Under the radar: The subversive work of American children's books, 1930--1980

Sociological conversations about cultural products like books have a long history, to which this study contributes. In addition, sociologists have long been interested in questions about how social norms and ideas are sometimes reproduced and sometimes resisted. This dissertation project is rooted in a tradition of sociologists who study the novel as a source of data. Like these sociologists, I look to the American novel for information about social ideologies and structured representations; like them, I look to the history of American book publishing for information about how texts come to exist and circulate. Unlike them, though, I focus on the cultural content and publishing history of American children's novels, and on each text's willingness to resist the reproduction of dominant social arrangements which are based upon inequality. And for good reason: American children's novels have been published within a very different configuration of industrial arrangements, and have been subject to different kinds of concerns over their content---both by theorists of cultural reproduction and public debates about what texts children should and should not be exposed to.; Further, literary scholars argue that modern feminist fiction emerged during the 1970s, as a component of second wave feminist political activity. This sociological study also critiques and transforms definitions of 'the feminist novel,' and suggests that feminist, or subversive, children's novels existed well before the late-twentieth-century eruption of second wave feminism. By using a less-individualistic theory of social stratification and resistance than previous research, the study uncovers a range of narrative strategies that explicate and resist overlapping forms of oppression. By creating a way to identify stories that implicate social structures in their representation of stratification, I identify a different way to think about what counts as a subversive children's novel. This dissertation conceptualizes children's novels as (potentially) containing narratives of resistance, which permits a connection to feminist theories of narratives, since they offer the best models for these types of questions and goals.