulfilled only at the
very last moment. Before each sequel ends, readers will finally enjoy a
comedic concluding moment, where, on a full stage, new main char-
acters can be seen relating to our old favourites: Howl, Sophie, and
Calcifer. But this happens only in the last chapters of Castle in the Air
and House of Many Ways. A repeated teasing delay of the series reader’s
happy moment of re-encountering well-loved earlier series characters
reperforming their original relationships to each other, therefore, comes
to constitute one of the grounds on which the reader, encouraged by
recollection, enticed by hope, becomes engaged in the narrative suffi-
ciently to gain from it the pleasure of going on reading it. All of which
goes to show that Jones herself is well aware that series reading does
indeed provide the pleasures of repetition, and knows well that to delay
satisfying desire for these pleasures puts them to work to engage readers,
and thus ensure the success of her series.
Notes
1. And in the same year as Either/Or. The Three Edifying Discourses also appeared
on the same day as Repetition and Fear and Trembling, though with a different
publisher. Between 1842 and 1845 Kierkegaard produced many of his most
important pseudonymous works.
2. As Kierkegaard himself would note in the book, “The dialectic of repeti-
tion is easy, for that which is repeated has been – otherwise it could not
be repeated – but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into
something new” (149). The narrator of Fear and Trembling is called Johannes
de Silentio. Silence is important too, a concomitant of the energy and con-
centration Kierkegaard considered should be devoted by individuals to their
own existence.
3. Gordon Marino, in the set of essays called Kierkegaard in the Present Age,
explains that objectivity is a form of suicide to Kierkegaard because
“[t]he only actuality concerning which an existing person has more than
knowledge about is his own actuality, that he exists, and this actuality is his
absolute interest” (Marino 21, quoting Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific
Postscript 316). Marino adds: “Thought contents have little to do with
it – understanding existence is existing with a passionate and personal
interest in your own existence” and “being conscious is, in part, existing
passionately” (22).
4. In Maria Tatar’s Appendix to Enchanted Hunters, Graham Greene is quoted on
“the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on the library
shelf a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley
Weyman which I had not read before” (Greene, Collected Essays, qtd. by Tatar
208). Greene was evidently another young reader whose youthful reading
required description in erotic terms.
5. Jones wrote books for children and adolescents of many different ages as
well as for adults. Farah Mendelsohn remarks that, although Jones chooses
to write for children, “she also writes for fantasy readers of all ages,” and that
“[r]eaders of fantasy are notoriously uninterested in the adult-child divide.
It is perhaps the last group of readers to maintain what Beverly Lyon Clark
has referred to as the category of ‘family’ reading” (xiv). My discussion fore-
grounds my own, adult, readings of Jones.
6. I have been unable to access the translation used by Vardy and cite the Hongs’
translation, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, in my Works Cited instead.
7. Timothy Long notes in Repetition and Variation in the Short Stories of
Herodotus that repetition “for effect and for composition” – that is,
with similar functions to the kinds of repetition he will describe in the
Herodotean narrative – “already existed in Homer, where it was carried to a
height of construction” (4) and remarks that Old Testament scholarship has
also identified meaningful repetition in the “leading word style” in biblical
narrative (3).
8. In Apuleius’s second-century The Golden Ass, the interpolated narrative

of Cupid and Psyche already enacts many familiar folk and fairy-tale rep-
etitions: three sisters, Psyche’s appeals to three goddesses, her four tasks or
ordeals, her four helpers, the instructions she is given about five encounters
in the Underworld, the carrying out of the five instructions. There is also the
interdiction/transgression pattern (twice).
9. Vasiliki Tsakiri quotes this phrase of Leibniz’s in his discussion of
Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition (132). Earlier in this discussion, he also
quotes Gillian Rose’s suggestion that the “fall or the beginning involves
initiation into prohibition” (qtd. in Tsakiri 131) where Rose seems to
indirectly suggest that the prohibition/transgression pattern stands at the
beginning of narrative, as well as at the beginning of time, in the Bible’s
mythologized past.
10. I discuss the functions of textual recall of earlier volumes in the children’s
series in an earlier essay, “Ending Only to Begin Again: The Child Reader and
One Hundred Years of Sequel and Series Writing.”
11. Mendelsohn’s Introduction to her Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature
and the Fantastic Tradition is useful on this quality in Jones’s writing, and
provides an instructive quotation from Jones herself: “It doesn’t seem to
me that genres are, per se, necessary. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t
mix them up a bit and change them around and make something new. This
is what I like to do. This is what you can do with children. I don’t see that
much difference between science fiction and fantasy” (xvi).
12. I am grateful to Mavis Reimer and student editors of this volume for point-
ing out that this destabilizing effect in Jones’s series might well be read as a
satiric comment on the wildly popular Harry Potter series.
13. Diana Wynne Jones died in March 2011.
14. See Peter Vardy for an approachable introduction to Kierkegaard’s think-
ing in terms of three Stages on Life’s Way: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the
religious. Kierkegaard described the “despairing aesthete,” who lives in a
kind of extreme state of the aesthetic, as demonic: “self-aware, thoughtful
and firmly in control of life” (Vardy 43). This individual may be highly suc-
cessful, but sets “an immense protective wall round him or herself, and will
allow nothing to penetrate this.” The demonic therefore lives “‘closed in’ on
her- or himself because this individual cannot bear to have her or his iden-
tity challenged by the divine” (44). Don Giovanni and Dr. Faustus exemplify
the demonic personality, for, even at the last, they cannot abandon them-
selves to the divine. To do so would be abandoning their own identity, a
part of which is to be opposed to the divine, and such an individual cannot
repent. He or she feels repulsion for the divine, and “rejects obligations to
[other] human beings” (45). Like Nietzsche’s Superman, individuals in the
demonic stage may believe themselves to be superior to others (45).
15. Ethical individuals, rejectors of the aesthetic, commit themselves to live in
certain ways, and so might define themselves, for instance, by their commit-
ment to marriage. Kierkegaard is aware that it is not easy to live according
to ethical rules: in Fear and Trembling he calls this kind of ethical man a
“Tragic Hero,” and his examples are Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus, “all
of whom sacrifice the person they love to a higher ethical duty” (Vardy 50).
The person Sophie is sacrificing, however, seems to be herself.
The series
Jones, Diana Wynne. Howl’s Moving Castle. 1986. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Print.
——. Castle in the Air. 1990. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Print.
——. House of Many Ways. 2008. London: HarperCollins, 2009. Print.
Works cited
Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Trans. Robert Graves. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950.
Print.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975. Print.
Donne, John. “The Anniversarie.” Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne
and Jonson. Ed. Hugh Kenner. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1964.
13–14. Print.
——. “The Extasie.” Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and Jonson.
Ed. Hugh Kenner. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1964. 23–25. Print.
——. “Song.” Seventeenth Century Poetry: The Schools of Donne and Jonson. Ed.
Hugh Kenner. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1964. 6–7. Print.
Garff, Joakim. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography. 1994. Trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. English translation of Figures III. 1972.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Print.
Greene, Graham. Collected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Print.
Miyazaki, Hayao, dir. Howl’s Moving Castle. Japan: Studio Ghibli, 2004. Film.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 2 vols. 1846. Kierkegaard’s
Writings. Vol. 12. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1992. Print.
——. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. 1845. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 5. Ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Print.
——. Fear and Trembling; Repetition. 1843. Kierkegaard’s Writings. Vol. 6. Ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
Print.
——. Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology. 1843. Trans. Walter Lowrie.
London: Cumberlege Oxford UP, 1941. Print.
——. Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons. 1845. Kierkegaard’s Writings.
Vol. 11. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1988. Print.
Long, Timothy. Repetition and Variation in the Short Stories of Herodotus. Frankfurt
am Main: Athenäum, 1987. Print.
Hundred Years of Sequel and Series Writing.” Children’s Literature and the
Fin-de-Siècle. Ed. Roderick McGillis. Westport: Praeger, 2003. 31–39. Print.
Manheim, Ralph. Trans. Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories.
London: Gollancz, 1993. Print. Gollancz Children’s Paperbacks.
Marino, Gordon. Kierkegaard in the Present Age. Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 2001.
Print. Marquette Studies in Philosophy 27.
Mendlesohn, Farah. Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic
Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. 1983. 2nd ed. London: Routledge,
2002. Print. New Accents.
Roberts, David E. Existentialism and Religious Belief. New York: Oxford UP, 1959.
Print. A Galaxy Book.
Tatar, Maria. Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood. New York, NY:
W. W. Norton, 2009. Print.
Tsakiri, Vasiliki. Kierkegaard: Anxiety, Repetition and Contemporaneity. Basingstoke;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.
Vardy, Peter. The SPCK Introduction to Kierkegaard. Rev. ed. London: Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2008. Print.
4
Harry Potter Fans Discover the
Pleasures of Transfiguration
Eliza T. Dresang and Kathleen Campana
The continued and widespread popularity of the Harry Potter novels

is easy to document. Since 1997, when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone [Book 1] was first published in the United Kingdom, more than
450 million copies have been sold and the seven volumes have been
translated into 73 languages (“Harry Potter Series”). Moreover, more
than five years after the publication of the final book, Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hallows [Book 7], scholars from a wide range of disciplines
and approaches continue to analyse the texts: this is evidenced by arti-
cles in the Spring 2012 and Winter 2011 issues of Children’s Literature
Association Quarterly (Galway; Dendle), in the 2012 and 2011 volumes
of Children’s Literature (Fitzsimmons; Wolosky; Cantrell), and by a recent
book by Colin Manlove. Fan fiction and other social media sites, includ-
ing J. K. Rowling’s own Pottermore website, have created new communi-
ties of readers which offer enhanced ways to interact with the original
Potter novels.
In 2009, Colette Drouillard found that, although several hundred
essays on the subject of Harry Potter had been published to that date,
the conclusions were predominantly constructed from adult per-
ceptions of young readers’ responses (2). Determined to learn from
the youth themselves, Drouillard undertook a project in which she
systematically collected the opinions of young readers on the series.
Drouillard’s research draws upon the community of readers who engage
in online discussions of Rowling’s works. She documents the extensive
practice of rereading of the Potter books as a predominant characteristic
of these readers. Of the 649 respondents to Drouillard’s survey, only
2.5 per cent said they had not read any of the Harry Potter books more
than once, while 32 per cent said they rarely or never read other books
95
multiple times (51). Some respondents had reread the Harry Potter
books as many as ten times, especially the first books.
All of the respondents were between the ages of 18 and 24, all were
members of the first wave of readers who grew up with Harry Potter,
and all were committed Harry Potter fans. According to Rebecca Borah,
“Fans are people who read, reread, and interpret texts. They seek out
other fans to discuss these texts … and reshape their readings” (355).
Drouillard asked what prompted these readers to become fans of the
Harry Potter books in particular. What motivated them to continue
reading book after book of the series once they started? Did their
membership in a community of readers reshape their readings?
Drouillard identified nine factors reported most often by these read-
ers as their motivation to continue reading the books. The factor we
investigate in this essay refers to a particular kind of repetition we will
call intratextuality.1 Drouillard explains that “the detail in the books,
particularly aspects linking storylines across volumes in the series, pro-
vided the motivation for many readers not only to continue reading
until the final book was published but to return and revisit earlier books
in order to follow threads in [the] story that weren’t initially evident”
(69). One of the young readers explicitly named this repetition as an
attractive factor, saying, “I loved finding bits where she had mentioned
something casually in one book, only to discover it was a big part of
one of the later books in the series” (70). Another observed that “no
other book has captivated me so much like Harry Potter. Sometimes
it’s like ‘I Spy’ when I reread the books. It’s amazing to see the little,
seemingly innocent things Rowling added to a book and find that it
becomes of great importance later” (65). Drouillard’s study establishes
that Rowling’s intratextual repetitions are among the top attractions of
the Harry Potter books for young readers.
In the books, Potter and his friends study transfiguration, described
as “turning something into something else, of course, it’s supposed
to be very difficult” (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone [Book 1] 125).
While transfiguration may be difficult in the magical world, Rowling
demonstrates ease at her own brand of transfiguration. Our close read-
ing of the seven Potter books reveals that Rowling employs repetition
to add depth for interpretation both through already well-documented
intertextual relationships with external texts and through complex
intratextual relationships within her own series of texts. The intratex-
tual repetition we analyse here is in the vein of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s rhizome (6, 7) – repetition as adaptation or unfolding,
repeating always with a difference. Our analysis leads us to conclude
Eliza T. Dresang and Kathleen Campana 97
that Rowling’s skilful introduction of minor details that later gain sig-
nificance is a particular intratextual repetition that acts as a lure to her
readers to read and reread the Harry Potter series, and as a harbinger of
a new form of pleasure in repetition in series fiction.
“Repetition itself creates bliss”
Feminist psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva coined the term inter-

textuality in 1966. As early as the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin had written
of “the novel’s special relationship with extraliterary genres” (33).
The novel, according to Bakhtin, “is constructed in a zone of contact
with the incomplete events of a particular present” (33). Building on
Bakhtin’s work and influenced by Roland Barthes, Kristeva theorized
that “[a]ny text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the
absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextual-
ity replaces that of intersubjectivity” (“Word, Dialogue” 37). She refers
to texts in terms of two axes: a vertical axis, which connects the text
to exterior, preexisting texts, and a horizontal axis, which connects the
author to the reader of a text (36).
A few years later, Michel Foucault articulated a similar theory of the
intertextual relations of a book:
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first
lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its
autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other
books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. …
The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands … Its
unity is variable and relative. (23)
In his work from the 1970s, Barthes eschewed text stability not only
from the point of view of its relationship to other texts, but also because
of the interpretation of text by the reader. Graham Allen summarizes:
“For Barthes, literary meaning can never be fully stabilized by the
reader, since the literary work’s intertextual nature always leads readers
on to new textual relations” (4). From this point of view, meaning is
produced not only by the reader in relation to a particular text, but also
in relation to a complex network of texts brought to the experience by
a reader. To the informed reader, discovering intertextual connections
brings a state of pleasure that Barthes refers to as bliss, because “repeti-
tion itself creates bliss” (Pleasure 40). According to Barthes, “pleasure
can be expressed in words, bliss cannot. … Bliss is unspeakable” (21).
In 2002, several decades after coining the term, Kristeva commented

on its widespread significance: “intertextuality is now a common-
place of most literary debates and a concept that appears in almost all
dictionaries of literary theory” (“Nous Deux” 8). Unlike intertextual-
ity, intratextuality is rarely discussed and no documented agreement
exists about the origin of the term. In 2002, Daniel Chandler asserted
that “whilst the term intertextuality would normally be used to refer
to allusions to other texts, a related kind of allusion has been called
‘intratextuality’ – involving internal relations within the text.” Alison
Sharrock, analysing intratextuality in Greek and Roman classics in
2000, characterizes it as follows: “a text’s meanings grow not only out
[of] the readings of its parts and its whole, but also out of readings of the
relationships between the parts” (6). Sharrock describes a pleasurable
intratextual reading experience that consists of “looking at the text
from different directions (backwards as well as forwards), chopping it
up in various ways, building it up again, contracting and expanding its
boundaries” (5). In Making Meaning, Creating Family: Intertextuality and
Framing in Family Interaction (2009), Cynthia Gordon writes that “inter-
locutors reshape and recontextualize both within texts (intratextual
repetition) and across texts (intertextual repetition) to perform a variety
of functions and create a range of meanings” (9). She identifies a type
of intratextuality that functions to build community among groups
such as families, and suggests that repetition “functions as a means
of binding people together. … Repetition serves this binding function
because it is a metalinguistic strategy; it directs a hearer or reader back
into their memory as if to say, ‘Pay attention to this again’” (10, quot-
ing Johnstone et al. 13). Gordon admits, however, that “intertextual
and intratextual repetition exist on a continuum” and that “identify-
ing intertextual (versus intratextual) repetition is not a straightforward
endeavour by any means” (17).
Intratextuality is obviously related to the literary device of foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing, however, offers subtle contextual clues that suggest in
advance something that might happen later in the text. Rowling does
engage in foreshadowing in the Potter books; for example, in Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire [Book 4], Ron is intensely jealous of Viktor Krum, who
escorts Hermione to the Yule Ball. Ron, of course, is Hermione’s husband
at the end of the series; this is an early glimpse of his feelings for her.
In contrast, we argue, the intratextual repetition used by Rowling
in the Harry Potter series provides no clues for readers that the rep-
etition will occur. Rowling’s intratextuality ultimately offers readers
pleasure when they recognize that uncontextualized hints – references
not discernible as significant upon first reading – are available to be

recalled and found. While foreshadowing is commonplace in literature,
Rowling’s particular type of intratextuality appears to be unique.
Intratextuality is also related to, but ultimately different from, what
Rose Lovell-Smith refers to as “recall writing.” Analysing several series
written for young readers, she discovers references among volumes
that go beyond reminding a reader of what has come before. Recall
writing, she suggests, is a specific type of repetition that establishes
and enhances themes of maturation, of “the passage from childhood
to adulthood” (37). As Lovell-Smith notes, “An extra dimension of
reference backward suggests interpretive possibilities to the reader and
also offers guidance forward into the current text” (33). Rowling does
make use of recall writing. For example, Dumbledore, who appears at
the Dursleys’ home to collect Harry as he is on the cusp of adulthood,
articulates memories that provoke recall about the very different paths
of maturation for Harry and Dudley, the Dursleys’ son. While Harry
has been treated with neglect and abuse by the Dursleys and has been
threatened by Voldemort, who has tried to kill him on numerous occa-
sions, he has been spared the type of disgusting damage that Dudley’s
parents have inflicted on him (Half-Blood Prince [Book 6] 55).
Rowling’s use of this provoked recall relates to her intratextuality in
that they encourage both memory and also possible expanded interpre-
tations of previously described events. Her use of recall writing differs
dramatically from the subtlety of her intratextual references, however,
in that these happenings, when first recounted, are an obvious and
integral part of the story.
Muggle Studies
Much scholarship already exists on the importance of intertextuality in

the Harry Potter series, although there is no general agreement on the
external texts that bring the most relevant commentaries to Rowling’s
opus. For example, the intertextual relation of Hogwarts to British
boarding schools and to school stories such as Thomas Hughes’s 1857
novel Tom Brown’s School Days was recognized soon after the publication
of the first book in the series (Iyer; Reimer; Rollin; Smith). Yet disagree-
ment on what the absorption and transformation (to use Kristevan
terms) of the British boarding school story means for Rowling’s series
exists even among those who accept the importance of this intertextual
linkage. There is general agreement that Tom Brown’s School Days “was
an important source for … school stories for at least a century following
its publication and, arguably, left an indelible mark on the generic form
itself” (Reimer 215). Some elements that Rowling has “absorbed” from
Hughes’s novel are obvious, such as, for example, the ages at which
Harry Potter and Tom Brown enter boarding school; their prowess at
games and the general course of their school careers; and their ultimate
upholding of school values because of the guidance of a wise and kind
headmaster (Steege 143, 148, 149, 150–51).
Whether or not Rowling “transforms” the generic form in her novels
is, however, debatable. David Steege asserts that “by making this a
school for witchcraft and wizards, [Rowling] transforms much of what
might be familiar to British readers and off-putting to American readers
into elements that are new and delightful for all” (154). He also points
to other transformations in that Hogwarts is a “coeducational institu-
tion with an ethnically diverse student body, one where individuality
is important” (153). Elizabeth Galway counters Steege’s conclusions:
“Rowling reinscribes many of the values and attitudes toward gender
and class extolled in Hughes’s foundational nineteenth-century novel”
(68); “Hogwarts … ultimately serves to mold the hero into a member of
the ruling elite and an ideal masculine citizen” (82).
In another example of intertextuality – the naming of characters,
with which Rowling took great care – one may find a counterargument
to Galway’s claims. When discussing sources for the characters named
Snape, Dumbledore, Hagrid, and Hedwig, Rowling said in an interview,
“I love names, as anyone who has read the books is going to see only
too clearly” (“The Surprising Success”). Hermione, the only one of
the three protagonists who is female, provides a prime example, with
various external references that help define her character. Rowling refers
to Hermione, a virtuous Queen of Sicily in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s
Tale, as her source for Hermione Granger’s first name (Fraser 31).
The heritage of Rowling’s character, however, comes from a number
of other Hermiones, including the Greek goddess Hermione, a Saint
Hermione, as well as more contemporary Hermiones who appear in
H.D.’s HERmione and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. In “Hermione
Granger and the Heritage of Gender,” Eliza Dresang suggests that giving
Hermione an unusual name with a number of powerful ties to several
mythological and literary Hermiones, all of whom show strength in
the face of adversity, provides her “legitimacy and strength among her
peers that the main male characters gain either out of heredity (Ron) or
endowment (Harry)” (212).
Those readers who have sufficient literary backgrounds will recognize at
least some of these connections and experience greater reading pleasure
than less experienced readers. Moreover, having an awareness of the

historical community of characters in which Rowling’s Hermione exists
may alert readers to the underlying strength and independence that
Hermione may not always exhibit. In this sense, readers may establish
a greater understanding of the author’s intent and perceive the vertical
text-to-text relationship described by Kristeva, Barthes, and Foucault. In
short, Rowling employs intertextuality to enable her more informed or
experienced readers to further enjoy making meaning of the text.
“Maybe it’s something you need to find out for yourself”
Although intertextuality is replete throughout Rowling’s series, close

analysis of her work reveals that both within and across the seven vol-
umes she also employs self-citational intratextuality. Rowling’s uncom-
mon use of intratextual repetition, simple or complex, begins with an
insertion of the entity to be repeated (a person, inanimate object, place,
or magical spell), without any signal that this element is to be taken
as particularly meaningful. But its repetition in another context and
at a later point plays a significant role in furthering the story. With no
contextual clues from the author, readers are on their own to discover
these treasures, as if Rowling is saying, “Maybe it’s something you need
to find out for yourself” (Deathly Hallows [Book 7] 395). We have already
suggested that Harry and his friends might call this type of repetition
transfiguration; we could also call it, simply, magic.
Whereas intertextuality offers extra reading pleasure to the most
informed readers, intratexuality offers rewards to a wider range of
readers. Intratextuality within the Harry Potter books has not been dis-
cussed in any academic paper we have discovered; yet there are dozens
of examples of intratextual repetition in the series. Here we outline four
such examples, demonstrating their usefulness to four different types
of readers: we call these the informed reader, the reflective reader, the
astute reader, and the learning reader.
The informed reader meets Nicolas Flamel

The casual introduction and later significance of the wizard Nicolas Flamel
in the first Harry Potter book is our first example of intratextual repetition
in the series. In fact, the references to Flamel blend intertext and intra-
text, doubly rewarding close readers of the series who are also informed
readers – those who have read extensively outside the Harry Potter series.
While on the train during his first trip to Hogwarts, Harry purchases
a package of chocolate frogs. The treats are accompanied by Famous
Witch and Wizard collectible cards; on the back of each card is the
name and a description of the witch or wizard pictured. “Harry turned
over his card and read: ALBUS DUMBLEDORE: Currently Headmaster of
Hogwarts” (Sorcerer’s Stone [Book 1] 102). Below this, Harry reads a brief
verbal sketch of Dumbledore:
Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times,

Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark
wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of
dragon’s blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas
Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and tenpin
bowling. (102)
With the narrative focus on Dumbledore, Nicolas Flamel seems just

a minor detail and is unlikely to be noticed by most readers. Several
chapters later, however, Hagrid accidentally reveals that Nicolas Flamel
is somehow involved in the mystery of whatever Fluffy the three-headed
dog is guarding.
‘You forget that dog, an’ you forget what it’s guardin’, that’s between
Professor Dumbledore an’ Nicolas Flamel.’
‘Aha!’ said Harry, ‘so there’s someone called Nicolas Flamel
involved, is there?’ (Sorcerer’s Stone [Book 1] 192)
Finally, after a fruitless search for information about Nicolas Flamel,

Harry gives his friend Neville his last chocolate frog, but keeps the
wizard card. Glancing at it, Harry realizes that it is Dumbledore again,
but this time something he had forgotten leaps out: Nicolas Flamel’s
name (218). Overhearing this, Hermione notes another detail about
Dumbledore and Flamel from the card – their work together on
alchemy. This leads her to a library book about alchemy, where she
discovers that Flamel, age 655, is the only known owner of a Sorcerer’s
Stone, which produces the Elixir of Life that makes the drinker immor-
tal (219). With this information, Harry, Hermione, and Ron ultimately
prevent Professor Quirrell and the evil Lord Voldemort from stealing the
Sorcerer’s Stone and gaining its powers (291–94).
In addition to being a magical character in the novel, Nicolas Flamel
was actually a real person, who died in 1418. Thus, he serves as an
example of both intertextual (Muggle) and intratextual (magical) cita-
tion. An informed reader might recognize Flamel’s name from the
beginning and experience the pleasure of knowing the solution to the
mystery of what Fluffy is guarding even before the bookish Hermione

can figure it out, and consequently may have the sense of participating
in the transfiguration or magic that occurs throughout the book. For
any reader who cannot make that connection, there is a second layer of
repetition and recognition that offers nearly as pleasurable a reward, the
sense that the reader, like Harry and his friends, had all the clues s/he
needed to solve the mystery right from the start.
The reflective reader practices in the Room of Requirement

Those readers we call reflective are drawn to dissonance and ambiguity.
In the many iterations of the Room of Requirement, we find an example
of a complex form of intratextuality that allows for multiple framings
of the same repeated element. The Room of Requirement in Hogwarts
magically appears for those who need it and takes on whatever char-
acteristics they seek. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [Book 4],
Dumbledore describes the Room of Requirement, though he does not
mention it by name.
‘Oh I would never dream of assuming I know all Hogwarts’ secrets,

Igor,’ said Dumbledore amicably. ‘Only this morning, for instance,
I took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom and found
myself in a beautifully proportioned room I have never seen before,
containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots.
When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the
room had vanished.’ (417)
Like the first mention of Nicolas Flamel, this description of the Room
of Requirement is brought in quickly and casually, without any clue to
alert the reader that it might be important until it is repeated later in
the series.
The Room of Requirement next appears when Dumbledore’s Army
is looking for a secret and safe place to practice defence against the
dark arts; “Dobby knows the perfect place, sir! It is known by us as the
Come and Go Room, sir, or else as the Room of Requirement!” (Order
of the Phoenix [Book 5] 386). Dobby, a house elf loyal to Harry, divulges
that he uses the room as a place to hide Winky, another house elf,
when she has had too much to drink. Dumbledore’s Army uses it as
their practice room throughout the book. The Room of Requirement
reappears in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [Book 6] when Harry
uses it to hide the Half-Blood Prince’s Potions textbook. At the same
time, it turns out, Draco Malfoy uses the room to smuggle Voldemort’s
followers, called Death Eaters, into Hogwarts (617). Finally, in Harry

Potter and the Deathly Hallows [Book 7], when Harry, Ron, and Hermione
return to Hogwarts to search for one of the final Horcruxes, the Room of
Requirement serves as an entryway into Hogwarts and a haven from the
Death Eaters whom Voldemort has put in charge of the school (577–78).
While Harry, Ron, and Hermione are using the Room of Requirement
as a hiding place, the Room in another form is also serving as a hiding
place for the very Horcrux they are seeking (627–30).
The complexity of the Room may be conceptualized through Gordon’s
use of the term frames for the meanings that different participants bring
to the same text. She applies this in her own work by examining how
dialogue in families can take on different meanings to family members
participating in the same conversation. Gordon incorporates Bakhtin
in her concept of “overlapping frames” by suggesting that this type
of repeated dialogue in families becomes “populated by two voices,”
where the same word or phrase may have two meanings for two people
participating in the same conversation or “two definitions of what is
taking place in the interaction, with the double-voiced words situated
in both frames” (116).
While Gordon does not reference the Potter works, her concept
of overlapping frames can be applied here because the Room of
Requirement is repeated from book to book, presented at the same time
through different contexts as “safe and dangerous, invisible and perme-
able, as open to evil intentions as it is to good ones” (Cantrell 206).
The Room, in other words, is an element that invites a reading through
Bakhtin’s notions of double-voices and dialogism: this repetition within
overlapping frames allows readers to decide the meaning they want
to attribute to the Room of Requirement or to think of it as a neutral
space. As Sarah K. Cantrell has observed, “Since the narrative provides
no definitive answer about the Room’s future, readers must admit to all
the unknown spaces and places that remain beyond their knowledge
and grasp” (209). Cantrell attributes her specific analysis of the Room
of Requirement to Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, or “other spaces,”
and Deleuze’s any-space-whatever, both of which emphasize space with
multiple potential meanings to readers (195).
The reflective reader, in fact, is comfortable with this ambiguity
of meaning and takes pleasure in thinking about it. For readers who
can handle complexity, even contradiction, the transfiguration of
Dumbledore’s casual reference to the Room of Requirement makes the
Room not the solution to a mystery but a mystery in itself. Neither a
mere novelty in the design of Hogwarts castle nor a decidedly good or
“dark” piece of magic, the Room accommodates multiple intratextual

repetitions or transfigurations.
The astute reader and the Cat Lady

Although Rowling uses a diverse range of repetitive techniques through-
out the series, intratextuality has the potential to be noticed by the
greatest number of readers because it requires no additional literary or
historical knowledge. The intratextual relationships require only that
the astute reader read the books in the series closely enough to be able
to remember an initial subtle occurrence when a subsequent repetition
ascribes meaning to it. Astute readers who can pick up on these rela-
tionships may discover, as Drouillard’s research shows, that this type
of literary detective work can create added pleasure in reading the text.
The character of Mrs Figg, Harry’s cat-loving neighbour, is an example
of how recognizing these cues enhances sense-making. Mrs Figg first
appears in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone [Book 1], when the Dursleys
leave Harry with her and go out to celebrate Dudley’s birthday (21–22).
She does not reappear until the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
[Book 4], after Voldemort has returned to human form, and Dumbledore
asks Sirius to “alert Remus Lupin, Arabella Figg, Mundungus Fletcher –
the old crowd” (713). At the beginning of Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix [Book 5], Harry avoids Mrs Figg because she “had recently taken
to asking him around for tea whenever she met him in the street” (2).
In Chapter 2, however, it is revealed that Mrs Figg is a Squib (a member
of a wizarding family who does not have magical powers) and that she
has been keeping an eye on Harry for Dumbledore the entire time he has
lived with the Dursleys (21). Finally, in Chapter 8, Mrs Figg serves as a wit-
ness in Harry’s disciplinary hearing regarding the Restriction of Underage
Sorcery. By testifying to the presence of soul-sucking Dementors as the
reason for Harry’s use of underage sorcery, Mrs Figg is able to get the
charges against Harry thrown out (143–50).
By Chapter 2, every reader learns Mrs Figg’s true identity, but the more
astute reader may pick up on the quick reference to Figg at the end of
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [Book 4], and be able to make the con-
nection between Dumbledore’s Arabella Figg and Harry’s Mrs Figg much
sooner. It is possible, then, for such a reader to deduce that in Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [Book 5], Mrs Figg does not invite
Harry to tea only to be nice, but also to keep an eye on him. Having an
awareness of this relationship can also give clues to the astute reader
that, while Harry feels forgotten and ignored by Dumbledore, the head-
master is actually watching over Harry and is concerned for his welfare.
Typically, this kind of meaning would be called dramatic irony, where

a reader is more aware of a character’s actual situation, and therefore
probable outcomes, than the character himself is. In this case, the ironic
meaning is accessible to astute readers who recognize Rowling’s intra-
textual repetition, and who can therefore add layers of meaning to the
text as they move through the series.
The learning reader sees the Cloak of Invisibility

As Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer note, some readers approach a
text such as the Harry Potter series without the schemata or preexist-
ing structures they need to adequately understand certain aspects of
the story (52). In contrast to the informed reader, the learning reader,
a term coined by Lovell-Smith (37), needs assistance from the author
with the meaning-making process. Rowling builds scaffolding, another
form of intratextual repetition, to help learning readers develop the
schemata they need to better understand the text. A scaffold, of course,
is a framework that offers support for a structure under construction. As
a developmental metaphor, scaffolding refers to the elements that offer
support to a young person in the learning and meaning-making process.
According to Nodelman and Reimer, “‘Structure’ refers to the way that
the various parts of a text relate to one another and form patterns. It
depends to a great extent on repetition and variations of the same or
similar elements” (69). In a narrative text, a “sequential structure …
guides the child toward a new understanding” (99). By deliberately
repeating people, places, and items throughout the books, sometimes
with increasing complexity, Rowling creates a type of intratextuality for
readers that will “allow them to make greater sense of what they read
and get deeper pleasure from it” (53).
Harry’s invisibility cloak is an example of how Rowling uses scaffolding
to increase the enjoyment of literature for learning readers. The invis-
ibility cloak first appears when Harry receives it as a Christmas present
from an unknown individual during his first year at Hogwarts (Sorcerer’s
Stone [Book 1] 201). The cloak reappears often throughout the series,
used as a tool during many of the adventures of Harry, Hermione, and
Ron, although it usually receives only a brief mention. One of the first
appearances the cloak makes is when Harry wears it to sneak into the
Restricted Section of the library to look for information on Nicolas Flamel
(205). By the time of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [Book 4], it is revealed
that the cloak has become one of Harry’s “prized possessions” (39) and
“essential” to some of their adventures (458). As Nodelman and Reimer
suggest, “a plot [or author] can manipulate the story by the duration of
events – the amount of attention it gives to particular events – and by the

frequency of the events – the number of times it tells about them” (63).
The repeated mention of the invisibility cloak becomes a signal that it is
important to the story, but the reader does not yet suspect how. In Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows [Book 7] it is revealed that Harry’s cloak is the
one true Cloak of Invisibility; it is one of the three Deathly Hallows, magi-
cal items of great power that together give the possessor power over death.
Along with the reader, Harry, Ron, and Hermione come to understand the
true nature and great importance of Harry’s invisibility cloak. By familiar-
izing her readers with this object throughout the texts, Rowling prepares
learning readers for understanding the importance of its unique power.
The community of readers

A discussion of how readers construct meaning from Rowling’s usage of
intertextual and intratextual repetitions would be incomplete without
acknowledging their impact on communities of readers. Kristeva describes
the connection between author and reader as a horizontal axis. There are
also additional horizontal linkages that connect communities of readers
to one other and to the text and author. Contemporary experiences of fan
communities confirm that “part of the pleasure of … synergistic aesthetic
reading-related experiences comes from the social interaction surrounding
the literature” (Dresang and Kotrla 104). Drouillard’s respondents identi-
fied sharing the reading experience with others as another major reason
they enjoyed the Potter series; extrapolating Gordon’s insights into how
unique frames construct cultural units, we suggest that both intertextuality
and intratextuality are bases for building strong communities of readers.
Of course, the Internet plays a role in connected learning and the
formation of communities. Intratextual possibilities and a sense of com-
munity among readers flourished with Rowling’s own introduction, in
2011, of the Pottermore website, where fans are sorted into houses and
interact as a community. There are built-in social-media-related connec-
tions among readers, including house participation in Quidditch games
and the opportunity to win badges for accomplishing various feats set
out by Rowling. She is slowly rolling out background material one novel
at a time; according to the Pottermore website, as of May 2013, 286,590
fans “like” the activities associated with Book 1.
Yet, even before there was Pottermore, the community of readers was
thriving in the world of fan fiction. By May 2013, the Harrypotterfanfiction.
com website had more than 78,000 stories based on Harry Potter characters
and themes, an almost unimaginable number of textual variations and
concrete evidence of how readers reimagine stories through intratextuality.
Media scholar Henry Jenkins studied fan communities centred

around television, and to some extent films, before the Web 2.0 world
exploded in the early 2000s. When online communities mushroomed,
particularly those centred on fan fiction, he turned his attention to
online fans. He documents his observations and research on youth and
Harry Potter fan fiction in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide. Numerous examples from Harry Potter fan fiction demonstrate
that readers are “living in a world where knowledge is shared and where
critical activity is ongoing and lifelong” (Kindle Version, Location
4069).2 Young fans are recreating the original text of Potter novels again
and again, forming their own versions of the intratextuality Rowling
demonstrates in the original seven novels.
Although shared reading is not unique either to Harry Potter or the digi-
tal age, the Harry Potter series has generated an extraordinary quantity and
variety of social media interaction, which has, with Rowling’s encourage-
ment, served to change, expand, and speculate on the original published
text, bringing a new significance to both intertextuality and intratextuality.
The current pervasiveness of social media and its impact on reading would
likely have come as no surprise to Barthes or Foucault, who found the
meanings of a book variable and relative to its situation; yet, with the Harry
Potter series there is a sense that the interactions have been orchestrated,
or at least facilitated, by Rowling. Her usage of intratextuality extends the
pleasure of being in the know – a pleasure normally offered only to the
most informed readers through intertextuality – to any careful reader of
the Harry Potter series. In effect, Rowling’s use of intratextuality produces
both the frame for the cultural unit of careful readers of the series and the
means for various kinds of readers to fit within that frame.
Notes
1. The other eight factors Drouillard identifies are the detail and depth of
storylines, attachments to characters, envisioning self in Harry Potter’s world,
revisiting childhood, the fact that the books are fun and easy to read, the crea-
tivity and originality of writing, new book or movie release, and the influence
of others reading the books.
2. Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide is
available in print form from New York University Press.
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5
Girls, Animals, Fear, and the
Iterative Force of the National
Pack: Reading the Dear Canada
Series
charlie peters
In novels from the Dear Canada series, fear is frequently kindled by the
repeated use of force by state representatives, or by those who seek state-
hood. Because of this iterative force, the girl diarists of the series feel
afraid, and their fear affiliates them with other people and with the non-
human animals who share their fear. Despite the nation-state’s regular
billing, in many contemporary cultural contexts, as a popular imagined
community, statehood (of whatever variety) is regarded with fear in the
books because the force that achieves and maintains it disrupts other
kinds of groupings. Ultimately, these diaries suggest that nation-states
are unable to support healthy, inclusive, and sustainable communities
because of their necessary use of force and their genocidal tendencies.
In addition to discussing the nation-state, a function of Dear Canada’s
girl diarists, as diarists, is to keep track of time. In Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson
explains that for people to imagine that they are part of a national com-
munity, they need to conceive of themselves as sharing a similar sense
of time. This synchronization is produced by novels and newspapers
and measured by clocks and calendars. Throughout the series, the girl
diarists do the work of producing the sense of a shared existence across
time that is needed for imagining the nation-state into being.
The Dear Canada series’ first-person accounts of historical events
are accompanied by a considerable amount of peritextual material1 –
namely, an epilogue, an historical note, photographs and other
illustrations, and a description of the writer who actually composed
the diary – some of which lends the fictional diaries an air of factic-
ity and some of which draws attention to their manufacture. There
is considerable evidence that the volumes in the series are texts of
111
Canada’s dominant culture. For example, a number of them have been

reprinted, several have won awards, and many are used in schools. On
its website, the publisher, Scholastic, advertises a parallel series called
Teaching with Dear Canada. One of the Dear Canada texts that I will
be discussing, Carol Matas’s Footsteps in the Snow: The Red River Diary of
Isobel Scott (2002), is featured in the first of this four-volume teaching
series. All three of the diaries that I consider were written in English by
well-known authors who live and write in Canada; for example, scholar
and writer Perry Nodelman is the author of the second novel I discuss,
Not a Nickel to Spare: The Great Depression Diary of Sally Cohen (2007).
The third novel, Blood Upon Our Land: The North West Resistance Diary of
Josephine Bouvier (2009), is by Maxine Trottier, a now-retired elementary
school teacher whose Métis ancestor, Georges Drouillard, acted as an
interpreter and hunter for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during
their crossing of the North American continent early in the nineteenth
century (Trottier 229). Like Matas and Nodelman, Trottier is a prolific
author of books for young people.
Michelle Smith, in her essay in this volume entitled “‘But what is
his country?’: Producing Australian Identity through Repetition in
the Victorian School Paper, 1896–1918,” shows how repetitive, shared
reading experiences internalize forceful nationalist and imperial-
ist stories in people’s hearts and minds. This can also be said of the
twenty-first-century Dear Canada series, which mimics its counterpart
from the United States, the Dear America series, in bringing to read-
ers’ present attention stories of past wars, battles, disasters, and other
hardships, as well as the fearful feelings that attend these tragic stories.
Given the preponderance of frightening events in the volumes, one
might even begin to wonder whether nationalistic sentiment neces-
sarily involves feeling afraid. Worth noting is the fact that Scholastic
began the Canadian version of the series in the fall of 2001, the same
autumn in which many North Americans were fearful – and encour-
aged to feel this way by their governments – because of the events of
September 11. In all three of the Dear Canada diaries that I discuss, the
girl diarists represent the Canadian nation-state and its governmental
predecessors as fear-inducing entities.
Fear has long been a topic in discussions of statehood. In 1651,
Thomas Hobbes recommended in Leviathan that sovereigns invest in a
political contract based on fear because feeling afraid “render[s] the sub-
ject governable” (McManus [9]).2 As Susan McManus puts it, Hobbes’s
contract would have those who are subject to government “exchange the
freedom to fear potentially everybody for the security of fearing only the
charlie peters 113
sovereign” ([9]). “[F]ear of ‘lower-class’ political mobilizations” was a key

factor in the establishment of the first nation-states – which were in the
Americas – explains Benedict Anderson (48). In Imagined Communities,
Anderson examines the shift from dynasties headed by monarchs to
republics run by advocates of representative democracy that began in
the late eighteenth century.3 Anderson considers the US to have been
the very first nation-state, and the political mobilizations that its citizens
feared were those by first peoples subjected to North American colonists’
genocidal actions, and those by former inhabitants of the African conti-
nent who were brought to the European colonies against their will to be
slaves, and their descendants. It seems, then, as though Hobbes’s ideas
about fear have been taken up by monarchs and republicans alike. In the
twenty-first century, the instrumental use of fear continues to dominate
relations between the sovereign and the subject.
Contemporary affect theorists have made the important observa-
tion that feeling afraid is not necessarily a personal feeling that is
contained within the bodies of individual people, for, as Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari demonstrate in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1980), affects such as fear are contagious and affiliative.
Thus, fearful feelings such as those attributable to the iterative force
of the nation-state can amount to “the effectuation of a power of the
pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (240). The
nation-state is frequently discussed, however, in terms of people sharing
more pleasant feelings, like feelings of belonging, and in terms of eco-
nomic growth and human progress. For instance, globalization scholar
Pheng Cheah characterizes nationalism as “a popular movement” that
has “sought to provide rightful regulation for the behavior of absolut-
ist states toward their individual subjects” (24). From the point of view
of the Dear Canada diarists, feeling afraid is what binds the sovereign
and the subject, as well as the human and the non-human animal, into
national packs. Using Edward Said’s terms from The World, the Text and
the Critic, Mavis Reimer demonstrates in “Homing and Unhoming: The
Ideological Work of Canadian’s Children’s Literature” that dominant
Canadian English-language texts intended for young readers “value
relations of affiliation over filial relations”: “Community … is not a
homogenous or kinship group, but a heterogeneous collection of peo-
ple” (8). In the Dear Canada series, it is fear that affiliates the girl diarists
with heterogeneous groups of people (and, in at least one of the three
texts, with other animals, too) during forceful confrontations involving
citizens of states or nation-states (Canada, England, Germany, Scotland)
and those seeking republican status (the Métis).
While feelings of fear affiliate characters in all three diaries, each one
privileges a particular way of creating a sense of community, and each
mode of community-making has a different relationship with time.
In Matas’s novel, set in 1815, fear affiliates the girl protagonist, who
is an ally of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with that company’s rival,
the North-West Company. Nonetheless, filiation, or bonds of blood, is
ultimately the privileged mode of association in the text. This mode of
relationship emphasizes biological continuity between the past and the
future. The promise of continuity and of restoration of familial patterns
is a salient function of the girl diarist in Matas’s text: she takes up a life
much like the one her parents want for her.
In Nodelman’s novel, set in 1933, affiliation is the privileged mode of
association. Affiliation is accomplished by fear, just as it is in the other
two texts, but it is also accomplished by feelings of curiosity and sym-
pathy on the part of the Jewish-Canadian girl protagonist, who resists
her father’s injunction to associate only with those who are similar to
her. This constellation of feelings enables Nodelman’s diarist to make
connections in the present with the Japanese girl in her class, the police
officer who accosts her on a Toronto street, and Jewish people who are
suffering from anti-Semitism in Canada and Germany.
In Trottier’s novel, set in 1885, affiliation is again accomplished in the
present through fear of the iterative force of the nation-state. However,
affiliation also happens across time, between the Métis girl protagonist
and the buffaloes who used to roam the prairie, between this girl and ani-
mals who presently live with her family, and between the woman this girl
becomes in the future and the great-granddaughter of a Canadian govern-
ment soldier who fought in the Battle of Batoche. Therefore, the mode
of association that is privileged in Trottier’s diary is a deleuzoguattarian
assemblage whose aspect is messianic and atemporal, for its orientation is
to eternity (or the present). In an assemblage, people, animals, plants, and
machines – indeed, all things – are understood to be mutually constitu-
tive because of their necessary interrelationship.
The assemblage is recommended by Reimer for “develop[ing] ways of
thinking about young people as political actors” (“On Location” 15).
Every one of the girl protagonists in these novels is unceasingly political
as she narrates the ins and outs of statehood. Regardless of the mode
of association that is privileged in the diaries, each of them politicizes
time, the present, or eternity by modelling ways of associating with
other beings that have particular temporal and atemporal aspects, and
each child character’s epistolary narration creates temporal and atem-
poral lines of flight along which energy flows. Additionally, all three
charlie peters 115
diarists discuss threatened communities of humans or non-human

animals, such as the Cree, the Jews, the Métis, and the Buffalo.4 In fact,
buffaloes figure prominently in both of the diaries that take place in
the nineteenth century, the period of their near-extinction. All in all,
these novels show iterative national force to be not only fearful but also
genocidal.
Raphaël Lemkin coined the word genocide in his 1944 book Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals
for Redress, in which he describes Nazi practices. Lemkin explains that he
created the term “from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the
Latin cide (killing)” to correspond “to such words as tyrannicide, homo-
cide, infanticide, etc.” (79). Lemkin explains that his coinage is intended
“to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruc-
tion of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim
of annihilating the groups themselves” (79). The objectives of such a
plan would be the “disintegration of the political and social institutions,
of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic exist-
ence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security,
liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging
to such groups” (79). In A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust Denial in the
Americas, 1492 to the Present, Ward Churchill borrows Lemkin’s defini-
tion and notes that genocide can have occurred “even if all individuals
within the dissolved group physically survive” (70).
Matas’s Footsteps in the Snow: The Red River Diary of Isobel Scott fore-
grounds the difficult lives of a group of Scottish immigrants to North
America; the dramatic backdrop is an iconic national tale of corporate
rivalry between two fur-trading companies, the North-West Company
and the Hudson’s Bay Company. What glimmers in the middle distance
is the disintegration of Cree communities and the near-extinction of
the Buffalo. Explicit reference to the destruction of these communities
does not take place until Matas’s epilogue. There, readers are told that
“Isobel died an old woman in the year 1883. About that same time the
last remaining buffalo on the prairie was sighted, and the Cree hunting
parties were starving to death. That way of life was forever over” (158).
Footsteps in the Snow traces a ghastly repetition: a group of immigrants,
displaced from their homeland by the Highland Clearances, become
ghosts to the Sheep who replace them, while those who settle in Canada
are haunted by the spectre of the Buffalo and the people who hunted
them. The historical record matches the story sketched by the Dear
Canada diary. What occurred in Scotland is repeated in Turtle Island5
and this is what Matas’s novel shadows forth. Land, regarded by quite a
number of Europeans as property, is gathered into the hands of the few,

and the many – people and buffaloes, in the North American example –
are displaced. Neal McLeod explains in Cree Narrative Memory: From
Treaties to Contemporary Times (2007) that members of the diaspora of
Cree people have lost “the sense of place that links us together as com-
munities” (6). Applying Lemkin’s definition, another name for this loss
is genocide, for “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the
destruction of [the] essential foundations of life” of Cree and of other first
peoples is what has happened – and continues to happen – in Canada.6
Isobel’s family left Scotland because of the destruction of commu-
nity that occurred in that country. The Historical Note in Matas’s book
explains that many Scots emigrated after “a stroke of a pen in England
banned all of the clans” and “property was taken away from the individ-
uals and given to the chieftains” (159). Isobel’s parents want to emigrate
to “become landowners” and “rise in the world,” according to Isobel’s
father, and, in the words of her mother, to “once again be proud and be
able to stand tall” (6, 4). On board the ship from Scotland, Isobel wants
the same things that her parents want. She pictures herself as a lady
“living in a grand house in the New World, with servants to wait on”
her (6). But what Isobel wants changes after she arrives on Turtle Island.
During a winter spent with a hospitable group of Cree who follow the
Buffalo, Isobel enjoys herself so much that she fears that she will become
“a savage” (79). Formerly, Isobel’s deference to her parents’ wishes
was pronounced; latterly, Isobel’s respect for hierarchical structures of
authority is considerably less. For instance, Isobel comes to fear the judg-
ment of their governor at Red River, then personally witnesses the Battle
of Seven Oaks, in which a group of Métis allied with the North-West
Company, angry because the governor dismantled their fort, kill him in
battle. When the Red River settlers hear that the Métis are on their way
to Seven Oaks, Isobel calls the governor “mad” for declining Saulteaux
Chief Peguis’s offer of help defending the settlers against them (114);
during the encounter with the Métis, she suggests that the governor’s
prideful and disrespectful actions towards them precipitates the battle.
Overall, Isobel’s fear of the violence that ensues from unwise leadership
that imposes an appropriative way of life is contrasted with her fear of
the pleasure that she takes in a communal way of life.
Although Isobel no longer wants what she had pictured on her way
to the “New World,” she gets it anyway. From the epilogue we learn
that Isobel “had long since ceased to care about being a lady” when she
becomes one, marrying “[t]he younger son of an earl” who builds her “a
grand home on the banks of the Red River” (157). Isobel ends up living
charlie peters 117
the life that her parents wanted even though she comes to want some-
thing else. Lee Edelman describes the societal injunction that stipulates
“that the Child and the future must repeat – and so realize and redeem –
the past” ([1]). The events that Isobel re-enacts are tragic ones, and the
societal injunction to repeat that Edelman describes is obeyed by her
with some reluctance, but the injunction is obeyed, nonetheless. Isobel
is a Child figure whose task is to demonstrate the continuity between
past and future of what is valued within her family unit in accord-
ance with this novel’s privileged mode of filiative community-making.
Isobel performs this task, but she also signals alternative ways of being.
Earlier, I discussed the fact that Isobel witnesses their governor’s death
at the Battle of Seven Oaks. After the battle, Isobel, her family, and
other Scottish settlers flee the Red River settlement and feel afraid when
they come across individuals from the North-West Company, the same
company whose members killed the governor. At this point, the mutual
acknowledgement of fears of reciprocal destruction affiliate the two
groups and turn a potentially violent situation into an encounter that
is courteous, if not friendly. Even so, their affiliation through fear is
supplemented by the filiation that is the privileged mode of group for-
mation in this diary. For the brother of a young orphan whom Isobel’s
family has adopted turns out to be a Nor’Wester who welcomes and
reassures them, demonstrating that, while fear does affiliate members
of different communities in this text, the preference in the diary is for
affiliative bonds to be backed up by familial or filiative relationships.
A challenge to filiation as a preferred mode of community-making is
offered by Nodelman’s Not a Nickel to Spare: The Great Depression Diary of
Sally Cohen. This diary centres on the many acts of anti-Semitism that
Sally Cohen witnesses in and around her hometown of Toronto, and it
culminates in a riot following an anti-Semitic act at a game at the Christie
Pits baseball fields in that city in 1933. In Nodelman’s novel, fear affiliates
by creating a sense of community among people from different national
traditions. This occurs, for example, in the course of Sally’s response to
a physical attack on her person. Sally is walking along College Street
in Toronto with her cousin Benny when a “policeman came right up
and kicked me in the behind and said, ‘Move over, you no-good little
kike. Do you think you own the sidewalk?’ Those are his exact words.
I will remember them forever” (110–11). Benny is furious, but Sally is
not angry, she is humiliated, and afraid that someone will learn of her
humiliation. She writes: “If anyone knew, I would die” (111).
In “Force of Law,” Jacques Derrida explains that the police are among
the legislators of nation-states because the police are “not content to
enforce a law [loi] that would have had no force before the police” (278).
To put it another way, the police decide the law on the spot and it is by
virtue of this decision-making ability that they are legislators. This helps
explain how it is that one policeman does his best to “calm things down”
(172) at the baseball game Sally attends at which a swastika is displayed,
while another policeman kicks a girl on the street because he thinks
that she is Jewish (and perhaps that she is a boy). Each individual police
officer must decide how and when to exercise force, but what all officers
know is that force must be exercised. Derrida explains why this is so: he
demonstrates that what is mystical about the foundation of authority,
including national authority, is that it has no authority; therefore, nation-
states (by means of their military representatives, such as soldiers and
the police) must repeatedly display fearful force. Representatives of the
nation-state must impress a state’s citizens with their willingness to use
force, and each assertion of force must aim to found state authority and
to preserve it simultaneously. Derrida writes that “[i]terability makes it
so that the origin must [doit] repeat itself originarily, must alter itself
to count as origin, that is to say, to preserve itself. … This iterability
inscribes preservation in the essential structure of foundation” (277).
Thus each use of force by a police officer at one and the same time seeks
to found and to preserve the authority of a given state.
Of course, this ever-present threat of force also creates a fearful citi-
zenry. The law is decided each and every day by each and every police
officer; to anticipate arbitrary force and to be fearful of that force is to be
a prudent citizen. At the end of her diary entry about being kicked, Sally
wonders about the policeman, about how he could do that to her and
how he knew that she is Jewish, and her curiosity is both sympathetic
and affiliative. After this, Sally writes that she is proud of being Jewish.
The pride that she expresses in her hereditary Jewishness is a filiative
gesture in the face of fear. Then Sally promptly shifts and returns to
an affiliative mode of community-making. Her Pa recommends stick-
ing with one’s own kind. Sally writes: “But maybe Pa doesn’t know
everything. Maybe just sticking to your own kind isn’t enough” (111).
Exposed to the arbitrary violence of the police, Sally’s fear of humilia-
tion encourages her to think about how to change things, and when she
does this she thinks about reaching out. “Maybe it would be interesting
to know some of the goyishe girls, even just a little,” she writes; “The one
I’d really like to know is Myoshi Ukeda. … I wonder what it’s like in her
house and what kind of food they eat” (112). Sally recommends sticking
to one’s own kind and sticking to other kinds, as well. Moreover, nei-
ther Sally’s fear nor her curiosity or sympathy is contained by national
charlie peters 119
boundaries: for instance, she is afraid of Adolf Hitler both for the sake
of German people and for the sake of people in Canada who are expe-
riencing anti-Semitism. Transnational bonds of sympathy are forged
by Sally’s fear and link her, in the present, with members of her own
national community as well as those of a different national community.
Sally’s fear produces simultaneous affiliation in the present that
brings her into imaginative association with people from different
places. Anderson explains that simultaneity is an important character-
istic of the nation-state and that the contemporary ideas about simul-
taneity that underpin the nation-state are attributable to “two forms of
imagining” in particular, both of which “first flowered in Europe in the
eighteenth century”: the novel and the newspaper (24–25). Notably,
Sally reads novels and much of her information comes from her cousin
Benny, who reads newspapers, and from her sister Sophie, who “reads
lots of books and magazines” (Nodelman 113). Anderson maintains
that novels and newspapers are responsible for what might now seem
like the somewhat mundane idea that people can “pass[…] each other
on the street, without ever becoming acquainted, and still be con-
nected” (25). Anderson’s description of the novel and the newspaper’s
production of our modern sense of simultaneity leads to his main thesis
about the nation as an imagined community. To make his argument,
Anderson borrows from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy
of History” the “idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ in which simul-
taneity is [in Anderson’s phrasing] … transverse, cross-time, marked …
by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar” (24).
Anderson’s main thesis is that “The idea of a sociological organism
moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise
analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid
community moving steadily down (or up) history” (26). Anderson’s
argument helps us to make sense of the affiliation that Sally experiences
in the present with people whom she doesn’t even know because they
live on different Toronto streets or in other countries such as Germany.
Sally’s affiliation with these people is produced by our contemporary
version of transverse simultaneity that dates to the inception of novels
and newspapers, and by our belief in the imagined community that is
the nation-state.
Anderson details another kind of simultaneity, an older version, one
that he associates with medieval Christendom and that is similar, he tells
us, to what Benjamin calls “Messianic time”; this, in Anderson’s words, is
“a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (24). With
regard to this older, medieval type of “simultaneity-along-time” (24),
Anderson cites Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in

Western Literature (1957). In this book, Auerbach suggests that medi-
eval simultaneity is actually something other than time, because it is
“something eternal, something omnitemporal, something already con-
summated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event” (qtd. in Anderson
24). Auerbach’s distinction between medieval simultaneity and time
resembles the distinction between time and the present (plus eternity)
that Derrida makes in “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and
Time.” In this essay, Derrida explains that, typically, the word time actually
describes that which is not; for the past is gone and the future is yet to be,
whereas the present, like eternity, is what is. The third text from the Dear
Canada series that I discuss, Trottier’s Blood Upon Our Land: The North West
Resistance Diary of Josephine Bouvier, will be approached from the perspec-
tive of this older version of simultaneity, for the kind of community that
is privileged in this diary – a deleuzoguattarian assemblage – is viewed
most effectively from the vantage point of eternity.
To describe a narrative, though, it helps to temporalize, first. Trottier’s
Blood Upon Our Land takes place in the late nineteenth century. It chron-
icles the stand taken by Métis and other indigenous peoples during the
North West Resistance over their right to make their own arrangements
for the land on which they lived. Diarist Josephine Bouvier survives an
important event of the Resistance, the 1885 Battle of Batoche, to tell
of the Canadian army’s invasion of her Métis town. Leading up to the
battle, Josephine fears for her family, for herself, for the people who live
in the town of Batoche, and for the Willow Cree who live nearby; on
occasion, she even fears for the government soldiers and their families.
In Josephine’s diary, fear crosses battle lines to create compassionate
ties of affiliation in the present between the Métis – many of whom
use force and seek statehood to protect their way of life – and soldiers
recruited by the new Canadian nation-state. Trottier’s fictionalized
retelling of the battle corresponds with historical accounts. The histori-
cal story can be told simply: in December 1884, Métis representative
Louis Riel let the Canadian government know that the Métis of Batoche
would resist the resurveying of land there, for the townspeople were
worried that the land, instead of stretching in long, narrow strips down
to the riverbank, would be divided into squares, denying river access to
many. The Canadian government regarded Riel’s petition on behalf of
Batoche as a rebellion, and the Métis, led by Riel, fought soldiers sent by
Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald. In addition to loss of
life on both sides during the battle, the novel’s epilogue informs read-
ers that indigenous allies Kah-pay-pamah-chukwew (Wandering Spirit),
charlie peters 121
Pah-pah-me-kee-sick (Walking the Sky), Manchoose (Bad Arrow), Kit-

awah-ki-ni (Miserable Man), Nahpase (Iron Body), A-pis-chas-koos (Little
Bear), Itka (Crooked Leg), and Way-wah-nitch (Man Without Blood)
were hanged along with Riel, the visionary leader of the Métis, in what
remains to this day the largest group hanging by the Canadian govern-
ment. This is a genocide from which the Métis community at Batoche
has never recovered. In the Dear Canada diary, Josephine’s family
continues to live in the town. Land scrips of ownership are eventually
granted to them by the Canadian government, but only after the battle,
the imprisonment of her father and brother, the killing of many of the
animals who live with them, and the burning of their house.
In addition to recording the tragic events of the North West Resistance,
Josephine writes in her diary about how the Métis survive in the days
when the Buffalo no longer come, even if her grandfather Moushoom has
trouble believing that these animals will not offer themselves to be hunted.
One night Moushoom sees footsteps in the snow, asserts that these are the
footsteps of a buffalo, not those of an ox, and tells Josephine that this is
“the most important thing you will ever see” (86). Historical accounts –
and the epilogue of Matas’s Dear Canada diary – tell us that mass killings
of buffaloes have taken place by 1885. Their near-extinction can be con-
sidered an “animal genocide[…],” a term Derrida uses with regard to non-
human animals in “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (394). These deaths
are recognized by Trottier’s text, for absent buffaloes are a conspicuous
presence in the novel. In many ways, Blood Upon Our Land is an elegy to the
Buffalo. The animal even enters the dream-world of Josephine to make the
parallel between the destruction of the Métis community and that of buf-
falo communities explicit. After a visit from Riel, who solicits her family’s
support for his petition to the Canadian government, Josephine dreams of
falling over the edge of a cliff just as the buffaloes had fallen when driven
there by the Blackfoot in the days before these people had guns.
Josephine’s dream is a harbinger of what is to come. Because the
Buffalo no longer exist, times are hard for the Métis prior to the Battle of
Batoche. The people of the town farm and hunt other animals, however,
and are able to sustain themselves. After the battle, Josephine’s family
and others among the townspeople starve. Due to the conflict, no crops
were planted; now the soldiers burn houses, steal belongings, and kill
or drive off the Bouviers’ horses, dogs, goats, cats, and ox. Josephine
despairs when her grandfather’s last surviving dog, Moon, returns home
after escaping the soldiers and, according to Moushoom, offers himself
to be killed and eaten. (Moon is the patriarch of the family of dogs who
lived with the Bouviers, and he and Moushoom are very close.)
Hope is fear’s twin. Both look forward: hope to future pleasure, fear to
future pain. Despair, in contrast, has no expectations. At the thought of
killing and eating Moon, who guarded the frightened members of the
family of dogs and humans who were inside the house during the bat-
tle, Josephine loses hope. Some maintain that despair demonstrates that
change is necessary more effectively than hope because, like joy, despair
is not invested in a past or a future but is absorbed by what is happening
in the present.7 Because despair can envision no future that it desires, it
signals that change is necessary for envisioning to recommence.
But what kind of change is called for by Trottier’s Dear Canada diary?
Perhaps Josephine’s despair at the prospect of killing and eating the
dog Moon signals a need for a different system than grouping ourselves
together into national packs, both because the novel demonstrates that
the nation-state is a genocidal entity that requires the use of force and
because the state does not adequately accommodate animal affiliates.
Derrida maintains that other animals disrupt human fraternity and the
idea of the Human’s exemplary dignity by disturbing the notion that
humans are not animals. In Trottier’s novel, Moon disrupts the notion
of humans’ exemplary dignity by being every bit as dignified as a person
could be, and the dog’s fearless loyalty makes his affiliation virtually
indistinguishable from that of human members of the Bouvier fam-
ily. Significantly, Josephine’s despair at the imminent death of Moon
turns to joy when Edmond, whom Josephine later marries, appears
with an antelope over his saddle, as if he were Abraham bringing the
horned substitute for this canine Isaac. The biblical analogy makes sali-
ent the importance to the novel’s cosmology of the dog Moon and of
Josephine’s feelings of despair and joy.
In her diary, Josephine even expresses concern about the respect
shown to the corpses of animals who are regularly eaten, such as
the Sturgeon, and those who were formerly consumed, such as the
Buffalo. Significantly, it is the Buffalo, around whom so much of
this tale revolves, who signify respect in the teachings of Anishinabe
(Ojibway) first peoples, according to Edward Benton-Banai. In The
Mishomis Book, Benton-Banai writes about Mush-ko-dayn’ Bi-shi-kee’
(Buffalo) counselling Way-na-boo’-zhoo (Original Man) to appreciate
the distances and differences between himself and other creatures
and to refrain from imposing his will upon others. Overall, then, it is
tempting to conclude that the kind of change that is called for by the
despair of Trottier’s protagonist is a change from the nation-state to a
system that would not set affiliated singularities against one another,
or destroy assembled groups of humans and/or other animals. Blood
charlie peters 123
Upon Our Land features an assemblage of people, animals, and tech-

nology whose interrelationship is emphasized and whose members are
regarded as mutually constituting. Josephine’s text diagnoses how the
nation-state – and those who aspire to that system of governance –
obstructs the healthful becoming of assembled human and non-human
singularities.
Another problematic that is rather more ambivalently adumbrated by
this Dear Canada diary is what Benjamin refers to as “homogeneous,
empty time” (261). Anderson tells us that the imagined community of
the nation-state depends on this understanding of time and that the
technologies with which it is most closely associated are the clock and
the calendar. Significantly, the technology foregrounded in Trottier’s text
and in its epilogue is a silver pocket watch that belonged to Josephine’s
mother, which stops working right before the Battle of Batoche begins:
“no longer being able to hear the watch’s ticking is almost as though
its heart has stopped” (150), writes Josephine, assigning to the silver
timepiece a heart and joining it to the assemblage of mammalian life
that is discussed above. It is tempting to regard the watch as part of the
assemblage because “heart-stopping” is an expression that is often used
to describe feeling afraid. That said, the place of this technology in the
assemblage requires further analysis because its inclusion appears to be
somewhat qualified. We learn expressly in the epilogue that the watch
is taken by a Canadian government soldier whose great-granddaughter
resurrects it and returns it to Josephine in working order, that Josephine
dies soon after, and that the still-ticking watch is buried with her.
Homogeneous, empty time is “buried alive” in the earth with Josephine.
Trottier’s text appears to problematize not only the nation-state but also
the temporal home of the state.
This problematizing of the homogeneous, empty time of the nation-
state can be set beside the diary’s attention to the importance of the
concept of eternity, which is atemporal, and which might be thought
of as “heterogeneous” and “full.” For, along with the assemblage, Blood
Upon Our Land privileges the older, medieval type of coincidence that
features “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present”
(Anderson 24). To appreciate the kind of community that is favoured
in this historical novel – and the critique of the nation-state that it
offers – readers would need to regard textual events from the perspec-
tive of this Messianic simultaneity. In particular, readers would need to
bring together Bible stories and absent buffaloes from the past, a great-
granddaughter and the imperiled Métis language of the future, and
Josephine’s despair in the novel’s present. Because Josephine’s despair
involves an allusion to the story of Abraham and Isaac, it is marked as

particularly significant. Derrida explains that “Eternity is another name
of the presence of the present” (“Ousia and Grammē” 46). Josephine’s
despair – and also the joy that she feels very soon afterwards, when
Edmond appears with the antelope – evict succession and participate
in the present, not as a series of “nows” but as an ongoingness without
awareness of boundary or limit. One might say that despair has no com-
pany but itself, while joy, as Friedrich Nietzsche puts it in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, “wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants every-
thing eternally the same” (434). Because they both involve the presence
of the present, despair and joy participate in eternity. By privileging
eternity and the assemblage (not to mention burying homogeneous,
empty time alive), it is as if this text asks its readers to deprioritize time
and imagine, instead, that everything is happening at once.
Additional evidence that it is the perspective of eternity that is being
foregrounded by Trottier’s novel is her protagonist’s awareness of events
outside of the linear sequentiality of homogeneous, empty time. For
example, Josephine dreams of falling over a cliff like a buffalo before the
disastrous Battle of Batoche. She also dreams of a soldier with eyes that
are the same colour as the timepiece, a soldier who knows her name and
digs her grave before her mother’s watch has been taken by this soldier
in the narrative. A reluctant diarist who repeatedly questions the merits
of sequentially recording the events of the North West Resistance in her
diary, Josephine seems to invite readers who would join her assemblage
to regard the past and the future from the vantage point of eternity, or
what Anderson calls “simultaneity-along-time” (24).
Derrida’s distinctions between temporal and atemporal concepts can be
extended to gloss the peculiarities of the operations of time in Trottier’s
text. Describing how these ideas generally work within metaphysics,
Derrida points out that the present and eternity are atemporal concepts
whereas the word time signifies the past and the future, which are tem-
poral concepts. Further, Derrida explains that the word time actually
describes that which is not, for the past is gone and the future is yet to
be, whereas the present, like eternity, is what is. Josephine is a visionary
or mystic, much like Benjamin, for whom “History is the subject of a
structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled
by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (“Theses on the Philosophy of
History” 261). For these visionaries, past and future nows are “alive” in
the present. This is also the case within the framework of metaphysics
when past or future nows are regarded from the point of view of eter-
nity or when one is present to the present.8 Together, visionaries such
charlie peters 125
as Josephine, philosophers such as Derrida, and Benjamin, who is both,

illuminate this contradictory or ambiguous relationship between eternity
and time. Within homogeneous, empty time, the past and the future are
“dead” and “unborn,” respectively, because they are the “no longer” and
the “not yet.” From the perspective of eternity, however, the past and
the future (time’s components) effectively cease to be time by becoming
present to the present and part of what is now. Thus it is that the past and
the future become the “living dead” when considered from the perspec-
tive of eternity via homogeneous, empty time, as they are in Blood Upon
Our Land. To restate, from the perspective of homogeneous, empty time,
the past and the future are dead or not yet alive. However, when “dead
time” is viewed from the perspective of eternity, after circuiting through
homogeneous, empty time, it is resurrected or enlivened and becomes
the “living dead”; all nows are equally existent from eternity’s perspec-
tive, just as all pasts and all futures are equally non-existent from the
perspective of homogeneous, empty time.
Looking at things from the perspective of eternity inconveniences the
nation-state by messing with the notions of progress and degeneration
in which the state is so invested. People from Turtle Island who think
of themselves as members of so-called “first world” nations frequently
do so by considering themselves to be members of solid communi-
ties “moving steadily … up … history” within homogeneous, empty
time (Anderson 26). To do this, Canadians and Americans have to be
selective about the people and events included within their linear nar-
ratives of progress through time. For instance, first peoples and Métis
communities that are subject to the ongoing genocidal actions of these
nation-states cannot figure prominently in their narratives of progress.
From the point of view of eternity, however, this type of selectivity is
impossible, as nothing can be excluded from eternity; it is not homo-
geneous and empty, but heterogeneous and full. This is not to say that
time does not accommodate critique. Matas’s Footsteps in the Snow, for
example, critiques the recurring genocides of the state, and children
taking up values from the past merely because they are encouraged to
do so by their parents, among other things. The critique of the nation-
state in Nodelman’s Not a Nickel to Spare works both temporally (by
sequentially chronicling affiliations) and atemporally (by prioritizing
affiliation in the present) to show that the state manufactures feelings of
fear and humiliation that thereafter inspire sympathetic affiliation with
citizens from other nations that is enabled by transverse simultaneity.
Nations define themselves by displacing their own plurality and
the fact that they are bounded by many other, different nations onto
narrative, such that “the difference of space returns as the Sameness of

time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One,”
as Homi Bhabha explains in “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the
Margins of the Modern Nation” (300). By burying the watch in the earth,
Trottier’s text displays another side of this coin: the way in which the
manyness of nations and their narratives displaces attention from one
spatial thing that all have in common: the earth itself, the earth into
which the still-ticking silver watch is put. The imagined national com-
munities described by Anderson are necessarily a series of inclusions
and exclusions, whereas the planet includes us all, human and non-
human animal alike. Burying this symbol of homogeneous, empty time
in the earth suggests that this is the “homogeneous” element around
which we might arrange ourselves actually and conceptually. From the
perspective of eternity, on this earthly block of becoming, our actions
are always already in play.
Repetition is an action that is intrinsic to the workings of the nation-
state, to figurations of the child, and to series texts such as Dear Canada.
Derrida demonstrates that the nation-state must repeatedly display
violent force to mask the fact that it has no real authority over the
animals and territory that it attempts to control. In Edelman’s frame-
work, the Child is the figure who promises that the future will repeat
the past. Novels from the Dear Canada series feature girl diarists who
frequently do what their ancestors did before them. They also chronicle
the vicissitudes of state governments and the fear-filled affiliations that
these state systems repeatedly engender. In “The Story of Repetition,”
Marc Rölli offers several definitions of repetition, one of which is par-
ticularly relevant to this argument: “Repetition means that the present
permanently falls into the past, that two moments of experience are
unconsciously associated with each other, or that we expect something
to happen because of habit” (98). In other words, repetition can take the
same shape as homogeneous, empty time, the very temporal concept on
which Anderson tells us that the nation-state depends for its existence.
These Dear Canada diaries are texts of the dominant culture that suggest
that our collective faith in the nation-state may be wavering, if not our
faith in the homogeneous, empty time that is its element.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements and many thanks to Clare Bradford and Mavis

Reimer for inspiring this paper and for opportunities to present it, to
editors Justin Girard, Mavis Reimer, and Melanie Dennis Unrau, with-
out whom this chapter would not have been published in a book, to
charlie peters 127
Josina Robb for helpful comments during copy-editing, and to Chelsea

Peters Parkinson, David Dorian Boulanger, Gerhard Werner, Kara Peters
Parkinson, Liz Parsons, Mia van Leeuwen, and Ryszard Hunka for reading
recommendations and for conversations during the paper’s composition.
Notes
1. I follow Gérard Genette who, in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation,
distinguishes among the peritext, epitext, and paratext of literary works.
2. Page numbers for online articles that are without them have been borrowed
from printed versions of the articles and inserted in square brackets.
3. In this essay, I follow Benedict Anderson’s usage of the words state and nation-
state. The word state refers to the government of people who are not neces-
sarily bound together by a common language or culture. This has been the
case with many dynasties. The word nation-state is more specific. As used by
Anderson, it refers to the government of a group whose members understand
themselves to be a group that shares a parcel of land and a common language.
4. I capitalize words such as Buffalo and Sheep to point to the significance of
naming and of the proper name in relations between human and non-human
animals as detailed in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida.
5. Turtle Island is a name that some indigenous peoples and some concerned
about colonial naming practices use for North America.
6. According to Robert Smallboy, a Cree elder quoted by McLeod, a very impor-
tant act aimed at destroying the Cree way of life was killing the buffalo to
deprive the Cree of food.
7. The idea that despair is more conducive to change than hope is from a per-
sonal conversation that I had with literary scholar and theorist Liz Parsons;
she cited Gerhard Werner, a Buddhist well-versed in philosophical discourses.
I have tried to work out the temporalities of hope, fear, joy, and despair, and
have used as inspiration the social historian Carolyn Steedman’s citation of
Friedrich Nietzsche who, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asserts that joy wants no
“heirs” (Strange Dislocations 171). I later came across a discussion of the tem-
poralities of hope and fear in an article by Susan McManus, cited above, that
resembles my observations here.
8. I am working with definitions of eternity offered by Derrida in “Ousia and
Grammeˉ” and by Carlos Eire in an appendix to his book, A Very Brief History of
Eternity. Eire explains that, in metaphysics, eternity is defined “[i]n expressed
or implied contrast with time” as “[t]imelessness; existence with reference to
which the relation of succession has no application,” a definition for which
he references the Oxford English Dictionary (232). This definition is consistent
with those offered by Derrida. Eire also offers common conceptions of eter-
nity that are consistent with time, such as “[t]ime without a beginning or an
end,” which is also referred to as sempiternity (229).
Works cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays

and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64. Print.
Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway. 1988.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.
Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern
Nation.” Nation and Narration. 1990. London: Routledge, 1995. 291–320. Print.
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1492 to the Present. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 1998. Print.
Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1987. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical
Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369–418. Print.
——. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” 1990. Acts of
Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002. 230–98. Print.
——. “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time.” 1972. Margins
of Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 31–67. Print.
Edelman, Lee. “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint.”
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Eire, Carlos. A Very Brief History of Eternity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.
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UP, 1997. Print.
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Government, Proposals for Redress. 1944. Clark: Lawbook Exchange, 2005. Google
Books. Google, 2008. Web.
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Scholastic, 2002. Print. Dear Canada.
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Event 14.4 (2011): n. pag. [1–21]. Web.
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Bouvier. Toronto: Scholastic, 2009. Print. Dear Canada.
6
“But what is his country?”:
Producing Australian Identity
through Repetition in the
Victorian School Paper, 1896–1918
Michelle J. Smith
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Australian

schoolchildren were exposed to unique state-based reading curricula.
While other nations adopted graded readers, Australian states developed
their own compulsory monthly papers that constituted the only read-
ing materials in schools for many years. The Victorian School Paper was
first published in 1896 to ensure that children in one of Australia’s most
populous states were exposed to educational materials prepared within
their own country. It was compulsory reading material until 1927, when
a series of eight books, the Victorian Readers, began to be instituted as
required reading and the School Paper was demoted to become a sup-
plementary text.1 The School Paper’s periodical format enabled repetition
of important themes and topics in the course of each school year and
throughout the duration of each child’s education, making it a unique
example of the pedagogic potential of serial reading. Moreover, it is an
example of how repetition across serial texts can facilitate the growth of
nationalism. To interrogate this interrelationship, I adopt Greg Urban’s
theory of metaculture, specifically his argument about the circulation of
discourse that explains how repeated acts of reading can instil imagined
communal identifications such as that of nation.
The content of the School Paper across its first 15 years reveals the
extent to which Australian identity was at this time firmly located within
the British Empire. With reference to white Australia’s Anglo-Saxon and
imperial roots, John Rickard explains that “Australian mythology both
competed with and depended on the mythology of Britishness” (129).
This essay charts the shifting, competitive, and dependent relationship
of these identifications within the Paper from its origins to the close of
World War I, while exploring the impact of students’ repetitive reading
129
of state-sanctioned articles, poems, and stories on their construction

and circulation.
The history of school readers in colonial Australia
In colonial Australia, it was not viable to produce and publish original

educational materials for comparatively small numbers of children scat-
tered across a vast continent. Instead, the graded series of Irish National
Readers, which the Newcastle Commission in 1861 revealed were also
used in almost half of all English schools, formed the basis of the early
Australian school curriculum. As literary historian Geoffrey Dutton
describes the farcical situation, “for decade after decade hundreds of
thousands of Australian children were brought up on school readers that
totally confused their historical and environmental values. In the Irish
National Board Reading Book series, which was widely used, Ireland was
always referred to as ‘home’” (67).
The Irish Readers were also adopted in Upper Canada from 1846 and
were critiqued for being “not Canadian enough in sentiment” (White
19).2 Similar concerns in Australia about the suitability of the readers
for educating colonial children compelled the publisher of the Irish
Readers to make begrudging adaptations to produce special Australian
editions.3 In 1871, new versions were shipped to Victoria, with trivial
and superficial changes to the standard Irish content despite a printed
declaration that they were “better suited than any other series for the use
of Colonial youth” (qtd. in Musgrave, “Readers in Victoria, 1851–1895”).
P. W. Musgrave notes that the revised readers contained little more than
12 extra pages on the kangaroo at one year level and, in the most revised
edition, 70 pages out of 406 were devoted to the topics of the discovery
of Australia and, perhaps reflecting an Irish fascination, snakes (“Readers
in Victoria, 1851–1895”).
The Education Act of 1872 established the Victorian state (public)
education system as secular, compulsory, and free. From 1875, after the
establishment of a separate Catholic schooling system and Education
Department debates about secular teaching, the Irish Readers were
viewed as inadequate because of their degree of religious content. The
British Royal Readers (published by Thomas Nelson and Sons)4 that
replaced them had a similar style and similar methods, and were also
roughly adapted to suit an Australian readership. Their overall focus was
on Britain, with the norm for each reader being less than ten per cent
of the total page content comprised of stories about Australian explor-
ers and the country’s “discovery.” Musgrave notes that “the general
Michelle J. Smith 131
approach to Australia was that common in Britain: the flora and fauna
were ‘strange and unlike those of other countries’ and the Aborigines
were ‘a very wild and savage race’” (“Readers in Victoria, 1851–1895”).
The British voice and content of these readers were not passively
accepted, however, and the Victorian Education Department lobbied
to improve the treatment of history in the readers. This resulted in the
production, in 1866, of a separate volume, entitled The Empire, for senior
classes, in which some history of white Australia was recounted.
As Australia moved toward Federation in 1901, educators sought out
locally produced school materials to counter dissatisfaction with Irish
and British readers that were not created specifically for Australian chil-
dren. Signalling the first perceptions of national difference, Australian
children were imagined by education authorities as requiring different
pedagogic content than their British counterparts. The production of
local readers was especially important because teaching was still develop-
ing as a discipline, and, as in England and Ireland, teachers relied heav-
ily on their content (Goldstrom 2). The first magazine produced by an
Australian State Education Department was South Australia’s Children’s
Hour in 1889. The Victorian Minister for Education, Alexander Peacock,
proposed to use it as a model for his State’s own educational periodical.
Reflecting his views, a resolution was passed in the Assembly in 1895:
“[i]n the opinion of this House, reading-books, and, as far as possible,
all other books used in State schools should be compiled and written in
the colony” (qtd. in Sweetman 125–26). In 1896, the first edition of the
Victorian School Paper was published for students in class III,5 and other
states followed, with New South Wales instituting The Australian School
Paper in 1904 (later The Commonwealth School Paper); the Queensland
School Paper was produced beginning in 1905, and Western Australia used
the Victorian paper until initiating their own paper later in the century.
The School Paper and replication in the periodical form
The Victorian School Paper was issued ten times during the academic
year and parents were required to pay one penny for each magazine.
After its successful debut, a separate edition for children in class IV was
instituted in 1897, with a paper for classes V and VI combined added in
1898. A further edition for classes VII and VIII combined for secondary
school students began in the early twentieth century. These successive
editions ensured that the Paper was a fixture of primary school educa-
tion from the early years to its conclusion, and would continue to be so
for the minority of children who continued to secondary school. Until
1930, the School Paper was the only prescribed reading text for state
school children.6 By 1906, the total print run of the Victorian School
Paper was between 145,000 and 150,000 copies each month (rising to
200,000 by the 1920s), superseding the circulation figures of the leading
British children’s periodicals of the era. (The obvious difference from
the British periodicals was that an entire population of children in one
region of Australia was required to read it.) Though they did publish
their own educational materials, Catholic and other independent pri-
mary schools began to use the School Paper in their curricula, as there
were few Catholic secondary schools and familiarity with the material
was essential for further education.
Almost all children in state and most independent schools in this
period, therefore, grew up with a common experience of reading.7 Its
wide audience and periodicity provides scope to understand the Paper
as functioning like newspapers, which Benedict Anderson suggests are
integral to the formation of modern nations. The reader of a newspaper,
Anderson contends, is aware that his or her reading “is being replicated
simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence
he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion”
(35). Schoolchildren would nevertheless have been aware of their imme-
diate classmates reading the School Paper, just as Anderson’s newspaper
reader would observe copies of the same paper being read on the subway
or in the local neighbourhood. Anderson argues that these “exact rep-
licas” of an individual’s newspaper, or a student’s own magazine in this
instance, provide regular reassurance “that the imagined world is visibly
rooted in everyday life” (35–36). In other words, the immediate visibil-
ity of the publication makes the reader’s membership in an imagined
national community appear tangible and real.
Like popular British juvenile periodicals, the School Paper included
poetry, stories, plays, photographs, paintings, non-fiction articles, and
sheet music, much of which was adapted from existing sources, though
original contributions were also sought. Dr John Smyth from the
Victorian Education Department spoke glowingly of the diversity of its
content and the transformative effect it had on child readers:
The fairy tales of all lands and ages are in its pages for the little ones;
gems of poetry culled from books and magazines sing themselves by
its means into the hearts of the boys and girls; Shakespeare, Milton,
Burns, Tennyson, and the other great writers of our tongue become
to its young readers household names through repeated acquaintance
and growing intimacy ... (Sweetman et al. 284–85)
As required reading for all children who attended school, the monthly
School Paper enabled what Smyth terms “growing intimacy” through the
repetition of favoured topics several times over the course of each year for
as many years as a child attended school. Furthermore, the Paper was not
seen as disposable but as enabling cumulative acquisition of knowledge,
especially as children were instructed to store each edition in a durable
folder throughout the school year (Musgrave, “Historical Sociology”).
The School Paper presented recurring ideas in its non-fiction and
poetry, repeated themed annual issues, and reprinted articles that
invited Victorian children continually to contemplate their part within
the empire and the nation. Urban argues for the importance of repetition
and replication in the creation of nationalisms, which helps to explain
why the School Paper, like Anderson’s newspaper, was a more effective
medium for producing the internalization of nationalism and imperial-
ism in children than an unchanging textbook. To exemplify how nation-
alisms come into being, Urban proposes that it was not the performative
act of the signing of the Declaration of Independence that brought the
United States into existence, but the subsequent “circulation of discourse
that is necessary for a significant number of individuals to come to
articulate their membership in a group, of a ‘we’” (95). The recognition
of “a people” as a social entity, Urban argues, requires the movement of
culture through “processes of replication” (95). Specifically, Urban con-
centrates on the replication of “patterns of discourse,” such as the usage
of pronouns that signal membership (“we,” “they”) and proper names
(“Republic of Texas”) (95). While Urban’s focus is on the circulation of
influential texts, such as the Declaration, he suggests more broadly that
each reading of a “nationalist” text generates an identification with a
“we” that forms the basis of the “imagined community,” as Anderson
describes it, of the nation.
The repeated process of inviting child readers to understand themselves
as part of the “we” inherent in the concepts of empire and nation can
be seen in the recommended uses for the School Paper in classrooms.
Students were required not only to read the Paper for factual information
that would be discussed in class, but also to memorize poems for recita-
tion and words for spelling tests. The Education Gazette and Teacher’s Aid,
which was published for Victorian teachers from 1900, regularly included
testing information for each grade. The School Paper was consistently set
for all grades that used it as the main source for testing reading ability,
spelling, and the recitation of poetry. Urban observes that patterns of
word usage integral to circulating discourses are sometimes consciously
memorized and reproduced (as Victorian students were compelled to do
for examination), but are more typically replicated through “unreflective

imitation, as one takes words or patterns one has heard and reproduces
them” (99). The broad circulation of particular usages, such as the use of
“we” as a signifier of the nation, Urban points out, necessarily occurs over
a period of time. With its status as compulsory reading from Grade III
until the point at which a child left school, the Paper was able not only to
repeat words, phrases, and poems that invited children to see themselves
as part of nation and empire, but also to do so over a span of years.
Urban’s theory about the circulation of culture and its relationship
to nationalism confirms historical pedagogical understandings of the
function of repetition. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693),
for example, John Locke proposed that the repeated practice of particu-
lar acts could not only “weed out” faults in character, but also plant
“what Habits you please” (64). The continual requirement for a child
to practise a behaviour such as bowing or making eye contact would
eventuate in the act’s naturalization, such that it would require no con-
scious thought, just like the process of breathing: “That by repeating
the same Action, till it be grown habitual in them, the Performance will
not depend on Memory, or Reflection, the Concomitant of Prudence
and Age, and not of Childhood; but will be natural in them” (64).
In other words, simply learning the rules about language or morality
will not prepare a child to speak another language or to be moral, but
habitual practice or custom will enable a child to acquire such abilities
and qualities. The process of belonging to a nation or empire might be
understood as a similar acquisition that is internalized within a child
through habit. The connection between childhood education and
familiarity with national custom is made metaphorically elsewhere in
Locke’s treatise where he likens children to “[t]ravellers newly arrived in
a strange Country, of which they know nothing” (178).
Like the newly arrived traveller, the schoolchild’s comparative lack of
knowledge places them in a position from which their ability to con-
test their instruction by the “locals,” namely adult teachers, is limited.
In her discussion of women’s magazines of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Margaret Beetham suggests that, rather than sim-
ply functioning as purveyors of ideology, these magazines are places
“where meanings are contested and made” (5). Beetham’s claim has
proven influential in the study of historical periodicals more broadly.
She problematizes the understanding of magazines and newspapers as
mirrors that simply reflect a given culture and proposes that we ought
to locate the ways in which periodicals and their readerships helped to
form the culture in which they were situated. Children’s periodicals of
this period show an ongoing dialogue with their readers that helped to
shape idealized notions of boyhood and girlhood, as Kristine Moruzi

discusses with regards to girls’ magazines in Chapter 7 of this volume.
In the instance of the School Paper, however, its pedagogic intent con-
strains the degree to which its meanings can be contested within its
pages: schoolchildren were not authorized to question or to debate the
articles presented within it in the way that the readership of children’s
magazines might be authorized to question or to debate ideas through
the presence of correspondence pages or essay competitions. Moreover,
these Australian child readers could not opt out of purchasing the
School Paper if they found its content dull or disagreeable, whereas
the preferences and interests of child readers as consumers influenced
commercially produced magazines and their financial viability.
Repeating narratives of progress and imperial belonging
New editions of readers were expensive to produce; given the state-

based education systems in Australia, with its small population, the
cost was prohibitive. In contrast, because it was published monthly, the
School Paper could respond to current world events, such as wars, and
readily incorporate changes in pedagogic style (Musgrave, “Readers in
Victoria, 1896–1960”).8 From its origins, the editor of the School Paper
was an inspector in the Education Department, Charles Long, who ful-
filled this role until his retirement in 1925. As a result of this close con-
nection, the Paper supported departmental patriotic initiatives. Special
issues were produced each year to commemorate Empire Day beginning
in 1905, for example, and later for ANZAC Day.
While the movement from the Irish Readers to the Royal Readers and
then to state-based Australian papers suggests an increasing desire for
Australian identity as distinct from British identity, the Paper evidences
the coexistence of narratives of belonging to both the British Empire
and the nation. The conundrum of national identity is the subject of
a letter that Professor Walter Scott submitted to the Australian Teacher
in 1894. Scott questioned the teaching of citizenship in schools, asking
in relation to an imagined student, “But what is his country? Is it New
South Wales, or Australia, or the British Empire, or humanity at large?
Even that simple question he might find it hard to answer” (2–3). The
answer to this question, according to the School Paper, was that students
should feel a connection to all four categories of identity, but especially
to nation and empire. Smyth wrote in 1922 that the publication had
three aims: “(1) To give the children acquaintance with the great prose
and poetic works of our literature; (2) to make them acquainted with the
classic stories of the ages; and (3) to develop in them an understanding
love of Victoria, of Australia, of the British Empire, and through these

of humanity” (Sweetman et al. 283).
In contrast with the comparatively uniform voice of the rarely
amended Irish and Royal readers, different voices extracted from vari-
ous newspaper sources, published books, contemporary and historical
sources, and those written specifically for readers of the School Paper
offer variations in achieving the stated aim of developing a love of state,
nation, and empire. Pedagogic aims of the School Paper, including those
relating to national identity, are supported by the periodical form itself,
which, as Beetham has established, “refuses … a single authorial voice”
(12). While textbooks and readers that were produced to endure for
several years were heavily mediated to construct a consistent tone and
to advance one unchanging view on key issues, the School Paper’s perio-
dicity meant that child readers were presented, from month to month,
with a variety of authorial perspectives that conformed to the broad
editorial aims of the Victorian Education Department. In particular, the
School Paper’s variety of voices enabled the frequent repetition of ideas
of nation and empire, creating an ongoing narrative of belonging that
repeatedly reinforced the child reader’s membership.
Though Musgrave proposes that the inception of the Paper and
cessation of the import of overseas textbooks “matched the national-
ism of the Federation years,” the Paper does not show linear move-
ment toward an increasingly nationalistic viewpoint at the expense
of empire (“Readers in Victoria, 1851–1895”). Even post-Federation,
schoolchildren were presented with two kinds of identification, as
both Australians and children of the British Empire, and with the pos-
sibilities and complexities of their intersection. The remainder of this
chapter focuses on the volumes produced for classes V and VI combined
in order to examine the continuation of, and variations within, narra-
tives of national identity across time through the repetition of themes
and even of the same articles, poems, and illustrations. As the readers
in these classes were the oldest students in primary schools, themes of
nationhood and empire were presented in a relatively sophisticated way
that was further developed in the twentieth century in the edition for
classes VII and VIII combined.
Informational articles, stories, and poetry about England and its
traditions appeared regularly in the School Paper, pointing out, for
example, the admirable and impressive qualities of English men. Some
examples include Thomas Campbell’s poem “Men of England” and the
articles “The Gallant Gordon: A True British Hero” and “The Triumphs
of the English Language.” Articles on English subjects were most often
framed within the context of their relevance and importance to empire.

Features on the reigning British monarch peaked on the occasions of
a death or coronation, such as the multiple special features produced
after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 and King Edward’s death in 1910.
The editions mourning the Queen’s passing provoked sentiments about
Australians as Britons by virtue of their place in the empire, with her
loss described as “unit[ing] in one the whole British race” (“Our Late
Beloved Queen” 81). Items specifically about the British Empire were
a fixture in almost every monthly part, and entire editions were pro-
duced to commemorate Empire Day. In its earliest years, the Paper often
sought to show child readers how Victoria and Australia were situated
within the British Empire and to assert that the state, the country, and,
by virtue of their citizenship, the child readers themselves were worthy
of this inclusion.
The praise of empire and the assurance of imperial belonging repeat-
edly included mention of the benevolence of Britain and its respect for
Australia as part of its global realm. These articles appear frequently in
comparison with occasional articles about Australia itself, which are
focused on the physical development of land in a narrative of industrial
progress, rather than on its character as a nation, as a people, or on its
contribution to the world. The supreme importance of the British ori-
gins of most Australians is aptly illustrated by a photograph of Victorian
State schoolchildren who were described as “representatives of English,
Scotch, Irish, and Welsh nationalities” – who appeared before the Duke
and Duchess of Cornwall and York during their visit at the Union Jack
display (“State Schools’ Demonstration” 60). The children photographed
are visually situated as part of the “we” evoked by identification with the
British Empire, and British heritage specifically (see Figure 6.1).
Non-fiction articles that set out the scale of the empire were published
at least annually, and were often accompanied by maps to illustrate the
worldwide expanse of British territory and Australia’s connection to it,
such as through the laying of telegraph lines (“The British Pacific Cable”;
“Map of Empire”). In many of these articles, the empire is idealized as
holding the potential to bring prosperity and safety to the world at large.
In November 1900, the article “The British Empire” includes a world map
and explains the constitution of the empire. The article is written from
the perspective of Joseph Cook, an American preacher and writer, who
describes touring around the world via Hong Kong, Calcutta, Singapore,
Malta, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Fiji. Cook proposes that the union
of all English-speaking peoples could have the power to strike “universal
peace through half the continents and all the seas” (36). In 1902, in
Figure 6.1 “State Schools’ Demonstration Before the Duke and Duchess of
Cornwall and York,” School Paper (Class III) June 1911: 75. Print.
“England, a Mother of Nations,” John Richard Green describes Britain’s

“real greatness” in its role as “a mother of nations” (as a colonizer) and
her future colonizing as important to “the future of mankind” (59, 60).
The first Empire Day number, in May 1905, is not only aspirational in
its account of empire’s further potential for expansion, but historically
pronounces that “British rule has made the world a better place to live
in” (Gillies, “Empire Day” 3). The schoolchildren of Victoria are repeat-
edly invited to see themselves as part of the British Empire first and
foremost, and to understand that their membership in this great entity
ensures their place on the side of good and their participation in the
amelioration of global problems.
Prior to the proliferation of stories of national pride and heroism
during World War I, the School Paper’s Australian content focused on
the physical transformation of the land to cultivate and “civilise” it.

These articles ranged from topics such as the development of water
supplies, ports and sewerage, and weirs across the country to the
founding of Melbourne as a city (see W. F. G.; Long; Mark J. Graham;
Eddy; “The Lower Yarra”). Such celebrations of industrial “progress”
were complemented by stories about discoveries of gold in Victoria,
which saw the riches in both population and wealth that gold brought
as “converting” a “remote dependency into a country of world-wide
fame” (“The Early Discoveries” 2–4). The inclusion of articles on
home-making in the Australian bush, such as an article published in
1909 accompanied by a reproduction of Frederick McCubbin’s iconic
triptych “The Pioneers,” served as a contrast and marker of how far
Australia’s cities had progressed (Fiddian). This narrative of colonial
progress reinforced the repeated articles about the improving work of
the British Empire.
The anticipation of Australia’s Federation and the opening of its first
Parliament in 1901 prompted an increase in articles about the nation’s
relationship to Britain and its place within the empire. An article about
the Federation of Australia’s colonies taken from Britain’s Daily News
advances the idea of Australia as among the “great nations sprung
from the British stock … bound to the mother country by every bond
of devotion and loyalty” (“The Federation of the British Empire” 64).
Britain is understood as allowing the Dominion of Canada and the
Australian Commonwealth to be “prosperous and progressive and
self-governed and yet ever willing to recognise that they are a part of a
greater Imperial whole” (64). Nevertheless, the germination of a sense
of national pride somewhat divorced from imperial sentiment was evi-
dent in stories of Federation. For instance, the multi-part article “The
Accomplishment of Federation” emphasizes the free choice inherent
in Australian Federation, unlike the histories of other nations where
violence was required to attain independence, intimating the origins of
unique Australian qualities (Garran and Quick).
The focus on Britain’s fair and kind treatment of Australia, however,
was imbricated with a developing sense of the newly Federated nation’s
obligations to Britain. This sense of obligation in war and in the cultiva-
tion of a strong British outpost is consistent with Victorian Education
Director Frank Tate’s public statements about the importance of cultivat-
ing “school-power” – by which “[e]ach unit must make itself fit by edu-
cation to bear its part in the world struggle” – to support British world
supremacy (7). In a speech to the Imperial Federation League on this
topic in 1908, Tate asserted that Australia’s sharing of “the undoubted
benefits conferred by membership of the Empire” necessitated upholding

it “by developing at this end of the earth a sturdy, self-reliant race” (7).
There are frequent examples of Australia’s obligation to Britain in the
School Paper in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1900, Andrew
Lang describes Australian hearts as “English,” driving them to assist
in “the English war” (“Advance Australia” 141). Throughout the year
1901, there are multiple examples of Australia’s constructed obligation
to Britain and the honour of belonging to such a mighty conglomerate.
In the poem “Farewell, Australia,” written by William Hall on the depar-
ture of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York from Australia after
Federation festivities, the need to stand “united for the Commonweal” to
protect each nation is again expressed to stave off foes “tho’ multitudes
assailing / Smite us and strike us with the strength of ten” (1).9
The repeated ideologies of imperial belonging and colonial bonds
between nations such as Australia and Canada remained consistent
in this period, following through as children grew older and passed
through the differently graded readers, and also as new children entered
school and took their place across the years. Identical articles on the
same topic, or slightly revised articles and images, reappeared at inter-
vals. For example, “How the Boys and Girls of Australasia can Help the
Empire” appeared in the Empire edition of 1906 and “How the Boys
and Girls of Australia Can Help the Empire” (both by W. M. Gillies) in
1910. Most frequently and consistently repeated throughout this period
were illustrations and explanations of, as well as poems in honour of,
the British flag, although the Australian flag became increasingly visible
during World War I and afterwards.10
Some articles directly addressed child readers as members of the
international community of the British Empire and invited them to par-
ticipate in the important work of imperial maintenance and even empire-
building. In “How the Boys and Girls of Australia Can Help the Empire,”
Gillies writes that part of Australia’s contribution to empire rests in its
capacity to spread and teach “British ideas of freedom … and human-
ity” in Asia due to its geographic proximity to that continent and also in
its ability to protect itself from attack (52–54). The work of reading the
School Paper itself became embedded in this imperial work. Readers were
provided with instructions as to how they could make the empire “safe”:
you can try to do your school-work well, and you can try to copy
the best men and women whom you meet, or whom you read of. If
you do your school-work well, you will become a citizen who is not
content with out-of-date or slipshod methods of making the Empire
safe and, if you copy the best men and women, you will be helping
to make the Empire strong in the best kind of strength, the strength
that comes of high character. (Gillies 54)
Stories of the “best men and women” read previously, then, become an
inspiration for future behaviour and are repeatedly embedded in the
ongoing narrative of Australian obligation to the international project
of imperial maintenance and defence.
Accommodating nationalism in World War I
While Urban explains that social groups are distinguished by their

carriage over time of “a particular set of public signs,” he observes that
“the reproduction of those signs over time can involve subtle shifts,
as the signs are reproduced” (117). The greatest shift in the reproduc-
tion of the signs of imperial belonging in the School Paper occur during
World War I, when nationalist content increases. The Paper was uniquely
positioned to educate children about Australia’s involvement in war; it
published regular updates about life on the battlefield, successes and fail-
ures in the ongoing fight, calls to readers to contribute to the war effort
through the Education Department’s War Relief Fund, monthly reports
on the progress of charitable campaigns, and poems by Australian
authors about the heroism of soldiers. In short, the periodical pre-
sented war as a current aspect of children’s citizenship and a constantly
evolving cause, rather than a static piece of history to be committed to
memory. As Joan Beaumont maintains, and the School Paper confirms,
Australian citizenship was historically “positioned within a wider ‘impe-
rial citizenship’” that was able to accommodate “dual loyalties and mul-
tiple allegiances” (172). Beaumont also argues that “membership of the
empire ultimately transcended and was superior to that of the nation”
(172), which accords with the issues of the School Paper published prior
to World War I. However, the war served as a catalyst for an increasing
emphasis on Australian identity and pride as distinct from its relation-
ship to empire. This Australian nationalism developed alongside, and
began to challenge the existing meta-narrative of, imperial belonging.
During Australian service in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the
“bravery and intelligence of the Australians” was championed, but was
largely significant because “the English papers” were “full of the story
of the mental alertness and physical courage of the Colonials” (“The
Return of Invalided Soldiers” 150). Similarly, the reasons for participa-
tion were not for Australia’s security but “the irresistible impulse of
popular feeling … to offer Her Majesty the service of her citizen soldiers,
dwelling beneath the Southern Cross” (“War: Victorians as Participants”
62). The same article from 1899, accompanied by a photograph of met-
ropolitan cadets, emphasized that the war would show “the firm resolve
of the people of an empire in which the sun never sets to stand together,
and, in the hour of stress and strain, to rally round the old flag” (62).
This view was representative of the outlook of the School Paper at the
turn of the century, in which Australia’s significance issued from its
membership of the British Empire.
During World War I, the performance of Australian soldiers was
regularly reported on, taking a substantial place alongside articles that
viewed the significance of the war through Britain and the empire. From
the reports of England’s Minister for War to local updates, the abili-
ties of Australian soldiers and the number of Australian casualties and
Victoria Cross recipients were a major preoccupation in scores of articles
in the Paper, especially for the four upper classes.11 While in the edition
for secondary school students, the February 1916 front cover image
entitled “Right to the End – How the Year 1916 Opened for the British
Empire” clearly flagged the continued idealization of empire, the follow-
ing month’s cover was devoted to a photograph of men at a recruiting
depot at Melbourne Town Hall, evidencing the growing importance of
depicting Australia’s contribution to the war.
In addition to war-related content consuming much of the monthly
editions, supplements were sometimes added in order to convey special
war messages, such as letters from the Director of Education. In April
1916, Director Frank Tate’s “Open Letter to the Children of Victoria”
makes clear several of the key ideas advanced throughout wartime,
including the emergence of Australian pride through the deeds of soldiers:
Every Australian has been filled with pride as he has read of the
glorious deeds of our soldiers in Gallipoli; and, to-day, because of
what they have done, the name of Australia stands high throughout
the Empire, and, indeed, throughout the world. You children have
read in your history of the great feats of arms which soldiers of our
race have accomplished in the past, and you had, no doubt, the feel-
ing that these men were far removed from you. But the Anzacs are
men whom you knew when they were here amongst us, living their
lives as ordinary, peace-loving citizens; they are your own brothers
and cousins, your own fathers and uncles. … Every girl and boy
should feel an inch taller when the thought comes, “These are my
people who have made such a name.” (2)
After his stirring account of the bravery of the students’ relatives at war,
he calls on them to deny themselves “visits to the picture shows and the
lolly [candy] shops” (4) in order to aid the war effort monetarily. Such
exhortations for child readers to be thrifty were regularly published,
including a reproduction of a speech from the late Earl Kitchener on
“The Need for Thrift, Personal and National” in 1917 and stories about
the specific financial contributions of individual students and schools
to the war effort through work. Schemes such as “The War Loan,” which
was the subject of the October 1917 supplement, sought to add to the
£116,000,000 already expended on the war by Australia through contribu-
tions toward the estimated £96,000,000 required in the next year. Though
children would not likely have had sufficient money to purchase war
saving certificates, they were encouraged to buy more affordable “war
savings stamps”: “Abundance of money means a quicker victory; and
a quicker victory means the saving of the Empire’s greatest treasure –
the lives of her men” (1). These regular calls to donate ensured that
the School Paper entwined citizenship with charity, and was a unique
example of a publication read by all children which could demand their
ideological and financial support of a national war effort. These appeals
to child readers repeatedly circulated the idea that Australian children,
regardless of their age, were part of the “we” responsible for the lives of
Australian soldiers. Moreover, these sentiments were supported by activ-
ities within schools that, as Andrew Spaull notes, “became a focal point
for the community’s material support for the war” (131). Primary and
secondary school children participated in war relief schemes that incor-
porated not only fundraising but also making goods for the Red Cross,
school cadets, Boy Scouts, and, for girls, work in hospitals through the
Girls’ League of Honour and the Red Cross (132–33).
During the war, as well as immediately afterward, the articles about
Australians were not only confined to frequent odes to the ANZAC
soldiers at Gallipoli. The Australian flag became a regular feature, along
with articles that considered the nature of the Australian and what would
come to be iconic Australian pursuits such as droving (moving livestock
on horseback). The importance of World War I in shaping this increased
emphasis on Australian identity is effectively conveyed by a photograph
published in February 1917. The image shows almost 7000 state school
children in formation at the Melbourne Cricket Club Ground, their
bodies spelling out the word “ANZAC,” enclosed within the massive
frame of thousands of other children’s bodies outlining the shape of the
Australian continent, complete with the island of Tasmania. The descrip-
tion explains that “at the blast of a whistle, the map faded, leaving the
living message, ‘Anzac,’ on the turf,” demonstrating the way in which

the mythology surrounding the Australian soldiers came to embody
Australian identity (“State Schools’ Physical Culture Display” 16). In
addition, the children’s physical reproduction of the word that stood in
for Australianness visually reinforced for the School Paper’s child readers
that they were, as individuals, an essential component of the nation.
The heroic Australian identity inspired by the war and champi-
oned by the Paper did not include Indigenous Australians, who were
not addressed as part of the “we” of nation or empire. Articles about
Aborigines were exceedingly rare in the combined paper for grades V
and VI, even when making allowances for the omnipresent racism of
the period. The pieces that were published, such as Henry Kendall’s
elegiac poem “The Last of His Tribe” in 1912, suggested that extinc-
tion was imminent. An extract from the work of prominent anthro-
pologist Baldwin Spencer, published in 1900, proposed that Indigenous
Australians “remain in the stone age” and would soon be extinguished,
like Australia’s native animals, by more evolved types: “Just also as, at
the present time, the kangaroo and the wallaby are giving way to the
rabbit and the sheep, so the stone-axe man and wooden-spear man give
way to the man with the iron tomahawk and the rifle” (143). While
Spencer’s article is disturbing to the contemporary reader, it is typical
of writing of the period that expressed sympathy for the imminent
extinction of Aboriginals at the same time as promoting the concept
of a hierarchy of races that justified British settlement. Perceived as in
decline, Indigenous Australia did not figure in the newfound pride in
nation diffused throughout the School Paper during World War I.
Conclusion
A circulating discourse like the School Paper not only encodes or reflects
existing discourses, but, in Urban’s terms, “itself plays a role in shaping
the historical course of replication” (105). Indeed, the School Paper was
understood as having a powerful ideological influence on its readers,
and its recognized authority is shown in its being the subject of Acts
of Parliament. In 1919, for example, the Victorian Labor Party resolved
“That no articles relating to or extolling wars, battles or heroes of past
wars be printed in the State school papers” (“Bolshevism in Australia”
5), in an exhibition of post-war pacifist sentiment. The School Paper
harnessed the repetitive potential of the magazine form in order to
fashion a standardized model of Australian identity, one consumed
by all Victorian children, especially in the lead-up to Australian
Federation and throughout World War I. Nevertheless, the serial format

of the Victorian School Paper did not forge a single narrative of national
belonging. The periodical format, which relies on a variety of authorial
voices, allows for the repetition with variation of multiple stories of
belonging. A melange of voices in its articles and poems, sourced from
Australian, British, and other colonial publications, enabled diverging
and converging identifications between Australia and the British Empire,
identifications which became gradually more complex as the mythology
surrounding Australian soldiers fed ideas of a distinct national identity
that were repeated alongside the remnants of earlier sentiments of impe-
rial obligation and belonging.
Notes
1. The periodical format, which parents were required to pay for each month,
was eventually seen as a disadvantageous way to distribute compulsory read-
ing. The development of the more durable Victorian Readers meant that par-
ents only had to pay for one book per year and each volume could be passed
down to younger children in the family.
2. Robert J. Graham’s examination of the Irish Readers in Canada shows that
there were concerns about their suitability from the time of their first intro-
duction (415). He also reveals that the cultural context that supported the
introduction of the Irish Readers was primarily informed by anxieties about
the influence of American teachers and texts in Upper Canada (415).
3. In J. M. Goldstrom’s study of English and Irish school readers, he points out
that revisions were a rarity once books were published: “it was a matter of
bringing out reprints, with sometimes a paragraph or a footnote added. In
1860 it was possible to buy an Irish reader essentially the same as it was in
1854” (128).
4. Nelson’s Royal Readers were published in Britain from 1872 to 1881. For a
consideration of the way in which the readers attempted to define a part
for British boys in the empire, see Felicity Ferguson, “Making the Muscular
Briton,” Children’s Literature in Education 37 (2006): 253–65.
5. The usual age of school commencement at the close of the nineteenth cen-
tury was six years old, and promotion to successive classes was dependent
upon examination results. In 1912, the schooling system was revised to
include eight grades, and it was expected that children without any form
of impairment would advance through one grade each year (Sweetman
et al. 232).
6. From 1913, supplementary readers were used, but it was the only set reading
book in state schools until this time.
7. Clare Bradford has previously observed that the locally produced readers that
gradually replaced the School Paper from the late 1920s, which were “medi-
ated by teachers and received by children in the institutional settings of
schools, … did not simply influence individual readers, but afforded a shared
experience which shaped communal values.”
8. Musgrave argues that the Paper visibly affected teaching methods, with one
inspector noting that “the numbers contain so much that is fresh, that the
teachers do not take for granted that the children comprehend, as they used
to do in regard to the books with which they have been saturated for many
years” (qtd. in “Readers in Victoria, 1896–1968”). While the fixity of readers
that were in use for years without update seemingly encouraged teachers
to assume that students were already familiar with the material, the new
content each month compelled teachers to approach each edition’s articles,
poems, and extracts with fuller attention.
9. To give some of many further examples of inspiring calls for Australian par-
ticipation in wars, see Alfred Austin’s “To Arms!” and Andrew Lang’s “Ballade
of the Southern Cross.”
10. In November 1904, “The Grand Old Flag” (148–49), which explains the con-
stitution of the Union Jack, is situated next to the poem “The English Flag”
(149).
11. In the Paper for classes VII and VIII, see, for example, “Some Earnest Words
from the Minister for War”; “Progress of the War” (which eagerly asks “Where
Are the Australians?”); and “Testimony to the Judgment and Diligence of
Australian Soldiers” (which proposes that Australians “have the qualities
which are going to win this war – courage, judgment, and ability” [157]).
Articles from the Victorian School Paper (all references,

except where indicated, are to the combined paper for
grades V and VI)
Austin, Alfred. “To Arms!” School Paper Mar. 1900: 81. Print.
“The British Pacific Cable.” School Paper Apr. 1903: 40–43. Print.
Campbell, Thomas. “Men of England.” School Paper Oct. 1898: 28. Print.
Cook, Joseph. “The British Empire.” School Paper Nov. 1900: 33–36. Print.
“The Early Discoveries of Gold in Australia.” School Paper Sept. 1901: 2–4. Print.
Eddy, F. C. “The Melbourne Sewerage System.” School Paper Sept. 1900: 11–15. Print.
“The Federation of the British Empire.” School Paper Dec. 1900: 64. Print.
Fiddian, Rev. J. R. “The Pioneers: Home-Making in the Australian Bush.” School
Paper June 1909: 73–75. Print.
“‘The Gallant Gordon’: A True British Hero.” School Paper Oct. 1898: 17–22. Print.
Garran, R. R., and John Quick. “The Accomplishment of Federation.” School Paper
Feb. 1901–May 1901: 66–68, 98–100, 120–23. Print.
Gillies, William. “Empire Day.” School Paper May 1905: 2–10. Print.
Gillies, W. M. “How the Boys and Girls of Australasia Can Help the Empire.”
School Paper May 1906: 50–56. Print.
——. “How the Boys and Girls of Australia Can Help the Empire.” School Paper
May 1910: 55–57. Print.
Graham, Mark J. “Water Supply in the Interior of Western Australia.” School Paper
Sept. 1899: 4–8. Print.
Green, John Richard. “England, a Mother of Nations.” School Paper May 1902:
59-60. Print.
Hall, William. “Farewell Australia.” School Paper Sept. 1901: 1. Print.
Kendall, Henry. “The Last of His Tribe.” School Paper Aug. 1912: 97–98. Print.
Kitchener, Earl. “The Need for Thrift, Personal and National.” School Paper Oct.
1917: 140–41. Print.
Lang, Andrew. “Advance Australia.” School Paper June 1900: 141. Print.
——. “Ballade of the Southern Cross.” School Paper Sept. 1900: 177. Print.
Long, C. R. “How an Empire Grows: The Founding of Melbourne.” School Paper
May 1906: 58–64. Print.
“The Lower Yarra – One of Melbourne’s Ports.” School Paper Sept. 1906: 114–16. Print.
“Map of Empire.” School Paper May 1905: 8–9. Print.
“Our Late Beloved Queen.” School Paper Feb. 1901: 81. Print.
“Progress of the War.” School Paper Nov. 1915: 156–57 and Mar. 1916: 30–32. Print.
“The Return of Invalided Soldiers to Australia.” School Paper July 1900: 149–50.
Print.
“Some Earnest Words from the Minister for War.” School Paper Aug. 1915: 103–04.
Print.
Spencer, Baldwin. “The Australian Aborigines.” School Paper June 1900: 142–43.
Print.
“State Schools’ Demonstration Before the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and
York.” School Paper (Class III) June 1911: 75. Print.
“State Schools’ Physical Culture Display,” School Paper Feb. 1917: 16. Print.
Tate, Frank. “Our Debt to Our Soldiers: An Open Letter to the Children of
Victoria from the Director of Education (20 Mar. 1916).” School Paper Apr.
1916: 1–4. Print.
“Testimony to the Judgment and Diligence of Australian Soldiers.” School Paper
Nov. 1916: 157–58. Print.
“The Triumphs of the English Language.” School Paper Mar. 1899: 89. Print.
“The War Loan.” School Paper Oct. 1917: 1–2. Print.
“War: Victorians as Participants.” School Paper Dec. 1899: 62. Print.
W. F. G. “The Goulburn Weir.” School Paper Aug. 1900: 162–67. Print.
Works cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Beaumont, Joan. “Australian Citizenship and the Two World Wars.” Australian
Journal of Politics and History 53.2 (2007): 171–82. Print.
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s
Magazine, 1800–1914. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
“Bolshevism in Australia.” Colonist 1 Mar. 1919: 5. Print.
Bradford, Clare. “The Victorian Readers.” AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource,
2008. Web.
Dutton, Geoffrey. Snow on the Saltbush: The Australian Literary Experience.
Ringwood: Penguin, 1984. Print.
Ferguson, Felicity. “Making the Muscular Briton.” Children’s Literature in Education
37 (2006): 253–65. Print.
Goldstrom, J. M. The Social Content of Education, 1808–1870: A Study of the Working
Class School Reader in England and Ireland. Shannon: Irish UP, 1972. Print.
Graham, Robert J. “The Irish Readers Revisited: The Power of the Text(book).”
Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l’éducation 14.4 (1989):
414–26. Print.
Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. 1693. London: J. and R. Tonson,
1779. Print.
Musgrave, Peter. “The Historical Sociology of Textbooks: A Victorian Case Study.”
Working Papers from the Textbook Colloquium, no.1. Web.
——. “Readers in Victoria, 1851–1895.” Paradigm 26 (1998). Web.
——. “Readers in Victoria, 1896–1968, I: The School Paper and Children’s
World.” Paradigm 15 (1994). Web.
——. “Readers in Victoria, 1896–1960, II: The Victorian Readers.” Paradigm 16
(1995). Web.
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Studies 32.116 (2001): 128–31. Print.
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Government School, 1830–1914. Ed. A. G. Austin and R. J. W. Selleck. Carlton:
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(1894): 2–3. Print.
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in Victoria. Melbourne: Education Dep. of Victoria, 1922. Print.
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Minnesota P, 2001. Print.
White, Edwin Theodore. Public School Textbooks in Ontario. London: C. Chapman,
1922. Print.
7
Serializing Scholarship:
(Re)Producing Girlhood in Atalanta
Kristine Moruzi
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of magazines

targeted at British middle-class girls rapidly increased. These magazines
were the primary mode through which girls consumed print culture.
In their pages, girls found serialized fiction, short stories, advice col-
umns, informational articles, and scholarly competitions as well as
correspondence sections that attested to the readers’ engagement with
the magazines and with other readers. As part of a strategy to obtain
a healthy and growing readership, many girls’ magazines attempted
to define a specific type of girl within their pages that was reinforced
through serial production. One focus of the girls’ magazine Atalanta,
launched in 1887, was higher education and learning. Each month, the
magazine included features on women’s colleges, correspondence and
editorials discussing the relationship between education and feminin-
ity, and a regular Scholarship and Reading Union section designed to
help its readers develop their scholarly capabilities and habits.
The monthly appearance of Atalanta encouraged its girl readers to per-
ceive education as a desirable feminine attribute. Moreover, Atalanta’s
model of girlhood – which reflected the importance of reading and
education – was promoted and reinforced through the serial publication
and the ongoing collection of Atalanta. Not only was a single number
of Atalanta an object to be owned, but it also promised more to come.
Using French poststructural theorist Jean Baudrillard’s theories of col-
lecting, I will argue that a collection of the monthly numbers or annual
volumes of Atalanta allowed girl readers to display their scholarship,
which was otherwise invisible, in material ways. Unlike physical cul-
ture, which is always inscribed on the body, mental culture is not as eas-
ily displayed. The collection allowed girls to obtain and present images
of themselves as educated or scholarly, but without the potentially
149
defeminizing effects often attributed to higher education.1 The regular

monthly appearance of the magazine allowed it both to be employed
as a tool for learning and to be possessed as a symbol of high culture.
Girls’ periodicals of the late nineteenth century defined and refined
specific types of girls in their pages in order to attract a dedicated read-
ership.2 Atalanta is unique among middle-class girls’ periodicals for
its highly specialized focus on girls’ education. Priced at a sixpence, it
was clearly aimed at middle-class girls since, as historian Diana Dixon
explains, this price prohibited its purchase by working-class girls (139).
It succeeded Alicia Leith’s Every Girl’s Magazine in 1887, when popular
girls’ novelist L. T. Meade joined Leith as co-editor, and remained in
print until 1898. The new name and the new editorial team signalled a
change in the magazine’s format and ideals. It began to include articles
by well-known literary figures such as H. Rider Haggard, who contrib-
uted the serialized story “A Tale of Three Lions” in the first volume.
As literary critic Edward Salmon observed in 1888, the high quality
“literary and artistic talent” meant that “[t]he popularity of the new
magazine is not surprising” (196–7). Over the years, other contributors
included Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Molesworth, Katherine Tynan,
George MacDonald, Charlotte Yonge, Louisa Parr, and Helen Zimmern.
The magazine was composed of a variety of different types of contribu-
tions, including non-fiction articles addressing the natural sciences and
history. A series on “Employment for Girls” continued throughout the
first year, beginning with Jane Wilson’s description of “Sick Nursing” in
November 1887. As the Honorary Secretary of the Workhouse Infirmary
Nursing Association, Wilson was one of many experts on female
employment who contributed to the magazine. She was followed by
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the constitutional women’s suf-
frage movement, on “The Post Office”; business owner Ethel Comyns
on “Type-Writing”; pharmaceutical chemist Isabella S. Clarke-Keer, the
first woman to become a full member of the Pharmaceutical Society, on
“Pharmacy”; and Edith Huntley, MD on “Medicine.”3
Moreover, unlike Every Girl’s Magazine, which had little interest in
girls’ education, each 64-page issue of Atalanta specifically encouraged
girls to become better educated through the dedicated pursuit of learn-
ing opportunities, both those offered by the magazine and elsewhere.
The magazine’s interest in attracting readers who were keen to learn
was apparent to its reviewers. A reviewer for the Church Quarterly Review
writes that “[n]o girl can read these papers, or enter the lists to com-
pete for one or other of the scholarships and prizes offered to readers
of Atalanta in so many various branches of art and literature, without
Kristine Moruzi 151
feeling stimulated to acquire fresh knowledge” (“Atalanta” 501). This

educated feminine ideal sustained Atalanta for much of its run. In her
theorizing of the periodical press, Margaret Beetham explains that,
“[s]ince the periodical depends on ensuring that the readers continue
to buy each number as it comes out, there is a tendency in the form
not only to keep reproducing elements which have been successful, but
also to link each number to the next” (“Open” 97). This helps to explain
why, in Atalanta, new depictions of educated girlhood appeared each
month. This model of scholarly feminine achievement was one of the
key elements that formed the basis of the magazine.
The serial nature of the magazine is an important aspect of the con-
struction and dissemination of a model of girlhood encouraging scholar-
ship and learning. In their analysis of the serial production of Victorian
fiction, Linda Hughes and Michael Lund describe the serial novel as “a
whole made up of parts that at once function as self-contained units
and as building blocks of a larger aesthetic structure” (“Textual” 149).
Similarly, the development of an educated girl reader through Atalanta
is enabled through the individual monthly parts that stand alone, but
which are also part of a greater whole. Each individual issue is self-
contained, with complete examples of short fiction, editorials, corre-
spondence, and competitions. The “building blocks” of the structure
are the serialized fiction, which continued from month to month and
often took up to a year to conclude; the dialogues created from ongoing
discussions in the editorial section of the magazine; and the publication
of competition results. Together, these magazine components, and the
monthly parts in which they are placed, form an aggregate of knowledge
that girls could use to develop their learning.
The aggregation of Atalanta’s knowledge was formed explicitly
through the production of an annual volume, comprised of the 12
monthly numbers and published each year in October to take advan-
tage of Christmas sales. Undoubtedly, readers of the annual consumed
Atalanta differently from those who read it monthly, since they read it
as a book rather than as a monthly issue. Of course, the annual was a
serial as well, appearing yearly. Furthermore, the annuals could be more
easily collected given their format. As hardcover books, with higher
quality paper, they were less ephemeral than the monthly versions. In
some cases, readers of the monthly parts arranged to have their cop-
ies bound, presumably so that they could establish a more permanent
collection of their magazine.
By binding their copies into volumes, the collectors of Atalanta
transformed the magazine from a temporary repository of knowledge
into a commodity to be saved and potentially reread at a later date.

The collector, of course, knew the value of, and the values embedded
in, the magazine and could look to a bookshelf filled with numbers of
Atalanta with satisfaction because ownership allowed her to associate
herself with the values of the magazine. Baudrillard explains that “our
everyday objects are in fact objects of a passion” (85). They represent an
emotional investment as well as a financial one. These objects “become
things of which I am the meaning, they become my property and my
passion” (Baudrillard 85). Paul van der Grijp writes that “[c]ultivated
leisure … may imply the deliberate choice to use one’s free time, energy
and monetary resources to create a select collection of a set of precious
objects accompanied by a personal discourse of erudition” (31). A col-
lection of Atalanta issues or volumes became “precious objects” that
signified middle-class status and the leisure in which to consume them.
Moreover, both Baudrillard and van der Grijp use the term “passion,”
suggesting an emotional commitment to, and a significant enjoyment
of, the collected objects beyond the financial investment.
A collection of monthly issues or annual volumes of Atalanta signified
the learning and knowledge of the collector. A collection of Atalanta
numbers also implied a particular reading community. In the last dec-
ades of the nineteenth century, girls had a range of periodicals avail-
able to them, including the Girl’s Own Paper, the most popular among
the girls’ magazines. Although the collecting of Atalanta suggests that
the models of girlhood in the magazine were attractive to collectors,
“readers have not always responded to texts in prescriptive or even
predictable ways” (Brake et al. 4). Thus the identity of the reader is “the
product of a complex set of negotiations and exchanges between his-
torically informed discursive practices and the individuals and commu-
nities with whom they came into contact” (4). While Atalanta certainly
could have been collected by girl readers with little interest in scholarly
learning, the magazine was also collected to reinforce the importance of
scholarship and learning for late-nineteenth-century girl readers.
Every number of Atalanta had two functions: to be read (at once or
at a later date) and to be possessed. The value of the object (the issue or
volume of Atalanta) came from how it allowed its owner to see herself
in the figures of the girls in its pages because, as Baudrillard explains,
“what you really collect is always yourself” (91). In collecting Atalanta,
then, the reader collected images of girls who pursue higher educa-
tion or who, at the least, value learning and scholarship. Owning one
or more numbers of Atalanta allowed the owner to demonstrate her
education through the presence of the magazine on her shelves. Her
Kristine Moruzi 153
collection of Atalanta was a symbol of her achievement; knowledge

was commodity to be collected and displayed. Yet the collection also
functioned as a repository of the owner’s scholarship. Although the
information contained in Atalanta’s literary essays had been read and
absorbed, the owner could always return to the source for clarification
and for new reading suggestions. At the same time, because the names
of prize winners and commended essays were published within the
pages of the magazine, in a very tangible fashion the collection named
and embodied its owner’s scholarly accomplishments.
The scholarly nature of Atalanta’s intended readership was highlighted
through the regular monthly section entitled the Atalanta Scholarship
and Reading Union. In this series, the literary works of well-known writ-
ers were discussed by respected contributors: Lucy Toulmin Smith wrote
about John Ruskin, Edmund Gosse about Robert Browning, Richard
Garnett about John Keats, Mrs L. B. Walford about Frances Burney,
and Sarah Tytler about George Eliot.4 In the first number of the regular
Scholarship and Reading Union series, Andrew Lang discusses the liter-
ary work of Sir Walter Scott.5 Lang encourages girls to read Scott’s novels
because they “will probably find them among the best books” (49) and
establishes the Scholarship and Reading Union series as a source of
excellent book recommendations and literary knowledge. Lang’s essay
is followed by Scholarship Competition Questions, to which readers are
encouraged to submit a response. In this case, subscribers have a choice
of two questions:
1. What seems to you to have been Scott’s Ideal of a Prose Romance?

2. Discuss the Plot of Guy Mannering. (Lang 54)
These questions were designed to promote scholarship by encouraging

Atalanta readers to read the novel chosen for the month (in this case
Guy Mannering) and then to submit an essay answering one or both of
the questions. An additional note informs readers that “their Papers
must not exceed in any case 500 words. Quality, not quantity, will be
the test of excellence” (Lang 54). Readers are asked to identify their
scholarly status by noting, at the close of the essay, whether they have
been on the Honour List in the past and the number of times they have
appeared. Each month, the names of those Reading Union members
whose essays were of good quality were printed in the Honour List. The
publication of their names, especially under the heading of the Honour
List, provided them with cultural capital within the community of
the magazine. As Mavis Reimer observes, the world created by Meade
in Atalanta “was a world of words” (222) that was, I argue, reinforced

through the magazine’s focus on reading. In particular, the Scholarship
and Reading Union – a regular feature of Atalanta – could be read like a
serial story despite its lack of an explicit overarching narrative: “a part
at a time, with breaks between reading periods dictated by published
format” (Hughes and Lund, Victorian 2). Moreover, the time between
the appearance of each monthly issue could be used productively by
the girl scholar to read the designated text for the month and write her
latest essay for the Scholarship and Reading Union.
Readers could demonstrate the depth and breadth of their reading
through another of Atalanta’s competitions. In the November 1887
issue, the editors began a series of Search Passages competitions, in
which readers were required to identify the author and the source text.
The answers were provided in the following issue and demonstrated the
range of literature with which Atalanta’s readers were expected to be
familiar. In this issue, the passages refer to Shakespeare’s Henry V, King
Lear, and Twelfth Night, Charles Lamb’s In an Album to a Clergyman’s
Lady, and Percy Shelley’s “And like a Dying Lady, Lean and Pale” and
“Ode to the West Wind.”
In order to submit to the Scholarship and Reading Union or the
Search Passage competitions, each reader was asked to include a coupon
clipped from the current issue. This coupon system worked to ensure
that each girl purchased her own copy of the magazine, rather than
borrowing a copy from a friend or reading it at the library. Although
Atalanta’s editors and contributors generally encouraged their readers
to pursue scholarly achievement, the magazine was undoubtedly a
commercial enterprise (in contrast to church magazines, for example,
where profit was not typically the primary motivation). The competi-
tions were part of the magazine’s strategy of attracting and maintaining
a loyal readership.
Scholarly readers of the magazine were rewarded materially with
scholarships and prizes. At the end of the year, those members who
had been mentioned five or more times for their Reading Union sub-
missions were “invited to send in Essays to compete for the Atalanta
Scholarship and Prizes” (“The Scholarship Competition” 124). In
November 1888, at the end of the first year, for example, 126 members
were invited to send in essays. A specific topic was posed – in this case,
not insignificantly, a quotation from Francis Bacon on the importance
of study – and each interested competitor submitted an essay of 2000
words drawing on examples from the books recommended in the previ-
ous year’s reading.6 This competition rewarded the scholarly reading of
the monthly competitions and encouraged readers to do their best in
Kristine Moruzi 155
each of the monthly essays. At £30 per year for three years, this scholar-
ship could represent a significant shift in a girl’s fortunes. It would not
pay for the whole of her fees at Oxford or Cambridge, for example, but
would help to defray her costs.7
The results of the Atalanta Scholarship Competition for 1887–1888
were published in the February 1889 issue. The Rev. T. H. Stokoe, D. D.,
Head Master of King’s College School, and Preacher to the Hon. Society
of Gray’s Inn, examined all the essays, and provides the following report:
Many of the Essays submitted to me were very creditable, and showed

a competent knowledge and appreciation of the books proposed for
reading during the year. … The chief defect however, was want of
method. There was a tendency to ignore the heading, and simply to
write a brief review of each author, with little or no reference to the
actual subject proposed. The Essay which entitles the writer to the
Scholarship is very satisfactory in every way. It was thoughtful and
sensible, and the style clear and good. (Stokoe 364)
Winners can be characterized because the lists include their names,

ages, and addresses. The fact that all four recipients were in their early
20s may suggest the typical age of readers, although many of the unsuc-
cessful candidates may have been younger. Two were from London,
with the others from Ireland and regional England, suggesting the wide
distribution of the magazine. In addition to the winners, the results
of the remainder of the girls are divided into three classes so each
competitor could see how the Rev. Stokoe had assessed her essay.
This list of scholars was a vital component of the network of educated
readers that developed through the serial production of Atalanta. The
list publicly acknowledged scholarly activity, with the names forming
the basis for the development and reinforcement of an educated ideal.
Each month, girls received the results of their own work and could see
how their own performance ranked against that of other scholarly girls.
The winning essay by Wilson and photographs of the winners and the
finalists appeared in the March 1888 number. These images of real girls
emphasized the ideals of the magazine by transforming the imagined
girl reader into an actual scholarly girl. These scholarly girls were not
representations of an imagined, ideal girl, but were real girls who could
collect images of themselves while at the same time inspiring other girl
readers to similar achievements.
Baudrillard concludes that collections are never meant to be com-
pleted. Would a girl owner have wanted her collection of Atalanta to
be complete? Or was she always seeking the next number, in which her
hopes, aspirations, and desires would be depicted? In A Magazine of Her

Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine 1800–1914 (1996),
Margaret Beetham argues that “femininity is always represented in
[women’s] magazines as fractured, not least because it is simultaneously
assumed as given and as still to be achieved” (1). The “educated girl”
is also fractured, in the sense that the collection of Atalanta represents
the learning she has already (hopefully) achieved, yet each month there
appears a new issue with new content to be consumed and mastered.
According to Baudrillard, “every object oscillates between a practical
specificity, a function which is in a sense its manifest discourse, and
absorption by a series or collection where it becomes one term in a
latent, repetitive discourse” (93). A new number of Atalanta, then,
might be said to have a “practical specificity” as it provides the next
instalment in the serialized story, the new Scholarship and Reading
Union with reading suggestions and search passages, letters from con-
tributors, and the latest editorials. This unique issue will be read, of
course (and possibly reread), but it also represents the latest in the series
and in the collection, where it becomes a term in the latent, repetitive
discourse of serialized educated femininity. Each issue serves an edu-
cational and socializing function when it is read, but in collecting the
magazine the girl collects herself, an educated, middle-class girl who
retains the feminine ideals of beauty, health, and virtue.
Moreover, as Baudrillard further explains, “any object” being col-
lected “immediately becomes the foundation of a network of habits,
the focus of a set of behavioural routines. Conversely, there is probably
no habit that does not centre on an object. In everyday existence the
two are inextricably bound up with each other” (93). The latest issue of
Atalanta functioned as the foundation (and reinscription) of a network
of habits related to reading, domestic responsibilities, and study. Deidre
Lynch argues that rereading represents a “set of socially regulated
consumption practices” (91). These “virtuous habits” can be “taken as
evidence of readers’ regular hours and sober lives” (91). Thus, a collec-
tion of Atalanta represented not only the scholarly achievement and
intellectual improvement embodied in the pages of the magazine, but
also the discipline required to read and reread such material. Habits of
regular, rigorous, and methodical scholarship were particularly impor-
tant for those girls who aspired to study at the university level. The
collection of Atalanta represented scholarly discipline that such girls
would need in the future.
Atalanta catered to girls’ aspirations by separating younger read-
ers from older readers in the competitions. For example, in the Prize
Kristine Moruzi 157
Competitions, the essays were divided into two groups, one for
competitors aged 15 years and over, and the other for competitors
under 15. This division into separate groups signalled the belief of the
magazine that the abilities and interests of girls shift at the age of 15.
The competition could be more equitably judged to allow younger girls
to demonstrate their achievements, which might not have been pos-
sible if they were competing against older girls. At the same time, the
younger girls were able to read the essays written by the winning older
girls, thus providing them with models of educated femininity to which
they could aspire. Significantly, the prizes – books in different amounts –
reinforce the scholarly nature of the magazine. For girls over the age of
15, the first prize was books to the value of one guinea, and second prize
was books worth half a guinea. For the under fifteens, the amounts for
first and second prize were books valued at ten shillings and a sixpence,
and five shillings respectively. Girls’ scholarship was thus rewarded
through the magazine in practical, monetary terms. Although not large
amounts by themselves, these prizes represented both economic and
cultural capital for the girls, which was accrued through their schol-
arly acumen. The public nature of the list of contributors made their
achievements visible to their friends and neighbours. Moreover, the
publication of the essays and the contestants’ names was undoubt-
edly an effective strategy in encouraging girls to continue reading the
magazine and to consider competing in the prize competitions, thus
reinforcing the scholarly ideal of the magazine.
The demography of Atalanta’s readership is made more visible through
the results of the Christmas Prize Competition, which was not part of
the monthly Scholarship and Reading Union competition. For an origi-
nal Christmas story of less than 1000 words, twenty-year-old Mary Grey
Bonham Carter “far outstrips our other writers and takes the First Prize”
(“Supplement” i). Second prize was divided between Florence Neele (17)
and Elsie J. C. Machlachlan (18). Following the winners, the magazine
“Highly Commended” 14 members and “Commended” 32 members
by identifying their names and ages. The remaining 62 members were
acknowledged through a listing of their names but without identify-
ing age. This list demonstrates that most of the members with “Highly
Commended” or “Commended” essays were between the ages of 17
and 20. Girls between these ages were reading and contributing to the
magazine, in part because girls of this age who wished to attend Girton
or Newnham needed to be actively working towards their goal through
a serious course of study. The scholarly content of the magazine made it
an ideal source for study since it could be collected to fulfil this purpose.
Of course, this discussion of the general age of the readers excludes

those who submitted essays that were not judged good enough to
receive a commendation, which could conceivably belong to younger
readers. It also omits those readers who read the magazine, but who
were not interested in the scholarly competitions. Nonetheless, this list
does suggest that girls submitting high-quality essays were in their late
teens and had presumably been reading the magazine for some time
and learning from the essays submitted by other readers.
Fewer submissions were received for the under-fifteen competition,
where competitors were asked to describe “Our Home” in an essay
not to exceed 400 words. Only 23 people submitted entries for this
competition, suggesting that the majority of the readers were 15 or
older. Of the ten Highly Commended or Commended entries, all but
two were submitted by girls aged 13 or 14. The editor writes, “Well
done, Miss Lucy Margaret Rankin! The description of your home reads
like a little poem. We prophesy you will wield the pen to some purpose
one of these days. Miss Blackith’s style is simple and pleasant. We have
pleasure in awarding prizes to both papers” (“Supplement” i). The edi-
tor’s comment implies that Rankin’s writing is of such quality that she
might someday be published elsewhere, suggesting the professionaliza-
tion of her amateur work. These girls, aged 12 and 14, were rewarded
for the quality of their writing by having their names appear directly
below the names of older girls who wrote lengthier and more complex
essays. This implicitly encouraged younger girls to continue writing and
provided examples of older girls who were succeeding.8
Alongside the literary components of the Scholarship and Reading
Union pages were the illustrations of scholarly girlhood that also
appeared each month at the top of the first page of the section. These
narrative illustrations typically feature both text – usually a short quota-
tion from a poem or essays – and image. In her study of the function
of visual imagery in Victorian culture, Julia Thomas explains that the
“intertwining of the visual and textual … works to subvert the idea that
there is a fixed distinction between these realms” (5). The interpreta-
tion of Atalanta’s illustrations depends on the interaction between the
visual and textual elements. The images frequently depict groups of girls
holding books, reading, and studying, thereby providing a model of
scholarly girlhood to be emulated by readers, while the textual elements
typically reinforce the appropriateness and relevance of scholarly work
for girls. Thomas underscores the uncertain relationship that exists
between text and image, which “renders these meanings unstable and
undecidable[,] … a relation that is always in process, renegotiated from
Kristine Moruzi 159
one picture and historical moment to the next” (10). Consequently,

although any reading of Atalanta’s illustrations must be tentative,
images of scholarly girls dominate. This would have facilitated the col-
lection of “yourself” (Baudrillard 91), since girl readers with academic
interests could collect images of beautiful and feminine girls who were
engaged in scholarly pursuits.
The first illustration for the Scholarship and Reading Union, appearing
in October 1887, brings together five classically dressed girls with an
excerpt from Tennyson’s 1847 narrative poem The Princess. The girls’
dress and their strong, upright bodies signal their health, even though
mental education was often criticized for coming at the expense of
physical education. Their dress may also allude to the study of the
classics, a domain that had traditionally been excluded from girls’
education in favour of more appropriate feminine accomplishments
such as modern languages, painting, and dancing. In Charlotte Yonge’s
The Daisy Chain (1854), for example, Ethel May is forced to aban-
don her study of the classics to have more time to tend to her home
duties. Similarly, Priscilla Peel gives up the classics in favour of mod-
ern languages in order to improve her career prospects as a teacher in
L. T. Meade’s A Sweet Girl Graduate (1891). Readers of the original poem
would understand the complexities of its message since, as Victorian
visual culture scholar Lorraine Kooistra explains, although the poem
“purport[s] to deal with the contemporary woman question, [it]
silence[s] feminist aspirations through the institution of marriage and
the biological imperative of maternity” (206). In contrast, the excerpt
included in Atalanta extols the importance of knowledge, encouraging
girls to “drink deep” (“Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union” 49)
from the newly unsealed fountain of knowledge to enhance their nobil-
ity. Without drinking from the fountain, they would be susceptible to
the traditionally feminine sins of emptiness, gossip, spite, and slander
that would make them slaves to vapid feminine domesticity and less
desirable models of femininity.
In the Scholarship and Reading Union, text and image are consistently
intertwined to produce meaning. Yet, as Thomas explains, these mean-
ings can be “highly political” because of their relationship to the “cultural
events and assumptions that mark the moments of their creation and
circulation, from issues of national and international significance … to
those that are seemingly more domestic (what women should wear and
how they are meant to behave)” (15). For example, the complex associa-
tions between girlhood and scholarship are reflected in the December
1888 illustration (see Figure 7.1). The image is divided into two rows of
three panels each. In the top row, girls are reading, or sitting with books
in hand. In the bottom row, a soldier prepares for battle, fights a mon-
ster, and lies dead on the battlefield. Each of these bottom panels also
includes a single word: Dutie, Chivalrie, and Glorie, respectively. Learning
is encouraged in the text appearing above and below each of the images
in the top row. The quotation above the first frame reads (in translation),
“And if the old books were all gone, the key of remembrance would be
lost,” from Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. Below the first frame is
another Chaucer quotation from The House of Fame, Book III: “Wherefore
to study and rede always I purpose to do day by day.” Through the
inclusion of the bottom frame, the girl’s scholarship is equated with the
“dutie” of the soldier to prepare for battle. Likewise, the girl has a respon-
sibility to arm herself with books and knowledge.
Figure 7.1 “Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union,” Atalanta Dec. 1888: 49.
Print.
Kristine Moruzi 161
The second frame stands out from those on either side because of the
circular image containing two girls, sitting together, reading a book.
Scholarly work can be a community effort since the single girl in the
first and third panels is joined by a companion. Qualities with which
they should be associated are described textually as love, fraternity,
“chivalrie,” courtesy, and bravery. Above and below them is a quotation
from Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls: “I hope some day to read in such a
way that I shall dream something that will bring me greater success, and
thus I will not refrain from reading.” Strengthened by a serious course
of reading, girls can aspire to success that they have yet to imagine.
Directly above the girls’ heads is a biblical quotation from Job: “I will
fetch my knowledge from afar / And ascribe Wisdom unto my Maker.”9
Education is positioned as a girl’s religious duty. Her wisdom is owed
to God’s grace and benevolence, yet the girl must seek her knowledge
“from afar,” possibly at a Cambridge or Oxford college. Once armed
with this knowledge, or wisdom, the girl scholar can achieve feats of
knightly valour, or “chivalrie,” as the brave soldier does in the panel
below. In the final frame, a girl wearing scholarly robes kneels in front
of a book lit by a bright light. The frame contains text from Dante
Rossetti’s 1881 poem “Rose Mary”: “In this glass all things are showne”
and “daughter once more I bid you reade.” In a fascinating juxtaposi-
tion, although the soldier in the panel below lies dead on the battle-
field, the girl scholar can achieve “glorie” while alive. Her duty to obtain
knowledge is almost religious in nature, an idea reflected in her pose of
prayer. Moreover, the relative size of the panels, with the larger panels
containing the narrative of the girl scholar, reinforces the importance
of the scholarly endeavour that is reiterated elsewhere in the magazine
and particularly in this section.
Beneath the illustration is an extract from a play by English dramatist
James Shirley. In the original context, this excerpt from A Lady of Pleasure
(1637) encourages a young man to pursue his university studies; when
included in Atalanta, however, this text is transformed to encourage
girls instead. Shirley is recontextualized so that he encourages learning
for girls of all classes. The reference to “nobility of birth” could be inter-
preted inclusively, although an alternative reading suggests that learning
is a vital accompaniment to a girl’s nobility. Certainly the girls depicted
in the illustration have middle-class markers in the form of their neat
hair and clean clothing, and the well-ordered domestic setting. While
not all girls would have necessarily been familiar with the writings of
Shirley, Chaucer, or Rossetti, this illustration signals the literary knowl-
edge and achievements to which girls who read Atalanta could aspire.
The illustrations associated with the Scholarship and Reading Union

were occasionally repeated. The image of the five classically dressed girls
appeared in October, November, and December of 1887, and again in
November 1888 and October 1889. Similarly, the six-panel illustration
appeared multiple times. In each case, the images appear with the same
textual excerpts, thereby reinforcing the scholarly ideals instantiated in
previous months. One possible reason for the repetition of these images
was expense, since commissioning unique images each month would
have been costly. Although the recurring images could have functioned
as a repeating signifier for this section of the magazine, they were not
repeated with any particular pattern, which may suggest that the deci-
sion to repeat a particular image depended on the amount of space
available.
These illustrations are repetitive only to the extent that the reader
interprets them in the same way each time she sees them, an unlikely,
if not impossible, scenario. Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition,
writes that “repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does
change something in the mind which contemplates it” (70). A reader of
a periodical would be hard pressed to “repeat” the reading experience
of a serial publication exactly. Beetham argues that “the periodical does
not demand to be read from front to back in order” and “openly offers
readers the chance to construct their own texts” (“Open” 98) because
they can be selective in determining what text they will read and in
which order. Among many other factors, a girl’s reading experience of
Atalanta could have differed based on her experience with the maga-
zine, the number of months or years she had “taken” it, whether she
had read this issue before, whether she had submitted an essay to one
of the competitions, and whether she was collecting the magazine. The
Atalanta reader who returned to a particular issue of the magazine was
guaranteed a new reading experience, even if she was rereading material
or revisiting an illustration.
Of course, in addition to the scholarly content, Atalanta was also
designed to be entertaining. Undoubtedly, one reason that middle-class
girls’ magazines were collected was to amass all the parts of an enter-
taining serial story, which could be reread at leisure. Yet the repetition
of scholarly content – through the Scholarship and Reading Union,
numerous informational articles about colleges for women, and occa-
sional fictional content – encouraged girls to pursue scholarly achieve-
ment and rewarded that pursuit both through material means and
through the intrinsic benefits arising from the satisfaction of collecting
and displaying the symbols of their achievement.
Kristine Moruzi 163
Notes
1. For further details about the medicalization of the education debate, see Joan
Burstyn’s “Education and Sex: The Medical Case against Higher Education for
Women in England, 1870-1900.” See also Burstyn’s Victorian Education and the
Ideal of Womanhood.
2. See Kristine Moruzi, Constructing Girlhood Through the Periodical Press,
1850–1915.
3. The series also included articles on shorthand, needlework, and
chromo-lithography.
4. Lucy Toulmin Smith was a literary scholar and sister-in-law to L. T. Meade.
In 1894, she was appointed librarian of Manchester College, Oxford (Porter).
Writer Sir Edmund Gosse’s most important book is Father and Son (1907), but
he was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and wrote and published
poetry as well as biographies, essays, and literary criticism (Thwaite). Richard
Garnett was keeper of printed books and superintendent of the Reading
Room at the British Museum library and was responsible for the first print-
ing of its general catalogue. He also wrote literary journalism, contributing
to the Literary Gazette and The Examiner (Bell). Lucy Bethia Walford was a
novelist and artist. Her work was first exhibited at the annual Royal Scottish
Exhibition in 1868 and in subsequent years. Her first novel was published in
1874, and she wrote extensively for various London journals (Finkelstein).
Sarah Tytler was the pseudonym of Henrietta Keddie, a prolific novelist who
produced primarily domestic realism and historical fiction (Mitchell).
5. Andrew Lang was a professional writer, producing reviews and other articles
for a wide range of periodicals. He was also a poet and wrote extensively on
anthropology and folklore (Donaldson).
6. “Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability” from “Of Studies” by
Francis Bacon, published in 1597.
7. In Arthur Talbot Vanderbilt’s What To Do With Our Girls; Or, Employments for
Women (1884), he details the costs associated with Oxbridge higher education
for women. Girton College was £105 per year, excluding books and laundry.
Newnham Hall was 60 guineas for room and board with a further 10 to 15
guineas for tuition. Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford) was £75 for room and board
with £15 for tuition (149–50).
8. Also of note are submissions by two boys, James W. Ley and Bruce Haylar. Ley,
age 10, receives a commendation for his essay.
9. See Job 36:3. The “wisdom” of this translation varies from the King James
Version, which ascribes “righteousness” to the Maker, further emphasizing
the role of girls’ education, which will make them wise.
Works cited
Primary sources
“Atalanta.” The Church Quarterly Review 27 (1889): 500–01. Print.
“Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union.” Atalanta 1 (1887/88): 49. Print.
Lang, Andrew. “English Men and Women of Letters of the Nineteenth Century.
I: Sir Walter Scott.” Atalanta 1 (1887/88): 49. Print.
Salmon, Edward. Juvenile Literature as It Is. London: Henry J. Drane, 1888. Print.
“The Scholarship Competition.” Atalanta 2 (1888/89): 124. Print.
Stokoe, Rev. T. H. “Atalanta Scholarship Competition for 1887–1888.” Atalanta 2
(Feb. 1888/89): 364. Print.
“Supplement.” Atalanta 1 (1887/88): i–ii. Print.
Vanderbilt, Arthur Talbot. What To Do With Our Girls; Or, Employments for Women.
London: Houlston, 1884. Print.
Secondary sources
Baudrillard, Jean. “II. A Marginal System: Collecting.” The System of Objects.
Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996. 85–106. Print.
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s
Magazine 1800–1914. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
——. “Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre.” Victorian
Periodicals Review 22.3 (1989): 96–100. Print.
Bell, Alan. “Garnett, Richard (1835–1906).” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. Web.
Brake, Laurel, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein. Introduction. Nineteenth-Century
Media and the Construction of Identities. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2000. 1–7. Print.
Burstyn, Joan. “Education and Sex: The Medical Case against Higher Education
for Women in England, 1870–1900.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 117.2 (1973): 79–89. Print.
——. Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood. London: Croom Helm,
1980. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
UP, 1994. Print.
Dixon, Diana. “Children and the Press, 1866–1914.” The Press in English Society
from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Michael Harris and Alan Lee.
London: Associated University Presses, 1986. 133–48. Print.
Donaldson, William. “Lang, Andrew (1844–1912).” Oxford Dictionary of National
Finkelstein, David. “Walford, Lucy Bethia (1845–1915).” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. Web.
Hughes, Linda K., and Michael Lund. “Textual/Sexual Pleasure and Serial
Production.” Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing
and Reading Practices. Ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten. Cambridge:
——. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1991. Print.
Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated
Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. Print.
Lynch, Deidre. “Canons’ Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use.” Bookish Histories:
Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900. Ed. Ina Ferris and Paul
Keen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 87–110. Print.
Mitchell, Rosemary. “Keddie, Henrietta (1827–1914).” Oxford Dictionary of
Moruzi, Kristine. Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. Print.
Porter, D. S. “Smith, Lucy Toulmin (1838–1911).” Oxford Dictionary of National
Kristine Moruzi 165
Reimer, Mavis. “Tales Out of School: L. T. Meade and the School Story.” Diss. U
of Calgary, 1994. Print.
Thomas, Julia. Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image.
Athens: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.
Thwaite, Ann. “Gosse, Sir Edmund William (1849–1928).” Oxford Dictionary of
van der Grijp, Paul. Passion and Profit: Towards an Anthropology of Collecting.
Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006. Print.
8
“I will not / be haunted / by
myself!”: Originality, Derivation,
and the Hauntology of the
Superhero Comic
Brandon Christopher
In “Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt,” which appeared in the

fourth issue of the comics series Showcase, published in 1956, Barry
Allen, a scientist in the “scientific detection bureau” (Broome and
Infantino 2), is doused in chemicals when a bolt of lightning strikes
his laboratory. The combination of chemicals and lightning changes
Allen’s molecular structure, and results in his becoming “the fastest
man on earth” (Kanigher and Infantino 7). Not surprisingly, given the
medium and genre in which the story is being told, Allen decides to
pursue a career as a superhero, adopting the alias “The Flash.” Allen
is not the first comic book character to adopt this nickname; the first
Flash, a former football player named Jay Garrick, had first appeared
16 years earlier in Flash Comics #1 (Fox and Lampert 1–15). In addition
to deriving his name from the earlier, so-called “Golden Age”1 Flash,
Allen’s superhero costume repeats Garrick’s lightning-bolt insignia,
and a pair of wings set above his ears derives from Garrick’s adop-
tion of a winged helmet, reminiscent of the Roman messenger god
Mercury. Rather than hiding the fact of its derivativeness, Showcase #4
foregrounds its intertextual borrowings. The first panel in which Allen
appears features a close-up of his hands holding an issue of Flash
Comics #13, and, again, the panel in which Allen decides to become a
superhero features a close-up of Flash Comics. In this way, the comic’s
citation of its predecessor works in multiple, potentially contradictory
ways. On the one hand, the comic acknowledges Flash Comics as its
inspiration, both explicitly through images of the prior comic and
implicitly through the adoption of a costume inspired by the previ-
ous Flash’s costume. On the other hand, by representing the previous
Flash as a character in a comic book in Barry Allen’s world, the comic
166
Brandon Christopher 167
dissociates the new iteration of the character from his predecessor,

presenting him as existing at one level of representation closer to
reality than the Flash of the 1940s.
The simultaneous performance of influence and originality embod-
ied in Showcase #4 is a fundamental aspect of the superhero comic.
Comics culture, especially the culture surrounding superhero comics, is
strongly characterized by nostalgia, “a burden,” Douglas Wolk argues,
that “comics have been carrying … since the culture around them
began to coalesce” (69). Drawing on decades-long publishing histories,
comics writers negotiate the dual pressures of history and nostalgia,
hearkening back insistently to the past in order to authorize themselves.
As the example of Showcase #4 demonstrates, however, the past that
the comic recalls is itself a fiction. That is, in the fictional universe of
comic books, the original Flash had not been a comic book character,
but a real person. In representing Flash Comics, an actual publication,
within the fictional universe of Showcase #4, writer Robert Kanigher
and artist Carmine Infantino blur distinctions between the intertex-
tual and the intratextual,2 appropriating and recontextualizing the
earlier comic within their own text. Taking Kanigher and Infantino’s
model of citation as a starting point, this essay analyses the function of
self-referential citation in superhero comic books.
Specifically, this essay analyses the ways in which manifestations of
influence and derivation in Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid and Sandman
and Mark Waid and Leinil Yu’s Superman: Birthright work to distance
these comics from previous iterations, using citation as a means of
foreclosing questions of originality and repetition. The effect of this
is a denial of the fundamentally cyclical nature of the medium and
genre in which they work. The essay contrasts this approach with that
of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, which highlights the extent to which it
is indebted to previous versions of the comic, embodying the narrative
structure of endless return typical of superhero comics in its eponymous
revenant protagonist. Furthermore, the essay reads these engagements
with questions of influence and originality through the lens of discus-
sions of performative citation by J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and
Judith Butler, drawing attention to the way in which citation in comic
books does more than simply establish and reinforce character and set-
ting. Through the unique interplay of intertextuality and intratextuality
that characterizes mainstream superhero comics, citation functions per-
formatively for the comics’ creative teams, fashioning for them a spe-
cific creative identity through the establishment of a selective genealogy
of influence and derivation.
In How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin emphasizes the crucial

importance of context to his seminal definition of performative
speech acts:
A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way

hollow or void if said by an actor on a stage, or if introduced in a
poem, or spoken in soliloquy. … Language in such circumstances is
in special ways … used not seriously but in ways parasitic upon its
normal use. (21)
For Austin, the performative utterance that is a recitation, that recalls

a previous enacting instead of simply enacting, is “parasitic.” Jacques
Derrida, in “Signature, Event, Context,” however, queries Austin’s
description: “is not what Austin excludes as anomalous, exceptional,
‘non-serious,’ that is citation[,] … the determined modification of
a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without
which there would not even be a ‘successful’ performative?” (325).
Performatives are ritualistic, Derrida argues, drawing their authority
to constitute precisely from their being re-iterations, an aspect of the
performative that Austin himself – terming it “infelicity” – has already
admitted as potentially problematic: “infelicity is an ill to which all
acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial”
(Austin 18–19). “[T]he performative’s referent,” Derrida writes, “is not
outside it, or in any case preceding it or before it. It does not describe
something which exists outside and before language” (321). That is,
the performative act, seemingly authorized by prior iterations of itself,
in fact “produces or transforms” the very original that it claims to
reproduce (321).
Modifying, or, rather, specifying, Derrida’s claims, Judith Butler
argues in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” that “gender is a
kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind
of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect
and consequence of the imitation itself” (722). In order to maintain its
authority, identity “requires to be instituted again and again” through
performative reiteration (725). While Butler is explicitly discussing
gender in her essay, her argument translates in relatively uncompli-
cated ways from gender to genre, itself a system of categorization
whose specific instantiations are constantly redefining themselves
retroactively by way of performative iteration. Like Butler, Derrida sees
in the performative a collapse of original and citation: “Repetition and

first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any
first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself”
(Derrida 10, italics in original). With this passage from Specters of Marx,
Derrida inaugurates his discussion of “hauntology,” outlining what
might be described as a poetics of revenancy, in which the original, in
its spectral, citational form, is always already being recalled, “because
it begins by coming back” (11, italics in original). This is a crucial aspect
of concepts of the “original”: originality is a function of citation. That
is, it is only in the context of its being repeated that the original can
signify as such.
Profoundly citational, the superhero comic book is “founded on a
dialectic of repetition and difference” (Groensteen 115), compulsively
telling and retelling the origins of its heroes. Its bivectoral narrative
structure, its pervasive, simultaneous yearning for past and future,
makes comics into what Pierre Masson describes as a “stuttering art
[art du bégaiement]” (Masson 71–72). In narrative terms, however, the
past is not always easily recuperable in superhero comics. As Umberto
Eco notes in his analysis of “The Myth of Superman,” Superman sto-
ries “develop in a kind of oneiric climate … where what has happened
before and what has happened after appears extremely hazy” (17).
That is, in order to continue to tell stories about a character over seven
decades, writers of the comic must situate the temporally dynamic nar-
ratives of individual issues of the comic book within, and subordinate
them to, a temporally static meta-narrative which has a beginning and a
middle, but, crucially, no end.3 Even as the immediate past and present
have often been deliberately vague, the distant past, Superman’s origin,
has been constantly on display in the comic books since the character’s
first appearance in 1938. It is important to understand, though, that to
speak of Superman’s “origin” is to speak of two related but discrete his-
tories. On the one hand, the term refers to the history of the character
as established within the meta-narrative of the various comic books in
which he appears; on the other hand, the term simultaneously evokes
the publication history of the character, not only in comic books, but
also in the Superman cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s, The Adventures
of Superman radio serial that ran from 1940 to 1951, and the various
live-action film and television adaptations of the character from the
1950s Adventures of Superman television series to the Smallville televi-
sion series of the last decade. That is, the fetishization of the character’s
origin narrative is always also a fetishization of the publishing contexts
in which that narrative has been and is being expressed.
II
Published in 2003 and 2004, Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu’s
Superman Birthright is one of a number of iterations of the Superman
origin story, which has undergone a wholesale revision at least twice in
the last 25 years; first, in John Byrne and Dick Giordano’s 1986 The Man
of Steel and, more recently, in Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s 2009–2010
Superman: Secret Origin.4 Unlike the two works that bracket it, however,
Waid and Yu’s foray into remaking the Superman mythos proposes an
updating of Superman’s origin story for the twenty-first century, rather
than a complete re-envisioning of the character: Superman, but with
email. As with most, if not all, engagements with the Superman story,
Waid and Yu deploy a number of iconic images connecting their work
to previous iterations of the character, such as a close-up image of a
business shirt ripped open to reveal the S-Shield logo on the front of
Superman’s costume.5 In addition to this sort of straightforward cita-
tion, Waid and Yu provide the attentive, and initiated, reader with a
number of nods towards the history of the comic book. For instance,
early in the series the comic reproduces almost exactly the cover of
Action Comics #1, the first comic book in which Superman appeared
(Figure 8.1). This panel, a full-page spread, offers a neat encapsulation
of Waid and Yu’s strategy in their updating of the Superman mythos.
Taking the signs and gestures of Superman’s history, Waid and Yu recite
them reverently while simultaneously recontextualizing and updating
them as in the case, for instance, when the modern Superman, rather
than change in a phone booth, changes behind a “MetroCel” billboard
depicting a phone booth (219). In this way, Waid and Yu’s text signals
both its debt to and departure from previous iterations of the story.
The mode of citation at play here is characteristic of mainstream
superhero comics. It is a combination of the intertextual and the intra-
textual in that comics writers’ and artists’ citations of previous iterations
of characters are simultaneously references to discrete other texts and
to earlier moments in an ostensibly coherent metastory, and thus they
function as citations both between and within texts. However, these
inter-intratextual citations function beyond simply marking the story’s
temporal resituation. Indeed, many of the comic’s recapitulations of the
touchstones of previous versions of Superman have little or nothing to
do with the story’s twenty-first-century setting. In the opening issue of
the series, which recounts the destruction of Superman’s home world,
Superman’s parents, as they prepare to launch him towards Earth,
presciently refer to their son as both “the last son of Krypton” (13), and
Figure 8.1 Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu, Superman: Birthright (New York: DC
Comics, 2004): 50; Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, “Superman,” Action Comics #1
( June 1938), Detective Comics [DC Comics]: Cover. Print.
“man of tomorrow” (16) – two epithets by which he will be (and has

been) commonly known. On the page that transitions from the past to
the present of the story, the image of the spaceship carrying the infant
Superman to Earth alternates in a series of increasingly large panels
with the image of a flying bullet (21), recalling the famous descrip-
tion of Superman as “faster than a speeding bullet” – a line which is
explicitly recapitulated later in the series as the headline to a news
story written by Clark Kent himself (134). Birthright repeats the major-
ity of these famous descriptions of Superman, always in contexts that
simultaneously recall and sidestep Waid and Yu’s predecessors. When
he happens on his mother checking out “UFOs.com,” Clark teasingly
asks her, “What’s up in the sky this time, Ma? A bird or a plane?” (60).
Similarly, Clark’s instant messaging nickname is “Mildmannered” (204),
a nod towards the conventional description of Superman’s alter ego as a
“mild-mannered reporter.”
Finally, to return briefly to the images in the collection, Waid and
Yu’s comic features a panel about halfway through the series that
shows Superman winking, a long-standing touchstone of Superman

stories (123).6 The wink came to prominence as the way in which most
episodes of the Superman cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s ended, that
is, with Superman, disguised as Clark Kent, sharing a knowing wink
with the audience. Waid and Yu’s use of the wink is noteworthy for the
purposes of this chapter on a couple of levels. First, the wink is tradi-
tionally used at the end of the story; used in that moment, it is a brief,
collegial breaking down of the fourth wall that emphasizes the dramatic
irony that underpins the Superman/Clark Kent combined identity by
acknowledging the viewer’s status as Superman’s sole confidant. Waid
and Yu’s use of the wink in Birthright functions differently: the wink
occurs well before the midpoint of the story, and it is directed not at
the reader, but behind Superman at Clark Kent’s colleagues Lois Lane
and Jimmy Olsen. Furthermore, the wink itself is incongruous. It is
not an indication of a shared secret. In fact, in the panel immediately
following the wink, one of the characters on the roof watches incredu-
lously as Superman flies off, asking, “Who is that guy?” (123). This line
underscores the extent to which Waid and Yu’s iteration of the wink
differs from its conventional use; here, rather than a sign of openness, it
is a sign of mystification. Thus, as it does in other instances, the comic
restates a conventional characteristic of Superman storytelling, but does
so in such a way that it maintains distance from the source material.
In distancing themselves from the source material, Waid and Yu
assert instead a connection to the reader. Just as Superman’s wink in
the mid-century cartoons interpellates the viewer, making him/her
Superman’s co-conspirator, so too does this wink hail the reader into
acknowledging a shared secret. In this case, however, it is not a secret
shared between Superman and the reader, or Superman and the other
characters. The wink here marks a transaction between the creators
of the book and their audience. It is a performative acknowledge-
ment of the intertextual nature of the comic book. That is, the wink
simultaneously draws attention to and is an instance of Birthright’s
compulsive citationality. Taken together, these recontextualized cita-
tions demonstrate the extent to which the identity that Waid and
Yu adopt in and through their text is constructed, is fundamentally
performative, defining itself as it enacts that definition. That is, by
emphasizing the text’s patchwork nature, Waid and Yu perform the
role of Superman-writer as a drag identity. Importantly, though, the
invocation of drag here should not be misconstrued as an argument
for the subversiveness of the comic. As Butler points out in Bodies That
Matter, “there is no necessary connection between drag and subversion.
… [D]rag may well be used in the service of both denaturalization

and reidealization” (125). Reidealization is overwhelmingly the effect
in the case of Birthright, as Waid and Yu establish their authority as
Superman writers/artists through this winking performance of deriva-
tiveness, through an accretion of capital that depends on the aura of
the original.7
Indeed, reinventions of Superman repeatedly figure themselves
as providing a return to early versions of the Superman story. As
discussed above, Waid and Yu recall the very first appearance of
Superman by citing the cover of Action Comics #1. When John Byrne
offers his reimagining of Superman in Man of Steel, he describes his
approach as “taking Superman back to the basics” (Sanderson 30),
a comment that he later elaborates upon, specifying a vision of his
iteration of Superman as “basically Siegel and Shuster’s Superman
meets the Fleischer Superman … in 1986” (30). In a similar attempt
to recall previous iterations of the character, the final words spoken
in Johns and Frank’s Superman: Secret Origin are “Look! Up in the sky!”
which invert the opening lines of the 1941 Superman cartoon, “Up in
the sky! Look!” Although they both cite the same source texts, Byrne’s
version and Johns and Frank’s version of Superman’s origins directly
contradict one another.8 The fact that each of these writer/artist teams
can and do make seemingly contradictory claims on the authority of
the original underscores the paradox facing comics creators writing
Superman’s origin in the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-
turies: there is, in effect, no original Superman story. Aspects of the
Superman mythos which have been canonized as “original” derive
from a range of sources. Superman’s status as the sole survivor of a
doomed planet originates in Action Comics. His ability to fly derives
from the Fleischer cartoons – the original Superman was simply a great
jumper. The now-iconic description of him as “faster than a speeding
bullet” originates from The Adventures of Superman radio serial. While
the infant Superman’s adoption by a farming couple from Kansas does
originate in the comics, it does not originate in Action Comics, in
which Superman was introduced in 1938. There, he was found and
dropped off at an orphanage (Siegel and Shuster, Action Comics 1).
The Kents are introduced in the first revision of Superman’s origins
in Superman #1, published in 1939 (Siegel and Shuster, Superman 1).9
What writers and artists of Superman comics do, then, is not so much
lay claim to a specific original as map out an authorized lineage for the
character, a lineage through which they then authorize themselves as
legitimate iterations of the Superman creator.
III
Superman is a special case. Only a few characters have the sort of pub-
lishing history that provides their writers with a variety of options for
telling and retelling the origin story. Most other characters do not bear
the kind of accumulated narrative or capital that Superman does. For
instance, when Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean resurrected the marginal
character of Black Orchid for DC Comics, publishers of Superman, in the
1980s, their subject was about as far from Superman, in terms of pub-
lishing history, as possible.10 Before Gaiman and McKean’s 1988 Black
Orchid miniseries, Black Orchid had been the main feature in a total of
three issues of Adventure Comics in 1973 before being the extra feature
in eight issues of The Phantom Stranger between 1974 and 1976. For
Gaiman and McKean, then, the sort of parasitic citation used by Waid
and Yu would be ineffective, given the obscurity of the character with
which they were working.
Black Orchid was a character with no origin story, whose identity
had never been divulged in her appearances in the 1970s. So, when
Gaiman and McKean created their version of Black Orchid, they had
free rein to create whatever origin they wanted for the character. Before
getting to the origin story, however, Gaiman and McKean, like Waid
and Yu, mined their character’s history, brief as it was, in order to
authorize themselves as comics creators. In the opening pages of the
comic, Gaiman and McKean simultaneously hearken back to earlier
iterations of Black Orchid and ironize the history they have been hired
to continue. As if advertising their departure from the conventions of
the superhero genre, Gaiman and McKean begin their comic by killing
the eponymous heroine. This moment is preceded by a number of other
details which signal the extent to which Gaiman and McKean’s decision
to kill the character derives from and engages with the dialectic of
repetition and originality that underpins comics writers’ performative
iterations of writerly identity.
Immediately before shooting the heroine, her captor pauses in what
seems initially like the clichéd moment in which the villain lectures the
hero, giving the hero the time and the information required to defeat
the villain. Just as he begins his lecture, the villain, known only at this
point as “Mr. Chairman,” interrupts himself, saying,
Hey … you know something? I’ve seen, y’know, the movies, James
Bond, all that. I’ve read the comics. So you know what I’m not
gonna do? I’m not going to lock you up in the basement before
interrogating you. I’m not going to set up some sort of complicated

laser beam deathtrap, then leave you alone to escape.
[…]
But you know what I am going to do? I’m going to kill you. Now. (14)
Just prior to the speech, the chairman has unmasked the disguised hero-
ine, who has infiltrated his corporation (Gaiman and McKean 12–13).
The full rubber mask that he pulls off of her is a hallmark of the 1970s
comics that featured Black Orchid, in virtually all of which the heroine
perfectly impersonates, by way of a rubber mask, a woman known to
the villains in order to get close to them. The unmasking in the original
comic was never shown; instead, in the penultimate scene, the villain
would discover a mask and some easily identifiable personal effects
and come to the realization that they had been fooled by the Black
Orchid. By showing the unmasking, Gaiman and McKean draw atten-
tion to the absurdity of the conceit. Not only is a rubber mask highly
unlikely to achieve a reasonable approximation of a human face, but
the costume that the Black Orchid wears, partially visible in the fourth
panel of the unmasking, would be impossible to hide under a business
suit. McKean’s illustrations emphasize this point by gradually shifting
the frame down along her body, creating the illusion of a difference in
size between the disguised and undisguised character. Also, immediately
prior to the unmasking the Black Orchid is trapped and bound in her
seat by the villain. Here, as with the mask, Gaiman and McKean recall
the 1970s iteration of the comics; however, in the 1970s comics, it is the
Black Orchid who ties women up in order to impersonate them.11 So,
in the first few pages, Gaiman and McKean simultaneously signal their
awareness of the storytelling traditions associated with the character,
and with the genre more generally, and their desire to invert, to ironize,
and ultimately to dispense with those traditions.
This is not the only time that Gaiman offered an ironized history for a
character when reviving a defunct superhero comic. In Sandman, which
ran from 1988 to 1996, Gaiman completely reimagined the central
character, altering the book from a standard, if somewhat surreal, super-
hero comic to a story of the life and death of the immortal, anthro-
pomorphized manifestation of dreams. Rather than simply ignore
the Sandman comics that had preceded his work, though, Gaiman
incorporated previous incarnations of the character into the story. For
instance, Gaiman’s character Hector Hall, a superhero who calls himself
“The Sandman,” was derived from the Sandman character created by
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in the 1970s. In contrast to the reverence of
the Superman writers and the subtle irony of his work on Black Orchid,
Gaiman’s treatment of this particular source material was sharply
parodic. Indeed, even the characters within the comic are scornful of
the 1970s Sandman. When this iteration of the hero challenges the
modern Sandman, known generally as Morpheus or Dream, and self-
importantly identifies himself as the Sandman, Gaiman and artist Chris
Bachalo dedicate six consecutive panels to their Sandman’s incredulous
laughter (Gaiman and Bachalo 17–18).
In another issue, Gaiman refigures another previous iteration of the
Sandman. Before Simon and Kirby created their interpretation of the
character, Gardner Fox had created a character known as The Sandman
in 1939. This Sandman, whose alter ego was Wesley Dodds, appears in
the first issue of Gaiman’s series; he is presented as adopting the identity
of the Sandman to combat insomnia brought on by the decades-long
imprisonment of Gaiman’s version of the character (Gaiman and Kieth,
“Sleep” 18). The point here is that, in each case, the previous incarna-
tions of the character are revealed in Gaiman’s reimagining to be deri-
vations of his creation, though it is worth pointing out that Gaiman’s
Sandman’s appearance owes a subtle but unmistakeable debt to Fox’s
so-called “Golden Age” iteration of the character.12 Just as with his treat-
ment of Black Orchid, Gaiman’s citations of earlier versions refuse sim-
ple categorization as repetition, emphasizing through parody a distance
between his work and those that preceded it.
While Gaiman’s comics, like Waid and Yu’s Birthright, offer recon-
textualized citations of previous iterations of the characters, the effect
achieved by Gaiman is not reidealization but “denaturalization,” to use
the alternative term in Butler’s binary of possible effects of drag (Bodies
125). That is, the means by which Gaiman resurrects these characters
and the ways in which he reincorporates their publishing histories into
his own comic are heavily invested in undermining traditional bina-
ries and hierarchies of old and new, paying and drawing attention to
the “constructed status of the original,” as Butler puts it (“Imitation”
724). Gaiman’s drag performance as comics writer, then, offers, to
borrow another term from Butler, an insubordinate form of citation,
undermining the very thing upon which it draws to authorize itself.
Although Gaiman does make a point in both of these comics of disa-
vowing the veneration for the past that tends to characterize retrospec-
tive moments in comics, he also engages in Waid and Yu’s reverential
mode of citation. Instead of gesturing towards the past, towards the his-
tories of the heroes of those comics, though, Black Orchid and Sandman
cite laterally. That is, all of the ways in which Black Orchid and Sandman
play with comics’ dominant modes of citation – killing the main charac-
ter at the beginning of the series, pointing out the absurdities inherent
to the comic’s concept, disassociating the comic’s present from the com-
ic’s past, and fundamentally inverting the basic conceit of the text – are
hallmarks of a comic that had undergone a re-envisioning in 1984 that
paved the way for Gaiman’s work in the latter half of the decade: Alan
Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing. In fact, the links between Gaiman’s
comics and Moore’s Swamp Thing are not simply tonal. Throughout
both Black Orchid and Sandman, elements of Moore’s comic are cited,
both textually and visually. For instance, in a panel of Black Orchid, the
central characters sit in a tree in a park in front of a tombstone whose
partially visible inscription reads “SWAMP” (Gaiman and McKean 86),
a reference to a Swamp Thing storyline from two years earlier in which
Swamp Thing is temporarily killed (Moore and Totleben 35–38). In the
third issue of Sandman, Morpheus visits John Constantine, a charac-
ter created by Moore who first appeared as a supporting character in
Swamp Thing. The issue cites Swamp Thing obliquely twice more, first
in Constantine’s reference to “the big green bloke” (9) and then visu-
ally by showing a list of cases on which Constantine had worked, three
of which – “Brujeria,” “Crisis,” and “American Gothic” – were Swamp
Thing storylines, and one of which – “The Plant Elemental” – refers
to the Swamp Thing itself (10). Gaiman’s citations of Moore’s Swamp
Thing thereby reorganize the genealogy of his comics series, appropriat-
ing a new “original” from which to assert their derivation. So, though
Gaiman reconfigures the trajectories by which he defines his and his
characters’ lineages, positioning his work as apart from other, derivative
continuations of comics series, he nevertheless constitutes his writerly
identity, like Waid and Yu, by way of reverent, performative citation.
However, in accreting the capital accumulated by its adopted source,
Gaiman’s iteration of this type of citation is explicit in acknowledging
the debt it owes to the structures established and authorized by Moore’s
work, a fact nowhere more evident than in a scene from Black Orchid
in which Moore’s Swamp Thing reaches inside Gaiman’s Black Orchid
and provides her with a handful of her own seeds by which she can
reproduce (114–15).13
IV
What, then, about Swamp Thing itself? As mentioned above, Moore’s

comic makes many of the same narrative moves that Gaiman’s com-
ics do. In “The Anatomy Lesson,” the second issue of Moore’s tenure
as writer of the comic,14 the reader is presented with the body of the
eponymous hero, “gray, brittle, tattooed by frost, quite dead” (Moore
et al. 15). Over the next two pages, the corpse is autopsied and the
uncanny contents of the creature’s body are inventoried: “two large,
pod-like structures within the chest cavity,” a “spongelike vegetable
brain,” a “useless heart,” “unworkable pseudo-kidneys,” and “organs
that couldn’t work [in] a body that had never needed them” (19–20).
The creature’s body replicates the forms of the human body, but the
material with which it does so is incapable of functioning as a human
body would. Up to that point in the history of the Swamp Thing comic,
the basic conceit of the comic had been that the Swamp Thing was bio-
scientist Alec Holland, who had been transformed into a giant, sham-
bling plant by a lab explosion in a swamp. Moore inverts the hierarchy
of the character’s hybrid nature: “we thought that the Swamp Thing
was Alec Holland, somehow transformed into a plant. It wasn’t. It was a
plant that thought it was Alec Holland! A plant that was trying its level
best to be Alec Holland …” (24). In this issue, then, Moore reimagines
the central narrative of the comic book from a conventional story of a
monstrous revenant to a story of passing. Swamp Thing is revealed to
be the flora of the Louisiana bayou in drag.
With this, it would seem as though Moore makes a clean break with
the character’s publishing history. The creature that inhabited the previ-
ous comics is dead, both in form and in conception. And, were Moore
following the same model that Gaiman follows with Black Orchid and
Sandman, this early, almost ritualistic performance of a break from the
past would signal the end of the comic’s consideration of its roots, and
would be left behind in favour of a story that would demonstrate the
independence and newness signalled by that performance. The reitera-
tive origin story for Gaiman, as, indeed, it is for the Superman writers
and artists, too, is a means to an end, a brief, ostentatious, acknowledge-
ment of indebtedness and connectedness whose recession is necessary
for the formation of a cohesive writerly identity.
Moore’s Swamp Thing, though, returns compulsively to prior itera-
tions of its hero’s origins. More significantly, it does so throughout
Moore’s tenure as writer. After “The Anatomy Lesson,” in which the
Swamp Thing’s previous origin story is debunked and rejected as a
“pathetic, misshapen parody” (Moore et al. 24), the following issue
contains a sequence in which the hero, who has returned to the swamp
and rooted himself there, dreams of carrying the skeleton of his former
self, which identifies itself as the last vestige of his humanity. After this,
the comic resembles Gaiman’s and Waid and Yu’s comics, in that it
seems to move on from a discussion of its past and to undertake a series

of new stories which do not concern themselves particularly with what
has gone before. Six issues later, however, in Swamp Thing #28, Moore
returns to the question of Swamp Thing’s previous incarnation. In the
middle of an idle conversation about the events of previous issues, the
Swamp Thing spots a ghostly figure staring at him. It is, we learn defini-
tively a couple of pages later, Alec Holland, or at least an apparition of
Alec Holland, the scientist whom the Swamp Thing formerly believed
himself to be. In a rage, the Swamp Thing declares defiantly, “I will
not / be haunted / by myself” (Moore and McManus 16). And, indeed,
every image of the ghostly Holland up to and including this page has
featured the apparition behind the hero, following or observing him.
From the next page onwards, the Swamp Thing pursues the ghost. He
follows it to the site of Holland’s death in the swamp, where he watches
his own origin, unable to intervene as it plays out in front of him. In
the silence following the almost ritualistic re-enactment of Holland’s
death, he watches as the previous incarnation of himself emerges from
the swamp. As the two reach for each other, the modern Swamp Thing’s
hand passes through the hand of his predecessor, who is, he recognizes,
insubstantial, “almost nothing” (17; Figure 8.2).15
Significantly, the history that the hero and the comic claim to dis-
pense with in this issue is not simply a narrative. This scene also marks
Moore’s coming to terms with the publishing heritage with which he
has been burdened. By juxtaposing the modern Swamp Thing against
its predecessor, the comic emphasizes the aesthetic differences between
earlier iterations of the creature and Moore’s. As Moore reiterates the
primal scene of creation, we watch as the creature he is responsible for,
but did not make, struggles to change the events of his origin. Face to
face with its past, Moore’s Swamp Thing (and Moore’s Swamp Thing)
defines itself against its origins. What has been implicit in the comic,
what has haunted its pages, the pulp history that threatens to under-
mine the high literary aspirations of Moore’s story is now explicit, but
also, significantly, as the issue’s title, “The Burial,” indicates, dealt with,
contained, finished.
This moment marks a fundamental shift in the engagement of Moore’s
comic with its history; instead of avoiding, disavowing, and mocking
the material that precedes his tenure on the comic, Moore engages with
it directly, incorporating its contradictions, its false starts, its crudeness,
into the story that he proceeds to write. Suddenly repetition is not an
unfortunate aspect of the comic; it is the controlling fact of the narrative.
Five issues later Moore becomes unabashedly citational when he “writes”
Figure 8.2 Alan Moore and Shawn McManus, “The Burial,” The Saga of Swamp
Thing #28 (Sept. 1984), DC Comics: 17. Print.
issue 33, “Abandoned Houses.” The story contains a framing device in

which Abigail Cable, Swamp Thing’s lover, dreams that she encounters
Cain and Abel, who had served as “hosts” of DC Comics titles House of
Secrets and House of Mysteries since the 1960s. Cain and Abel invite Abigail
to choose to hear either a secret or a mystery. She chooses a secret, and
what she and the reader are presented with is a story that is uncannily
similar to the origin story previously revealed in Swamp Thing #28. Now,
though, the story seems to take place in the early twentieth century, and
the scientist killed in a lab explosion is not Alec Holland, but Alex Olsen.
As the cover illustration of the issue also shows, the creature himself
looks different, more shaggy or hairy than Moore’s Swamp Thing usually
appears (Figure 8.3). This issue is basically a reprint of The House of Secrets
#92, from 1971, the comic in which Len Wein and Berni Wrightson’s
first version of the Swamp Thing appeared. In 1972, the two would start
181
Figure 8.3 Alan Moore and Ron Randall, “Abandoned Houses,” The Saga of Swamp Thing #33 (Feb. 1985), DC Comics: Cover; Len
Wein and Bernie Wrightson, “Swamp Thing,” The House of Secrets #92 (July 1971), DC Comics: Cover. Print.
again, establishing the canonical Swamp Thing origin story, abandoning

the original conception, which, had Moore not resurrected it, would
have simply faded away, conveniently forgotten. Moore co-opts this bit
of ephemera into his larger narrative, imagining the Swamp Thing as
just one in an eternally repeating series of Elemental Champions whose
names and stories are oddly similar. In this way, Moore conflates the
character’s publishing origin with its narrative origin, refiguring the latter
in a bravura performance of inter-intratextual appropriation. Rather than
allowing the past to haunt the present of the comic, Moore makes the
present haunt the past, retroactively recontextualizing previous events
within the context of the narrative he has created.
Douglas Wolk argues that comics, as a result of their institutional-
ized veneration of their own history, are systemically burdened by a
culture of nostalgia, in particular nostalgie de la boue, in which comics
writers and artists demonstrate an unhealthy attachment to “the crap
and hackwork of the past” (69). Both Gaiman’s and Waid and Yu’s
comics demonstrate a keen sense of the risks of this type of nostalgia.
While Gaiman, on the one hand, disassociates his work from the pulp
conventions of his characters’ pasts,16 Waid and Yu, instead of rejecting
that heritage outright, maintain a winking, almost ironic relationship
to it. Moore, though, embraces nostalgie de la boue unabashedly, going
so far as to literalize the metaphor in a scene from Swamp Thing #28 in
which the hero searches for the body of his former self by digging into
the rain-soaked mud of the Louisiana Swamp (Moore and McManus 1).
The hero’s revenant status becomes the defining feature of the comic,
an eternal “coming back” of an imagined original.
As the various Superman stories demonstrate, the effects of citation
are circular: an origin story’s authority depends on those later comics
whose authority is established through citing the origin story. However,
it is one thing to acknowledge that one’s work derives and repeats; it is
quite another entirely to acknowledge that it is derivative and repeti-
tive. Thus, in an effort to establish their own autonomous authority,
comics creators such as Gaiman and Waid and Yu distance themselves
from their precursors through parody and irony. Moore’s Swamp Thing,
though, lays bare the very acts of appropriation and recontextualiza-
tion that these other comics seek to obscure. That is, Swamp Thing
is unabashedly derivative and repetitive, not because it is a creative
failure, but because derivativeness and repetitiveness are fundamental
characteristics of its genre. In its radical refiguring of citation and origin,
Moore’s Swamp Thing exemplifies Thierry Groensteen’s characterization
of comics as “founded on a dialectic of repetition and difference” (115),
fashioning through that dialectic a synthesis of past and present in

which neither is subordinated to the other.
What Moore’s comics, as well as the others discussed above, demonstrate
is the way in which repetition serves to establish within and between
texts a sort of “plan-effect.” That is, in returning to material written and
drawn by others years, if not decades, earlier, these comics retroactively
assert an overarching narrative plan, a plan which, crucially, did not
exist when the “original” comics were created. In this way, repetition in
serials and series simultaneously reframes – even recreates – an originary
moment and turns to that moment as a means of establishing authority
through the assertion of a visionary intentionality. In so doing, repeti-
tion necessarily engenders processes of “reading backwards” that Laura
Robinson discusses in her reading of L. M. Montgomery’s late additions
to the Anne of Green Gables series in Chapter 2 of this volume, or the
rereading practices that Eliza Dresang and Kathleen Campana note in
their discussion of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series in Chapter 4. What a
reading of comics, in particular Moore’s radical rewriting of Swamp Thing,
crystallizes for these analyses of repetition, because of comics’ divorcing
of creator and product, is the extent to which these rereadings, these
returns to the “original” texts, are always necessarily rewritings. Both
origin and citation, Moore’s hauntological comic buries the phantasmatic
original within itself, even as it buries itself within the original, thereby
becoming the source from which it is itself derived.
Notes
1. Showcase #4 is credited by many readers and critics as inaugurating the
“Silver Age” of comics. More recently, however, the system of “Ages” by
which comics are divided into eras has come under scrutiny both for its
imprecision and its inappropriateness when applied to comics outside of the
superhero genre. See, for instance, Benjamin Woo, “An Age-Old Problem:
Problematics of Comic Book Historiography.”
2. My use of the term “intertextual” is derived from Gérard Genette’s
modification of Julia Kristeva’s coining of the term in Desire in Language.
Intertextuality, Genette writes, is “a relationship of copresence between
two texts or among several texts,” a copresence that can take the form of
“quoting,” “plagiarism,” or “allusion” (1–2). I use “intratextual” to denote
similar processes within an individual text or narrative (see my discussion
of the interplay of intertextuality and intratextuality particular to comics
below). For further discussion of these terms, see Eliza T. Dresang and
Kathleen Campana’s essay in this volume.
3. This is less true with regard to current comic book publishing conventions
than it was when Umberto Eco wrote the essay in 1972. With the ascend-
ance of trade paperback reprints of comic books, stories have tended to
grow longer and less self-contained, with events from one issue potentially
resonating through the narrative of the comic book for years.
4. At the time of composition of this essay, the character is undergoing yet
another reimagining of its origins, in DC Comics’ line-wide redefinition of
its roster of heroes, marketed as “The New 52.”
5. John Byrne’s and Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s comics also make deliberate,
obvious use of this image. Indeed, it is the cover image of the first issue of
Byrne’s Man of Steel.
6. Superman’s wink is well-established enough to be the sole piece of evidence
to identify a disguised, ostensibly dead Superman at the end of Alan Moore
and Curt Swan’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”(Moore
and Swan 24) and to mark Superman’s final appearance on the penultimate
page of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (Miller 198).
7. The gesture, though, is effectively self-negating; as Judith Butler argues,
“The … replication and resignification of … constructs within [different]
frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called origi-
nal” (“Imitation” 724). That is, the very act of citation undermines the aura
of the original with whose borrowed authority Mark Waid and Leinil Francis
Yu authorize their own work.
8. A number of the titles of the individual issues of Johns and Frank’s series –
“Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes” and “Mild-Mannered Reporter,”
for instance – pointedly reintroduce aspects of the Superman mythos elimi-
nated by Byrne in his 1986 reimagining of the character. The way in which
the titles function as a rebuke to Byrne is underscored by the title of the first
issue, “Boy of Steel,” which applies a modification of the epithet which gave
Byrne’s series its title to a story that describes the exploits of a post-pubescent
Superboy, whose adventures Byrne had previously written out of existence.
9. As a further example of the inconsistency of early versions of Superman’s
origin, Superman’s adopted parents are given various names until writers
finally settle on “Martha” and “Jonathan” in 1950 and 1951, respectively.
10. Black Orchid was one of a number of moribund or cancelled comics titles
assigned by DC in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a group of British writers,
including Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Peter Milligan in an attempt to
reinvigorate their roster of superheroes.
11. See, for instance, Sheldon Mayer and Tony DeZuñiga, “Challenge to the
Black Orchid”; Michael Fleisher and Nestor Redondo, “Crime of the Black
Orchid”; Michael Fleisher and Russell Carley, “The Secret of the Black Orchid”;
and Michael Fleisher, Russell Carley, and Fred Carrillo, “The Black Orchid
Conspiracy.”
12. Gaiman’s Sandman’s “costume,” a long purple-black trench coat and a bony
mask with a proboscis-like protuberance is reminiscent of Gardner Fox’s
Sandman’s costume, which consisted of a purple cape and a First-World-War-era
gasmask.
13. Gaiman’s mode of borrowing and citing synchronically rather than dia-
chronically is evocative of Svetlana Boym’s cultural repurposing of the
biological process of “exaptation”: “‘lateral adaptation’ which consists in
a cooption of a feature for its present role from some other origin” (Boym,
“Off-Modern”). For Boym, exaptation offers an alternative to strictly
diachronic models of influence and derivation: “Exaptation questions the

very process of assigning meaning and function in hindsight, the process
of assigning the prefix ‘post’ and thus containing a complex phenomenon
within the grid of familiar interpretation” (“Off-Modern”).
14. Though it is technically the second issue for which Moore served as writer,
“The Anatomy Lesson” has been retroactively canonized, in collections of
Moore’s run on the comic, as the inaugural issue. The previous issue, Swamp
Thing #20, appropriately titled “Loose Ends,” is left out of most collections.
15. The scene’s envisioning of the past as spectral is reminiscent of Andrei
Tarkovsky’s use of superimposed elements and double exposure to denote
nostalgic yearning in his film Nostalghia (1983) and of Boym’s later, clearly
Tarkovsky-inspired, characterization of nostalgia as “a double exposure, or a
superimposition of two images” (Future xiv).
16. It should be noted that the past is not so easily dispensed with in Gaiman’s
Sandman, as the impostor Sandman, to whom the eponymous hero refers
repeatedly, and presciently, as “little ghost” (Gaiman and Bachalo 14, 16,
18, 21), haunts the series in the person of his son, Daniel, who ultimately
replaces Morpheus as Lord of Dreams.
Works cited
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. Print.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. Print.
——. “The Off-Modern Mirror.” E-flux Journal 19 (2010): n. pag. Web.
[Broome, John, and Carmine Infantino]. “The Man who Broke the Time Barrier.”
Showcase #4 (Sept.–Oct. 1956), National Comics [DC Comics]: 1–10. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Literary Theory: An
Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1988.
722–30. Print.
——. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge,
1993. Print.
Byrne, John, and Dick Giordano. The Man of Steel. New York: DC Comics, 2003.
Print.
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9
Michael Yahgulanaas’s Red and
the Structures of Sequential Art
Perry Nodelman
My subject here is not a series, but a single book. That book, however,
is a graphic novel, a story made up of a sequence of separate panels,
and as such, I believe it can offer significant insights into the range of
verbal and visual texts that operate by adding discrete new sections to
a sequence of existing ones – including the groups of separate but con-
nected fictional texts we identify as series. Furthermore, as a new way of
telling the old story it reinvents and passes on, the graphic novel I focus
on is itself part of a series of versions of the story. An exploration of the
sequential effects of this one text should, then, suggest much about the
structure and the reading strategies implied by series literature generally.
The Vancouver Art Gallery, March 2010. In the midst of Visions of British
Columbia, a show about the landscapes of that province, I come upon
what appears to be a large painting. My first impression is of a roiling
sea of bright colours, followed quickly by a contrary sense of order, a
sense created first by the grid of eighteen separate sheets that make up
the whole image and the six smaller squares each of those contain, and
second by the repetitively curved black lines that divide the same space
into different but still symmetrical sections (see Figure 9.1). This paint-
ing on the gallery wall is an intriguingly paradoxical combination of
anarchy and repetition.
On a bench in front of the painting is a book, its cover duplicating the
colour palette of the painting. As I flip through it, I re-see what appear
to be sections of the painting. The book is a graphic novel, Michael
Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Red: A Haida Manga. The image on the wall con-
sists of all the images on each of the book’s pages, laid out from left to
188
Figure 9.1 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009): unnumbered endpages. Print.
189
right and from top to bottom in the sequence of the book. In looking at
the book, I am repeating my experience of the same images – but I am
seeing something different.
Furthermore, as a graphic novel – an example of what Will Eisner iden-
tifies as sequential art and Scott McCloud defines as “juxtaposed pictorial
and other images in deliberate sequence” (9), it represents a mosaic form
of art, a larger structure (as revealed most clearly on the gallery wall and
also depicted on a two-page spread after the end of the story in the book
and again repeated in a larger image printed on the inside of its dust
jacket) that is built from but nevertheless preserves the separateness of its
individual panels. As comics theorists reveal, that mosaic quality under-
lies what appears to be a characteristic invitation to reader/viewers to
engage in repeated looking and relooking that conflicts with and enriches
the chronological development of the narrative, in a process that requires
connections between each panel and each detail of each panel with all
the other details and panels in an expanding body of contexts. As Thierry
Groensteen says, “the comics panel is fragmentary and caught in a sys-
tem of proliferation; it never makes up the totality of the utterance but
can and must be understood as a component in a larger apparatus” (5).
Look, for example, at the first two-page spread in Red (2–3). Making
some conventional assumptions about understanding something iden-
tified as a graphic narrative – that, for example, each of the segments
of the image surrounded by black lines represents a separate panel, and
therefore a separate moment in a sequence, and that the sequence most
likely moves from left to right and top to bottom – a reader/viewer must
then puzzle out the sequence. The first two panels on the left-hand page
are versions of what cinematographers call establishing shots, focused
mainly on the setting. The bubbles depicted in the third panel make
sense only once one refers back to the main panel of the first page,
depicting someone in a boat looking down at a redheaded figure under
the water. That glance back might then suggest that the figure in the
top left panel on the third page might be the same person in the same
boat, and the panel beside it then makes the most sense in the context
of, first, the panel immediately to its left, second, all the panels on the
previous two pages that offer a context for the panel to the left, and
third, the context of the accompanying words, “Red! you are too risky!”
(3). Together, these all suggest that the redhead, named Red, is being
plucked from the water by the other character. The remaining frames at
the bottom of the third page then recontextualize what precedes them
by making it clear that Red’s foolhardiness is not only habitual but
purposive: he has been searching for food. The last panel finally shows
Perry Nodelman 191
both of the interacting characters who have appeared up to this point

only in images that isolate them from each other. Reader/viewers must
work to fill in the gaps and make the implied connections between
these images.
In order to understand what happens on the second page of Red,
I had to refer back to the first page. As Douglas Wolk suggests, comics
are unlike films, which (at least for those without access to the “pause”
and scene selection features on VCR and DVD players) move only for-
ward and at a mechanically controlled speed: “You can linger over each
panel; you can observe a tier or a page or a two-page spread as a com-
position and get a sense of the whole thing at once; you can look back
at panels you’ve already read (you can scarcely not do that, when you’re
observing what change has happened between panels) or turn the
pages backwards at will” (130–31). Groensteen identifies this openness
to contextualizations in addition to the most obvious sequential ones
as a “general arthrology” (22) or overall system of connections – the
potential participation of each panel of a story in a network of verbal
and visual connections to all of the other panels.
For some reader/viewers, this aspect of comics undermines the uni-
directionality of time. For example, McCloud proposes that, “unlike
other media, in comics, the past is more than just memories for the audi-
ence and the future is more than just possibilities! Both past and future
are visible and all around us” (104). The graphic novelist Art Spiegelman,
author of the groundbreaking Maus books which revisit the past of a
Holocaust survivor in order to understand it anew, says, “Comics are
about time being made manifest spatially, in that you’ve got all these
different chunks of time – each box being a different moment of time –
and you see them all at once. As a result you’re always, in comics, being
made aware of different times inhabiting the same space” (Silverblatt
135). Yahgulanaas himself says, “In Haida manga time/space is a twist-
ing expanding and compressing flow that has no unnamed spaces”
(Rocking Raven). The past is never over, the future always present. Red is
Yahgulanaas’s attempt to twist and expand his own Haida culture – to
see it anew: “The comics form encourages me to extract meaning and
form where I find it, in the indigenous and the settler cultures, and to
flip them upside down, reverse them, recombine them, to allow new
meaning to emerge in a renewed form” (“Notes on Haida Manga” 54).
Choosing to proceed in this way seems a logical use of comics struc-
ture, which normally requires continual revisions on the part of reader/
viewers. Reading a graphic novel is a matter of repeated recontextual-
izing – always developing new understandings of individual panels and
details by considering them in relation to earlier and later elements.

Knowledgeable practitioners of sequential art tend to make use of that
process in ways that go beyond the connections between one panel and
others. For instance, a key pleasure for devoted readers of the superhero
comics produced by DC and Marvel over the decades is their charac-
teristic self-referentiality. As Wolk suggests, “superhero comics’ readers
understand each thirty-two page pamphlet as a small element of one of
two gigantic narratives” (90). As a result, a minor character in a story
produced in 2013 may evoke an earlier story in which that character
appeared decades earlier, or even, as Brandon Christopher points out
in his discussion of the superhero genre in his essay in this volume,
offer a new interpretation of what happened earlier. For readers who
know these series well, then, “A lot of the pleasure in reading comics
is filling in all the blank space beyond each panel, as far as it can go in
both space and time, with the drawing on the page as a guide or set of
hints” (Wolk 132).
As a graphic novel, Red manifests the qualities of sequential art –
including, especially, the invitation of its “general arthrology” to fill in
the spaces between the panels by connecting them together. As an art-
work hung in a gallery, Red reveals an even greater arthrology – a visible
organization different from and significantly adding to the meaning of
the temporal sequence of its narrative. As Yahgulanaas says in a note in
the book, as well as being a story on the page, Red “is also a complex of
images, a composite – one that will defy your ability to experience story
as a simple progression of events” (109). In what follows, I describe my
own experience of repeated but different viewings of Red in order to
show how the discrete elements and blank spaces of a mosaic structure
allow for ongoing revisioning of the same basic elements.
II
My first response in coming upon Red on the wall of an art gallery was
shaped by my expectations of what “art” is and how to look at it as a
source of aesthetic pleasure. I found the shapes and colours pleasing in
and for themselves. But I was also aware of figures of faces and other
recognizable objects emerging from the purely sensual information,
and wondered about their meaning. Their presence suggested they mat-
tered enough to be inspected more carefully, that their details might
reveal something significant about the objects they represented. In
other words, the image shared the illustrative quality of most artworks –
a quality that galleries imply by providing catalogues and names for
Perry Nodelman 193
shows in which works appear, and by placing didactic labels near each
work that bear titles and other information which the visual images
then become illustrations of. I looked for and located the name of the
work and its artist, but found neither revealing, for I was unfamiliar
with the name Yahgulanaas and had no context to understand what
Red might refer to. I could, though, speculate about the work’s place in
the context of what Arthur Danto calls the “artworld”: “To see some-
thing as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere
of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (431).
I had words like “impressionism” and “expressionism” in my mind, and
the names of artists like Matisse and Picasso.
Also, at this point, my awareness of the curving black lines superim-
posed over the sea of colour came into play. They look like the form-
lines in traditional West Coast aboriginal art. As Bill Holm explains,
“A formline is the characteristic swelling and diminishing linelike figure
delineating design units. These formlines merge and divide to make a
continuous flowing grid over the whole decorated area” (29). Like those
in traditional West Coast Art, Yahgulanaas’s black lines seem to form the
bilaterally symmetrical outlines of an animal or, perhaps, three differ-
ent animals in a horizontal row. My uncertainty about what the lines
represent emerge from another quality Yahgulanaas’s work shares with
traditional West Coast art, in which the figures depicted, “subject to
conventionalized distortion and emphasis” (72) such as bilateral sym-
metry and the inclusion of secondary figures in the spaces formed by
the outlines of parts of larger figures, look much like each other and are
similarly difficult to interpret.
Nevertheless, Yahgulanaas’s use of these traditional forms is anything
but traditional. In a culture with no “art” as such, that is, with no
objects created simply to be placed in a gallery and admired as beautiful,
these visual depictions appeared on artefacts with ceremonial implica-
tions and practical purposes like identifying clan affiliations. Producing
a manga that makes use of these forms as part of telling a story implies
a turn to the representational possibilities of visual depictions, to how
they might look to a detached observer, rather than to the symbolic
spiritual value of visual depictions. Unlike the formline images that
create a sort of lattice over Red’s surface, the naturalistic cartoon figures
behind the lattice often appear incomplete, sometimes in close-up and
within depicted backgrounds, in the style of European-based perspec-
tive art. Tellingly, those backgrounds often include representational
depictions of objects like totem poles and canoes which themselves
contain versions of the traditional images used traditionally.
Yahgulanaas’s artistic revisioning might be viewed as a misuse of

the tradition – representing as Haida that which is non-Haida. But
such “misuse” is itself a longstanding tradition. In Visions of British
Columbia, a book produced in relation to the Vancouver Art Gallery
show, the nineteenth-century Haida craftsman Charles Edenshaw is
described both as “a consultant to many anthropologists” and “an
artist of Haida ancestry” whose “inspired handling of formline design
led to a huge demand for his work” (Grenville and Steedman 249).
That the same creator could be both a source of authentic information
about another culture and an individually inspired artist in the con-
text of mainstream culture implies a blurring of boundaries between
traditional Haida and non-traditional settler-society ideas about the
meaning and purpose of the objects Edenshaw created. According to
the descriptions of other aboriginal works included in Visions of British
Columbia, this sort of blurring is not unusual: Richard Hunt is an artist
who “has also produced ceremonial works for the Museum of Natural
History in New York” (250); Willie Seaweed “produced almost every
kind of ceremonial object used in Southern Kwakiutl society,” but also
“helped the progression of southern Kakwaka’wakw art … to a more
expressive and dramatic style” (251); and Bill Reid “transformed Haida
forms and myths into compelling and modern images” (251). Clearly,
Yahgulanaas is not the only contemporary West Coast artist whose
work can be described as a transformation of indigenous traditions.
On the basis of the accounts in Visions of British Columbia, I might
argue that adaptation of the traditional is the West Coast Aboriginal
tradition – and also that such adaptations are themselves a form of
sequential art. As revisionings of the past style, adaptations reveal gaps
in the traditional examples that were not visible as gaps before a later
artist made their presence known by finding ways of filling them in. In
revealing gaps by filling them, the sequence created by building a new
work on old ones mirrors the basic structural principle of comics and
other forms of sequential art. As Yahgulanaas reveals in an interview,
for him, Haida culture is clearly “not static and frozen. … Manga is pic-
tures without boundaries, without limitation. … If I took that concept
of liberated pictures, I could take totem poles and I could open them
up and I could restructure them and I could re-piece them together”
(Brunhuber).
Beyond questions of tradition and authenticity, the appearance of
Red as one of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s “visions of British Columbia”
provides another context that revisions it. In the accompanying book
edited by Grenville and Steedman, which pairs the visual images from
Perry Nodelman 195
the show with excerpts from BC writers, pages of Red accompany a piece
by ’Laanaawga Chief Sgiidagiids, a Haida artist also known as Louis
Collinson (who died in 1970), who makes a plea for multiculturalism:
the people of our islands

composed of members of nations and races from all over the world
are beginning to intertwine their roots so strongly that no troubles
will affect them
(158)
The juxtaposition of Yahgulanaas’s revisioned Haida-like images with

this passage creates another recontextualization of his work, repurpos-
ing its aboriginal content in a way that allows it not only to function
successfully as settler-society art, but also to meet the political needs
of a Canadian society conceived as being multicultural. Contemporary
Aboriginal people might well object to the idea that their indigenous
nations are merely equivalent to all the other cultural groups in the
multicultural intertwining of roots: for one thing, this form of acknowl-
edging equality implies an equal right to lands to which indigenous
peoples have specific claims. The context of a show identifying the work
of Yahgulanaas and a number of other Aboriginal artists as “visions of
BC” equivalent to the work of artists of settler backgrounds who also
appear in the show amounts to the insistence on the supremacy of a
particular, settler vision of contested territory as a political entity called
British Columbia. The context of the show might then be seen to subvert
Yahgulanaas’s description of his work as subversive of colonialist views
of Haida culture, of what he calls “the wooden Indian, the abandoned
village, the romantic image of the vanishing people” (Brunhuber). More
optimistically, the introduction of Yahgulanaas’s anarchistic version of
history might in turn destabilize and subvert the colonialist views and
the celebration of mainstream multiculturalism that its inclusion in
the exhibition is intended to support. It may not be accidental that the
specific image from Red that accompanies Sgiidagiids’s hopes for mul-
ticulturalism shows Yahgulanaas’s hero Red on the verge of capture by
those he thinks are his enemies, but about to escape.
Thus far, my views of Red have skirted the other tradition to which it
refers: manga. While clearly a kind of comic, manga does have qualities
that might account for Yahgulanaas’s reference to it specifically, and
not just to comics generally. Yahgulanaas says: “I found manga attrac-
tive because it is not part of the settler tradition of North America (like
Archie or Marvel comics, for example) insofar as manga has roots in the
North Pacific, as does Haida art” (“Notes on Haida Manga” 54). But a
key element that distinguishes that art from other comics – its tendency
to complex arrangements of panels of different shapes and sizes – is
clearly attractive to Yahgulanaas. He says of Red,
The eye and the mind pulls us from that page there down this line
here swooping up over here, flipping back, bouncing up and down
and going wherever we will go. And when we read it like that, we
can’t read the book, we can’t read the story as a book. So it’s all about
the context, and it’s when Europeans came to North America and
saw indigenous societies, how could they possibly understand what
the narrative was or how the structure worked because they didn’t
have the map. (Brunhuber)
Scott McCloud suggests that a key quality of manga is that the transitions
between the panels often tend to be what he calls “aspect-to-aspect,” an
arrangement rare in North American comics (which focus more on nar-
rative sequences) and one which “bypasses time for the most part and
sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood” (72).
Not only are there many aspect-to-aspect relationships between panels
in Red, pulling viewers up and down and here and there, but they also
tend to create an exaggerated sense of time as space, of time/space as,
in Yahgulanaas’s words, “a twisting expanding and compressing flow”
which insists on the possibility of other paths through the same mate-
rial. The manga form offers yet one more way in which sequential art
fosters acts of recontextualization.
Considering Red as manga represents a shift from viewing it as gallery
art to considering it as narrative. In the gallery, after realizing that the
image on the wall was also a story in a book, I began to try to read it
as I would a book – from left to right and top to bottom of each page,
and then on to the next page. I did not, however, get very far with that,
in part because the speech balloons in the wall images were empty, in
part because I kept being drawn back to the picture as a whole. Indeed,
empty of words and viewed merely as blank space, the speech balloons
play a part in the pattern of the whole, offering another repetitive ele-
ment to add to the white borders of the internal squares and the black
curvilinear forms. My attraction to this abstract whole – to the work
as an artistic representation – kept interrupting my efforts to read Red
as story. Indeed, as Rocco Versaci suggests, “One can never completely
‘escape’ into a comic book because its form – impressionistic illustra-
tions of people, places, and things – reminds us at every turn (or panel)
Perry Nodelman 197
that what we are experiencing is a representation” (6). Charles Hatfield

suggests that the movement back and forth between following a story
and perceiving a visual pattern that results from the constant presence
of visual imagery is a key to the comics form: “A single image within
such a cluster typically functions in two ways at once: as a ‘moment’ in
an imagined sequence of events, and as a graphic element in an atem-
poral design” (139). As a result, “there is a tension between the concept
of ‘breaking down’ a story into constituent images and the concept of
laying out those images together on an unbroken surface” (140). In
displaying all of its constituent images in the form of one bigger image
that reveals the otherwise hidden presence of the formline animal or
animals, the gallery version of Red represents an exaggerated version of
that tension.
Reading Red as a narrative in a book once more brings its traditional
roots to the fore. Now the focus is primarily on the story it tells, and
that story is about Haida life in the past. According to its jacket copy,
Red tells a traditional story: “Referencing a classic Haida oral narrative,
this stunning full-colour graphic novel documents the powerful story of
Red, a leader so blinded by revenge that he leads his community to the
brink of war and destruction.” According to Robert Haines in his review
of the book, however, Yahgulanaas’s version of this traditional story has
contemporary implications: “This cautionary tale of anger, pride and
revenge … is woven with an eye towards former President George Bush
and the policies and actions of the post-9/11 years.” Furthermore, the
text contains many now-current colloquialisms and references. In yet
one more way, then, Red seems to represent a remaking of the tradition
it expresses.
In doing so, however, it might also represent yet one more way of
maintaining traditional aspects of the tradition. In originally oral cul-
tures such as those of indigenous North American nations, stories tend
to have complex relationships with the circumstances surrounding their
telling, and might well suggest new ways of connecting the past to the
present. As Henry Glassie says of oral storytelling generally, “Context is
not in the eye of the beholder, but in the mind of the [oral] creator. Some
of context is drawn in from the immediate situation, but more is drawn
from memory. It is present, but invisible, inaudible. Contexts are mental
associations woven around texts during performance to shape and com-
plete them, to give them meaning” (33). The possibility that the exploits
of a hero from the past might be seen to comment on current political
issues is then grounded in the tradition of such stories. As in sequential
art generally, re-viewing and recontextualizations not only allow new
versions of what has been seen already, but also affirm the ongoing
continuation of what was there in the first place.
In order to make sense of the story of Red, one has to figure out
how the individual panels fit together, a process complicated by the
work’s other life as a piece of gallery art. When Red is broken up into
the individual pages which viewers come across in a book, the black
lines that create whole forms for gallery-goers, now divorced from the
larger context, operate primarily as borders for the panels that make
up the graphic narrative. But because the lines must still maintain the
shapes necessary for the larger but now not visible image, they create
comics panels of odd shapes and sizes that are difficult to relate to each
other. For Haines, “Red is a challenging work, filled with non-uniform
panel borders that slip and slide as characters interact with the bor-
ders, grabbing hold, laying down, leaning against; the pages dripping
with little details that gave even this veteran comic reader some pause,
occasionally missing the correct order.” Groensteen, who believes that
the repetitiveness of similar rectangular panels provides comics with
their characteristic rhythm, which he describes as a steady “breathing,”
worries that, “[w]hen the layout is chaotic, this breathing becomes
affected, anarchic, or even disappears” (61). Not only is the character-
istic and somewhat hypnotic rhythm of repeated rectangles lost, but
also the focus shifts from engagement in the story being told to the
nature of the telling – what Groensteen identifies as “an ostentatious
performance” (61).
Even so, the implications of the story are as discernible in its modes
of presentation as they are in its narrative details. The lines and shapes
on the page convey the chaos that disrupts the social order as much
as do the events those lines and shapes depict – the abduction of Red’s
sister Jaada, the various invasions and murders that follow. The act
of looking at a page of Red and trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to
figure out what is happening conveys much about what Yahgulanaas
might have found interesting about this story – and also why he might
have wanted to tell it in such a complex, anarchic, and potentially
confusing way.
Consider, especially, the ways in which the characters of Red seem to
lean on, grab at, and otherwise struggle against the constraints of the
borders that contain them. At times, even the words of the text violate
the confines of the borders, actually appearing inside them – and there
are often words painted into the pictures outside the speech balloons.
Red seems to set up the usual patterns and distinctions of comics – the
regular left-to right and top-to-bottom narrative sequence, the system
Perry Nodelman 199
of separate but connected panels, the use of words in relation to but

separate from visual images – in order to transgress the boundaries
within which these patterns conventionally operate. The effect is of
an order established but transgressed, just as Yahgulanaas transgresses
(or expresses by appearing to transgress) Haida traditions. The ongoing
struggle to maintain traditional forms and at the same time resist their
constraining elements is what Red is all about.
According to McCloud, “[c]omics panels fracture both time and
space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments.
But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally con-
struct a continuous, unified reality” (67). We can do so because each
panel contains enough information to allow us to connect it to the
others – and specifically, therefore, contains elements repeated from
earlier panels. For that reason, Pierre Masson calls comics “the stutter-
ing art” (qtd. in Groensteen 115): the repeated information and the
new information establish another rhythm characteristic of comics, a
stuttering that moves forward by means of partially repeating what is
past. Red often makes use of this stuttering sort of sequencing in ways
that seem to defy the kind of closure McCloud speaks of. Readers with
an expectation, based on past experiences of comics stuttering, that
they can discover the meaning of individual visual details by figur-
ing out their relationship to depictions of the same objects or events
in other panels might find themselves thwarted when Yahgulanaas
leaves out obvious information that might allow them to make con-
nections that establish the whole picture. For instance, a series of pages
show action proceeding in two different places – Red kills a fish, and
perhaps his brother-in-law, as traders entice a woman with their goods
in the village – without announcing the fact of the different locations
in which these events take place, leaving readers to attempt to puz-
zle out how the panels relate to each other (71–74). At other points,
Yahgulanaas focuses on apparently insignificant details in ways that
complicate attempts to establish the whole picture. In the sequence in
which Red thwarts a raider’s attempt to capture him, repeated figures
of the raider’s weapon connect the various separate images of him and
eventually account for how he dies (28–31). But close-ups of Red’s feet
and hands are so extreme that his entire position remains unclear until
he falls; and meanwhile, Yahgulanaas devotes increasing attention to
the raider’s hair clasp, which gradually grows from a few blurred lines
into what looks as if it were another fully realized character involved in
the scene, making the actual physical relationship of Red and the raider
harder to understand (30–31; see Figure 9.2). At the same time, though,
200
Figure 9.2 Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009): 30–31. Print.
Perry Nodelman 201
as the image on the hair-clasp of what appears to be a totemic figure

coming to life grows clearer and larger, it implies a context, unspoken
in the text, of Haida culture – and, perhaps also, in becoming so promi-
nent a part of the depiction of the combat, the presence of spiritual
forces engaged in the encounter. While it is hard to develop a virtual
establishing shot of those events, it is easy to comprehend the range of
implications they have beyond the specific physical actions, and to read
the extremely stuttering rhythm of the separate panels as revelatory of
the artist’s energetically unsettled worldview.
Red is both contemporary and traditional, both a work of gallery art
and a graphic narrative, both engaged in the conventions of comics
and defiant of them, and demanding both movement forward through
a narrative sequence and movement backwards to understand that
sequence. In all these ways, Red is a combination of looking forward
and moving back: back to tradition and forward to revisioning of that
tradition; back to the previous panel in order to understand this one
and the next one; back to the whole painting and forward through the
narrative.
For readers who have not previously seen Red hanging on a gallery
wall, the image that appears on its last double-paged spread, of the
pages of the story they have just read laid out as in the gallery, might
well come as a major surprise. But after these readers absorb the discov-
ery that the pages they have just been perusing can be arranged in an
entirely different but equally orderly way, I suspect that few of them
will be able to resist an impulse to leaf back and reconsider the earlier
images in the light of and in relation to this new context for them. Even
after the story is over, then, this final image invites yet another form of
recontextualization, another movement backward and forward again.
As such, it reveals qualities that seem to be central to the structure of
comics generally, and perhaps, then, to other forms (like series of novels
or TV shows) that consist of sets of discrete entities that appear sequen-
tially and/or represent an ongoing chronological sequence:
• the central impulse is to make what seemed to be over continue

• one can make what seemed to be over continue only by going back
to what it has been already
• returning to what seemed to be over from a later viewpoint changes it
• the change reveals the incompleteness of what seemed to be over – its
openness to recontextualization
• and, as a result, what seemed to be over is always apparently
complete and yet never over.
In a 1995 essay about Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, I suggested that

the addition some years later of a fourth book, Tehanu, to an appar-
ently complete trilogy represents “not so much an attack on history
as a continuation of it. It merely repeats what was always true of the
Earthsea books: although each book always could – indeed must, for
new readers – be read and understood without knowledge of its sequels,
the new information provided by the sequels always forced readers
into a revised understanding of what went before” (180). I concluded,
“Tehanu reveals the continual process by which all of us constantly rein-
vent the past” (199). So, I might now add, does the structure of comics
narrative – and the structure of series literature generally.
III
While the conclusions I have reached about Red and the ongoing recon-
textualization of comics structure might open a way into understand-
ing the structure of series literature more generally, they suggest little
about the ways in which the generalizations might need to be modified
in a specific consideration of texts in series for young people – the
focus of this collection of essays. Indeed, Red itself raises such ques-
tions. It was not published specifically as a text for young people, but
a School Library Journal review identifies it as being for Grade 7 and up
(Lipinski), and it was nominated for inclusion as one of the American
Library Association’s “Great Graphic Novels for Teens” in 2011. On the
other hand, a contributor to the Goodreads website who tagged Red as
“children-teen” and “graphic-novel,” added, “This isn’t really a teen’s
book and it really isn’t fiction. I need to develop better tags” (“Red:
A Haida Manga”).
In implying an uncertain audience, furthermore, Red exhibits a charac-
teristic common to many of the texts discussed in this volume. Series as
diverse as L. M. Montgomery’s Anne books, superhero comics, the Buffy
the Vampire Slayer TV series, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels
attract both younger and older readers and viewers. What these texts
have in common, I believe, and what might make them available to a
wide range of readers, are the ways in which they engage with the basic
character types and story patterns found most frequently in the literature
most enjoyed by most readers and viewers of all ages – what scholars
identify as popular literature.
The same can be said of much of the literature written for young
readers, whether in series or in freestanding volumes. As I suggest in The
Hidden Adult, my book about the characteristics of children’s literature,
Perry Nodelman 203
the similar ideas about audience that underpin children’s literature and
popular literature for audiences that include adults mean that they share
a number of qualities. Both are “simple” literatures with an emphasis
on action rather than on subtleties of character or linguistic complexity;
both often invite readers to identify with their protagonists and depict
events from the protagonists’ point of view; and the plots of both rarely
diverge greatly from the same basic story patterns. Most significant in
the context of this essay, both literature for young people and popular
literature often consist of texts in series, the later components of which
offer revisits to familiar characters in new situations – variations that are
recontextualizations of the earlier stories.
In The Hidden Adult, I also identify variation as a defining character-
istic of children’s literature: “the events described in the texts … can
be read as variations on each other, their repeating elements juggled
into a series of new patterns as their plots unfold” (236). The same can
be said, I think, of many of the events within the individual episodes
of much series fiction, of the sequence created by all those episodes
together as a series, and of the acts of recontextualizing invited by a
comics text like Red.
I suspect that the reason that comics and series fiction for both adult
and mixed audiences share these characteristics with the vast bulk of
texts written specifically for young people has something to do with the
ways in which all three types of storytelling resist closure. While many
individual texts for children and young people achieve their happy
endings as their protagonists learn something or otherwise change in
a way that presumably brings at least some aspect of their childhoods
to an end, both children and adults who read widely in texts for young
people experience that happy ending, and then revert back to an earlier
innocence and a different version of the same plot trajectory as they
read other texts. This experience can be repeated pleasurably again and
again. Something similar happens to readers of both individual com-
ics and narratives from series and of whole series of comics and other
genres, albeit usually without the implication that the onset of maturity
is what brings things to a satisfactory end. Even so, there is a sense that a
significant pleasure offered by such narrative experiences is their eternal
return to and reinvention of what once was: variation as an indulgence
in a utopian resistance to the erasure of a simpler past by the ever ongo-
ing movement of time, a way of moving forward without leaving what
came earlier behind, of experiencing a different version of an earlier
and still innocent pleasure yet again. Viewed in these terms, series for
young audiences might be best understood as characteristic examples of
writing for young people, and comics and series that claim or include
adults as target audiences might well be understood as variations of the
patterns of children’s literature for older readers and viewers.
As I say that, though, I realize how it might seem dismissive. Am I
claiming that all these texts are best characterized by what I identified
earlier as their characteristic simplicity – that they lack the depth usually
assumed to characterize worthwhile literature? I believe they do lack the
kind of depth we associate with, say, the plays of Shakespeare or the
novels of George Eliot; but that is not to say that they are not complex.
Paradoxically, they have a complexity that emerges from the repetitive
simplicity of the components they so obsessively recontextualize – the
complexity of variational form.
In a passage of his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that I
have often quoted, Milan Kundera neatly sums up the nature of that
complexity as he compares his own work to a set of variations by
Beethoven:
You recall Pascal’s pensée about how man lives between the abyss of
the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The journey of the varia-
tion form leads to that second infinity, the infinity of internal variety
concealed in all things. … The journey to the second infinity is no
less adventurous than the journey of the epic, and closely parallels
the physicist’s descent into the wondrous innards of the atom. With
every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther from the origi-
nal theme, which bears no more resemblance to the final variation
than a flower to its image under the microscope. (164–65)
The variations on stories of the same superheroes to be found in comics

series, repetitive and yet richly imaginative in their recontextualiza-
tions of the same few relatively simple components, clearly represent
that sort of journey to the second infinity. So too, as I have suggested
in my essay “Rereading Anne of Green Gables in Anne of Ingleside,” do
Montgomery’s Anne stories. So, too, in its own way, and a result of its
brave insistence upon and ever-mutating engagement with the ongoing
recontextualizations of sequential art, does Yahgulanaas’s Red.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul DePasquale and Kay Stone for guiding me to
a clearer understanding of how oral storytelling functions in societies
like the one experienced by Yahgulanaas’s Haida ancestors.
Perry Nodelman 205
Works cited
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Comics.” National. CBC Television, 2009. Canadian Reference Centre. EBSCO. Web.
Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Philosophy of the Visual Arts. Ed. Philip
Alperson. New York; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. 426–33. Print.
Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Expanded Ed. Tamarac: Poorhouse, 1990.
Print.
Glassie, Henry. Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster
Community. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. Print.
Grenville, Bruce, and Scott Steedman, eds. Visions of British Columbia. Vancouver:
Vancouver Art Gallery-Douglas & McIntyre, 2009. Print.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen.
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007. Print.
Haines, Robert. “Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.” The Joe
Shuster Awards. 22 Feb. 2010. Web.
Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.” A Comics Studies Reader. Ed. Jeet Heer and
Kent Worcester. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. 132–48. Print.
Holm, Bill. Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. 1965. Vancouver:
J. J. Douglas, 1978. Print.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Heim.
Harmondsworth; Middlesex: Penguin, 1981. Print.
Lipinski, Andrea. Rev. of Red: A Haida Manga. School Library Journal 56:5 (2010):
143. Print.
Masson, Pierre. Lire la bande dessinée. 2nd ed. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de
Lyon, 1990. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1994.
Print.
Nodelman, Perry. “Generic Archetypes? Universality and Maleness in Le Guin’s
Earthsea Trilogy.” Children’s Literature 23 (1995): 179–201. Print.
——. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 2008. Print.
——. “Rereading Anne of Green Gables in Anne of Ingleside: L. M. Montgomery’s
Variations.” CCL/LCJ: Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour
la jeunesse 34.2 (2008): 75–97. Print.
“Red: A Haida Manga.” Rev. Goodreads. 10 June 2010. Web.
Silverblatt, Michael. “The Cultural Relief of Art Spiegelman: A Conversation with
Michael Silverblatt.” Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Ed. Joseph Witek. Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 2007. 126–36. Print.
Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature.
New York: Continuum, 2007. Print.
Visions of British Columbia. Vancouver Art Gallery. Vancouver, Canada. 23 Jan.–18
Apr. 2010. Exhibition.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean.
Cambridge: Da Capo, 2007. Print.
Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll. “Notes on Haida Manga.” Geist: Ideas and Culture
Fall 2008: 54–56. Web.
——. Red: A Haida Manga. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009. Print.
——. Rocking Raven. Blog. 7 Sept. 2004. Web.
10
The Beloved That Does Not Bite:
Genre, Myth, and Repetition in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Debra Dudek
“Force won’t get it done. You’ve got to work from the

inside. To kill this girl, you have to love her.”
(“Innocence,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2)
… friendship between oneself and another is … not

yet actually possible but is something – like democracy
or justice – that is always still to come.
(Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters 18)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) performs repetitions and, like several
of the show’s numerous immortals, it seems destined not to die. The
character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer first appeared in 1992 in a film
of the same name. While the film achieved modest attention, it was
not until the film’s writer and creator, Joss Whedon, revamped his idea
as a television series that Buffy became a household name. Airing on
television for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003, the series continues in
comic-book form, with Issue 25 of Season 9 published in September
2013. Moving from film to television series to spin-off to comic books
and now possibly back to film, Buffy’s repetitions and reiterations
embody and extend conventions of medium, genre, and narrative.
The television series – and particularly the relationship between Buffy
and Angel in the first three seasons – draws upon the horror subgenre
of the teen vampire film and reshapes it into a groundbreaking genre
pastiche. The portrayal of Buffy and Angel’s relationship reiterates the
impossibility of endings in order to demonstrate that the work of love-
based justice relies on infinite repetition, the justice “still to come”
that Richard Kearney borrows from Jacques Derrida in this essay’s
second epigraph.
206
Debra Dudek 207
Revamping a genre
In order to understand how BtVS repeats some of the earlier conven-

tions of the vampire genre and significantly changes and influences
future vampire series, I outline how the series uses repetition as a feature
of genre and of myth. I draw upon philosophers Mircea Eliade’s and
Richard Kearney’s theories of myth and the genre theory of Rick Altman.
I focus specifically on the relationship between Buffy and Angel, which
is established in the first three seasons of the series, because the dynam-
ics of their relationship is at the core of this generic shift. When the
human Buffy and the vampire Angel fall in love, it introduces a new
syntax into the vampire subgenre, a syntax that is repeated and estab-
lished in subsequent vampire series including Twilight, The Vampire
Diaries, and True Blood.
One of the strengths of BtVS is that the love between Angel and Buffy
does not exist for itself only. Angel’s repeated actions to help Buffy
anticipate his later decision to leave her in order to “help the helpless” –
to quote the tag line from the spin-off series Angel. Angel’s desire to
“become someone” (“Becoming”), refers to both his past and future acts
and might be considered archetypal. In Cosmos and History: The Myth
of Eternal Return, Eliade argues that an archaic ontology relies upon the
belief that “an object or an act becomes real only insofar as it imitates
or repeats an archetype” (34). He claims that the repetition of important
acts, such as war, move the individual from profane time – in which the
individual is in a state of becoming – into mythical time. Angel, whose
very name suggests that he is an archetypal figure, transforms from a
rat-eating vampire who hides in sewers to a warrior who helps the slayer
fight evil. In this transformation and through the repetition of impor-
tant acts, Angel becomes a mythical monster, whose story signifies the
possibility of resistance against evil.
While Eliade separates the profane from the mythical, Kearney con-
nects monsters and myth because he claims that they can teach people
about what he calls “the enigma of evil” (100). In his introduction to
Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Kearney draws on the work of structural
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to discuss the function of mon-
sters in narrative. He summarizes Lévi-Strauss’s argument as follows:
“By telling stories about monsters we provide symbolic resolutions to
enigmas – those of our origins, time, birth and death – which cannot
be solved at the level of our everyday historical experience. In short,
monster myths offer imaginary answers to real problems” (233). This
idea of offering imaginary answers to real problems exists at the core of
BtVS as Buffy encounters both demons and humans who embody and
challenge notions of what it means to be good and to be evil. Whether
the problem is a cyber-stalker, an abusive boyfriend, a power-hungry
mayor, or a bullying pack of demonic hyenas, each episode or story arc
presents Buffy with a dilemma that must be – and is – solved. By using
Kearney’s argument to frame an analysis of how Buffy and Angel repeat-
edly identify and fight against those beings that cause harm, we can see
how Angel’s function includes the mythical and archetypal as well as
the ethical and the everyday.
Kearney also discusses the categories of evil in Western discursive
genres, and argues that such definitions fall into the mythological,
scriptural, metaphysical, and anthropological. The nature of evil that
BtVS examines concerns the mythological, in which “considerations
of moral choice are inextricably linked to cosmological cycles of fate
and destiny. Evil is basically alienation – something predetermined by
forces beyond us” (84). Both Buffy’s predetermined role as the slayer
and Angel’s lack of choice concerning his vampiric state suggest that
fate and destiny are at work in the series. Angel’s original change from
a rather foppish human into an evil vampire was not something he
chose. Historically, vampires are evil creatures made so through no
wrongdoing of their own, and, indeed, the human backstories of many
of the feature vampires on BtVS, such as Drusilla and Spike, highlight
their inherent innocence and purity or their trusting gullibility.
This emphasis on the potential humanity of vampires is one way
in which BtVS extends the vampire genre. In The Changing Vampire of
Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Growth of a Genre, Tim Kane
argues that there are three cycles of vampire films and television series:
the “Malignant Cycle,” which extends from 1931 to 1948 and features
vampires as killers without compassion (21); the “Erotic Cycle,” which
runs from 1957 to 1985, and figures vampires who are less murderous
and more sensual, who seduce their victims with a kiss before attack-
ing (43–44); and the “Sympathetic Cycle,” which begins in 1987 and
extends to the mid-2000s, when Kane published his study. Kane argues
that Angel belongs to the “Sympathetic Cycle” of vampires, a vampire
who is more human than beast, while still retaining the erotic nature of
his predecessors in the “Erotic Cycle” (88–89). I extend this analysis by
arguing that Angel embodies aspects of all three cycles as he fluctuates
between his “good” sympathetic self, Angel, and his “evil” malignant
and erotic self, Angelus. Because viewers are aligned with Buffy, they are
situated to be torn between loving and trusting Angel and fearing the
return of his predatory impulses.
Debra Dudek 209
Another way in which BtVS conforms to and extends other texts

within the “Sympathetic Cycle” is by drawing upon a range of genres
including horror, romance, teen drama, action, and comedy. While
Kane argues that genre pastiche is typical of the films and televisual
texts within the sympathetic cycle (88), the genre pastiche for which
BtVS is the exemplar extends beyond Kane’s study. Since the publica-
tion of Kane’s book in 2006, the syntax and semantics established in
BtVS can be seen in numerous other teen film and televisual series,
including the Twilight films, The Vampire Diaries, and Teen Wolf.
BtVS, arguably, is the vampire narrative that moves its protagonists
from sympathizing with to falling in love with vampires, successfully
merging teen drama, romance, and horror. Indeed, I suggest that a new
cycle has begun: the Beloved Cycle, in which the vampire becomes the
beloved. In BtVS, most vampires are still evil monsters who have to die,
but, when Buffy falls in love with Angel and Angel with Buffy, a new
syntax begins.
I borrow the terminology of syntax and semantics from genre and
film critic Rick Altman: it is a useful framework for analysing the repeti-
tions that take place within teen vampire televisual series generally and
BtVS specifically. Altman considers the work of prominent genre critics
including Tzvetan Todorov, Fredric Jameson, and Paul Hernadi and
defines semantic and syntactic views as follows:
we can as a whole distinguish between generic definitions which

depend on a list of common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, loca-
tions, sets, and the like – thus stressing the semantic elements which
make up the genre – and definitions which play up instead certain
constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable place-
holders – relationships which might be called the genre’s fundamen-
tal syntax. The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building
blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which
they are arranged. (“Semantic” 10)
Repetition and narrative are at the core of these approaches. Both syn-
tactic and semantic approaches define a genre through the repetition of
elements across and within texts. For instance, Angel’s character draws
upon the semantics of previous vampires – his face that changes from
human to monster, his long black coat, his lurking in the shadows. He
also introduces a new semantic element: the vampire that does not bite.
This semantic element combines with the syntax of his relationship
with Buffy, which becomes a precursor to contemporary vampires and
vampire–human relationships, such as that of Edward and Bella in

Twilight and that of Stefan and Elena in Vampire Diaries.
In order to map the syntactic elements of the vampire genre and to
understand the current explosion of the teen-romance-horror genre,
such as Twilight, we must look to BtVS. The line between BtVS, Twilight,
and other popular young adult series, such as Vampire Diaries and
Vampire Academy, includes many televisual and filmic texts that draw
on the generic crossovers that BtVS introduces. Altman states, “[j]ust
as individual texts establish new meanings for familiar terms only by
subjecting well known semantic units to a syntactic redetermination, so
generic meaning comes into being only through the repeated deploy-
ment of substantially the same syntactic strategies” (“Semantic” 16).
The semantic unit of a vampire seeking redemption by resisting his
vampirism undergoes syntactic redetermination in two main forms in
recent vampire televisual series. The first redetermination transfers the
new semantic element of the vampire seeking redemption onto the
syntax of the film noir genre, which is established in the series Angel
and continues into relatively short-lived television shows for adult
viewers, such as Moonlight and Blood Ties. The second syntax, much
more successful and seemingly durable, follows the romantic relation-
ship between a guilt-ridden vampire and a human, or semi-/somewhat
human. These examples include True Blood and Being Human for adult
audiences and Vampire Diaries and the Twilight saga for teen viewers.
The repetition of these semantic elements results in a new syntax
in the vampire genre as the teen-romance-horror genre continues to
germinate. Altman discusses this type of repetition in terms of inter-
and intratextuality as well as viewer pleasure and suspense. He writes,
“The repetitive nature of genre films tends to diminish the importance
of each film’s ending, along with the cause-and-effect sequence that
leads to that conclusion. Instead, genre films depend on the cumulative
effect of the film’s often repeated situations, themes and icons” (Film/
Genre 25). Although Altman writes specifically about film genres, his
comments about endings can fruitfully be applied to BtVS, especially
when the formal aspects are linked to narratives of redemption and par-
don. Angel’s multiple sins require multiple acts of redemption in order
for deliverance to occur. Because he is an immortal, presumably he will
be paying his debt for an eternity.
The repetition of sin and redemption is enabled by the forms of the
text – a multiple season television series, its spin-off television series,
and its continuation in comic books – which prove to be ideal forms
for a narrative about a character for whom redemption can never end
Debra Dudek 211
because justice is still to come. This multiple-medium platform demon-

strates what Peter Lunenfeld in “Unfinished Business” calls an aesthetic
of unfinish, which he relates to a “perpetually suspended narrative”
(16). The final scene of the final episode of the Angel series is such a sus-
pended narrative. In this scene, Angel and his crew are shown fighting
against demons in a back alley, which implies that the work of redemp-
tion is never complete. The absence of Buffy from the scene also denies
the show a heterosexual happy ending. Although Buffy and Angel’s love
initiates Angel’s commitment to fight against evil and injustice, the
effect of their love moves out beyond the two of them: the archetypal
struggle between good and evil shifts because a vampire aligns himself
with humans in order to defeat his own kind.
Working against evil
The final aspect of Altman’s analysis that I shall summarize relates to

the function of genre. Altman claims that critics debating the function
of genre generally and film specifically align along two fronts: that
genre serves a ritualistic function by offering “imaginative solutions”
or that it serves an ideological function by representing “deceptive non-
solutions” (Film/Genre 27). In relation to film, Altman claims that the
ritual approach attributes “ultimate authorship to the audience, with
the studios simply serving, for a price, the national will” (“Semantic”
9), while the ideological approach demonstrates how “audiences are
manipulated by the business and political interests of Hollywood” (9).
Altman’s central objective is to embrace contradictions in the critical
methodology of genre theories, in which critics usually focus on defin-
ing a genre either by describing its syntactic and semantic elements or
by analysing their ritualistic or ideological functions. Altman claims that
genre criticism needs to attend to the semantic and syntactic elements
of a genre as well as to its ideological and ritualistic functions. In other
words, genre criticism should not separate a description of the charac-
teristics of a genre from an analysis of how those characteristics inform
an interpretation of the text’s meaning. I put Altman’s methodology to
work by calling attention to the semantic and syntactic elements of this
new Beloved Cycle and by connecting these elements to my argument
that in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, these semantics serve a ritual function
because the series offers imagined solutions to real problems via Buffy
and Angel’s love-based justice that works against evil.
The general premise of the television series circulates around the
idea that Buffy is a normal high school girl who finds out that she is
“the vampire slayer, one girl, in all the world, a chosen one. One born
with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread
of evil” (“Hellmouth”). In Season 1 – only twelve episodes – Angel is
Buffy’s almost-boyfriend who mostly lurks and warns her of impending
dangers. He is a 240-year-old vampire who spent the first half of his vam-
pire life living without remorse, without a soul. During this time, he was
known as Angelus, the most “vicious creature ever,” the vampire with
the face of an angel (“Angel”). In the universe of the Buffy texts – what
fans calls “the Buffyverse” – a gypsy curse has returned Angel’s soul to
him, condemning him to an eternity of penitence for his past evil deeds.
As Angel says, he’s spent the last “100 years hanging out, feeling guilty.
I really honed my brooding skills” (“Lie to Me”). For the first three sea-
sons, Angel is the only sympathetic vampire. Most other vampires are
one-dimensional killers and evil demons, although some of Spike’s dia-
logue anticipates the development of his character into a sympathetic,
and arguably beloved, vampire. After Angel leaves BtVS at the end of
Season 3, the remaining four seasons develop Spike’s character as he
seeks to become – and sometimes succeeds in becoming – Buffy’s lover.
Angel’s drive to “become someone” connects to his desire to work
side by side with Buffy in her fight against Sunnydale’s demons. When
Angel first sees Buffy, his response is less love-at-first-sight and more
an acknowledgement that she fights alone. The first half of Season 2
develops the relationship between Buffy and Angel as they try to negoti-
ate between the practical limitations of their relationship – that she is a
mortal and he is a vampire – and the obvious passion and love they have
for one another. As the following exchange elaborates, their relationship
oscillates between reasoned restraint and emotional lack of control:
Angel: Listen, if we date, you and I both know one thing’s going to
lead to another.
Buffy: One thing’s already led to another. It’s a little late to be reading
me the warning label.
Angel: I’m just trying to protect you. This could get out of control.
Buffy: Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?
(“Reptile Boy”)
What neither of them can imagine at this point is that “out of control”
functions both euphemistically and literally. Eight episodes later, Buffy
and Angel have sex for the first time, which breaks Angel’s curse and
turns him back into Angelus because he experiences “a moment of true
happiness” (“Innocence”).
Debra Dudek 213
After Buffy wakes up in Angel’s bed and finds herself alone, she seeks
him out; their subsequent conversation draws upon the syntactic ele-
ments of teen drama, when the seemingly perfect boyfriend turns nasty
after he “gets what he wants.” The rest of Season 2 follows Buffy’s strug-
gle as she fights against her love for Angel, who taunts her in the form
of Angelus, and the knowledge that, as the slayer, her duty is to kill him.
The first epigraph of this essay summarizes the tension that resonates
throughout this season after Angel loses his soul: although Angel is now
evil Angelus, he still must love Buffy in order to kill her. Angelus at this
stage most embodies the malignant and erotic vampires of the past, but
traces of the sympathetic and the beloved haunt him, especially in the
episode “I Only Have Eyes for You,” which I shall discuss at the end of
this essay. Similarly, Buffy still loves Angel but knows she must kill him,
knows that her love-based justice cannot be sacrificed for her beloved.
In the final scene of the final episode of Season 2, Buffy sends Angel
into a hell dimension right at the same moment that Buffy’s friend
Willow, who is a witch, restores his soul.
Season 3 opens with Buffy living in Los Angeles, shunning her slayer
duties in order to try to deal with her grief at sending Angel to hell. In
other words, Buffy struggles with knowing whether or not her actions
have been just. It is useful to return to Kearney here, who argues for an
interdisciplinary “diacritical hermeneutics” whose basic aim is “to make
us more hospitable to strangers, gods and monsters without succumb-
ing to mystique or madness” (18). This hermeneutics foregrounds rec-
ognition and justice, so that one is able to “tell the difference between
one kind of other and another – between (a) those aliens and strangers
that need our care and hospitality, no matter how monstrous they
might first appear, and (b) those others that really do seek to destroy
and exterminate” (10). This question about how to recognize evil in
order to offer or withhold hospitality is exactly the question with which
BtVS engages in its first three seasons, as Buffy assesses and reassesses
her understanding of evil, especially as it is embodied in Angel, and
Spike to a lesser degree.
Because Buffy, as the slayer, is destined “to stop the spread of
evil,” she needs to be able to identify who she must slay and then
do so. Kearney proposes a threefold approach to moving from
the discernment of evil to ethical action: practical understanding,
working-through, and pardon (100). Practical understanding is the
term Kearney assigns to “that limited capacity of the human mind to
deliberate about the enigma of evil” (100). This process of deliberation
“operates on the conviction that evil is something that must be actively
contested. … For how could we act against evil if we could not identify
it, that is, if we could not in some way discern between good and evil”
(101). Throughout her relationship with Angel, Buffy struggles with
how to identify evil and to reconcile the fact that Angel can be both
good and evil. When Angel first presents himself to Buffy, he says,
“I know what you’re thinking; don’t worry, I don’t bite” (“Hellmouth”).
Angel’s repetition of this phrase “I don’t bite” – and his actions that
support his utterance – establish Angel’s separation from the normal-
ized discourse of the vampire who bites, and initiates a new semantic
unit of the vampire who does not bite humans. In this initial meeting,
Buffy has no precedent for understanding that Angel is a vampire who
does not bite. When Buffy and Angel first kiss, however, Angel’s face
changes from human to vampire, with the implication being that the
passion of the kiss brings out the monster in the man (“Angel”). Buffy
screams, Angel jumps out of Buffy’s bedroom window, and the next
several episodes follow Buffy’s methods of processing the contradic-
tory information that Angel is a vampire, which marks him as evil,
while his repeated actions signify him as good.
Buffy must go through this process again in Season 2 after Angel
turns into his evil self, Angelus. Angelus joins forces with Spike and
Spike’s beloved Drusilla to reanimate an apparently indestructible
demon called the Judge, who will bring about Armageddon by destroy-
ing humanity. Narratively, the Judge is introduced as a way of proving
Angel’s lack of humanity and of demonstrating that vampires – such
as Spike and Drusilla – can contain aspects of humanity. For example,
the Judge expresses disgust at Spike and Drusilla’s love for each other,
which he deems too human. Whereas vampires drink blood to stay
alive, the Judge gains power when he sucks the humanity out of any
being, human or inhuman. His touch transfers the essence out of the
being and into himself, but if a being contains no humanity, then he
cannot extract any power. His first victim is a vampire who reads books
and therefore signifies as human; this again complicates the syntactic
and generic alignment of vampire with evil. When the Judge lays his
hand on Angel, however, he says, “This one is clean. There isn’t a trace
of humanity in him” (“Innocence”). The Judge’s various pronounce-
ments about Spike and Drusilla, the book-reading vampire, and Angel
demonstrate that vampires neither lack humanity nor are all evil. In
other words, some vampires can act humanely even though they are
no longer human.
One of the strengths of BtVS is its repeated refusal to provide narra-
tives that allow for simple characterizations of evil. Kearney says that
Debra Dudek 215
“[j]udgement [is] based on the practical wisdom conveyed by narra-

tives and driven by moral justice” and that “it is the task of narrative
imagination to propose various fictional figures that comprise so many
thought experiments which may help us see connections between the ethi-
cal aspects of human conduct and fortune/misfortune” (101). The narra-
tives that constitute BtVS serve this function. For instance, at the crucial,
pivotal moment when Angel turns into Angelus, the Judge pronounces
Angel’s absolute lack of humanity, a pronouncement that Spike, Drusilla,
and the viewers – but not Buffy – witness.
At the end of the episode “Surprise,” in which Buffy and her friends
find a way around the condition that the Judge cannot be killed by any
weapon “forged by man” and annihilate him with a rocket launcher, a
tearful Buffy says to Giles, “You must be so disappointed in me.” This
statement implies that Buffy is concerned that Giles, who as her Watcher
teaches her about monsters but also functions as a father figure, will be
disappointed in her for not killing Angelus when she had the chance and
for falling in love with a vampire who now seems intent on killing them
all. Giles responds by saying, “Do you want me to wag my finger at you
and tell you that you acted rashly? You did. And I can. I know that
you loved him. And he has proven more than once that he loved you.
You couldn’t have known what would happen.” Giles calls attention to
Angel’s repeated actions in order to substantiate his claim that Angel
loved Buffy, and viewers are called upon to weigh the repeated proof of
Angel’s humanity and constant guilt against Angelus’s acts of evil.
The above conversation is also useful for understanding the second
stage of Kearney’s approach, what he calls “working through.” This pro-
cess of working through means understanding how suffering may be a
response to acting against evil (103). Buffy’s emotional suffering when
Angel turns into Angelus and then again when Angel suffers as he recalls
his harmful acts performs this idea of working through how to “make
sense of evil” (103). That evil is embodied in the form of a beloved,
and that this beloved contains the possibility of evil within himself,
demonstrates the need for vigilance and for repeated action to identify
evil and then to resist its lure. Angel’s fluctuation between Angel and
Angelus also demands repeated acts of judgement and working through
so as not to see harmful others where they do not exist.
The final stage of Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics is pardon or
forgiveness. Kearney argues, “Against the Never of evil, which makes
pardon impossible, we are asked to think the ‘marvel of a once again’
which makes it possible. … prevention often requires pardon as well as
protest in order that the cycles of repetition and revenge give way to
future possibilities of non-evil” (105). Buffy and her friends must learn
this model of forgiveness, as Angel repeatedly performs “good” acts ad
infinitum. In one of the most moving episodes of Season 2, “I Only
Have Eyes for You,” Buffy and Angel perform this “marvel of a once
again” and learn the importance of pardon as prevention against future
evil. In this episode, a poltergeist seeks forgiveness for killing his lover
and then himself. Possessed by the ghosts of these two lovers, Angel and
Buffy re-enact the scene of the lovers’ deaths, but it is Buffy who is in
the role of the killer seeking forgiveness. By understanding why a killer
might seek forgiveness, Buffy moves from a position of assertion that
the killer does not deserve forgiveness to an understanding of why he
might need it in order to move to a pardoned future.
Conclusion
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – a narrative about a high school girl who loves a
vampire and who repeatedly confronts, judges, fights, suffers, and forgives
him and others – continues to provide a model for how to act ethically
in a world that seeks to characterize and to act against evil by naming
people as monsters. This series revises the syntax of the relationship
between vampire and victim to become a loving relationship between
equals, both of whom commit themselves to fight against those who seek
to harm humanity. Angel as both monster and man, both human and
inhuman, who repeats acts of evil and of good, provides a figure against
whom viewers might test their methods for recognizing and judging acts
of evil. As Buffy and her friends repeatedly negotiate their responses to
Angel’s actions, so viewers are called upon to perform a ritual in which
they imagine how they might act. Angel’s actions unsettle the sameness
of genre because Angel’s repeated actions are not one act repeated over
and over, keeping him forever in a cycle in which he rehearses his regret.
Instead, repetition with variation moves him forward into an unfinished
future, a future without ending, a future whose cumulative effects dem-
onstrate his commitment to justice that begins with, and is inspired by,
but does not end happily-ever-after with romantic love.
Works cited
Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Cinema Journal
23.3 (1984): 6–18. Print.
——. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. Print.
“Angel.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season on DVD. Writ. David
Greenwalt. Dir. Scott Brazil. Fox, 2001. DVD.
Debra Dudek 217
“Becoming, Part One.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season on
DVD. Writ. and Dir. Joss Whedon. Fox, 2002. DVD.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Writ. Joss Whedon. Dir. Fran Rubel Kuzui. Fox, 1992.
DVD.
Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask.
New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Print.
“Innocence.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season on DVD. Writ.
and Dir. Joss Whedon. Fox, 2002. DVD.
Kane, Tim. The Changing Vampire of Film and Television: A Critical Study of the
Growth of a Genre. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Print.
Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness. New York:
Routledge, 2003. 1–20. Print.
“Lie to Me.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season on DVD. Writ.
and Dir. Joss Whedon. Fox, 2002. DVD.
Lunenfeld, Peter. “Unfinished Business.” Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New
Media. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000. 6–21. Electronic.
“Reptile Boy.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season on DVD. Writ.
and Dir. David Greenwalt. Fox, 2002. DVD.
“Surprise.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Second Season on DVD. Writ.
Marti Noxon. Dir. Michael Lange. Fox, 2002. DVD.
“Welcome to the Hellmouth.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season
on DVD. Writ. Joss Whedon. Dir. Charles Martin Smith. Fox, 2001. DVD.
11
Roy and the Wimp: The Nature of
an Aesthetic of Unfinish
Margaret Mackey
Peter Lunenfeld explores the idea of “unfinish” in a deliberately “unfin-

ished” essay, first published in 1999 as the full scope of the digital
revolution was becoming apparent: “To celebrate the unfinished in this
era of digital ubiquity is to laud process rather than goal – to open up
a third thing that is not a resolution, but rather a state of suspension”
(8). Lunenfeld says that “the universal solvent of the digital” alters
how we tell stories, dissolving boundaries between text and context:
“Technology and popular culture propel us toward a state of unfinish
in which the story is never over, and the limits of what constitutes the
story proper are never to be as clear again” (14).
The suggestion that the fundamental shape of the story might be
changing under the pressure of new technologies and new forms of capi-
talism is an idea worth exploring. Certainly there are indicators that sup-
port Lunenfeld’s argument. In a digital era, it is difficult to distinguish
between a text, its backstory (“the information about how a narrative
object comes into being” [14]), and its packaging (the paratextual mix of
trailers, sneak previews, advance publicity, and spoilers that accompanies
many contemporary stories). “Narrative franchises” (16) compound the
fluidity of the digital world through branding exercises that proliferate
characters and stories in adaptations, commodification, and transmedia-
tion. “Final closure of narrative can not occur in such an environment
because there is an economic imperative to develop narrative brands:
product that can be sold and resold,” says Lunenfeld (15).
Yet I am not completely convinced that the changes are quite as radi-
cal as Lunenfeld would have us believe. In this chapter, I investigate
issues of “narrative franchise” and digitization, teasing out the implica-
tions of two corporately sponsored stories told some decades apart to
similar audiences, largely composed of young boys, although many girls
218
Margaret Mackey 219
could also be described as fans. What can we learn about the shaping
of our stories from a consideration of Roy Rogers and the Wimpy Kid?
The universal solvent
Lunenfeld’s proposition – that corporate imperatives for branding and

rebranding the market product of the story find their perfect vehicle
in the ever-soluble medium of the digital – makes persuasive reading.
His argument can be sustained by a close examination of a children’s
story that is also a market phenomenon: the ever-expanding universe of
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, which began its life on a website,
became a series of books that took over the New York Times Bestseller list,
has been adapted into successful movies, and carries the brand over to
a plethora of commodities.
The franchise story that never ends, however, is not a new or purely
digital phenomenon. Lunenfeld’s argument is to some extent con-
founded by the entirely analogue example of texts in radio, recorded
music, film, television, and comic book format about and starring the
cowboy hero Roy Rogers in the 1940s and 1950s. Rogers crossed media,
format, and genre boundaries with ease and success, producing an oeuvre
that, even in summary, runs to well over 300 pages of annotated “film/
disc/radio/television/comic-ography” in Raymond White’s compendium
(117–458, plus another 20 pages on solo work by his co-star Dale Evans).
Rogers’s story is told over and over again in ways that sometimes cor-
respond to, and sometimes contrast with, the never-ending story of the
Wimpy Kid.
Comparing and contrasting these two character-driven franchises,
each wildly popular with the boys of its day and many girls as well,
enables us to tease out what is radically new about the digital era of
corporate fiction, and what is inherited from an analogue past. As is the
case with much popular culture, these two examples will also permit
some exploration of the social dynamics and dominant media of two
eras: that of radio and television and that of the Internet.
The Wimpy Kid
Greg Heffley, Kinney’s anti-hero, tells his own story in a series of jour-
nals illustrated with line drawings. (The book version describes itself
on the front cover as “a novel in cartoons.”) To himself, Greg is always
right; he is blind to his own mean-spiritedness and self-centred cruelties
to others. His plans never end well, but he never stops planning.
To date, we have seen seven novels and three movies. A 2010 arti-
cle in USA Today suggests that Kinney envisaged the series as running
between five and seven books:
I always thought that kids would be satisfied if the story wrapped up

nice and neat over a certain number of books. But recently, I’ve been
wondering if kids care about that at all. I’m starting to think that
with these books, it’s all about the jokes and not about the stories.
So I think that as long as the jokes are good, I should keep writing.
(qtd. in Minzesheimer)
It is easy to grasp the incentive to “keep writing.” A March 2013 tally

reports world sales of approximately 80 million copies of the seven nov-
els currently in print and two additional volumes: Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Do-It-Yourself Book, a kind of fill-in-the-blanks journal, and The Wimpy
Kid Movie Diary (in three versions, updated each time a new movie was
released). As of that date, the books were available in 44 territories and
in 42 languages. An eighth novel, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck, was
published in November 2013 and the manager of Penguin’s Children’s
Books described the series as “the biggest children’s book brand.” In
2012, she observed, a copy of The Third Wheel (Book 7) was sold every
3.7 seconds (Tivnan).
In every authorized version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the key moments
are described by Greg in word and cartoon image on the lined pages of
his journal. In a sense, it is the ongoing journal that is “unfinished,”
even as particular episodes draw to a conclusion.
The story first took life online, at www.funbrain.com, and it contin-
ues to be told at that site – which also includes links for book purchas-
ing and movie viewing. The online version sets the tone for the whole
enterprise, featuring “hand-written” script and cartoon drawings on
lined pages. The online diary opens as follows:
Tuesday, September 7th

First of all, I want to get something straight: this is a JOURNAL, not a
diary. I know what it says on the cover but when Mom went out to buy
this thing I SPECIFICALLY said to make sure it didn’t say “diary” on
it. So don’t expect me to be all “dear diary this” and “dear diary that.”
All I need is for some jerk to catch me carrying this thing around
and get the wrong idea.
The other thing I want to clear up right away is how this was NOT
my idea, it was Mom’s. (Kinney, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid – Day 1”)
Margaret Mackey 221
The host site, Funbrain, home of the original production of the Diary of
a Wimpy Kid, is produced by the Family Education Network, a branch
of the giant international corporation Pearson. It offers a variety of
entertainment options for young people: educational games (more than
a hundred purporting to develop skills in math, reading, and literacy),
as well as comics and “online books” (“About”).
The Funbrain site positions itself as a safe route into the Internet for
young children. It assures parents that they can trust Funbrain
to deliver a fun and safe experience for even the youngest chil-
dren. The Playground helps parents introduce their preschoolers to
the Internet and teaches them how to manipulate the mouse and
keyboard. … Funbrain is committed to providing a safe gaming
environment that bridges learning and entertainment. (“About”)
In other words, the Wimpy Kid franchise made its first appearance
under the guise of safe, wholesome, educational, and parent-approved
content for children.
The features of ruled paper, script, and cartoons transfer readily to the
printed book. The first book adapts the website’s initial September intro-
duction, including the disclaimer about the whole question of writing
in a diary. It foregrounds many of the constructed elements of the origi-
nal (the lined paper, the stick figures, and so on) in a slightly wordier
version of the online opening (it’s all Mom’s fault), with a cartoon
illustration identical to the one on the website. The book, in fact, offers
a textbook example of remediation, as Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin use the term when they refer to texts “presenting themselves as
refashioned and improved versions of other media” (14–15).
Of course, the online version was imitating book values in the first
place, with its heavy emphasis on the notebook format of Greg’s
journal. This joke is likely not lost on Kinney’s readers. The story is
largely repeated from the online version, but the materiality of the book
as object is emphasized in the design of the series. All the book covers in
this series emphasize their “bookishness” with a faux appearance of pad-
ding, stitching, and important spine design. Greg’s drawings appear on
a simulacrum of torn-out lined paper taped to the cover. The physicality
of the book is front and centre in such a design.
The story is also reworked into an online game. The Funbrain site
links to Poptropica, one of the most popular and best known of all
children’s websites. Poptropica features a map full of attractions, one of
which is “Wimpy Wonderland” (“Poptropica Island Tour”). One of the
first options you encounter when you enter “Wimpy Wonderland” is

a shop selling books and DVDs of the story, a development that man-
ages to be simultaneously metafictional and crass in its impact. Readers
are presumably expected to move between the immersive world of the
online story and the commercial world of the sales pitch, to engage with
the story both intellectually and financially, to be both connoisseurs of
metafiction and consumers of stuff.
“Wimpy Wonderland,” like many other instantiations of this world,
is laid out on that familiar background of ruled paper. Your avatar gets
to walk around with cartoon characters from the book, and, of course,
converse with them via the speech bubbles that also appear in all other
versions. The plot revolves around a snow day. Everyone is having fun
except Greg, whose little brother Manny is lost.
To help each other, players often post online “walkthroughs” of the
game, both verbal and video. Here is an example, posted as early as
16 March 2011, by Dafster, who brags that his is the first walkthrough
on the web, even though it is only written, not video. A (relatively)
short quotation will supply some sense of the detailed repetition of
game events:
Step 1. Talk to Greg, he’ll tell you about Manny and how he lost him.
Keep talking to him until he asks you to search for clues in his house.
Step 2. Walk to the left screen until you get to Greg’s house. (It’s
the first house you’ll see. Walk inside and move around the house.
You’ll find an adress book [sic] and a piece of Greg’s diary. You also
might possibly find a locker number (sorry, I can’t remember where
you actually get this, so if you don’t find it there, you might have to
search around for it, if you don’t find it anywhere, then I’ll tell you
the number: 9, 37, 15). (“Wimpy Wonderland Walkthrough!”)
Less than a year after this early walkthrough appeared, a search on

Google turned up 246,000 hits for the relatively precise term “wimpy
kid winter wonderland walkthrough.” It is a bad idea to take Google
hit statistics too literally, but, even taken with every kind of qualifica-
tion, the vast numbers suggest proliferation of interest in a single text
form. The obsessive accounting for every single move through the
game characteristic of the walkthrough texts, more or less by definition,
means that fans are repeating and articulating the steps that took them
through the game.
The movie version also repeats key events. As with online and book
versions, the incident of the diary purchase appears early in the film
Margaret Mackey 223
version, embellished further by a cameo scene of Mom comparing prices.

The film also goes out of its way to make connections with the “paper”
origins of the story, though the reference back to the older medium is
a little misleading since the story actually first appeared on a screen.
The movie flashes back and forth between the real-life actors and the
cartoon images in which the characters first saw the light of day. The
DVD cover illustration makes a point of aligning actor Zachary Gordon
against the cartoon image of Greg. According to USA Today, the conver-
sion of this wildly popular series into a film called for careful treatment,
as it was dealing with what the magazine calls a “sacred trust” not to
anger or upset young viewers:
Director Thor Freudenthal leveraged his TV-commercial background

to give the film a multimedia feel, combining live action with
Kinney’s cartoons.
“Kids today are just inundated with different forms of media
all day long, and I felt the movie had to acknowledge that fact,”
Freudenthal says. That often means that the cartoons suddenly fill
the entire screen, offering a familiar touchstone to fans of books that
combine words with cartooning. (della Cava)
The effect also hearkens back to the original Wimpy Kid Funbrain website
where the cartoon did, indeed, fill an entire screen.
The movie launched to very mixed reviews, in part dependent on
how believable and/or repugnant the reviewer found the character
of Greg. Like every other branch of the franchise, however, it was
commercially successful.
One central element of all these versions of the story is a foreground-
ing of the means of telling through the written words and sardonic car-
toons of a self-serving narrator. In some ways it is the moment of telling
that remains forever unfinished in the world of Greg Heffley.
All the versions of Diary of a Wimpy Kid conclude with a relatively
open-ended and downbeat final scene. The relationship between Greg
and his friend Rowley is always in some ambiguous stage between
resumption of hostilities and their resolution – an ongoing cycle. The
different versions of the story simply leave off the telling at slightly dif-
ferent points in this cycle. In all cases, however, it is always clear that
“more of the same” is inevitably on the horizon.
Given the huge investment required to make a movie, it is not
surprising that a variety of potential revenue streams are activated
to support the financial commitment of the film version. One major
ingredient in the Wimpy Kid universe is a book on the making of the

three movies – released a total of three times with appropriate updates
(Kinney, Movie Diary). The conventions for these “making-of” books
are reasonably well established, as I can attest from personal perusal
of a large number of them (See Mackey “Borders,” “Men in Black,” and
“Phase Space”). One example after another includes behind-the-scenes
photos, storyboards and script samples, and interviews with various
agents (actors, authors, producers, costumers, and the like). This volume
adheres to these conventions but it does manage an interesting merger
of the cartoon boys, the boys created verbally, and the actors who bring
them to life in the movie. Each edition of the book is crowded with
explanations of the many details that go into the construction of a fic-
tional universe for a film, and the verisimilitude of the movie scenes is
explicitly gauged against the book rendition as in the example below.
Kinney points out that the stories are not specifically located, though the
holidays imply an American setting. “The reason there aren’t any geo-
graphic clues in the books is because the reader is supposed to believe the
stories could’ve happened anywhere – across the country or right down
the street” (Movie Diary 26). He highlights the producers’ vain search for
a typical American town:
So it’s weird that they ended up finding the perfect American town
in Canada.
Vancouver was chosen as the location for “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”
because the houses and schools in the suburbs look just like the
ones in the United States. Plus, lots of other movies are filmed in
Vancouver. (26–27)
This short passage discusses the construction of the book as well as

the movie and makes an elementary reference to the irony of the final
choice of a foreign location to represent Every-City. It also refers to the
movie-making industry. It is very much a case of looking behind the
façade of the screen.
The appeal of reiteration
The process of adaptation normally means that a story is retold in

ways that take advantage of the semiotic affordances of the medium
to which it is being transferred (and by which it is being reproduced).
But the micro-changes involved in the switch between online site and
novel format feature a kind of reiteration that takes very little account
Margaret Mackey 225
of what can be communicated in one format or the other. Perhaps the

fact that the online story remediates the affordances of paper in the
first place is part of what makes this particular adaptation so conserva-
tive. The book essentially tells the same story as the Funbrain site, but
takes advantage of paper’s particular qualities: you can own it, lend
it, hide it, trade it, take it to bed with you. Are these longstanding
virtues of paper enough to explain the phenomenal sales figures for a
text that is essentially available for free on the Internet? Or is it rather
that the novel embodies Greg’s original diary in pleasing ways? Or
do the purchasers of the novels actually read and relish the stories in
both formats? Some sales can be ascribed to family and friends happy
to purchase a product already known to be enjoyed by the recipient
of a gift, but this explanation is not strong enough to account for the
astonishing numbers of Wimpy Kid sales. This chapter is not a recep-
tion study, but there are many intriguing questions about the recep-
tion of the Wimpy Kid oeuvre to be asked. How many readers have
looked at the text in both online and paper formats? Are they readers
who are happy to reread in any case, or does this double formatting
appeal to even those readers who normally resist reading something
for a second or third time?
Lunenfeld suggests that the capacity of ordinary readers, viewers, play-
ers, and users to “open up” a text through the affordances of the digital
contributes to a new sense of “unfinish” in our culture. Yet it is very
striking that much of the Wimpy Kid empire is rather more closed and
finite than we might expect, especially given the “present continuous”
nature of the original stories, an essential quality of their diary format.
I searched online for fan fiction concerning Greg, Rowley, or Greg’s
big brother, Rodrick, and found strikingly little. It was noticeable that
the small set of Wimpy Kid fanfics told stories only in words; not a
single drawing appeared in the collection I inspected. Top listings on
the YouTube site contained mainly official trailers and interviews relat-
ing to the release of the movies, rather than fan film. The absence of
fan-contributed visuals is startling.
In contrast, visuals were promoted in an official “Do-It-Yourself
Comics Contest,” running through the spring of 2011. The compe-
tition was sponsored by publishers Amulet Books in coordination
with School Library Journal, with the winner out of more than 3000
entries announced at the American Library Association in June 2011.
“Are you funnier than me?” demanded the cartoon Greg, setting up
this competition. “Prove it!” (“Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Comics
Contest”.) The contest promoted drawing; the submission had to be
“an original comic made by YOU (and only you) on one side of an
8 ½ x 11” piece of white paper.”
The Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book (Kinney) also encourages
drawing, and even provides “training” texts: a cartoon with the speech
bubbles filled in, a cartoon with empty speech bubbles for the book’s
owner to contribute, and then some blank panels for which the owner
is expected to supply drawings as well as captions (different stages of
both unfinish and reiteration all on the same page).
But if the online numbers are any indication, it is in the virtual
world of Poptropica that most children continue their ongoing rela-
tionship with the Wimpy Kid, at least in public (there is no telling
how many private diaries Greg Heffley has spawned, another topic for
a reception study some day). The site visitors certainly do not seem
to be using their newfound digital powers to dissolve the conclusion
of the story or to create their own ongoing narratives. Rather, they
seem to be happy enough on a kind of neverending “walkthrough”
of a very strongly known world. The walkthrough, by definition, is
a highly detailed reiteration of the known text. Although the charac-
ter of the Wimpy Kid is at least as open to new adventures as Harry
Potter (whose novels have spawned many thousands of fan fictions),
the Wimpy Kid readers respond with repetition rather than new
adventures or relationships.
The King of the Cowboys
Boys of previous decades admired a different hero, one who had no

dealings with the digital – but the analogue world of Roy Rogers fandom
nevertheless presents many parallels to the digitally empowered territory
that is today occupied by Greg Heffley. An exploration of the similarities
and differences of these two overwhelmingly successful textual worlds
allows us to tease out the distinctions in Lunenfeld’s argument between
what is digitally and what is simply commercially enabled. Separated by
many decades, each of these stories managed to appeal to huge numbers
of children, especially boys, who followed their hero’s exploits across a
broad variety of media and through a range of commodities and collecti-
bles. The strong similarities provide a valuable opportunity to investigate
“unfinish” in analogue and digital forms in a kind of case study where
many of the other variables can be held constant.
The Roy Rogers empire emerged out of one man’s career change.
In 1942, actor Leonard Slye legally adopted his screen name of Roy
Rogers. Simultaneously, he left his singing group, Sons of the Pioneers,
Margaret Mackey 227
and began to establish himself as a singing cowboy, a career that would

allow him to reiterate a relatively singular plot over and over again.
Raymond White’s (2005) compendium of titles featuring Roy Rogers
in a variety of media represents the truly stunning scale of the singing
cowboy’s achievements. Because of the complexities of Rogers’s output,
it is hard to put simple numbers on the different categories of produc-
tion, but perhaps a few figures will give some sense of the scope of the
operation. Not including promotional films, I counted more than 120
feature films in White’s list. There were hundreds of radio programmes,
and the number of recorded individual songs may be indicated by the
68 albums and 41 compilation albums listed separately. One single
series of comic books, produced by Dell between 1948 and 1961, sup-
plies a tally of 145 issues. Additionally, there are comics about Dale
Evans (Roy’s friend in the series and his wife in real life), and separate
comics about Trigger, the horse, as well as a variety of more miscel-
laneous titles that feature Roy Rogers stories: Western Roundup, March
of Comics, Roy Rogers Western Classics, to name a few (White 117–65,
174–212, 230–99, 345–99).
The 100 television shows aired 278 times over six seasons on NBC,
between 30 December 1951 and 31 March 1957. After that, Rogers sold
the rights to the Nestlé Corporation, and since the early 1960s the show
has been broadcast thousands of times in syndication (White 400).
Rogers and Evans made numerous other television appearances on vari-
ety shows, inspirational programmes, and miscellaneous retrospectives.
The numbers related to Diary of a Wimpy Kid are undeniably sen-
sational, but the Roy Rogers numbers are also remarkable. Roderick
McGillis stresses the marketing implications of such ubiquity, describing
the cowboy culture of the 1940s and 1950s:
cowboys were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. As we have seen,

they were most obviously in the movies and by the end of the 1950s
they were definitely on television; as many as fifty prime-time west-
ern programs appeared from the late 1950s to the early ’60s. Cowboys
also turned up on cereal boxes, on belts, on stationery, on Thermos
bottles and lunch boxes, on bicycles and guitars, on pins and ear-
muffs, and on a variety of clothing, toys, and games. … The cowboy
was ubiquitous in the 1940s and ’50s, and the values he inculcated
in an entire generation have not diminished in recent years. (163–64)
The Roy Rogers Show on television also made a feature of what effectively
amounted to reiteration of the same story over and over again, though
details altered every week. The opening and closing of the show were
entirely fixed. Just as Funbrain.com now purports to introduce small
children to the Internet, so Roy Rogers, deliberately or otherwise, set a
standard of expectation for predictability in series television, then new
to child viewers. In a way, all media are new to child viewers, who are
themselves “new,” so to speak; but young Internet users in the 2000s
and young television viewers in the 1950s alike represent a special
case, one where children cannot apprentice themselves to parental
behaviours since parents are themselves novices.
Young fans certainly learned that you could rely on a few things with
Roy. The opening words and images of the TV show were always identi-
cal. “Roy Rogers,” said the printed letters over an image of Roy galloping
and firing his gun, and the voice-over picked up the description: “King of
the cowboys, with Trigger, his golden palomino, and Dale Evans, queen
of the west, with Pat Brady, their comical sidekick, and Roy’s wonder-dog
Bullet” (“Roy Rogers Show Opening”). The ending was, if anything, even
more sacrosanct; Roy and Dale rode Trigger and Buttermilk, singing in
harmony (Roy took the melody) as the credits rolled:
Happy trails to you / Until we meet again.

Happy trails to you / Keep smiling until then.
Happy trails to you / Till we meet again.
(“Roy Rogers Show – Happy”)
The conclusive nature of the little clip is announced in many ways;

credits proclaim an ending, the ritual of Roy and Dale riding the prairie
in front of a breathtaking backdrop of mountains sums up many of
the elements of the programme, and the words themselves, along with
Roy and Dale’s farewell waves, both say goodbye and suggest a future
meeting – allowing for the continuation of more of the same. This cer-
emonial sign-off always follows a very neat tying-up of loose ends in the
final moments of the story itself, signifying a doubling of the ending:
the single story is officially over while the potential for ongoing connec-
tion remains strong. The neatness of the closure paradoxically opens up
the way to more of the same next week.
Each instalment of The Roy Rogers Show involves some version of
a story in which Roy, because of his depth of character and nobility,
knows all the answers to whatever problems are temporarily besetting
his neighbours. Some of Roy’s all-knowing ethos presumably arises from
the evangelical version of Christianity professed by both Rogers and
Evans. It was a Christianity that permitted a man to assert his authority
Margaret Mackey 229
in very violent ways; even if Roy was very slow to pull his gun, he never
hesitated to use his fists. Patriarchal ideology infused every minute of
the television programme, and many of Rogers’s and Evans’s other
productions as well. Such ideological saturation (perhaps regardless of
its content) leads to a sense of profound familiarity, and, in this case,
the developing knowledge of the young viewer that he or she could
always trust Roy to come up with the right answer was comforting.
It is striking today to look at one of the Roy Rogers television pro-
grammes that preserves all of its commercials (“Bad Neighbors”).
Today’s young people are often described as media-savvy, but the chil-
dren of the 1950s also had to develop some tacit critical strategies just
to make sense of a programme such as this one, learning to distinguish
between fictional Roy, hero of the show, and persona Roy, who invests
the integrity of his own real-life family in his sales pitch. At the opening
of this particular show, Roy and Dale and their own off-screen children
advertise Jello Instant Pudding.
The relationship between this married Roy and Dale (with their own
children and with a pudding to sell) and the dramatic roles they play
in the fiction that follows is complicated, to put it mildly. Roy speaks
directly to the watching children and exhorts them to pester their
mothers for this pudding. Dale, speaking as a mother herself, supplies
the back-up appeal to the moms about the virtues of the “busy-day
dessert.” Then they seamlessly change modality. In the story that fol-
lows, Roy and Dale have different narrative roles, but young viewers are
expected not to be confused by the sudden shift.
The fictional Dale’s relationship to Roy is ambiguous. She is an inde-
pendent woman running a café in Mineral City. White describes their
connection as follows:
Her relationship with Rogers in the series appeared to be purely

platonic. … Rogers certainly felt that his youthful audiences did not
want him kissing anyone, except maybe Trigger. In the television
series, Rogers and Evans were good friends who talked and worked
together to solve local problems but never kissed or showed any
overt affection. (93)
This fictional relationship plays out in the story of “Bad Neighbors,”

which features a relatively standard plot, involving fury among the
cattlemen because the farmers are denying them access to the watering
hole they need to fuel their cattle drive, a denial that leads them to
dynamite the dam. But, at the dramatic moment of the announcement
of this terrorist action, the narrative comes to a halt and salesman Roy
reappears. Three animated bears assemble a sign saying “STOP” and
we turn to a cartoon advertisement for Post Sugar Crisp. The three
bears, who also appear on the box front, are in peril; an animated Roy
gallops to their rescue and sings a song with them about Sugar Crisp.
They all ride past a billboard photograph of Roy, which comes to life
so Roy can say, “Yes sir, buckaroos, Sugar Crisp is my favourite too.”
The modal shifts in the presentation of Roy are complex, even though
the message is rather simple-minded, and viewers are expected to shift
back to the narrative again when the ad ends. Post-commercial break,
the plot thickens. There is much action with guns and fists, and a great
deal of highly dramatic music on the soundtrack; it would be very
repetitive to recite every detail because the same ingredients of fighting
and shooting show up so frequently. In the end, neighbourly feelings
triumph through Roy’s good advice, and the show ends with ongoing
slapstick humour from Pat Brady.
Adults may consider the constant recurrence of fistfights and gun-
fights to be mind-numbing; I have serious questions about whether
children share this reaction. Most series fiction is highly repetitive and
I have elsewhere considered the values and comforts of such repetition
as “exciting yet safe” (Mackey, “Exciting” 92). In this case, child viewers
seem not to have been troubled by the predictability of the plot. The
satisfactions of Roy asserting his authority through a combination of
homilies and fisticuffs carry enormous potential for repetition. The
violence represents risk that is safely housed within the ideological
fabric of the story frame. Roy uses violence to establish the moral reso-
lution of the story, but viewers know it will all have to be done again
next week. The end justifies the means (at least temporarily), and so it
is okay to shoot and fight if you are a good guy.
In “Bad Neighbors,” after the plot is wrapped up but before “Happy
Trails,” there is another advertisement. We see the image of the Double
R Bar Ranch, and a circle opens up to reveal Roy’s face. “Well, that’s
it, riders,” says Roy. “But before we leave would you remember to do
something for Dale and me?” The circle widens to a full-screen image
that reveals Dale standing beside him, and the two of them engage in
dialogue that addresses viewers about the many excellent qualities of
Sugar Crisp cereal. A credit tells us that we have watched a Roy Rogers
production and then we listen to the finale.
The shift of persona between the fictional Roy and the salesman Roy
is unexplained; children new to this medium in 1954 were expected
to carry the patriarchal reliability of fictional Roy over to the huck-
ster version; all the sales patter was modelled on the Roy-knows-best
Margaret Mackey 231
characteristics taken from the show. Yet children were also supposed to
mark the shift in the relationship between Roy and Dale, to make some
sense of their role as parents in the advertisement even as they are just
friends in the storyline. It is a mix every bit as intriguing as the varied
instantiations of the Wimpy Kid, and calls for considerable sophistica-
tion on the part of young viewers. The ideological scaffold of unques-
tioned patriarchal values would have been highly familiar to 1950s
youngsters since it was reinforced in many quarters. Presumably the pro-
ducers hoped that children would naively take the advertising version of
Roy as embodying these virtues as thoroughly as the character Roy, and
would treat his enthusiasm for Sugar Crisp with respect. It seems likely
that many children learned to make a distinction, but no doubt some
took on board a simple view of Sugar Crisp as approved cowboy fodder.
We do not have enough reception data about young viewers’ reaction to
these shifts, but it is always a mistake to underestimate them.
Categories of unfinish in the world of Roy Rogers
Readers of Greg Heffley’s accounts of his life need to learn how to deal
with an unreliable narrator whose confident plans predictably fail.
Viewers of the Roy Rogers stories needed to master the convention of
unreliable endings, despite the fact that every story ends with Roy in
the right and the villains in the wrong, with the moral universe firmly
re-established. As with any kind of series repetition, it takes only the
opening of the next show to place the known world at moral and physi-
cal risk once again. There is never any hint at the end of the story that
things are okay only temporarily; within the story itself, no character
ever questions the absoluteness of the resolution. Viewers, however,
would have learned early on to expect more of the same kind of disrup-
tion next week. Greg Heffley’s readers sometimes need to read against
his interpretations, applying their broader knowledge of recurring pat-
terns that seem invisible to him. Roy Rogers’s viewers needed to apply
their awareness of recurring patterns to read against the closed ending
of each episode.
The Roy Rogers stories were not open to digital dissolution, of course.
But they were famously and completely open to analogue reiteration in
the form of children’s incessantly repetitive games of playing cowboys,
with or without the attendant Indians. McGillis describes his reaction
to watching cowboy films at the cinema;
[W]atching the cowboys round up the bad guys was deeply satisfying,
so much so that we went home and re-enacted what we saw on the
screen. Playing cowboys was just about all we did for a few years way
back when, and while playing we indulged in a fantasy of control
and authority. (49)
I am struck by the strong similarities between the digital “walkthrough”

of Wimpy Wonderland and this kind of analogue “gallop-through” of
children’s cowboy play in the 1940s and 1950s. Surely there is at least a
link between the two in that theme of “fantasy of control and authority.”
Knowing how to play the online game supplies a different form of author-
ity, but one that offers its own satisfactions. Michael W. Smith and
Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, in their complex and well-known study of 49 adoles-
cent male readers, suggest that control and mastery are integral to (at least)
boys’ reading pleasure (30). What we see here across the decades may
simply represent different manifestations of control and expertise within
the fantasies children develop from the prompts of their favourite texts.
Comparisons and contrasts
It is easy now to overlook this similarity, but both the Wimpy Kid and
Roy Rogers found homes in a new medium: the Wimpy Kid, at the
start of his fictional existence, on the Internet; and Roy Rogers moving
into television when he was already successfully established in movies,
radio, and the recording industry. Each participated in a kind of educa-
tional exercise: the Wimpy Kid habituating children to make a regular
appointment with a continuous work of online fiction, and Roy Rogers
teaching children a variety of serial viewing lessons. Many of the les-
sons for Roy Rogers fans transferred from or developed from a merger
of radio and movie-going habits: for example, scheduled viewing time,
various forms of visual and audio literacy, conventions of introduction
and conclusion, distinctions between the fictional and the advertising
personae, and so forth. Potential lessons from the Wimpy Kid include
the virtues of checking in regularly to see if your website has been
updated, learning to place a serially told story within the surround-
ing context of numerous other enticements on the Poptropica site, and
engaging with the responses of other fans.
Yet there are many deep contrasts. The most obvious, of course, occur
with the models of masculinity on offer. Roy is everything that Greg is
not: tall, confident, talented, terrific on a horse, good with people, and
always right, not only in his own eyes (Greg can compete at that level),
but also in the eyes of all who surround him (Greg loses definitively by
this standard of comparison).
Margaret Mackey 233
The simplistic patriarchy that fuels Roy’s inevitable rightness about

everything was exploded by subsequent ideological disputes concerning
feminism, colonization, and the values incarnated in the Cold War,
to take just a few examples. To a degree, Greg Heffley is dealing with
fallout from the collapse of the Roy Rogers model of masculinity. Even
though one is a man and one is a child, I think it is useful to look at how
the two characters are presented. It is also very interesting to consider
whether the two heroes of these very different popular fictions reflect
the media in which they made their names. Roy Rogers was a movie
star, almost by definition larger than life. Even when he moved to
television, children could only watch, imitate, and aspire. Greg Heffley
first appeared on the Internet and was thus, from his origins, open to
“the universal solvent of the digital” (Lunenfeld 14); Greg himself could
be described as possessing a “soluble” character, one constantly under
threat of disruption.
There is little room created in the Roy Rogers saga for disputes about
the rightness of Roy; outright cynicism and denial would seem to be the
only readily available routes to a critical perspective. Greg’s perspective,
however, invites scepticism and rereading from multiple points of view.
The lack of ending in Greg’s stories also makes room for a more open
interpretation; however misleadingly, Roy’s narratives are neatly tied
up, every single time.
Despite these points of discrepancy, however, it is a bit startling to
acknowledge the many and varied similarities between the Roy Rogers
stories and the Greg Heffley stories. Roy’s persona, as written and acted,
never changes. Greg notionally moves from grade to grade over the
seven novels so far, with an occasional reference to increasing age, but
the drawn Greg looks exactly the same in Book 5, The Ugly Truth, as in
the first book. Presumably the visual references to actor Zachary Gordon
will age a bit more appropriately. (This reality check is perhaps one of
the limitations of using the same actor as an adolescent instantiation of
“unfinish” – had the producers established a convention of a different
actor for every movie they could have run forever.) But even the movie
establishes that the cartoon images are the first point of reference for
this story.
Although Greg Heffley first came to life on the Internet screen, his
textual and commercial resemblance to analogue hero Roy Rogers is
greater than I expected to find when I began this project. The similari-
ties between the two sagas raise a number of questions to which the
answers are not entirely clear. To what extent has the incorporation
of the digital from the very outset of the Wimpy Kid project perhaps
reduced the impact of the “universal solvent of the digital” and its invi-
tation to “unfinish” the provisionally finished? Perhaps it is a question
of demographics: on the evidence of the Internet, readers of the Wimpy
Kid stories seem more willing to invest creative effort in a walkthrough
than in a fan fiction. While I could find almost nothing in the way of
Roy Rogers fan fiction, a non-written instantiation of a similar instinct
is documented in accounts of kids “playing cowboys” and re-enacting
Rogers’s stories in their own homes, with themselves as the hero. It is
possible that the open-ended nature of the Wimpy Kid story acknowl-
edges the “universal solvent” pre-emptively; maybe Kinney is writing
a story with no ending because he knows it is going to a digital home
where endings can always be undone. Certainly he is writing in an
era where our concepts of narrative and narrative conclusion are more
plural and open than they were in the television era. The idea of the
“end of the story” is itself mutating, just as Lunenfeld suggests.
It is clear, however, that the commercial imperatives that govern the
marketing of various elements of the Wimpy Kid franchise are very far
from new. Roy Rogers provides an equivalent to every strand of the
marketing strategy except for the Poptropica component; and a strong
argument could be made that the Saturday morning matinees and
the weekday afternoon television shows provided an analogue effort
after the same kind of blanket coverage that marks the ingredients of
Poptropica today. Funbrain’s publicity exudes much of the same kind of
righteous rhetoric as was implied in the moral assertiveness of the Roy
Rogers approach. Cowboy shows were seen as wholesome, “a fun and
safe experience” in Funbrain’s terms.
If we take them as even roughly parallel in some of their psychologi-
cal configuration, there is an interesting shift from the physical “gallop-
through” of children’s cowboy games to the digital walkthrough in
which Greg’s snow day is explicitly performed for other viewers. There
is an element of display of personal skill in the walkthrough that played
out differently for child cowboys through the requisite cowboy costume
and cap gun, and the essential defeat of the bad guys. The change in
the scale of audience is one major difference, but the performance of
control is a common feature.
None of this surprising degree of alignment between analogue and dig-
ital phenomena suggests to me that Lunenfeld was wrong in his predic-
tion that the “universal solvent of the digital” would transform how our
society tells stories to itself. What I think we can learn from the parallels
between Roy Rogers and Greg Heffley is that the ground was much more
extensively prepared for a contemporary aesthetic of unfinish than we
Margaret Mackey 235
have perhaps assumed. The commercial imperatives that seem to have

driven the Roy Rogers enterprise look very familiar today. I found many
lavish full-page, full-colour advertisements for Roy Rogers paraphernalia
in 1950s magazines. The role of the digital is revolutionary but that
revolution has its roots in a complex and fascinating past. Both cowboy
games and computer walkthroughs participate in what Lunenfeld refers
to as forms of “process” and “suspension” (8).
In ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes more subliminal
in nature, Greg Heffley re-embodies many of the cultural and com-
mercial roles of Roy Rogers. Yet his repetition of these roles is riddled
through (in all senses of that phrase, perhaps!) by complex ideological
debates about boyhood and manhood that have dominated the past
half-century. His capacity to speak to millions of boys and to invite
them to “walk through” his life and adventures is a reiteration of Roy
Rogers’s invitation to his young listeners and viewers; but the Wimpy
Kid’s theme is one of repetition with small variations and with under-
cutting questions. It could be said, perhaps, that Greg returns to the
narrative of masculinity that Rogers personified with aplomb, but ren-
ders it “unfinished” and uncertain. Where Roy provides solutions, Greg
offers dissolutions. Both the digital and the cultural forms of porous-
ness in the Wimpy Kid stories open up a closed story of male certainty
and allow for new and critical forms of repetition. Roy’s ideology of
masculine entitlement is reconsidered and questioned, even as Greg
aggressively attempts to assert its values. A comparison of these two
reiterated stories suggests very strongly that, while the commercial pat-
terns remain strikingly similar, other aspects of our cultural life are set
to repeat in new and transformative ways.
Works cited
“About Funbrain.” Funbrain. Web.
“Bad Neighbors.” The Roy Rogers Show. NBC. 21 Nov. 1954. Vol. 1. Critics
Choice Video, 2004. DVD.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Print.
della Cava, Marco R. “This ‘Wimpy Kid’ Was Made, Not Born.” USA Today 18 Mar.
2010, Life sec.: D3. Print.
Kinney, Jeff. Diary of a Wimpy Kid. New York: Amulet, 2007. Print.
——. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid – Day 1.” Funbrain. Web.
——. Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book. New York: Amulet, 2008. Print.
——. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth. New York: Amulet, 2010. Print.
——. The Wimpy Kid Movie Diary: How Greg Heffley Went Hollywood. New York:
Amulet, 2011. Print.
Lunenfeld, Peter. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge: MIT
P, 1999. Print.
Mackey, Margaret. “Exciting yet Safe: The Appeal of Thick Play and Big Worlds.”
Play, Creativity and Digital Culture. Ed. R. Willett, M. Robinson, and J. Marsh.
——. “At Play on the Borders of the Diegetic: Story Boundaries and Narrative
Interpretation.” Journal of Literacy Research 35.1 (2003): 591–632. Print.
——. “Literacy in the Zone of Corporate Development: The Cultural and
Commercial World of Men in Black.” Simile: Studies in Media & Information
Literacy Education 1.1 (2001). Web.
——. “Playing in the Phase Space: Contemporary Forms of Fictional Pleasure.”
Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books 88 (1999): 16–33. Print.
McGillis, Roderick. He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western.
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print.
Minzesheimer, Bob. “Author Jeff Kinney to Reveal ‘Ugly Truth’ about ‘Wimpy
Kid.’” USA Today 29 July 2010, Life sec.: D1. Print.
“Poptropica Island Tour, Wimpy Wonderland.” Poptropica. Web.
“The Roy Rogers Show – Happy Trails to You.” Online video clip. YouTube. 7 May
2010. Web.
“The Roy Rogers Show Opening.” Online video clip. YouTube. 24 Sept. 2007.
Web.
Smith, Michael W., and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys”:
Literacy in the Lives of Young Men. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002. Print.
Tivnan, Tom. “Global Launch for Eighth Wimpy Kid.” The Bookseller. 26 Mar.
2013. Web.
“The Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Comics Contest.” Wimpy Kid. Web.
“Wimpy Wonderland Walkthrough!” Dafster’s Gaming Universe. 16 Mar. 2011.
Web.
White, Raymond E. King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West: Roy Rogers and Dale
Evans. Madison: U of Wisconsin P-Popular, 2005. Print.
12
MP3 as Contentious Message:
When Infinite Repetition Fuses
with the Acoustic Sphere
Larissa Wodtke
At age nineteen, Shawn Fanning became the youthful face of rebellion

when he launched his peer-to-peer music file sharing platform Napster
in 1999. Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, a 2013 documen-
tary about Napster, describes Fanning as one of the “brilliant young
minds that ignited the biggest youth revolt since Alan Freed hit the
radio” (“About the Movie”). For three years, Napster allowed millions
of Internet users to share their digital music collections for free, until
its shutdown following a lawsuit by major record labels. Napster’s chal-
lenge to the music industry was possible because of the development
of MP3s, a digital audio encoding format that decreases a file size by
discarding all unnecessary auditory data. Combined with faster Internet
connections and ever-increasing terabytes of memory storage in tech-
nological devices, the lossy data compression characteristic of MP3 files
enabled the alternate, “underground” circulation of music through
Fanning’s software.
MP3s have become ubiquitous since the turn of the twenty-first
century. The file format has not only prompted panic in a music indus-
try that continues to rely on a twentieth-century business model, but
also elicited innovation among musical artists and fans along with con-
tinuous speculation about “the future of the music industry.” Although
they are as mediated as other music formats before them, MP3s are also
adaptable to more playback devices than previous formats and, due to
their compression, easily moved through space and time. Composed of
a series of on-off digits, MP3s are, in theory, infinitely and uniformly
repeatable; and yet, the MP3 exists in a non-linear space that allows for
all elements to be simultaneously present everywhere at all times. This
space is decentralized and functions much like sound itself, defying
spatial margins and temporality.
237
Unique existence in space and time becomes irrelevant in the face

of simultaneous fluidity, as do authenticity and monetary value. In
this sense, MP3s are representative of an emerging economy in which
immaterial entities, like affect, knowledge, and social relationships, “are
coming to outweigh material commodities” (Hardt and Negri 132). At
the same time, MP3s currently precipitate further repetition in the form
of parody and nostalgia through the manufacture of their analogue,
material counterparts, which have technically become redundant and
old fashioned, but nonetheless continue to be perceived as the com-
modities with more monetary value than the MP3. For these reasons,
I argue that MP3s are useful texts through which to explore the effect
of digital repetition on postmodern, post-industrial culture. Moreover,
using Marshall McLuhan’s conception of typographic/mechanical
media and the acoustic sphere, I suggest that the disruptive effect of
MP3 repetition is linked to the MP3’s hybrid nature. Such a framework
provides an opportunity to conceptualize the future of cultural produc-
tion and consumption, including the future of emerging formats for
narrative texts for young people.
The music industry: from value assumptions to value-added
Between the invention of sound recording and the development of

the MP3, the twentieth-century music business was most certainly an
industry: it mass-produced tangible formats of recorded music and
owned those technological processes of mass production (Frith 58).
Music was conceived of as a material commodity to which industry
could assign monetary value and then market as an inherently valu-
able product, especially to youth. Because young people are perceived
as more likely to buy into what is “new” or “modern” at a crucial point
of identity formation (Moore 23), and because they have a high dispos-
able income to spend on commodities like music (Kusek and Leonhard
98), the music industry has often keenly pursued the youth market.
Over the past decade, as music file sharing became more prevalent,
the major record labels and their organizations, such as the Recording
Industry Association of America, have desperately opposed what they
deem “piracy,” particularly within what used to be their most lucra-
tive market. Young people, in turn, have come to embody a rebellion
against the authority of the music industry and its rigid, outdated
business model. Media coverage of the high-profile case of Napster
often focused on the youth of its creator, with a Fortune headline ask-
ing, “Who’s Afraid of This Kid?” (Kover). Portrayed as “digital natives”
or “screenagers,” young people are commonly understood to be the
Larissa Wodtke 239
earliest and most active adopters of new technology. Because of their

widespread adoption of the MP3, they have also come to represent an
increasing unwillingness among consumers to pay for music (Swash).
Most recently, however, young people are also being represented as
analogue consumers. In a scholarly study of young people returning
to vinyl, the purchase of vinyl records was conceptualized as an act of
both authenticity and agency (Hayes). These young people “adopted
decoding practices that mimic those used by previous generations to
purchase, experience, and respond to music. Like the audiences of
nostalgia films, their consumption of cultural texts draws upon popular
understandings of how these experiences were framed in (and by) the
past” (55). While acknowledging that young people utilize both MP3s
and vinyl, Andy Cush nuances this position in a post for the music
app blog Evolver.fm: “serious young music fans … are well aware of the
respective advantages and disadvantages of both formats. We spend
too much time cruising blogs for MP3s. … Our iPhones are loaded with
music apps. When we come home, we listen to our favorite albums,
carefully, on vinyl” (Cush). Words like “serious” and “carefully” imply
a particularly authentic fandom defined by listening practices that are
deliberately constrained by the medium being used, prioritizing atten-
tion over distraction and quality over quantity. The simultaneous use
of both digital and analogue formats points to music fans’ tolerance of
repetition and their willingness to access the same content in different
formats and contexts for particular purposes.
In 2010, after over a decade of the proliferation of the MP3 format
and the emerging panic over peer-to-peer file sharing, Ryan Moore noted
that “popular music is not simply a commodity in its own right but also
a central medium for greasing all the various wheels of the consumer
culture as the boundary between content and advertising is obliterated”
(199–200). This culture of convergence, in Henry Jenkins’s terms, and
cross-promotion (what media conglomerates refer to as “synergy”) is
obvious in most popular series-based narrative franchises for young
people (see Margaret Mackey’s chapter in this volume). Cross-media cap-
italism is changing in subtle ways, however, often outside of the chan-
nels of major media businesses and because of the MP3 medium itself.
In a September 2008 blog post, Kevin Barnes, lead singer of the
American indie band called of Montreal, announced, “We Will Only
Propagate Exceptional Objects”:
We only want to produce objects that have a function and that can
be treasured for their singularness [sic]. … A CD has little value, as
an object … That is why, instead of following the tired path of the
past, we’ve decided, to release a table top floral beast, a lantern, a

collection of wall decals, a stallion shaped print, a collection of pins,
and a clothing and tote bag line as our album packaging instead. …
We envision a time when you’ll be walking around your local record
shop and be like, “What’s the new Radiohead album again? Oh yeah,
a bonsai tree in the shape of a deformed goat, I see it over there.”
While a new Radiohead album as a bonsai tree is not a reality yet, a

Radiohead “newspaper” album is. Radiohead’s eighth studio album,
entitled King of Limbs, came in an initially mysterious newspaper
version. It was eventually revealed that this version used album artwork
designed to look like a Sunday newspaper, and contained: two ten-inch
vinyl records; a CD; perforated blotting sheet artwork, which looked like
LSD tabs; and a newspaper containing art and text by Stanley Donwood
(who has designed nearly all of the artwork for Radiohead’s albums).
On the Creative Review website, Donwood gives an explanation for this
particular type of special edition:
Newspapers are eminently disposable. … They will fall apart very,

very quickly unlike a Kindle or an iPad that’s going to end up on
the shores of some subcontinent somewhere. … I love the heritage
of them, and what newspapers have done to change the world from
being a really class-based, almost feudal system to people being able
to get information cheaply. (qtd. in Williams)
He goes on to say that he is aware of the fact that fans will see this
package as a collectible, highly valuable item, and will do their best to
preserve it.
Both Barnes and Donwood touch on ideas like singularity, function-
ality, aesthetics, collectability, disposability, accessibility, and, perhaps
most significantly, value. Value-added has become a commonly used
phrase, especially in the music industry; according to a Deluxe Products
Survey by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM),
value-added is an adjective used to describe deluxe music packages,
which could include a CD with bonus content, a DVD, ringtones, and
other merchandise. In the NARM report, one music-retailer described a
deluxe edition as “[s]omething worth paying for, as opposed to down-
loading for free” (National Association of Recording Merchandisers; my
italics). It is important to note here that value is equated with monetary
or exchange value. Both Radiohead and of Montreal are working with a
similar definition of value-added music. The perceived necessity to add
Larissa Wodtke 241
value to music is a result of a shift in medium, namely from the CD to

the MPEG-1 Layer III, more commonly known as the MP3.
MP3 as mechanical text
Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s work on mechanical-visual culture and

his conception of acoustic space, one can see that the MP3, as a medium,
falls into a liminal space between phonetic-literate and audile-tactile
cultures, creating a tension in its status as a commodity. McLuhan traces
the origin of mass commodity culture to the innovation of movable-type
printing, which he characterizes as repetitive, uniform, linear, visual,
and conducive to thinking as an individual. He contrasts the print/
mechanical society associated with movable-type printing (phonetic-
literate culture) with the community, orality, and simultaneity of audile-
tactile culture, which he sees as typical of both pre-literate and electronic
societies. McLuhan’s theories about these two modes of communication,
and the societies they ultimately produce, are applicable to an analysis of
recent business models for selling music, including those of PledgeMusic
and Spotify. These contemporary examples of alternative methods for
music production and distribution demonstrate that the tension in the
MP3’s hybridity contributes to the problem of assigning MP3s mon-
etary value, often leading to fetishization of analogue technology and
its materials, the replacement of material commodities with access and
social experience, and the insertion of human agency, including that of
fans and artists, as part of the content of the medium.
MP3s are information, and this information is encoded to be primar-
ily auditory and/or acoustic; however, it is also bound to binary code. In
other words, it is a form of communication that falls within McLuhan’s
understanding of mechanical culture. McLuhan argues in The Gutenberg
Galaxy that “just as print was the first mass-produced thing, so it was
the first uniform and repeatable ‘commodity’” (125). The binary code of
MP3 texts acts as the ordering of discrete parts of space and time (Evens
55), allowing for exact uniformity and potentially infinite repetition.
Not only is mechanical media, such as print, linked to uniformity and
repetition, but it is also strongly identified with abstraction (McLuhan,
Gutenberg Galaxy 17–18). Marcus Boon, in his book In Praise of Copying,
describes the binary code of digital music files as “a series of ones and
zeros,” “symbolically registered,” and “stored in a series of compart-
ments” (199); in other words, MP3s are based on the abstraction of
numbers and symbols, and they are inherently serial, much like the
phonetic alphabet. The MP3’s binary code is an alphabet that is not
read visually, but the fact that MP3s are built of binary code means
that, at least conceptually, they participate in phonetic-literate culture.
Paul Levinson claims that binary code “works so well as a conduit of
communication precisely because it has no literal resemblance to what
it is communicating” (164); this flexibility in communication can be
compared to the abstraction of the phonetic alphabet allowing for the
meaningfulness of language.
While digital music has been in existence much longer than MP3
files have, this technology represents the first instance of separating, or
abstracting, digital information from such paratexts as LP covers, jewel
cases, and liner notes (Straw 86); this contributes to the perception that
MP3s are immaterial and, hence, the medium resists previous modes of
music commodification. In addition to this abstraction from visual, tan-
gible paratexts, the songs themselves have become disaggregated from
the narrative of the album, narrative itself being a form which, arguably,
follows a linear tendency related to print culture (McLuhan, Gutenberg
Galaxy 244). This shift into non-linearity via abstraction fragments the
whole and presents both new possibilities and challenges to artists.
Not only is the code that composes MP3s ostensibly “immaterial,” and,
thus, not obviously visible, but the cost of producing the code, includ-
ing labour costs, is rendered invisible (Betancourt). In reference to print
culture, McLuhan describes the uniformly repeatable mechanical effect
as being ostensibly “uncontaminated by human agency” (Gutenberg
Galaxy 144). The impression that the MP3 is a labour-free object seems
to be confirmed by the ease with which one can copy and transfer it.
This mechanical effect of repeatability is amplified by the perceived
intangibility of the digital text, an effect that feeds back into the invis-
ibility of the labour used to produce the MP3 and the lack of monetary
value attached to the MP3. In their extreme uniformity, repeatability,
and abstraction, MP3s are what I will call hyperextensions of the
mechanical/typographic medium. Paradoxically, this hyperextension
of commodifiable mechanical culture leads to the uncommodifiable
format of the MP3.
MP3 as acoustic text
In Understanding Media, McLuhan uses the example of the electric light

as “pure information,” a “medium without a message” (19). He goes
on to argue that “[t]his fact, characteristic of all media, means that
the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (19). Digital
objects demonstrate this quality more clearly than physical objects.
Larissa Wodtke 243
Michael Betancourt describes digital objects as “symbolic content,”

which “becomes a physically accessible form only when presented
through a technological intermediary … or transformed into a physi-
cal object.” Like other digital objects, MP3s are only functional when
“translated” into a visual version of their code on various interfaces,
such as an iTunes application or the screen on a cellphone. In effect,
MP3s are always mediated and, like repetitious musical commodities
before them, such as CDs, dependent on another commodity (Attali,
Noise 96). The fact that MP3s, which can be free of physical paratexts,
only appear within a context produces a significant tension in their
conceptualization as commodities.
The binary code that makes up the MP3 is not just linked to abstrac-
tion, uniformity, and repetition, but also to a less fragmented pre-print
culture. McLuhan refers to Tobias Dantzig’s Number: The Language of
Science, in which Dantzig “indicates that even digital counting is a
kind of abstraction or separation of the tactile from the other senses,
whereas the yes-no which precedes it is a more ‘whole’ response”
(Gutenberg Galaxy 179). This observation can be used to illuminate and
complicate the code that composes MP3s: while MP3s are abstractly
digital, they are also based on the dualistic binary code that operates
on the more holistic yes–no premise, one of the oral characteristics
of the MP3. This yes–no premise of binary code demonstrates why
the MP3 format can also be considered an electric medium without
abstracted fragmentation.
McLuhan compares binary code with a mosaic of simultaneous items
(Understanding Media 334), a comparison which can be useful in classify-
ing MP3s as part of electric, automated media rather than just mechani-
cal media. To McLuhan, automation is characterized by programmed
machines able to switch between functions, rather than the fragmented
specialization of human labour in the mechanical assembly line mode
of production: “It is part of the automation or electric logic that special-
ism is no longer limited to just one specialty” (Understanding Media 469).
His discussion of automation and its “power of adaptation” (470) antici-
pate digital media, in which binary code can be adapted into almost
anything. Though other art forms, like visual art, literature, and film,
can also be transmuted into binary code, the MP3 is strictly composed
of sound and is created with as much compression as possible, discard-
ing all unnecessary audio data. The result is that the MP3 becomes a
small file with no obvious loss of quality to those listening to it. These
aspects of the MP3 make it more easily abstracted and transportable,
and allow it to appear less material than visual forms such as films.
In McLuhan’s terms, the MP3 medium is contradictory. Although

MP3s are a hyperextension of mechanical/typographic media, they
are further complicated by their auditory characteristics, especially
those which connect them to what McLuhan describes as the “acous-
tic sphere” and the automated world of electric media. Using sound
itself as a model, McLuhan describes this acoustic space as simultane-
ous, non-linear, and decentralized; multiple planes are experienced at
once, not as fragments or in succession. Of course, music is sound, and
along with its aurality comes a sense of communal sharing, an aspect
associated with orality. Marcus Boon agrees that music, as a cultural
form more copious than others, “appears and disappears fleetingly,
conjures the immanent vastness of the Net, constellates into infinite
sonic chains, precipitates collective joy, is eminently portable, and
resists being turned into a thing or property” (In Praise 65). Mark Poster
extends this inference of orality inherent in music to digital culture:
When cultural objects are digitized, they take on certain character-

istics of spoken language. Like an oral sentence or a song, digitized
voice is easily and with little cost reproduced by the networked
computer user. … The model of consumption does not fit practices
of speech or singing. Similarly, players of digitized sound are not
consumers but … users. (244)
Poster’s distinction between consumers and users is an important one,

particularly in discussions of the sale of access to music. Value under
industrial capitalism, which depends upon the manufacture and con-
sumption of tangible commodities, is resisted by the MP3 medium itself
due to its aural existence, which can be experienced in a simultaneous
sphere of sound and as a digitally simultaneous (and perfectly uniform)
object throughout the rhizomatic Internet. In “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin claims that “[e]ven
the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element:
its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where
it happens to be” (220); however, in this age of digital reproduction,
McLuhan’s conception of the acoustic sphere where “every thing or
event creates its own space, and time” (McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws
of Media 53) may be more useful. MP3s are capable, then, of flowing
uninhibited through multiple contexts.
According to McLuhan, “the ‘message’ of any medium or technol-
ogy is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into
human affairs” (Understanding Media 20). The MP3 was created with the
Larissa Wodtke 245
purpose of compressing data, and, thus, facilitating the ease of mass

reproduction and distribution; the message of the MP3, then, might be
said to be an exponential increase in the scale of repeatability, uniform-
ity, and mobility. Jonathan Sterne argues that the MP3 is a “celebration
of the limits of auditory perception” that “emphasizes distraction over
attention and exchange over use” (“The mp3 as Cultural Artifact” 828).
In an industrial capitalistic economy that assumes that ownership of
the means of production secures the value of a commodity, the MP3,
which can be mass-produced by more people than any other preceding
music media, degrades its own market value from the outset. Sterne
states, “if recording shifted music from use-value to exchange-value,
then digitization in the form of the mp3 liberates recorded music
from the economics of value by enabling its free, easy and large-scale
exchange” (831).
I am not arguing that the value of the MP3 can or should be meas-
ured only by that which is monetary. McLuhan argues that “it is a
consumer-oriented culture that is concerned about authors and labels
of authenticity. Manuscript culture was producer-oriented, almost
entirely a do-it-yourself culture, and naturally looked to the relevance
and usability of items rather than their sources” (Gutenberg Galaxy 131).
This lack of concern over intellectual property encourages an additional
form of repetition: intertextuality. Dominant discourse, as seen, for
example, in the mainstream media and in copyright legislation, focuses
on the theft and piracy of digital music – on, in other words, the capi-
talistic exchange of music. Such a focus ignores the affective circulation
of music (Rodman and Vanderdonckt 248). As in McLuhan’s description
of manuscript culture, the circulation of music is more about acces-
sibility and visibility than about private ownership and intellectual
property. This alternate economy includes affective fan labour (Baym
and Burnett), such as blog promotion, podcasts, and non-profit record
labels. This labour may also extend to creative collaboration between
fans and artists, such as that employed by Nine Inch Nails, Imogen
Heap, and Einstürzende Neubauten, among others.1 Musicians can
cultivate further affect by allowing fans to participate in their artistic
and marketing processes, positioning themselves with their fans on the
side of authenticity, creativity, and transparency against the perceived
commercialization and greed of major record labels. As part of the
campaign to raise $100,000 from fans for her Theatre is Evil album and
tour, for example, singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer produced a short
video in which she proclaimed that “[t]his is the future of music” and
“[w]e are the media” (“Amanda Palmer”).2 This participatory feature
of MP3 culture makes sense in light of McLuhan’s statement that “in

all media the user is the content” (McLuhan and Zingrone 276), and
that the “electric dynamic [is] one of public participation in creativity”
(Understanding Media 430).
A. Fuat Firat and Nikhilesh Dholakia identify the concept of post-
modern consumption in similar terms: “In modernity, the subject (the
consumer being) encounters the objects (products) as distinct and dis-
tanced from her/himself. In postmodern consumption, the consumer
renders products a part of her/himself, becoming part of the experience
of being with products” (95). This type of consumption, of course,
also ties into Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of collecting, in which there
is a “mutual integration of object and person” (97). For Baudrillard,
collected objects are abstractions which can enter into a relationship
with the subjective self (91), and, as collectors seek to complete their
specific series of objects, “gratification flows from the fact that posses-
sion depends … on the absolute singularity of each item … and, on the
other hand, on the possibility of a series, and hence of an infinite play
of substitutions” (94). This “fusion of absolute singularity with infinite
seriality” (95) points to an interesting, perhaps contradictory, hybrid of
uniqueness and repetition.
From Content to the Cloud: MP3 as hybrid
According to McLuhan, hybridizations of media “breed furious release

of energy and change” (Understanding Media 74). I argue that the hybrid
medium of the MP3 is generating a lot of energy, both from those who
are trying to resist the inherent meaning of the medium, and from
those who are attempting to adapt to the change that the medium
precipitates, while continuing to operate within the assumptions that
accompany previous media. Musical artists and entrepreneurs, who are
increasingly becoming part of the latter group, are creating numerous,
apparently new business models in an endeavour to assign a monetary
value to music. From 2011 reports by the BBC (“Radiohead Spearhead
Surge”) and The Economist (“The Revival of Vinyl”) about the recent
resurgence of vinyl sales to the proclamation by Wired writer Steven
Levy that the integration of cloud music services with Facebook is
“The Second Coming” of the Napster music-sharing dream, it is clear
that there are two major responses to the MP3 medium: one repeats
the older analogue format or other physical art forms with a perceived
aesthetic and commodity value, and the other privileges social sharing
and accessibility to quantity. In some cases these two responses overlap,
Larissa Wodtke 247
as in vinyl albums accompanied by download codes or the opportunity

to download digital files immediately upon ordering physical albums.
MP3s, however, are still most often presented by artists and their record
labels as the bonus material made available for convenience rather than
the commodity that has aesthetic value. In both responses to the MP3
medium, the artist and the fan/user/consumer have become increas-
ingly involved in the content of the medium through collaboration
and sharing.
PledgeMusic is one of the many online crowdfunding ventures work-
ing toward a new business model for music. According to its website, the
company has two goals: to allow fans to help their favourite artists make
records, and to offer artists a new way to take control of their music and
sell it successfully to fans (“About”). Unlike in the now defunct busi-
ness model of Bandstocks,3 fans’ investments in PledgeMusic projects
do not translate into shares or partial ownership of the products them-
selves. Rather than investors, fans are more like patrons of or donors
to a cause, as is the case in many other crowdfunding models.4 One of
the distinguishing features of the PledgeMusic model is the emphasis
on “customization” and menu offerings, which act as incentives for
their pledges. The menu items on offer attempt to assign music, in the
form of MP3s or otherwise, a monetary value. For example, Gang of
Four, a well-established post-punk band which released its first album
in 1979, opted to raise funds for its 2011 album, aptly entitled Content,
via PledgeMusic. The artist page for Gang of Four on the PledgeMusic
website says, “For £8 you’ll receive the project download when released,
plus access to pledger-only updates” (“Gang of Four”). Significantly,
they added a gift chart of sorts, which shows just how many gifts of
money are needed and in what denominations they can be given. If the
digital album is not enough, “there’s more! Pledge for any of the below
and the download and updates are free.” This list includes a range of
items such as: a signed CD plus vocalist Jon King’s Spotify playlist of the
week (£22); a signed and numbered rare white-label vinyl copy of the
album (£30); raw footage from Gang of Four’s US tour (£100); The Lost
Cassette, a recording of Gang of Four’s first-ever show, encased in a cas-
sette Walkman (£175); a Lyric Clinic with band members (£250); a heli-
copter ride with the band back to London after the Glastonbury Festival
(£950); and, the most highly priced pledge incentive, band member and
renowned producer Andy Gill’s services to mix your track for £1500.
The Ultimate Content Can (£45), which is also listed among the myriad
options, is the album packaged in a metal can, along with vials of the
band members’ blood and a scratch and sniff book (Trendell). Notably,
this special edition extends to senses beyond the auditory or even

visual, and it also quite literally inserts the artists into the commodity.5
There is a repetition to be found within the value-added commodities
themselves, which are essentially multiple versions of the same content
sold in different formats.
In looking at these offers, four things become apparent: (1) the down-
load of the album is not worth much itself, so other features have to be
added, and these features are especially focused on analogue formats;
(2) considerably more monetary value is assigned to physical objects,
whether they directly contain the musical content or are related to it;
(3) the most valuable products are actually services and visible labour
performed by the band members; and (4) fan consumers are encouraged
to become part of the products and to create rather than just consume.
In generating increasingly unusual and nostalgic paratexts, it seems that
artists are also introducing a parodic element through which they com-
ment on where their music fits into the post-industrial economy. In the
case of a left-wing band like Gang of Four, who penned songs such as
“Capital (It Fails Us Now),” the parody is pronounced.
These extreme uses of paratexts within the alternative music econ-
omy are also apparent at a more independent level, without the use
of third-party crowdfunding sites. Having created Corporate Records,
an ironically titled online record label to sell their own digital music
files and those of any artist who signs up for free, The Indelicates, an
English indie band, have also offered value-added packages to house
their music. The Complete Special Edition of their Songs for Swinging
Lovers album included, among many other things, a short length of
the actual rope that the duo used to hang themselves in the album
cover art, and a piece of fudge made by a band member. The erasure
of human agency, which McLuhan related to mechanical culture,
is partly reinstated through the human-handled and/or homemade
objects on offer, including the rope and fudge. In an electric, auto-
mated culture, McLuhan says, the “custom-built supplants the mass-
produced” (Understanding Media 465). The variety of special editions of
Songs for Swinging Lovers, like those offered by Gang of Four, attempts
to customize the commodity in order to reintroduce the element of
scarcity that gave objects their value in mechanical culture. These cus-
tomizations belie assumptions about what can be assigned monetary
value; they imply that monetary value is linked to scarce, aesthetically
pleasing visual and tactile objects. This emphasis on materiality is also
often reflected in the music itself, especially in that of the lo-fi genre.
Despite deliberately low sound quality, bands like Animal Collective
Larissa Wodtke 249
are producing fetishized music products, which many fans consider

highly valuable; for example, the online ordering for the thousand-unit
limited-edition pressing of Animal Collective’s Animal Crack Box had
to be suspended within the first few hours of availability due to “over-
whelming demand” (Thiessen), and the test pressing sold for $2425 on
eBay (Breihan). By producing music that bears all of the imperfections
of older analogue recording techniques, these bands tap into fans’
“nostalgia for a music that still requires materiality” (Kreitler).
In his essay “Potlatch Digital,” Jacques Attali proposes four scenarios
for the future of music consumption, two within a “repetitive era,” one
that he calls the “potlatch scenario,” and a fourth called “composi-
tion.” The first two options attempt to apply legislative restrictions to
MP3 reproduction, which he sees as ultimately ineffective. The potlatch
scenario creates a gift-giving economy in which live performance takes
precedence as the commodity worth paying for, while composition
focuses on the act of making music rather than listening to it. These lat-
ter two propositions appear to be more viable in the context of the MP3.
Implementing the value of performance, The Indelicates also offered
Songs for Swinging Lovers as a Super Special Edition, which promised that
the band “will come to anywhere you like (within the UK) on a date of
your choosing, play the album for you, record it and then sign a legal
document transferring all the rights in the recording to you, thereby
creating a limited edition of one” (“The Indelicates Store”).
Some new music industry alternatives have dispensed with physical
items completely, and have turned music into a service rather than a
product. One such service already briefly mentioned is Spotify, which is
currently available in the United States and parts of Europe. Like many
other cloud services, the information accessed by users does not exist
on individual users’ hard drives; instead, the music is stored in cyber-
space to be accessed and used by listeners, much like a personal radio
and all-inclusive music library. There are varying levels and quality of
access ranging from Free to Premium; the monetary value increases as
your allotment of listening hours increase and as the amount of adver-
tising decreases (“Terms and Conditions”). Users can also manipulate
the music in the cloud to create their own playlists while sharing them
with others. In Spotify’s original model, the user could purchase the
MP3s via Spotify’s partner 7digital, downloading to his/her own hard
drive without Digital Rights Management. In many ways, this service
exemplifies the tension of the MP3’s hybridity: it privileges mobility
and the simultaneity of the acoustic sphere rather than private owner-
ship, while also operating as a try-before-you-buy incentive to possess
MP3s as commodities. Launched in 2008, Spotify has yet to make a

profit (Weissman), and in the meantime, it quietly discontinued its
download store in 2013 (Solomon), and may be pressured to change its
business structure in exchange for paying lower royalty costs to major
record labels (Sandoval; Peoples). A study conducted at the University
of Hertfordshire, which found that 78 per cent of their adolescent
respondents would not pay for a streaming music service (Bahanovich
and Collopy 21), further challenges a model like Spotify. I argue
that this failure is linked to the MP3 medium, which is at odds with
monetary value. If MP3s are free-flowing, simultaneous objects that are
also infinitely repeatable and uniform, the constraints and containment
imposed by Spotify seem counter-intuitive and counterproductive.
Nevertheless, cloud music services, including iCloud and Google Play,
appear to be on the rise as the music industry’s latest significant devel-
opment and strongest hope. As cloud music services are being built
into the context of the social networking behemoth Facebook (Levy),
MP3s are becoming valuable within a context that allows for signifi-
cant increase in accessibility through mobility and quantity; users can
access the exact same millions of music tracks anywhere through any of
their music-playing devices at the same time, and they can share their
choices with anyone else on the same social network. The aesthetics of
analogue recordings, tangible musical objects, and their paratexts are
exchanged for ubiquity and multitude. MP3s become yet another con-
textual feature of the social networking landscape; as Patrik Wikström
concludes, “online music services will compete with their contextual
features, rather than with content exclusivity” (178). Like the many
devices that store MP3s, including computers, phones, MP3 players, and
now social networking platforms, the licensing of music in television,
video games, and ringtones makes money through its containment
of the medium. MP3s derive value and meaning from their contexts,
not their content. In other words, “the medium is the message,” as
McLuhan proposed over 45 years ago (Understanding Media 25).
Notably, none of these examples is making large profits; most are
breaking even or losing money. Perhaps this foundering is related to
an attempt to apply the rules and experiences of older media – the
repetition of mechanical culture – to the newer media – the repetition
of digital culture. The hybrid medium of the MP3 fuses mechanical
reproduction and digital copying, amplifying the uniform repetition
of the former and the simultaneity of the latter. This combination of
amplifications has placed the MP3 outside the capitalistic industrial
economy, interrogating the value of music in ways that are pushing
Larissa Wodtke 251
the limits of marketing and sales methods. When used by major labels
in the effort to counter the decommodification of music brought on
by the MP3 medium itself, value-added tactics can become gimmicky
rather than aesthetically interesting, and novel without being innova-
tive. For example, in 2011, the Universal Records-signed band Kaiser
Chiefs outlined how they were going to sell their album, The Future is
Medieval. The customer could choose ten songs of the twenty the band
had produced, design her/his own cover, pay £7.50 to download it, and
then “re-sell” it to others, earning a pound for each album sold (Kaiser
Chiefs “Please”). The graphic design of the band’s website during the
release of The Future is Medieval fetishized the analogue text, including
images of telegraph machines, Victorian-era cameras, and the nostalgic
material culture of Wunderkammer objects. Universal Records built in
strict boundaries for creation, including the tracks available, and the
cover art objects that could be used; there was no room for original con-
tent from the fan or user, encouraging participation with very limited
agency. Clearly, the Kaiser Chiefs are still operating under the auspices
of an industry of mechanical control.
Their album title is oddly appropriate in a McLuhanesque reading of
the current state of the music industry. The MP3 hybrid of mechanical
and electric media has produced an economy for music that straddles
different media cultures: the repetitive, intellectual property-based
mechanical culture, and the pre-print (now also digital), communal
sharing culture. As with of Montreal’s and Radiohead’s ideas for com-
modifying music, there is much to be teased out here: creative fan–artist
collaboration, entrepreneurship, selection and manipulation, customi-
zation, and extensive repetition with difference. The music industry is
and has been a site of numerous forms of repetition, whether through
sound and commodity reproduction or through perennial styles and
genres that fade in and out of vogue as fans become nostalgic. In his
book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, music critic
Simon Reynolds views the recent hyper-acceleration of nostalgia in
music culture as a pathological tendency, in some ways reflecting
Fredric Jameson’s “Nostalgia for the Present” (279–95). In fact, much of
the promise of selling music would seem to lie in nostalgia that cannot
imagine a future beyond what Mark Fisher has termed “capitalist real-
ism.” Simon Clayton of The Indelicates suggests that “the only truly
scarce resources left for the recording industry to exploit are nostalgia
and sentimentality – hence all the handwringing about ‘record store
day’ and all other processes that commodify and fetishise what really
just amounts to shopping” (Wodtke). Perhaps one of the messages of
the MP3 medium is that the human agency of live performance, and
affective interaction and collaboration with fans, will be the most
effective conduits to value; maybe the only music that can be success-
fully valued as a monetized commodity is that which is contextualized
successfully, including within the fetishized, nostalgic material for
collectors.
In 1984, Stewart Brand stated that “information wants to be free”
(“Discussions” 49). The hybridity of the digital medium, which, to
use McLuhan’s terms, amplifies mechanical repetition and electronic
simultaneity, explains why information like the MP3 “wants to be free.”
In their 2005 manifesto for the digital music revolution, David Kusek
and Gerd Leonhard imagine the future of music to be akin to water,
“ubiquitous and free flowing” (3), but with the same utility cost. The
very hybridity of the digital medium, which explains why it is free, also
reveals why this proposition is a challenging one. Though the MP3 is
technically a proprietary medium, consumers currently only pay for the
files indirectly by purchasing the devices which play them; corporations
which manufacture the software and hardware to play and copy MP3s
pay the licensing fees (Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format 26–27).
I would argue that, despite these indirect, largely unperceived costs, the
MP3 has set a precedent for open-source compressed music files like Ogg
Vorbis; in other words, there are already music files in existence that are
not only indirectly free for users, but also free of proprietary licensing. In
his essay, “Collateral Damage,” published by The Wire, Boon speculates
that MP3s and their discontents may be a way into thinking about the
larger context of post-industrial capitalism. He concludes, “It’s hard to
own sound, to lock it down. A minimum global living wage is one idea …
but how to get there is one of many challenges we face” (ellipses in orig.).
In light of Boon’s question, Hardt and Negri’s conception of “common
wealth” can offer a context for speculation on the message of the MP3
and the future of music as commodity. In looking at the shifts in the
composition of capital, they note that “[b]iopolitical products … tend to
exceed all quantitative measurement and take common forms, which are
easily shared and difficult to corral as private property” (136). In Hardt
and Negri’s terms, the MP3, and the music it represents, is an exemplar
of the commons, and may signal a larger shift away from capitalism and
its focus on private property.
It might be useful to look at the MP3 and its effect on the music
industry in relation to the negotiations around the ebook medium
that have begun to take place in the book publishing industry. There
is already evidence of the fetishization of the material book and its
Larissa Wodtke 253
paratexts. In his Booker Prize acceptance speech in 2011, Julian Barnes

stated: “Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its
contents, will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical
book … is to resist the challenge of the ebook, it has to look like some-
thing worth buying, worth keeping” (qtd. in Brown). While the ebook is
a possible comparison point with the MP3, there is an even more direct
correlate in the realm of narratives for young people: the mobile phone
novel, or m-novel. The m-novel, a medium that first gained mainstream
popularity in Japan as early as 2004 as keitai shousetsu, is a relatively
short, fictional narrative composed and read on a cellphone, and is
particularly popular with young people (Lukacs). Like MP3s, m-novels
discard anything deemed superfluous, creating minimalist narratives.
Their Japanese detractors have argued that they “aren’t literature at all
but the offspring of an oral tradition originating with mawkish Edo-
period marionette shows and extending to vapid J-pop love ballads”
(Goodyear 27). It is notable that these otherwise visual, typographic
texts are compared to orality and popular music. Their denigration as
such points to a bias in favour of a typographic medium; critics like the
one cited above do not acknowledge the message or the possibilities of
a hybridized medium, which, in this case, also uses aspects of electronic,
aural media.
Echoing the emphasis on music fan involvement and collaboration
in the affective economy of the MP3, m-novels are often dependent on
interactivity and participation. Yoshi, the author of the first m-novel,
interacts with his fans by using their suggestions for story material,
and by responding to their fluctuations in attention: “‘[i]t’s like play-
ing live music at a club,’ he said. ‘You know right away if the audience
isn’t responding, and you can change what you’re doing right then and
there’” (qtd. in “Cell Phones”). In the case of the m-novel, participation
can be tied to education, too. After launching an initial pilot project
called Kontax in 2009, the Shuttleworth Foundation began Yoza, a
library of free mobile novels, to encourage literacy among young people
in South Africa (“Yoza!”). The foundation asked readers to comment
on the stories as they were published serially, offering an incentive of
free airtime for their phones. Teenagers were also urged to contribute
their own stories, to vote in opinion polls at the ends of chapters, and
to interact with characters through a social networking platform (Lee).
Digital texts like the MP3 and the m-novel demonstrate the pos-
sibilities and challenges of cultural consumption in the twenty-first
century. They defy monetary terms through their infinite repeatability,
are highly portable, and are episodic, in that they are consumed as
small, abstracted files that ultimately fragment a narrative, whether

that narrative takes the form of an album or a novel. Just as the MP3
is an aural medium fused with typographic elements, the m-novel is
a typographic medium fused with aural qualities of simultaneity and
decentralization. Returning to McLuhan’s concepts, both the MP3 and
the m-novel suggest that mechanical repetition is becoming hyper-
extended beyond the industrial while merging with the acoustic sphere.
In the end, perhaps the most interesting thing about McLuhan’s theory
is that it is being repeated in this form, though with crucial differences
that can provide a paradigm for an emerging socio-economic order that
troubles twenty-first-century capitalism.
Notes
1. In 2008, Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor) released two albums, Ghosts I–IV
and The Slip, encouraging fans to share and remix the band’s music for non-
commercial purposes. A year later, Reznor also released free, high-quality
video footage of his Lights in the Sky tour via BitTorrent, allowing fans to
edit it into a tour documentary. Imogen Heap’s #HeapSong1 project, which
began in March 2011, used crowdsourcing to create the first song on her next
album, currently referred to as Heapsongs. Fans were invited to upload “sound
seeds” (samples of everyday sounds), sound solos, words, and visual art, which
Heap used for inspiration and, in some cases, incorporated into the song.
From 2002 to 2008, Einstürzende Neubauten implemented their Supporter
Initiative, which featured a subscription format in which fan supporters “paid
the band directly to produce an album for an agreed date while access was
provided … via the Neubauten website to the group’s … struggles to craft
and organize the promised music” (Shryane 380). Subscriber-volunteers were
further involved with this project in areas of design, marketing, distribution,
and tour logistics (381).
2. Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign went on to set a record for the highest
amount of funds raised on the site: over $1,000,000, at least ten times her
original goal. Her case demonstrates that artists who have established, dedi-
cated fan bases can work successfully outside of the major record label model,
but it remains to be seen if lesser-known artists could achieve such success.
3. Bandstocks was a short-lived website through which artists could raise money
for their musical projects via fan investment. Fans could buy as many shares
of stock as they wanted and would be paid a small percentage of any profit
made from selling the record.
4. There are several other crowdfunding sites for artists, including Kickstarter,
IndieGoGo, and Sellaband. This patron model had been used in the musical
context more generally before these sites; for example, the British singer-
songwriter Momus (Nick Currie) created his 1999 album Stars Forever by
writing and recording customized songs for fans who each paid him $1000.
5. An article written for the Guardian in 2010 highlighted the current trend
of “added value” packages in the music industry, citing Lady GaGa’s
Larissa Wodtke 255
Super-Deluxe Fame Monster Bundle, which included a lock of the pop star’s
hair; and Nine Inch Nails’ drummer Josh Freese’s $75,000 package, in which
he “offer[s] to join a fan’s band or be their personal assistant for a month,
record a five-song EP based on their life story, and give them a flying trapeze
lesson and a drum kit” (“Musicians Counter”).
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13
The Little Transgender Mermaid:
A Shape-Shifting Tale
Nat Hurley
From the mainstream media accounts to the medical literature and com-
munity organizations, transgender children, it would seem, are obsessed
with mermaids. Take, for instance, Barbara Walters’s 2007 20/20 seg-
ment “My Secret Life: A Story of Transgender Children.” Walters meets a
six-year-old child named Jazz who collects mermaids and whose parents
describe the ubiquity of the icon for transgirls. Jazz’s mother, Renee
Jennings, claims that all young transgirls are obsessed with mermaids,
and the scenes of Jazz’s bedroom show mermaids everywhere. Even the
show’s opening clip of Jazz (which also serves as the transition from
commercials) depicts her in mermaid iconography reminiscent of Walt
Disney’s Ariel; Jazz emerges from the water, on the beach, wearing a
purple bikini, and running her fingers back through her hair – just like
Disney’s transfigured princess. Similarly, “A Boy’s Life” in The Atlantic
(2008) describes the self-fashioning of Brandon, a child who, we are
told, “drew himself as a mermaid with a sparkly purple tail, or a tail cut
out from black velvet” (Rosin 1).1
Literature prepared by the Children’s National Medical Center in
Washington, DC and distributed to families of children with “gender
variant behaviours” by hospitals across North America goes so far as to
make specific mention of Little-Mermaid-identification as a symptom of
gender identity disorder in boys, “usually first noticed between the ages
of 2–4 years”: “Boys may show an interest in women’s clothes, shoes,
hair and make-up. They play-act and identify with female characters
such as Barbie™, The Little Mermaid™, Snow White or Cinderella”
(“A Guide for Parents” 1). Wherever the transchild appears, the mer-
maid is not far behind; in the process, the transgirl comes to occupy
the symbolic position as poster child for all transchildren. In the UK,
the organization for transchildren and their families is simply titled
258
Nat Hurley 259
Mermaids;2 Italian politician, transgender activist, and writer Vladimir

Luxuria rewrote “The Little Mermaid” as a transgender fairy tale in her
collection Le favole non dette (The Untold Fairy Tales) (2009); and come-
dian Annie Solstad assumed the ubiquity of the mermaid as an icon
for transchildren in a parodic tirade that cautions against allowing any
child to watch Disney’s The Little Mermaid.3 And the more this asso-
ciation gets made, the more it comes to produce itself as people try to
confirm it. Blogger Koa Beck, for instance, asks, “Do Transgender Little
Girls Have a Fascination with Mermaids?” and implicitly answers her
own question with “yes” by transcribing her interviews with doctors
and therapists who offer their reflections on the status of the mermaid
figure for their own trans clients.4
No ethnographic study on the link between transgirls and the lit-
tle mermaid exists, but information about the lives and treatment of
transgender children is emerging which suggests how much there is at
stake in paying attention to the kinds of stories and voices associated
with these young people. For example, a study published in March 2012
in Pediatrics – the only medical study of a US cohort of youth being
treated for what is still called gender identity disorder – reports that the
numbers of children being treated for GID are growing at an astonish-
ing rate. A treatment team at The Boston Children’s Hospital reports
a fourfold increase in the per-annum rate of patient presentation to
the Children’s Hospital since 2007, when they assembled their Gender
Management Service (or GeMS).5 Among those patients ineligible for
treatment, the largest constituency is those who were deemed “too
young” (under the age of 11), but also excluded are children who are
queer-identified (rather than children strongly identified with one sex
or the other) and children whose families cannot afford the treatment
or who have to travel too far to make regular trips to the hospital.6 The
group of “too young” children is also the age group for whom identi-
fication with the mermaid figure is so widely reported as a symptom
of their trans status. Children like Jazz and Brandon, for whom the
mermaid is a site of trans self-fashioning, would not be eligible for treat-
ment at GeMS. For such children, the mermaid story is evidence not of
the performative character of reading, but of cultural narrative literally
as life force.
The prominent status of the mermaid not just as icon, but as the
frequently invoked sine qua non of transchildren thus raises fascinat-
ing questions about the cultural circulations and condensations that
make the figure available as this kind of cultural symbol. Owing largely
to the popularity of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale generally, and to
Disney’s film adaptation of it specifically,7 the widespread circulation

of the mermaid as an icon makes visible – and available – an image
of gender, not as a predetermined script for a particular body, but as
a perfect emulsion of bodily becoming and gendered self-affirmation,
each held in perfect tension with the other in the static figure of the
mermaid. It is not hard to see what might be appealing about the mer-
maid for transchildren and their families: the mermaid has become a
site of possibility for phantasmatic and bodily becoming, even if what
the children reach for in the mermaid may be different from what
their families reach for. The fantasy image allows the child to live
beyond the boundaries of her own body, in a gender form recognizable
to others, while also permitting her to exist in a kind of in-between
state. Meanwhile it allows parents to see their child affirmed in a nor-
mative cultural story. The transgirl can be like any other girl who is
fascinated by princesses, a relief, perhaps, to those parents who would
not be upset but pleased to know that, to revise a phrase from Peggy
Orenstein, “Disney ate [their] daughter.”
As the figure of the mermaid resonates across the various contexts of
her invocation, we can begin to see how the figure both expands and
constricts the possibilities for thinking transchildhood. What is indis-
putable is that “The Little Mermaid,” through creative repetitions and
unpredictable recirculation, has gained traction (legs, if you will) as a
mechanism for organizing the budding life narratives of gender-trans-
gressive youth. But the mermaid figure mobilizes only those aspects
of Andersen’s tale that correspond most fully to normative (typically
white, able-bodied, and middle- to upper-class) understandings of femi-
ninity, sexuality, colonialism, and childhood innocence and knowing.
Both the creative appropriations and the narrative reductions at play
in the reception of “The Little Mermaid” make this tale an exemplary
case study for rogue circulation, what I take to be the productive circula-
tion of a text or artifact in unpredictable or unexpected ways – a textual
instantiation of what Judith Butler framed as the relationship between
imitation and gender insubordination (see “Imitation”). Circulation
assumes the repeated exposure of texts to various audiences across time
and space, as well as the possibility that those texts may themselves be
replicated to maximize that exposure. As Butler argues, such repetitions,
even when they assume replication or imitation, create the possibility
for rupture or difference. Recent theorists of circulation such as Michael
Warner, Benjamin Lee, and Edward LiPuma, as well as Dilip Gaonkar
and Elizabeth Povinelli, have pressed the materialist stakes of a theoreti-
cal approach to cultural circulation that takes up, in even more pointed
Nat Hurley 261
ways, the issues Butler’s work raises. “[C]irculation,” Lee and LiPuma
aver, “is a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation,
and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific
types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built
around them” (192). These “structured circulations,” as Lee and LiPuma
call them, allow an understanding of the forms of collective agency that
emerge from within a “new stage in the history of capitalism” (210),
namely, circulation-based capitalism, or, simply, globalization.
Central to this way of thinking about circulation is a consideration
of the ways publics are formed by being addressed. The circulation
of texts enables those texts to hail new readers and audiences and to
help consolidate new social constituencies. An umbrella organization
like Mermaids depends precisely on this logic to hail its members and
to organize them as a public through the mermaid figure. While one
might argue that such a deployment of the mermaid figure and her
story constitutes a perversion of the original tale, theorists of circula-
tion like Michael Warner suggest that, under the conditions of modern
circulation, “writing addressed to a public” (that is, to strangers rather
than to specified addressees) “cannot go astray” (74). To make a cultural
text public is to make it available to strangers whose relationship to that
work cannot be predicted in advance. And yet, the ways in which the
little mermaid has become an icon for transgender children suggests
that what Warner identifies as the “fruitful perversity” of all public
discourse (113) intensifies in some cases to produce surprising effects of
circulation that create the impression that discourse has, in fact, “gone
astray.” What we might call the normative perversity of public discourse
thus makes possible the intensification of seemingly non-normative
circulation to the point of producing what Warner would call a new
“counterpublic.”8
Dependent as it is on this normative perversity of cultural circula-
tion, “The Little Mermaid” organizes a non-normative public even as
it simultaneously affirms other social norms. This is another way of
saying that there are limits to this subversive, even heroic, story of icon-
production and appropriation. The reduction of narrative to icon and
the repeated circulation of that icon evade the very elements of the tale
that might complicate our understanding of some of the issues facing
trans youth. Nothing prevents a rogue act of gender insubordination
from being re-subordinated through its repetitions, or recirculated in
other, equally surprising ways. The pleasing and surprising circula-
tions of “The Little Mermaid” often find themselves at odds with the
reductive form those circulations take: the trans-figured mermaid is an
arrested figure for transyouth, opening up new sites of cultural identifi-

cation that mobilize some aspects of Andersen’s tale while leaving some
of its complications behind.
This is a story of circulation and its discontents, of how seemingly
inert pathways of cultural movement make it possible for an established
narrative like “The Little Mermaid” to take new and unexpected forms,
to fashion new and unpredicted publics, and to allow new affective con-
tradictions to emerge where childhood, gender, and narrative intersect.
The mermaid narrative mobilizes sympathy, joy, tragedy, hope, guilt,
longing, and entitlement – sometimes all at once – as these competing
affects find articulation through the transchild’s attachment to a gen-
dered fin that stands in for phenomena as various as legs, class status,
genitalia, gender ambiguity, and the promise of normativity.
The news networks and medical texts that engage and reproduce
the story of the transchild’s association with mermaids take up specific
elements of the tale, leaving others behind. In doing so, they position
the mermaid figure as a story of transchildhood that corresponds to
transsexuality as a wrong-body narrative, a redeployment that often
inserts the mermaid as icon within one dominant, highly medicalized
story of transsexuality, without taking up the details of the story that
fail to fit dominant narratives of gender and their imbrication in global,
classed networks of privilege distribution. It is the image of the mer-
maid, more than the little mermaid story, that appears most frequently.
Ironically enough, it is the flexibility and, to borrow a term from Walter
Benjamin, the inexhaustibility of the mermaid story that makes it avail-
able for such fresh interpretations. As Benjamin has argued, a story is
distinguished by the fact that “it does not expend itself. It preserves and
concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long
time” (90).
In this spirit of the tale’s inexhaustibility, I offer a reading of the
ways Andersen’s tale can be seen to complicate the narrative of
transgender childhood that the mermaid has been called upon to cir-
culate, restoring to it some of the contradictions that haunt it. I trace
competing circulations of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” a tracing
which, I ultimately suggest, can open up more complex understand-
ings, imaginings, and identifications for the trans constituencies in
question. The mermaid tale does not just easily transform the trans-
child into a knowable icon, but produces, in the tension between the
sublimated and the overt cultural meaning of the little mermaid, a
crisis of knowability – not so much for transchildren as for the adults
trying to manage them.
Nat Hurley 263
Transreading “The Little Mermaid”
What most people today know about the little mermaid they know
from Disney’s adaptation of Andersen’s story into a musical debate
about whether, according to one catchy Disney tune, “it’s better down
where it’s wetter.” In one sense, it is easy to see the mermaid’s appeal.
As Jazz Jennings tells Barbara Walters, she likes mermaids because
“they’re different down there.” Disney’s film in particular presents the
mermaid as a site of magical transformation in the service of a big love
story. Embodied as a mute, perfectly Barbie-fied white female, Ariel gets
her prince to fall in love with her without saying a word. In Andersen’s
tale, by contrast, the mermaid, who wants a land-walking prince to
fall in love with her, is driven not only by love but also by her desire
to get a soul, which can only be achieved by acquiring a pair of legs,
so that romantic love may prevail and (hetero)sexual love be consum-
mated. The end game in each text is quite different. So are the endings
themselves. Unlike Andersen’s tale, the Disney film gives Ariel a happy
ending, not just a tragically hopeful one. Andersen’s mermaid does not
have Ariel’s success: she loses the prince to another woman, refuses to
kill him to save herself, and ultimately throws herself into the sea (in a
gesture widely interpreted by critics as suicidal). But Andersen does still
hold open the possibility that she can acquire a soul – albeit through
religious-colonialist benevolence. The story ends with the mermaid
suspended between worlds: one (her underwater world) to which she is
dead and the other (the world she might inhabit with a soul) to which
she is powerless to be born until she has done enough “good deeds”
in “the warm countries” (presumably in the global south) (Andersen
“The Little Mermaid”). If she is a successful “daughter of the air” who
tends to the sick and does good deeds in these locations for three hun-
dred years, she may get her soul. The themes of bodily ambiguity and
bodily transformation (perhaps even the terms of gender idealizations)
resonate in obvious ways with some narratives of transgender and
transsexual life. But the repetition of the mermaid tale in the context
of transgender life neglects other elements of Andersen’s version that
might complicate our understandings of transgender children and the
discourses available to them for self-representation in both medical and
social terms.
Central to the little mermaid’s initial plans for transformation in
Andersen’s tale are instances of painful physical change and the abid-
ing feelings of abjection and suffering, all of which the mermaid wil-
fully embraces as the conditions of her being. Andersen’s mermaid is
undeterred by the fact that with legs she will “feel as though [she] were
walking on knives so sharp that [her] blood must flow” (Andersen).
Against the advice of all the knowing adults around her (but also in
concert with that advice), she chooses that pain of bodily transforma-
tion. In doing so, the mermaid affirms what the authoritative figures in
her story foreground: the centrality of pain and painful knowledge to
social subjectivity. It is not just the villainous sea witch who peddles this
position. Early in the tale, when the mermaid’s grandmother is clipping
oysters to her granddaughter’s tail as a symbol of status, the mermaid
complains that “[i]t hurts.” “One has to suffer for position,” says her
old grandmother. When the mermaid eventually makes a bargain with
the sea witch, it is no surprise to hear, “you shall have your wish, for it
will bring you misery, little princess. You want to get rid of your fishtail,
and instead have two stumps to walk on as human beings have, so that
the prince will fall in love with you; and you will gain both him and
an immortal soul.” The sea witch continues: “Your tail will divide and
shrink, until it becomes what human beings call ‘pretty legs.’ It will
hurt; it will feel as if a sword were going through your body.” The mer-
maid’s bodily beauty will be in tension with the suffering she endures
to acquire it. She will be “the most beautiful human child [people] have
ever seen” and she will “walk more gracefully than any dancer”; but
every step “will feel as though [she] were walking on knives so sharp
that [her] blood must flow” (Andersen). When the mermaid whispers
her consent, the witch emphasizes that, once she has a human body,
she can never be a mermaid again. As payment, the witch cuts out her
tongue, rendering her voiceless. There is no Disney-fied Ursula here to
swirl the sea and trap the mermaid’s voice. For Andersen, loss of voice,
like the acquisition of legs, is a surgical process.
The Disney film version elides the problem of pain by making Ariel’s
loss of voice and acquisition of legs a site of pain-free jouissance. We are
presented with Ariel’s eventual orgasmic breaking of the sea’s surface,
hair flipped back, chest out, and eyes closed. But in Andersen’s tale,
the loss of voice is anything but musical or pleasurable. It is politi-
cally vexed. The sea witch insists, “that voice you will have to give to
me. I want the most precious thing you have to pay for my potion. It
contains my own blood, so that it can be as sharp as a double-edged
sword.” As an effect of her voicelessness, the mermaid becomes pure
body: as the witch puts it, all she has left is “[her] beautiful body, …
[her] graceful walk and [her] lovely eyes.” The Disney version of “The
Little Mermaid,” stories of the transgirl’s identification with mermaid
figures, and medical discourses about transchildren alike all accept
the compelling iconography of the mermaid figure while essentially
Nat Hurley 265
eschewing (and mostly avoiding) the narratives of surgical pain that are
part of Andersen’s tale.
The mermaid’s sacrifice of her voice within the tale is, ironically,
repeated in this avoidance and silencing in the circulation of the tale.
Among the most interesting things about following all the cultural
fascination with mermaids and transchildren is, indeed, the status of
the child’s voice in these accounts: someone is always filling in, speak-
ing for, or overwriting the voice of the child – even when that child
is there to be asked to speak, like Jazz with Barbara Walters. A special
broadcast of the CBC’s Passionate Eye on “Transgender Kids,” which
first aired in Fall 2011, opens with the disclaimer that (a) this show
might not be appropriate viewing for children and (b) the show would
refer to the children’s genotypic sex, not their pronouns of choice.
How and whether the transperson can speak has long been a point
of contention in the context of transgender politics. As Dean Spade
argues in “Mutilating Gender,” transpeople must regularly speak from
a particular script in order to access medical treatment. That script usu-
ally requires a confession of pain or of having a wrong body. And the
script is almost always classed: you need the proper health insurance
because not everyone has a sweet voice to sell to the sea witch. The
problem of speaking of, to, and for the transgender person is ampli-
fied when it comes to children, who, it has long been acknowledged,
already face the daunting (because competing) investments that adults
have in filtering, protecting, and extending the putative innocence of
children.
Andersen’s mermaid is striking for the ways she does not inhabit that
space of innocence at all. Indeed, it is with full knowingness that she
both takes on her project of bodily transformation and, later, assumes
the role of imperialist child to accomplish her goal of soul acquisition.
In both aspects of the tale, the mermaid inhabits very privileged scripts
(of gender, class, and moral rectitude). It is on accepting the condition
that she can never return to her mermaid form that she fully embraces
the suffering the witch promises and the tasks she is set in order to
get the soul she wants. When she cannot win the love of the prince
(he marries someone else), she is relegated to a kind of missionary-
colonialist purgatory of the hard-done-by with the daughters of the
air, “where the heavy air of the plague rests” (Andersen). Here, she is
told, “If for three hundred years we earnestly try to do what is good,
we obtain an immortal soul and can take part in the eternal happiness
of man.” Having “borne [her] suffering bravely” she, too, can enjoy the
happiness of men through “good deeds” in a pestilence-ridden, warm
climate (Andersen).
In the context of Andersen’s story, the very fact of having a soul seems
to be its own justification for the process of getting it. But this ending
is hardly happy, clear, or unambiguous. The closing paragraphs of the
story hang heavy with affect that makes the mermaid’s moral standing
as well as her investment in normativity ambiguous, even as it focuses
attention on her suffering. She is self-sacrificing and self-interested at
once; she is a social outcast seeking repatriation through missionary
work. She has striven for something “with all [her] heart”: she has
longed for a particular kind of body, which may seem vain by some
standards, but ultimately the tale transforms her surface longings into a
symptom of a deeper interiorized longing for a soul. It remains unclear,
however, whether she should simply have been happy with the body
she had and thus stayed a mermaid, or if she is to be admired for follow-
ing her heart and altering her body to reflect her sense of interiority. It
is not hard to see how and why the mermaid might nicely encapsulate
the dilemmas of the transchild, particularly if we see the mermaid liter-
alizing the existential dilemma of the transperson.
This hopeful but less-than-happy ending of Andersen’s story (replete
with its colonialist overtones) is never invoked in media stories about
transchildren, which treat the mermaid more as icon than as story. For
parents and doctors alike, the goal is to protect children from pain, usu-
ally in the service of preserving their innocence. Folding more children
under the banner of innocence, however, does nothing to undo the
complexities of innocence that have been elaborated by James Kincaid,
Jacqueline Rose, and others. Nor do the media stories invoke the queer
childhoods described in the explosion of recent work on the topic by
Kathryn Bond Stockton, Elizabeth Meyer, Jack Halberstam, Kenneth
Kidd, Tison Pugh, Michelle Abate, and many others. I wonder what it
would mean, then, to restore to the narrative of the transgender little
mermaid these otherwise muted elements of pain and abjection, as well
as the structures of race and class privilege that adhere to the mermaid
tale as it comes to us through Andersen, all of which have gradually
been drained out of the tale in its circulation from the nineteenth
century into the modern moment. Andersen’s little mermaid, after
all, knowingly accepts that acquiring legs will cause her physical and
emotional pain on a number of fronts. This is a position of knowing
rarely afforded to any child figure, and one that the medical industry
forecloses for transchildren. No medical practitioner takes seriously the
possibility that a young person knows enough to choose the bodily
pain of surgical transition before or during puberty, even as the medical
establishment (as well as mainstream news media) clings to the story
Nat Hurley 267
of transgender as transsexuality. Indeed, an updated interview between

Walters and Jazz features Jazz frankly saying “I want boobs!” even as she
is shown talking with doctors, who are outlining her hormone blocker
therapy.
Rogue circulation and inert pathways: ravelling

the transgender mermaid
When Barbara Walters presents us with the young Jazz Jennings admiring
her mermaid figurine, we are encouraged to see how, for the transchild,
the little mermaid represents a utopian site of both bodily ambiguity
and bodily becoming. With a tail in place of genitals, the mermaid is
at once perfectly un- or not-yet sexed and tragically cis-gendered. Her
conventional femininity serves as a model of gender coherence just as
her waist-down embodiment of gender holds out the promise that the
body is at least possibly in a state of genital development – as if even
normative, cis-gendered femininity might be read through the usually
stigmatized lens we reserve for understanding transgender. In place of
a spoiled identity (interviews with parents of transchildren frequently
mourn their lost child),9 the mermaid (stripped of story, pain, and suf-
fering) restores to the transchild all the benefits of idealized childhood
innocence. The mermaid models a state of potential bodily becoming
and reconstituted innocence, and the transchild is arguably mobilized
by both of these interpretations at once. This mobilization cannot be
reduced to a single agent; rather it is an effect of the system of circula-
tion itself, which makes the mermaid available both for individual child
identification and for structural reauthorization and recommodification
by adults. The mermaid operates as a unique signifier for transchildren,
but a signifier that is also consistent with feminine cultural norms. It is
thus equally arresting for Jazz, her parents, her doctors, and Walters – all
for different reasons – as the figure comes to be affirmed (but perhaps
also critiqued) by dint of its circulation. The case poses a riddle solvable
most readily, it would seem, by a reader-response approach: an interpre-
tive community of readers builds a frame of reading reference by which
the little mermaid makes sense as a transgender icon.10
But there is another way to think through this problem. What if we
were to assume that there is something about the history and the form
of the tale that makes it available to this reading? What conditions make
possible the circulation – and consolidation – of the little mermaid as an
icon for transchildren? Greg Urban asks a similar question in his investi-
gation of cultural circulation in Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through
the World: “Why,” he wonders, “does … printed literature circulate

along the pathways it does?” (21). And how do we account for the seem-
ing novelty of cultural artifacts within that history of movement? For
Urban, “the prior existence of a spoken vernacular facilitates the flow of
printed material written in that vernacular. The new cultural objects –
the printed items – seize upon an old element or set of elements” (21).
Urban tries to account for this process of signs producing other signs
in terms of repetitions and accumulations, and in terms of forgotten –
or what he calls “inert”– pathways of cultural movement that these
repetitions both leave behind and implicitly carry with them. In this
logic, the transgender little mermaid could be seen to have emerged as
an effect both of a normative mass story (Andersen’s but also Disney’s)
that has found an unexpected audience and also as an effect of alterna-
tive vernaculars that have developed around that story. The emergence
of this mass story depends on reanimating the series of inert pathways
and variations that are always part of the repetition, not merely pro-
duced as an effect of it. What is useful about these frameworks are the
possibilities they suggest for disrupting the seemingly futile bouncing
between the poles of sameness and difference that the concept of rep-
etition sometimes conjures up; that is, they help us to understand the
ways a cultural work is not simply reducible to ideology and the ways
its elements come to be both taken up and forgotten in the material and
affective organization of social life. “The Little Mermaid” and its circula-
tion history suggest the usefulness of these models.
Whether Andersen’s tale ultimately reads as a story about gender and
love or as a story about miracles, souls, and religions – and the extent
to which the tale invites expanded readings in either direction – is very
much caught up in the text’s circulation and reception history within
and outside Denmark. It serves as a good example of the ways in which
some circulations of the tale foreground some elements while concomi-
tantly rendering others inert. To an extent, this debate can be broken
into national interpretations of Andersen’s tale. From the vantage point
of many Danish scholars, there are two little mermaids: Danish and
Anglo-American. Viggo Hjørnager Pedersen, for example, argues that
“Andersen is, to all intents and purposes, an English writer, read by mil-
lions of people who do not understand a word of Danish, and exerting
more influence on English children’s writing than any native Briton
until Lewis Carroll” (2). Herbert Rowland goes so far as to make the case
for a specifically American Andersen, who came to prominence in the
antebellum period (1845) and whose influence diminished only after
Andersen’s death in 1875. Indeed, a considerable body of Americanist
Nat Hurley 269
criticism devoted to the author’s works appeared in American periodi-

cals during these years. While Pedersen highlights the extent to which
“The Little Mermaid” circulates as a British text, there is an extensive
record of Andersen’s reception in America, too, not surprisingly given
the extent of the transatlantic circulation of literature written in English
in the late nineteenth century.
The Anglo-American version of Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”
seems to be read in terms of gender and unrequited love – issues that
seem beside the point for Danish scholars. Jack Zipes points out in
his study of Andersen that, “[i]n Denmark, most Andersen scholars
now accept the view proposed by James Massengale that ‘“The Little
Mermaid” concerns a miracle, rather than a simple matter of unrequited
love and suicide which is followed by a bit of authorial ‘structuring
invocation.’” (Zipes 108, quoting Massengale 555). In Denmark, in
other words, the focus is less on the story’s treatment of embodiment
and feminine self-sacrifice in the service of romantic love and more
on its theological treatment of the soul. Seen in this way, the story is a
Christian conversion story, which, as Zipes puts it, is “based on a mira-
cle: the pagan girl learns all about Christian love and devotion” (108).
This interpretation of the tale focuses primarily on the status of the
mermaid’s desire for a soul, on her inner life and spiritual aspirations.
Obviously, it is too crude simply to say that in Denmark no one talks
about gender in the tale, or that no one notices the religious or coloni-
alist overtones outside of Denmark. But it does seem curious that the
status of gender seems to figure more largely in reading contexts outside
of Denmark, where, perhaps not incidentally, the mermaid figure seems
to have become more of a transgender icon (at least as far as I have been
able to find out).11 Indeed, the queering of Andersen and his writing
seems to be generally less controversial outside Denmark. In “Notes on a
Scandal,” Dag Heede narrates the conflict that emerged when he offered
up a queer reading of Andersen in time for the national celebration of
Andersen’s bicentenary. According to Heede, there are two competing
stories about Andersen: “The great official Danish myth is a heterosex-
ual construction that somehow makes the life-long bachelor the most
unfortunate lover in the history of literature. … Another construction
that mainly had followers outside of Denmark until recently, presents
the highly strung, nervous, eccentric and effeminate artist as a clear
example of a homosexual” (411). Such readings of Andersen’s gendered
self-understanding have erupted in some corners into speculation about
his own status as trans. In a personal email to me, for instance, Vladimir
Luxuria explained that, as she sees it, Andersen “was a transgender.
I read many love letters where he defines himself as a female soul”

(“Re: Fairy Tales”). In the kind of passage that Luxuria seems to have
in mind, Andersen wrote to Edvard Collin: “I languish for you as for
a pretty Calabrian wench … my sentiments for you are those of a
woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain
a mystery”.12 There is no evidence of Andersen having any kind of
requited love, which no doubt leaves everyone something to argue
about. My point is not to insist on any essential reading of the tale, but
to point out that the metacultural texts (readings of the text that frame
and facilitate other readings) that drive the circulation of Andersen’s
tale outside of Denmark are obviously far more invested in the gen-
dered and queer elements of the tale and its depictions of embodiment
than the Danish ones are. What have been inert pathways in Denmark
emerge as more active pathways of circulation in English-speaking con-
texts – even as these metatexts generate some relatively less-travelled
paths of interpretation. In short, “The Little Mermaid” has become a
dominant transgender icon for readers in contexts where the tale has
already been circulating as a mass-produced narrative about gender.
Each English repetition may foreground the mermaid’s gender or
bodily state – and so, in some ways, create the conditions in which the
mermaid becomes a metaphor for the transchild. But those repetitions
also render invisible other elements of the tale that destabilize the meta-
phorical fit. Just as most Disney fans do not see the mermaid first and
foremost as a transgender icon, most adult supporters of the transchild
likely do not see in the mermaid tale a story that would disrupt the
prevailing medical conventions for treating transkids. If they do, that
complication has not yet found its way into media accounts.
Recall that the standard medical treatment for young trans persons
today is to affirm the terms of their gender self-identification, while
withholding permission for actual bodily change. Doctors typically
produce a delay in the development of secondary sex characteristics
at puberty by prescribing hormone blockers. In a way, the result sus-
tains the fantasy inherent in the transchild’s mermaid identification
(whether that identification originates in the child herself or in the
adults seeking narratives to offer the child in order to understand
herself): she does not yet have the body she wants and is on the way
to having the soul she wants. The point (and effect) of the hormone
blockers is to delay any kind of surgical intervention until adulthood,
under the assumption that, up to that point, a child cannot know
enough to make such a decision or, if a doctor assumes the child can
know, s/he will regret the decision later.13 Proceeding on a principle
Nat Hurley 271
of deferral (of the physical onset of secondary sex characteristics and

any surgical transformations to the body), medical treatment of tran-
schildren is predicated on the assumption that the child cannot yet
know enough to make the kinds of decisions that Andersen’s mermaid
clearly made for herself on the basis of love and religion. In effect, this
treatment ignores or represses precisely the kind of knowledge – and
the knowing embrace of pain – that is tragically central to Andersen’s
tale; it mistrusts the willingness to embrace a radically altered body
that even Disney romantically endorses. Whether we read “The Little
Mermaid” as a story of the mermaid’s acquisition of a soul or as a story
of her acquisition of a particular kind of body, one thing is clear: the
mermaid knowingly chooses a painful bodily transformation, and, in
doing so, foregrounds the centrality of pain and painful knowledge to
social subjectivity.
The ways in which the little mermaid is taken up within transyouth
communities – and the ways this taking-up is itself taken up by adult
commentators – has led the transchild-as-mermaid story to go viral. The
best example is the commentary generated in the blogosphere by Barbara
Walters’s 20/20 segment. But this taking-up works to displace some ide-
ologies of the transchild, and of childhood more generally, while simul-
taneously reinforcing others. As the mainstream media accounts make
clear, the figure elevates transgirls to a position of greater symbolic impor-
tance to the movement than transboys. To equate the mermaid with
the transchild and not just the transgirl (as Mermaids.uk does) displaces
the transboy from any claim to representability. (There is no umbrella
organization called Merlads, even though there is a long artistic history
of mermen.) Further, the very descriptions of these transchildren seem to
foreground white middle-class fantasies of properly gendered childhoods.
The little mermaid is a tragic figure, in part because of her fall from high
birth: she has an expectation that her desires should be met and that
the combination of her class status and her proper femininity will secure
that end. The fact that the mermaid embodies a state of becoming makes
her a perfect cipher for childhood innocence more generally, feeding the
fantasy (her own and her readers’) that she can become whatever she
wants to become, whether through class privilege, acquiescence scripts
of gender or spirituality, or sheer benevolence.
There is also the problem of normative embodiment. Even in its
apparent capacity to complicate the normative relationship between
gender and embodiment, the mermaid figure nonetheless affirms the
able-bodiedness of gender more generally. What goes practically undis-
cussed in media accounts is that the tale has already been called upon
to name and organize a lesser-known birth defect called “syrenomalia”:

“an often lethal condition in which children are born with their lower
extremities fused” (Romano et al. 256). Medical research on this con-
dition also draws on the long history of narrative circulation that the
figure of the mermaid has enjoyed (since antiquity) and also privileges
Andersen’s tale.14 The condition is presumed to entail a surgical cure,
although only nine cases of successful surgical correction are known
to date. Syrenomalia would thus seem to mobilize a different, even
an opposite, tale of bodily transformation through the story of the
little mermaid. Whereas the mermaid here figures a state of non-nor-
mative embodiment and mobility – a site of “impossible love” (256) –
representations of transgirls figured as mermaids (like the figure of Jazz
swimming with a mermaid tail) hold out hope almost exclusively for
a normatively gendered embodiment. There is no discussion in any
treatment of the transchild-as-mermaid that I have read that takes up
the intersection of transchildhood and disability. If anything, disorder
is a term from which advocates for transchildren want to distance
themselves. There are good reasons for refusing pathologization, but
there is a very interesting contradiction at play here whereby the rights
claims of transchildren might depend on their claims to the desire for
normative embodiment over against the claims that might be made
for disabled bodies. The children for whom the mermaid figure is a ral-
lying point are otherwise able-bodied and they want to be differently
able-bodied.
In light of all the complex ways in which what we might term
mermaid-subjectivity might operate for and beyond transyouth, it
seems clear that Andersen’s tale offers up a much thicker set of iden-
tificatory possibilities than can be attributed solely to the mermaid’s
iconic anatomical ambiguity. As we have seen, the mermaid’s bodily
indeterminacy operates in the service of both suspending and shoring
up a wrong-body narrative of transgender. (It must be emphasized here
that discussions of transchildren make no distinction between transgen-
der and transsexual, in the way adults make this distinction; to be a
transgender child is not to embrace the indeterminacy of gender or a
form of genderqueerness, as can be the case for transgender adults, but
to be in the wrong body, as the Walters interviews foreground.) The mer-
maid figure also carries with it a history of missionary aspirations that
define a path of spiritual upward mobility as well as a historical asso-
ciation with disabled bodies – all alongside the very gender-normative
ways that the mermaid plays well with other forms of fairy-tale princess
narratives that appeal to masses of young girls.
Nat Hurley 273
I began this discussion by pointing to the little transgender mermaid

as an effect of rogue cultural circulation, enabled by the broader meta-
cultures of circulation through which the tale moves. Indeed, given
“The Little Mermaid”’s circulation history, we might now conclude that
there are many other interpretations of the tale and that, perhaps, the
tale is even defined by a history of appropriations and varied readings.
Indeed, the mainstream representation of the mermaid as the figura-
tion of the transchild is one of the narrowest available interpretations.
In swerving away, both from the questions of pain and knowledge that
are central to Andersen’s text and from the potential for the mermaid to
figure transgender as distinct from transsexual, the icon of the mermaid
for transyouth falters at the moment when what is complex about the
tale (and the tail) could, perhaps, be most useful.
And yet to offer such a critique too easily dismisses how arresting
this figuration of the mermaid is for transchildhood. I wonder what it
would mean, then, to restore to the narrative of the transgender little
mermaid the muted elements of pain and abjection – the knowledge of
both affects that Andersen’s tale gave the little mermaid – all of which
have been drained out of the tale in its circulation from the nineteenth
century into the modern moment. Andersen’s little mermaid, after all,
knowingly accepts that acquiring legs will cause her physical and emo-
tional pain on a number of fronts: her tongue will be cut out, her every
step will be like walking on knives, and she will never again return to
her home. It is worth repeating here that such an embrace of surgical
bodily transformation and states of pain by a child is almost impossible
for adults to imagine, much less to bear. The cultural impulse of contem-
porary adults to protect children from pain, to assume that they could
not possibly know enough to choose such pain or to bear long-term
consequences without regret, underwrites the treatment protocols for
transchildren in the medical industry. Doctors and parents alike presume
that the transchild – unlike Andersen’s mermaid or even Disney’s Ariel –
simply cannot know enough to choose bodily pain. (To which I would
say: there are many forms of suffering, and some trans people suffer
more from being denied sex reassignment surgeries than from getting
them.) Muting or forestalling the question of bodily transformation, in
any event, endorses and privileges gender ambiguity at the expense of
sexual development (medically speaking), since the effect of hormone
blockers is essentially to delay the onset of secondary sex characteristics
at puberty. So, children can be ambiguously gendered (under the guise
of being transsexual), but not actually transsexual, if transsexuality
involves more than cross-dressing and taking hormone blockers.
One might even say that the status of the mermaid as an icon of sus-
pended, gendered becoming opens up another site of possibility for the
transchild who does not actually want to choose between being male
and female. Andersen’s tale does not simply affirm the wrong-body
story of transgender. As many transgender theorists argue, trans- is not
just a story of a subject’s mismatched body and soul, and transpeople
consistently live across genders. For that reason, I do not see anything
inherently wrong with the ways the mermaid’s anatomy figures a radi-
cal suspension of developmental gender – as long as that suspension is
not forced. It is one thing to identify with and want to be a mermaid;
it is entirely another thing to make the mermaid a placeholder for
becoming something else.
Andersen’s tale is hardly the key to all mythologies when it comes
to understanding transyouth. But it does seem to open up more pos-
sibilities than the dominant discourses about transyouth allow. These
dominant discourses, the culture about culture – or what Urban calls
“metaculture” – do a lot of the work of cultural circulation. They bind
together dominant and inertial pathways of circulation, both of which
are central to explaining the movement of culture through the world.
An ethnography of transyouth might be more useful than journalism
in getting at a fuller understanding of how transyouth really think
about mermaids. At the level of understanding how circuits of cultural
movement make possible rogue circulations, there is no doubt more
work to be done. But from a literary standpoint, where hermeneutics
is what we do best, what seems most radical about the little mermaid
within Andersen’s tale is her ability to knowingly negotiate the con-
figuration of her own body within a framework of subject formation
that foregrounds pain and loss as essential to social being and, as her
grandmother says, “position.” That Andersen’s mermaid is a tragic
figure only heightens the sense in which she can be held responsible
for, and so seen to be a knowing agent of, the choices she has made.
It also holds open the real option of second-guessing: maybe being a
mermaid (determinately gendered, but indeterminately embodied) is a
viable option in and of itself. Maybe the mermaid’s embrace of pain is
less painful than living in one’s body of birth. And yes: maybe a young
person may change her mind – which tends to be the worst thing that
cis-gendered people can imagine for trans people, especially young peo-
ple, who do want sex-reassignment surgery. I am not saying that there
is a single answer – only that, when it comes to bodily transformation,
Andersen’s story of the little mermaid is more complicated than the
current thinking of the medical profession. As Benjamin argues, “The
Nat Hurley 275
wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and
teaches children to this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world
with cunning and with high spirits” (102). “In fact,” he continues, “one
can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller
to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship,
whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experi-
ence, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way”
(108). Perhaps those who appropriate the mermaid figure are involved
in precisely this task of using the story to “fashion the raw material
of existence” in such a “solid, useful, and unique way.” The trick may
be to use the mermaid figure not to prevent (or contain?) what some
doctors and parents might consider premature bodily unfoldings, but
to hold on to as many of the tale’s shape-shifting possibilities – and as
many of the possible, even unpredictable, or uncomfortable variations
of childhood – as we can.
Notes
1. This American Life, National Public Radio, ABC News, and CBC have all
presented stories about transgender children, not all of which feature the
mermaid figure prominently. See, respectively, “Somewhere Out There: Act
Two: Tom Girls”; both Alix Spiegel entries; and Alan B. Goldberg and Joneil
Adriano, which features a photo of Jazz Jennings holding her mermaid.
2. See <http://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/>.
3. The spoof directly targeted right-wing Christian activist Victoria Jackson
(herself a Saturday Night Live veteran). In the wake of a televised same-sex
kiss between the characters Kurt and Blane on Glee, she argued that young
people should not be exposed to such scenes. The spoof of Jackson takes on
a surreal quality for the ways its parody of parody shuffles dizzily between
various levels of irony. In mocking Jackson’s position, the clip’s description
of The Little Mermaid’s obvious trans-, Muslim-, and gay-friendly themes
almost fails to register as irony at all.
4. See in particular statements by Katherine Rachlin and Christine Milrod,
both of whom work with trans populations and have commented on the
prominence of the little mermaid figure for their clients. Koa Beck cites both
authors in her blog entry.
5. See Norman Spack, et al. This study in Pediatrics shows that the number
of referrals to the GeMS clinic spiked after it expanded its intake program
to include children, adolescents, and young adults in 2007. In a follow-up
response to the published results of this study (appearing in the same issue
of Pediatrics), Walter J. Meyer points specifically to parental anxiety as a rea-
son for a spike in referrals and insists that “[v]ery little information in the
public domain talks about the normality of gender questioning and gender
role exploration and the rarity of an actual change” (571). But pediatricians
thus see themselves as bearing the burden of education for their patients.
Confusing gender identity with sexuality, they claim that high numbers of
youth who question their gender identity ultimately, in Meyer’s words, “will
take another life path, often to homosexuality” (571). It is unclear, therefore,
how much this spike in numbers is an increase in incidence, an increase in
parental awareness, or an increase in diagnosis.
6. The study of transchildren is important, but also raises many questions
about terminology and methodology. Medical and popular discourses
about these children tend to collapse the distinctions between transsexual
and transgender (the latter being taken as a synonym for the former). The
child’s agency is also precariously represented. Because of issues about legal
consent, interviewing and representing children as beings with autonomous
desires is a challenge. Even interviews like those conducted by Barbara
Walters, which seem to give us the child’s own point of view, show Walters
and other adults seeding the very answers to the questions they ask. To know
what narratives or vocabularies originate with transchildren themselves or to
make arguments for whether they really are transgender or transsexual is an
impossible task in our current cultural climate.
7. For a detailed history of “The Little Mermaid’s” popular adaptations, see Jack
Zipes 36–37 and 104–17.
8 Given the processes by which Michael Warner describes the constitution
of publics and counterpublics, it is possible that what is being constituted
through the circulation of the little mermaid is a new public rather than a
counterpublic. However, as Warner points out, “A counterpublic maintains
at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The
cultural horizon against which it marks itself is not just a general or wider
public, but a dominant one” (119). While it would be wonderful to think of
transchildren as constituting their own public, it would be a stretch to aver
that they occupy anything but subordinate status at this point in history.
9. See the 20/20 special on “My Secret Life: A Story of Transgender Children,”
as well as The Passionate Eye’s special on “Transgender Children.” Both inter-
view parents of transyouth, many of whom either continue to mourn the
loss of the child they thought had been born to them, or they discuss how
they had to get past this state of mourning to embrace the child they have.
10. See here especially Stanley Fish, and Janice Radway. This scholarship argues
for the production of textual meaning through shared networks of inter-
pretation that collectively generate new insights against older modes of
analysis.
11. Given Copenhagen’s long history as a go-to city for sex reassignment surgery
(dating back to the case of Christine Jorgensen in the early 1950s) as well as
the prominent status of the mermaid statue and tale for the tourist industry,
it seems odd that the mermaid figure has not become a cross-over figure as
a rallying point for queer and/or transgender people. I have found no trace,
however, of an equivalent emergence of the transgender mermaid in main-
stream reports about trans or queer life in Denmark. This is not to say there
are no subcultural forms of attachment – only that such readings and align-
ments do not appear in literary criticism, cultural studies, or even Google
searches. Even in reports about Andersen’s putative queerness, no mention
of the mermaid being a figure for trans-identification (for either adults or
children) is made. See, for instance, Huffington Post article “Hans Christian,”
Samantha Gilweit, and Andersen Stupor. Stories about transgender life in
Nat Hurley 277
Denmark do not even take up the association (see Raa). The closest tie I have
found is a transsexual escort service called Mermaid Escort in Copenhagen.
12. Interestingly, Zipes cites this letter in his book on Andersen, too. He leaves out
the passage about Andersen’s feminine feelings, however, thus foregrounding
the part of the letter in which Andersen claims, “I’ve never had a brother,
but if I had I could not have loved him the way I love you, and yet – you do
not reciprocate my feelings!” (qtd. in Zipes 51). Zipes admits that there is a
“homoerotic attachment to Edvard” (51), but primarily frames the letter by
describing the relationship between Andersen and Collin in Freudian terms,
noting that Collin “served as Andersen’s superego and most severe critic” (51).
This exact quotation (“I languish for you …”) is widely circulated
in online sources. See, for example, <http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/
fam/bioa2/anderse02.html>, <http://www.bookslut.com/fascinating_
writers/2008_08_013382.php>. It is very likely that these sources found
the quotation as part of the Wikipedia page for Hans Christian Andersen,
which cites its origin in Andersen’s Correspondence. But the provenance of
this precise translation has been harder to locate in print. I have located
one instance of this quotation on page 162 of a book titled Andersen’s Fairy
Tales, which is available through Google books, for which, strangely, no bib-
liographic information is provided (even though a screen shot of the page
with the quotation on it as well as the page number is available). There is
no doubt that a letter exists in Danish from which this passage has been
translated, though there does seem to be some question as to how it should
be translated: whether, that is, Andersen is referring to himself or to Collin
as a “Calabrian wench.”
It is also likely Luxuria’s reading of Andersen’s correspondence may be
vaster than I have been able to verify. Her references to Andersen’s claim
to possess a female soul would seem to be grounded in the voluminous cor-
respondence discussed in the volume that Edvard Collin published about
his forty-seven-year-long correspondence with Andersen in 1882: Hans
Christian Andersen and the Collin Family. Jens Andersen refers to this book
and to the reception history of this correspondence in his biography of
Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life. Up until 1930, when a four-
volume compendium of Andersen’s correspondence was published, Collin’s
book stood as the dominant, homophobic, account of Andersen’s gender
and eros. Magnus Hirschfeld’s compendium of essays Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen [Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types] features an oft-cited
essay, “Hans Christian Andersen: Evidence of his Homosexuality” by Carl
Albert Hansen Fahlberg (using the pseudonym Albert Hansenin), published
in 1901. Collin’s book and Fahlberg’s essay have amplified the effects of
each other, contributing to a century of speculation about Andersen’s sexu-
ality that has not been flattering to the author. As Jens Andersen puts it,
“Andersen scholars have homophobically given a wider berth” (172) to his
homoerotic preoccupations and, more recently now, to his gender identity.
13. Scholarly and activist literature written from the perspective of transgender
people is rife with critiques of the medical system’s mistreatment of transpeo-
ple. For a good selection of this scholarship see Susan Stryker and Stephen
Whittle’s The Transgender Studies, especially Judith Butler’s “Doing Justice to
Someone: Sex Reassignment Surgery and Allegories of Transsexuality.”
14. See Romano et al. for more details about syrenomalia.
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Index
Abbott, Jacob 28 n1 Atalanta 17, 26, 149–63

accumulation Attali, Jacques 249
of capital 15, 174, 177 Auchmuty, Rosemary 29 n9
collection of 17 Auerbach, Eric 120
of narrative 174 Austin, J. L. 67–8, 81, 167–8
signs and 268
of small children’s stories 80 Bakhtin, Mikhail 97, 104
acoustic space Balibar, Étienne 15–16
music distribution and 27, 238, Barrie, James 28 n4
241, 249–50, 254 Barnes, Julian 253
MP3s as acoustic text 242–6 Barnes, Kevin 239–40
“aesthetic of unfinish” 27, 211, Barthes, Roland
218–35 intertextuality 97, 101
Agamben, Giorgio 36, 50 literary meaning 97, 108
alienation pleasures of repetition 74, 77, 79,
evil and 208 86, 97
Oz series 51 rereading 38–9
self-alienation 52 n7 Bates, Martine 18
Allen, Douglas 12 Baudrillard, Jean
Allen, Graham 97 collections, theories of 17, 26,
allusion 58, 64, 84, 98, 123–4, 183 n2 149, 152, 155–6, 159, 246
Almond, David 3 Baum, Frank L.
Altman, Rick 207–11 children and consumerism 16,
American Library Association 202, 225 39
Anastasiu, Heather 13 Denslow, collaboration with 45–6,
Andersen, Hans Christian 27, 259–77 50
Andersen, Jens 277 n12 Father Goose 45–6
Anderson, Benedict 111, 113, illustration, use of 45
119–20, 123–7, 132–3 series, versions, and adaptations of
Anne of Green Gables series 24–5, Oz 38, 43, 48–50
28 n6, 57–72, 183, 204 Tin Woodman character 24, 34–7,
anti-Semitism 114, 117–19 41–2, 49, 52 n2
Apuleius 92 n8 Bearn, Gordon C. F. 22
archetypes Beaumont, Joan 141
Northrop Frye’s theory of 8 Beck, Koa 259, 275 n4
theories of 8, 11 Beckwith, Osmond 43
in Twilight 4, 207–8, 211 Beetham, Margaret 134, 162
Arendt, Hannah 36 Benjamin, Walter
assemblage fairy tales 274–5
Dear Canada series 122–4 inexhaustibility of stories 262
Deleuzian interpretation and mechanical reproduction 24,
23–4, 114, 120 34–7, 51, 52 n7, 244
Howl’s Moving Castle series 85–6 naming relations 126 n4
281
282 Index
Benjamin, Walter – continued Campana, Kathleen 2, 25, 83, 183

psychoanalytic approaches 37, Canadian Library Association 2
52 n5 cannibalism 68
resistance 51 Cantrell, Sarah K. 104
Theses on the Philosophy of History Capital, see Marx, Karl
119–20, 123–5 capitalism
Benton-Banai, Edward 122 anti-capitalism 23
Beston, Henry 46–7 capitalist realism 251
Birkert, Sven 81–2 challenges to 27
Black Orchid 26, 167, 174–8, 184 child consumers 16
nn10–11 circulation-based 261
Blackmore, Tim 36–7 commodities, accumulation of 15
Blyton, Enid 13–14 cross-media 239, 244–5, 250–1
Bolshevism 144 exchange- and surplus-value 15
Bolter, Jay David 221 globalization and 261
Boon, Marcus 241–2, 244, 252 industrial 20, 244
Borah, Rebecca 96 mechanical production 51, 239,
Bourdieu, Pierre 16 244–5, 250–1
Bradford, Clare 145 n7 music and 51, 239, 244–5, 250–2,
Brand, Stewart 252 254
Brand, Victor 36 post-industrial 252
Brazil, Angela 1 private property and 252
Brennecke, Ernest 37 technological development and
Brent-Dyer, Elinor 12 218
Breuer, Josef 29 n10 visual culture and 35
British Empire Carroll, Lewis 268
Australian identity 129, 135–42, 145 cartoons
Brooks, Peter 6–7, 14 advertisements 230
Buckley, Chloe 20 dime novelists 48
Budra, Paul 58–9, 70 movies and 233
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3, 26–7, 202, naturalistic figures 193
206–16 Superman 169, 172–3
Butler, Judith The Wimpy Kid 219–26
Bodies That Matter 63, 68, 172–3, Chamberlain, Kathleen 1–2
176 Chandler, Daniel 57–8, 98
circulation theories 260–1 Chaucer, Geoffrey 160–1
deconstructive approach 64 child, as trope
“Doing Justice to Someone … child characters 13, 114
Transsexuality” 277 n13 figurative children 20, 126
drag, effects of 63, 176 and Edelman and the future 117
Freud, use of 19 as timekeeper 25
Gender Trouble 63 transchild as icon 262
homosexuality 17–18 transgirl as symbol 258
“Imitation and Gender childhood
Insubordination” 18–19, 62–3, adulthood, passage to 99, 270
168–9, 176, 184 n7, 260–1 changing ideas about 9
performative citation 18–19, 21, education 134
25, 26, 63, 167, 176, 184 n7 end of 26, 203
subject formation and repetition happy endings 203
17–19, 62–3 humour and 44
Index 283
innocence 203, 260, 267, 271 Roy Rogers stories 227–8

mermaid narrative 260, 262, 271–5 superhero 166–85
queer 266 theories of:
reading 81–2 disaster, role of 24
revisitation of 108 n1 as a genre 24
terrors 39 as performative citation 26,
transchildhood 260, 262, 271–5 166–85
children’s literature as sequential art 26, 190–204
generic characteristics of 26, 61, history of 170
202–4 children’s book illustration
as a genre 8 46–7, 52 nn9–10
home, centrality of 4 narratives of origin 21
myth and ritual, theories of 12 commercialism 44, 52 n9
political economy of 2 commodities
repetition, function of 7–8 accumulation of 15
school curricula 8 branding and franchising of texts
series writing and 75–6 7, 17, 219, 226
theoretical explanations 11 desire for 29, 52 n3
Children’s Literature Association’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid brand 219,
list 1, 95 226
Christopher, Brandon 19, 21, 26, 63, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean
70, 192 franchise 17
Cixous, Hélène 40–1 knowledge as 151–3, 238
Clark, Beverly Lyon 91 n5 magazines as 151–2
classism 23 material vs. immaterial 238–52
Clayton, Simon 251 music as 238–52
Coats, Karen 14 production of 15–16
Colebrook, Claire 9, 21 representation of 15
collection sequels as 39
Baudrillard’s theory of 17, 26, compulsion
149–59, 162, 246 to repeat (Pleasure Principle)
Goosebumps books 17 12–14, 20, 50
in Harry Potter 102–3 consumerism 51
“The Little Mermaid” 258–9 Cush, Andy 239
music 237, 239–40, 252
as narcissistic process 17 Dantzig, Tobias 243
as pastime 17 de Man, Paul 41
Roy Rogers collectibles 226 Dear Canada series 24, 25, 111–27
colloquialism 197 “death drive” concept 14, 22
colonialism 113, 127 n5, 130–1, deconstruction 21, 64, 70
138–41, 145, 195, 233, 260, Delaney, Joseph 20
263, 265–6, 269 Deleuze, Gilles
comics any-space-whatever 104
The Boondocks 29 n6 Capitalism and Schizophrenia 23, 113
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3, 206, 210 Difference and Repetition 21–3, 162
comic-strips 29 n6, 34–5, 37, 47, eternal return 22
50–1, 52 n4 intratextual repetition 96–7
Diary of a Wimpy Kid 27, 219, Marx, influence of 20
221, 225–6 nation-building 25
Oz series 34–7, 44–5, 50–1 newness 20
284 Index
Denslow, William Wallace 38, 44–6, exchange-value 15, 245

50 existentialism 78, 87–8, 90
Denson, Shane 5–6 expressionism 193
Derrida, Jacques
animal genocide 121 fairy tales
eternity, definition of 120, 124, Andersen’s Fairy Tales 277 n12
127 n8 “The Little Mermaid” 259, 270,
“Force of Law” 117–18 274–5
“hauntology” 169 children’s literature and 132,
infinite repetition 206 274–5
iteration 21, 118 The Golden Ass (Apuleius) 92 n8
Marx, influence of 20 Grimm 80, 85
naming relations 127 n4 Howl’s Moving Castle series 76,
nation-building 25, 126 83–6, 89, 90
newness 20 pantomime 76
“Ousia and Grammē” 120, 124, pedagogical purpose 274–5
127 n8 princess narratives 272
performative citation 167–9 transgender identity in 259, 270,
“Signature, Event, Context” 168 274–5
temporal and atemporal concepts uncanny, the 40
120, 124–5, 127 n8 versions and revisions of 7
theory of citationality 21, 167–9 fan
deterritorialization 23, 28 clubs:
Dholakia, Nikhilesh 246 Chalet School series 12
dialogism 104 fiction communities:
Diary of a Wimpy Kid 27, 219–27 digital fan culture 28 n3, 95,
didacticism 10 107–8
Donne, John 78–9, 88 Harry Potter 19, 95, 107–8, 226
Donwood, Stanley 240 Twilight 13
double-voices 104 Wimpy Kid 225–6, 234
Douglas Wiggin, Kate 28 n6 labour (music industry) 245–8,
Dresang, Eliza T. 2, 25, 83, 100, 107, 251, 253, 254 nn1–2, 255 n5
183 Fay, Lucy Ella 46
Drouillard, Colette 95–6, 105, Fascism 52 n7
107–8 femininity
DuBois, Rachel 13 Andersen and 270, 277 n12
Dudek, Debra 3, 26–7 conventional models of 159, 260,
Dutton, Geoffrey 130 267, 269–71
education and 26, 149, 151,
Eaton, Anne Thaxter 46 156–7, 159
Edelman, Lee 117, 126 gender identity 17–19
Eire, Carlos 127 n8 “The Little Mermaid” figure 260,
Eliade, Mircea 12, 26–7, 207 271
Enton, Harry 48 feminism
“eternal return” 12, 22, 203, 207 aspirations of 159
Erdrich, Louise 29 n6 feminist psychoanalysis 97
eternity 77, 114, 120, 123–6, 127 n8, ideological disputes 233
210, 212 Field, Walter Taylor 46
Evans, Dylan 12 Fields, James T. 44
Index 285
Fincher, David 23 Management Service (GeMS) 259

Firat, A. Fuat 246 parody 63
Fisher, Mark 251 performance 18, 25–6, 62–3, 168
Fitzsimmons, Rebekah 2–4, 28 n6, social construction of 18–19
95 see also transgender
Flynn, Richard 16, 38–9, 44 Gender Trouble, see Judith Butler
folktales 8, 79, 81 Genette, Gérard 81, 127 n1, 183 n2
Foucault, Michel 97, 101, 104, 108s genre
Fox, Gardner 166, 176, 184 n12 children’s literature as a 8
Fox, Paula 28 n5 criticism 84, 211
franchises fiction:
Narnia, Chronicles of 3 Anne books 61
narrative 7, 17, 27, 28 n3, 218, Buffy the Vampire Slayer 206–16
239 comic books and superheroes
Pirates of the Caribbean 17 24, 26, 166–9, 174–5, 182,
Wimpy Kid 19, 221, 223, 234 183 n1, 192, 203
Frankfurt School 51 Howl’s Moving Castle 76, 85
Freud, Sigmund inventor stories 44
collecting 17 Roy Rogers 219
comical, the 37 school stories 29 n9
compulsion to repeat 12–13 science fiction and fantasy
death drive 14, 22 92 n11
gender identity and relationships vampire books 26–7, 206–16
17–18, 277 n12 intertextuality and 97
mechanical men 36 music 248, 251
“Mourning and Melancholia” reading and listening 82–3
17–18 theories of:
pleasure principle 14, 19, 39–40 archetype theory 8
psychoanalytic practice 29 n10 performativity theory 19, 26
theories of repetition 20 Gerson, Carole 59
uncanny, the 19, 24, 34–5, 37, gift economy 27
39–41, 43 Gillies, W. M. 140–1
Frye, Northrop 8–9, 12 globalization 113, 261
Goldstrom, J. M. 145 n3
Gaiman, Neil 26, 167, 174–9, 182, Gordon, Cynthia 98, 104, 107
184 nn10 and nn12–13, 185 Gothic
n16 American 177
Gaonkar, Dilip 260 Anne books 25, 58, 65, 67–8, 70–1
Garff, Joakim 75–6 as parody 25, 68
gender Graham, Robert J. 145 n2
Birchbark House series 29 Grahame, Kenneth 1
class and 100 Green, John Richard 138
drag and 62 Greene, Graham 91 n4
Harry Potter series 100 Groensteen, Thierry 169, 182,
homosexuality 269, 275–6 n5, 277 190–1, 198–9
n12, 18 Grossman, Anita Susan 4
identity disorder (GID) 259 Grusin, Richard 221
imitation and 18–19, 62–3, 168–9, Guattari, Félix 23, 25, 96, 113–14,
176, 184 n7, 260–1 120
286 Index
Gubar, Marah 60–1, 71 n2 Napster 237

Gupta, Suman 6 Roy Rogers 233–4
young users of 228
Hade, Dan 17 see also fan: fiction communities;
Hall, Stuart 16 MP3s
Hall, William 140 intertextuality
Hamer, Naomi 28 n3 Anne of Green Gables books 57–8,
Harry Potter 2, 4, 6, 20, 25, 29 n6, 67
75, 83, 92 n12, 95–108, 183, comic books 166–8, 170, 172
202, 226 definitions 97–8, 183 n2
Harvey, David 15 Harry Potter 25, 96–103, 107–8
Heede, Dag 269 intratextuality vs. 25, 57–8, 64–5,
Hendershot Parkins, Rachel 29 n7 96–108, 167, 170, 182, 183 n2,
Hernadi, Paul 209 210
heroism 88–9, 138, 141 music, circulation of 245
see also nationalism Oz series 84
heterosexism 23 iteration 35, 36
Hill, Leslie 21 Butler on 62–4, 168
Himmelweit, Susan 16 Derrida on 21, 167–9
historical fiction 163 n4 reiteration 224–6
Hobbes, Thomas 112–13 as re-narrating an event 81
Howl’s Moving Castle 10, 25, 74–93
Hughes, Linda 151 Jackson, Victoria 275 n3
Hughes, Thomas 99–100 Jameson, Fredric 10–11, 16, 209, 251
Hunt, Peter 10 Jarrell, Randall 28 n5
Hurley, Nat 19, 27–8 Jenkins, Henry 12, 108, 239
Hutcheon, Linda 63, 65–6 Jentsch, Ernst 34–6, 39–40, 50
Jess-Cooke, Carolyn 17
ideology Johnson, Deidre 28 n1
cultural works of art and 268 Jones, Diana Wynne 10, 25, 48, 76,
genre and 211 78, 83–92
Marxist critique of 16 journalism 163 n4, 274
of masculine entitlement 235
patriarchal 229 Kane, Tim 27, 208–9
production of 16 Kanigher, Robert 167
in women’s magazines 134 Kearney, Richard 206–8, 213–16
imperialism 112, 129, 133–45, 265 Kellner, Douglas 16
see also nationalism Kenyon-Warner, Ellen 44–5
impressionism 193, 196–7 Kierkegaard, Søren 10–11, 19, 25,
industrialism 35, 51 74–83, 87–8, 90–2
Infantino, Carmine 167 Kincaid, Jamaica 28 n4, 266
Internet Kleist, Heinrich von 40–1
community formation and 107 Kooistra, Lorraine 159
connected learning and 107 Kristeva, Julia 97–101, 107, 183 n2
databases of academic research 4 Kundera, Milan 204
Diary of a Wimpy Kid 219, 232 Kusek, David 252
franchising and 219
Funbrain site 221, 225, 228 Lacan, Jacques 12
MP3 media and 27, 244 Lang, Andrew 153, 163 n5
Index 287
Langbauer, Laurie 3, 11, 14–16, 20, mechanical reproduction 24, 34–6,

24 38–9, 43, 51, 244, 250
learning reader 10, 64, 101, 106–7 Mendelsohn, Farah 84, 86, 91 n5,
Lee, Benjamin 260–1 92 n11
Lefebvre, Benjamin 7, 59–60, 66–7 mermaids
Lemkin, Raphaël 115–16 anatomical ambiguity 272
Leonhard, Gerd 252 bodily pain 27, 273–4
Lewis, C. S. 3, 28 n3 bodily transformation 263–7,
LiPuma, Edward 260–1 271–5
literary journalism 163 n4 cross-cultural and cross-linguistic
Lively, Penelope 28 n5, 81 comparisons 268–70, 276 n11
Locke, John 9–10, 134 circulation history 273
Long, Timothy 91 n7 cultural understandings 274
Lovell-Smith, Rose 10, 25, 64, 99, disabled bodies 272
106 gender identity 258–9
Lund, Michael 151 iconography of 258–74
Lunenfeld, Peter 27, 211, 218–19, irony and humour 275 n3
225–6, 233–5 mass stories 268
Luxuria, Vladimir 259, 277 n12 media accounts 271, 275 nn1, 4
mermaid-subjectivity 272
Macherey, Pierre 16 metaphor for transchild 270
Mackey, Margaret 3, 17, 27, 224, publics and counterpublics 276 n8
230, 239 as signifier 267
Makowski, Silk 6 tragic figure 271
Malabou, Catherine 14 transchild-as-mermaid 271–3
manga 26, 188–96, 200, 202 transgender life 276 n11
Marino, Gordon 77, 91 n3 transgender youth and circulation
Marx, Karl theory 27, 258–77
Capital 15–16 transgirls’ obsession with 258–60
collecting 17 metaculture 25, 129, 267–8, 273–4
Derrida and 169 Meyer, Walter J. 275–6 n5
production and reproduction Miller, Frank 184 n6
15–16, 20 Miller, J. Hillis 6–7
masculinity 27, 232–3, 235 Miller, Kathleen Ann 60, 67–8, 70
gender identity 17–19 Milrod, Christine 275 n4
Mason, Pierre 169 Mitchell, Kevin 23–4
mass production 35, 44, 238 Mitchell, Robert 24
Masschelein, Anneleen 20 Mitchell, Rosemary 163 n4
Matas, Carol 25, 112, 114–16, 125 mode of production 35, 243
McCallum, Robyn 7–8 Modern Languages Association 4
McCay, Winsor 37 modernity 24, 246
McCloud, Scott 52 n4, 190–1, 196, Montgomery, L. M. 24, 28 n6,
199 57–72, 183, 202, 204
McCollum, Allan 35 Moore, Alan 167, 177–85
McGruder, Aaron 29 n6 Moore, Anne Carroll 38, 45–6
McLuhan, Marshall 27, 51 n1, 238, Moore, Ryan 238, 239
241–54 Mori, Masahiro 34–6, 50
McManus, Susan 112–13, 127 n7 Moruzi, Kristine 17, 26, 135, 163 n2
Meade, L. T. 29 n9 Moss, Anita 8
288 Index
motifs 84 life 72 n4, 260

MP3s 27, 237–54 m-novels 253
Müller, Beate 66–7 main vs. subsidiary 75
multiculturalism 195 of masculinity 235
multiplicity 22–4 minimalist 253
Oz series and 43 monsters, function of 207
Musgrave, Peter 130–31, 133, 135–6, of motherhood 59
146 n8 objects 218
oral 80, 84, 197
Narnia, The Chronicles of 3 philosophical reflection through
narrative 87
accumulation of 174 plan 183
activity and 82 pleasure 78–9, 90
biblical 91 n7, 92 nn8–9 of progress and imperial belonging
children’s fantasy 84 135–41, 145
chronological development of 190 psychoanalysis and 14
coming-of-age 85 reader positioning 13, 79
comprehension 196 of redemption and pardon
concepts of 234 210–11
construction of 5, 21, 26, 167–69, reduction 260–2
178 sequential 2, 106, 196–201
contextualization of 70 signals 83
conventional 10 simple 79
conventions of 206, 262 style 83
conversion 82 suspended 211
cultural 259 sustained 49
dilemmas 1 temporality and 7, 120, 124–6,
embedded 77 192
European literary 79 trauma and uncertainty in 13
of events 84 “walkthroughs” 226
fetishization of 169 see also series texts; seriality;
fiction 74, 79 transgender
focus 102 nationhood
folk 84 Australian 25–6, 129, 135–45
fragmentation of 254 Canadian 24, 25, 111–27
franchises 17, 27, 218, 239 nation-state 24, 111–14, 117–27
future vs. present tense 80–1, 84 National Association of Recording
functions of repetition in 80–3, Merchandisers (NARM) 240
181–2 nationalism 111, 113, 129, 133–4,
genre and 82–3, 192, 253 136
graphic 190, 198, 201 during World War I 141–4
happily-ever-after 70, 88 heroism 136–8, 140–3, 144
Herodotean 91 n7 see also imperialism
heroes of 13, 63 New Woman concept 28 n6
illustrations 158–9, 161 Newland, Jane 6, 23
imagination 215 newspaper “funnies” 44
impulse 41, 48 Nguyen, Kim Hong 14–15
interpolated 92 n8 Nietzsche, Friedrich 92 n14, 124,
intratextuality and 183 127 n7
Index 289
Nodelman, Perry 1, 8, 16–17, 25–6, personhood 19

60–1, 106, 112, 114, 117, 119, peters, charlie 24–5
125 plagiarism 183 n2
Norton, Mary 28 n5 pleasure principle
Barthes 74, 77, 79, 86, 97
objectivity 87, 91 n3 compulsion to repeat 12–14, 20,
Oppel, Kenneth 2 50
Owens, Craig 35–6 Freud 14, 19, 39–40
Oz, The Wizard of 3, 16, 20, 24, political economy 2
34–52, 84 popular culture 218–19
see also Tin Woodman (Tin Man) popular novels 1
Poster, Mark 244
Palahniuk, Chuck 23 Povinelli, Elizabeth 260
parody Pritchett, V. S. 81
Anne of Green Gables series 58, psychoanalysis 13–15, 29 n10, 37,
62–8, 71 52 n5, 97
counterculture and 19 Pullman, Philip 2
of drag 63
Gaiman’s comics 176, 182 quoting 183 n2
gender 63
Gothic as 68 Rachlin, Katherine 275 n4
Moore’s Swamp Thing 178 racism 23, 144
music and 238, 248 realism 68–9, 87
poetry and 7 capitalist 251
repetition and 19, 58 domestic 163 n4
spoofs and 275 n3 recall writing 64, 99
pedagogy Recording Industry Association of
American teaching in Canada 145 America 238
n2 Red: a Haida Manga 26, 188–204
Australia vs. Britain 131 Reimer, Mavis 126
citizenship teaching in Harry Potter series 99–100
schools 135 on ideology and community 113
method and practice of 15, 146 n8 Meade’s Atalanta 153–4
repetition as pedagogical technique metaphor of world 29 n9
8–9, 134 on structure 8, 106–7
School Paper, pedagogic intent of young people as political
133–6, 145 n7, 146 n8 actors 114
secular teaching 130 repetition
serial reading, potential of 129 effect of 22, 62–3, 210, 238, 242
teaching, discipline of 131 paradox of 9, 10, 27, 36, 41, 62,
teaching guides 8–9 76, 78–9, 81, 88, 173, 188, 204,
teaching series 112 228, 242
theories of 9 representation
young people’s texts and 10 artistic 196–7
see also Internet; fairy tales; schools; of chronological progress 79
series texts; seriality of commodities 15
Pedersen, Viggo Hjørnager 268–9 conceptual theories of 22–3
performativity 18–19, 21, 25, 26, graphic 50
62–3, 167, 176, 184 n7 as a learning outcome 9
290 Index
representation – continued institutional setting of 145 n7

logic of 11 primary school curricula 8
mechanical 35, 43, 50 reading materials 129–32, 145 n6,
of reality 120, 167 145 n7
of scholarly girls 155 school stories 99
self-representation 263 secondary school curricula 23
story-telling and 79 state 137–8, 143–4, 145 n6
of transgirls 272–3 war effort, contribution to 143–4
visual 35, 155, 193 see also pedagogy
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 79–81 Seldes, Gilbert 37
ritual selfhood 19, 41, 45, 76–7, 82, 90
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 211, 216 Sendak, Maurice 28 n4
genre and 211, 216 sequential art 26, 188–204
history and 178 series texts
performatives 168, 179, 228 contemporary popularity of 3–4
theories of 11–12 critical responses to 4, 12, 23–4
Robinson, Laura M. 19, 24–5, 183 critics of 6, 10–11, 13, 16–18, 21
rogue circulation 27, 260, 274 cultural functions of 5
Rölli, Marc 11, 126 literary texts vs. 5–6
Rose, Gillian 92 n9 modernity and 24
Ross, Catherine Sheldrick 6 pleasure and 25
rote learning 9 repetition and 126
Rowland, Herbert 268 study of 5
Rowling, J. K. 2–3, 19, 95–108, 183, as a teaching tool 10, 14, 232
202 see also under individual series
Roy Rogers Show 27, 219, 226–35 seriality
Rubio, Mary Henley 66, 70, 71 n1, conferences on 29 n8
72 n5 of consumer culture 17, 35
Rudd, David 13 definitions of 4–5
Russell, Danielle 3–4 Derrida, perspective from 21
forms of repetition and 27
Said, Edward 113 gender construction and 18
Sandman (Neil Gaiman) 26, 167, infiniteness of 246
175–8, 184 n12, 185 n16 modernity and 36, 51
“Sandman, The” (E. T. A. Hoffmann) mechanical reproduction and 37,
39–40 39, 51
Saunders, M. Sean 18 multimedia and 3
scepticism 233 narrative series 10
Schellenberg, Betty A. 58–9, 70 pleasure and 37
Schlee, Ann 28 n5 practice of 5–6, 11, 28
Scholarship and Reading Union Pages problem of 6
26, 149, 153–62 of popular forms 5, 34
schools serial redoing and 26
Australian curricula 129–32, taste-making critics and 3
135–6, 137–8, 145 n6 as a teaching tool 10
School Paper 16, 25–6, 112, 129–47 sexism 23
boarding 99–100 Sharrock, Alison 98
citizenship teaching in 135 Shrigley, Eugene Wilford 47
Dear Canada series 112 Sloan, Glenna Davis 8
Index 291
Smith, Lucy Toulmin 153, 163 n4 Thomas, Joseph T. Jr. 7

Smith, Michael W. 232 Thomas, Julia 158–9
Smith, Michelle 16, 25, 112 Thurtle, Philip 24
solipsism 90 Tin Woodman (Tin Man) 20, 24, 34,
Solstad, Annie 259 35–6, 41–3, 49, 51, 52 nn2, 3
Spaull, Andrew 143 see also Oz series
Steig, William 28 n4 Todorov, Tzvetan 209
Stephens, John 7–8 Tom Swift series 50–1
Sterne, Jonathan 245 Tosenberger, Catherine 12, 19
Stine, R. L. 14 Tournier, Michel 28 n4
Stott, Jon C. 8 transfiguration
Stratemeyer Syndicate 14, 18, 50 Disney princesses 258
subjecthood Harry Potter 25, 96, 101, 103–5
child subjects 28 “The Little Mermaid” 261–2
intentional subjects 21 transgender
learning subjects 8, 28, 52 n7 “The Little Mermaid” 258–77
in modernity and transgirls 27, 258–60, 264, 271–2
postmodernity 246 transsexuality and 262–3, 266–7,
self-parody and 63 272–3, 276 n6, 277 n11
social subjectivity 264, 271–4 youth 19, 27
statehood and 112–13 see also gender
subject formation 17, 51, 52 n7 trauma
subject as process 19 Anne books 69
subjective states 77, 82–4, 87 compulsion to repeat 12–14
subjectivity and mechanization 24 cultural 14
Superman 26, 167, 169–78, 182, 184 traumatic neuroses 19
nn6, 8–9 Trottier, Maxine 25, 112, 114,
surplus-value 15 120–6
Swamp Thing 26, 167, 177–83, 185 Tsakiri, Vasiliki 82, 92 n9
n14 Twilight Saga 4–5, 13, 27, 207,
209–10
Tarkovsky, Andrei 185 n15
Taxel, Joe 2 uncanny, the
television Anne of Green Gables 68
adaptations of comic books 169, Freudian perspective 19–20, 24,
210–11 34–5, 37, 39–41
adult-viewing 210 Gothic elements of 68
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3, 26–7, Harry Potter series 20
202, 206–16 Oz series 20, 34–5, 39–41, 43, 50
fan communities of 108 poststructuralism and 20
music licensing in 250 Swamp Thing 178
Roy Rogers stories 219, 227–9, witch child 20
232–4 Updike, John 43, 49
sequential art and 26 Urban, Greg 25, 27, 129, 133–4, 141,
series for young people 3, 26, 29 144, 267–8, 274
n6, 169 use-value 15, 17, 245
technology in 35
youth discussions of 10 vampires 206–16
Thomas, Gillian 57, 60, 69–70 vampirism 210
292 Index
van der Grijp, Paul 152 Williams, James 23

Vanderbilt, Arthur Talbot 163 n7 Williams, Raymond 16
Vardy, Peter 92 n14 Williams Biancos, Margery 28 n4
Vidal, Gore 43, 49 Wizard of Oz, see Oz, The Wizard of;
visual culture 27, 35, 159, 241 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The
(Oz series)
Waid, Mark 26, 167, 170–8, 182, Wodtke, Larissa 3, 27, 29 n7, 251
184 n7 Wolk, Douglas 167, 182, 191
Walters, Barbara 258, 263, 265–72, Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (Oz
276 n6 series) 3, 16, 20, 24, 34–52, 84
Warner, Michael 260–1, 276 n8 see also Oz, The Wizard of
Watson, Victor 2, 6 Working Infirmary Nursing
Weber, Samuel 13–14 Association 150
Weitenkampf, Frank 47
Whedon, Joss 206 xenophobia 23
White, E. B. 28 n4
White, Raymond E. 16, 219, 227, Yahgulanaas, Michael 26, 188–204
229 Yu, Leinil 26, 167, 170–8, 182, 184
Whitman, Walt 82 n7
Wikström, Patrik 250
Wilde, Oscar 40 Zipes, Jack 269, 277 n12
Wilheim, Jeffrey D. 232 Zupančič, Alenka 11, 23

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Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Series Editors: Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford

Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature

Introduction: The Compulsion to Repeat 1

10 The Beloved That Does Not Bite: Genre, Myth, and

1.1 Frank L. Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz

The Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature series was initiated in

Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford

symposium and to prepare this collection. Larissa Wodtke and charlie

Nyala Ali holds a Master’s in Cultural Studies from The University of

Kathleen Campana is a PhD student in the Information School at the

Brandon Christopher is Assistant Professor of English at The University

Eliza T. Dresang, Beverly Cleary Professor for Children and Youth

Debra Dudek works at the University of Wollongong, Australia as a Senior

Deanna England has an honours degree in Psychology and a Master’s

Nat Hurley is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film

Laurie Langbauer is a professor of English at the University of North

Rose Lovell-Smith is a senior lecturer in the English Department at

Margaret Mackey is a professor in the School of Library and Information

Kristine Moruzi is an associate lecturer at Deakin University. She

Perry Nodelman is Professor Emeritus of English at The University of

charlie peters is an independent scholar who has taught courses at

Mavis Reimer is Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and

Laura M. Robinson is an associate professor and Head of the English

Michelle J. Smith is a research fellow in the Centre for Memory,

Larissa Wodtke is Research Coordinator at the Centre for Research in

There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people:

their cultural authority through their campaigns against series literature

instrument of category maintenance (particularly categories of class

between vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black as hetero-

rather, to begin by asking, what principle or principles distinguish

make meaning of the world. If “[n]arrative is one of the large categories

people by noting “the volume and persistence of retold stories as part of

recognition, reiteration, remembering, representation, reproduction, and

the express purposes of both delighting and instructing young people.

character of novelty” (52). Alenka Zupančič contends that the discovery

One of the obvious senses in which repetition is consolatory is that it

recognizing the operations of repetition (in the sense of cyclical return)

reducing the level of stimulation or excitation incited by the original

are positioned as oppressive keepers of the symbolic order at the begin-

Generation Xers without hope, and post-9/11 mourners. Nguyen writes,

analysis of reproduction, production is not the production of things, it

children are growing up in,” namely, to “be egocentric, be fearless,

that “gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of

of the imitation itself” (“Imitation” 313). In this reading, Butler clearly

words, is that which is experienced simultaneously as familiar and as

For Derrida, repetition, or iteration, is not a consolidation but a

and Repetition that the same is an effect of an underlying, masked

Deleuze’s later work on “becoming” with Félix Guattari develops the

everyday life. A Deleuzian reading of any series, according to Mitchell,

We have already shown in our review of theories of repetition and the

the order in which publishers usually present the series. Borrowing

combination of repetitive and changing messages about Australian

love, forgiveness, and the potential to change. Dudek extends Tim

in which the protagonist knowingly negotiates the complications and

gender in Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark House series; challenges to American

This paper focuses on L. Frank Baum’s character the Tin Woodman. It

and periodicals as central modes of technological production. Mori,

Mechanical reproduction is a strategy of art in the modern machine

Blackmore, writing about the early comics of Winsor McCay, observes