The New Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children's Literature in English

Ted McGee is an associate professor of English (Children’s Literature)
at St. Jerome’s College, University of Waterloo.

The New Republic of Childhood is an indispensable resource for the study
of Canadian children’s literature in English. Egoff and Saltman,
professors of librarianship at the University of British Columbia, have
expanded, revised, reorganized, and updated The Republic of Childhood,
published by Egoff in 1967 and revised eight years later. The aim of the
work is the same as that enunciated in 1967: to help adults judge “the
quality of children’s books.” So too are the basic approach
(historical and generic) and the way two historical chapters (one on the
growth of children’s literature in Canada, the other on the publishers
of it) frame chapters that focus on various kinds of literature, from
“outdoor adventure stories” to “poetry picture books.” The New
Republic, like the old, is jammed with quick summaries of a multitude of
books, and with forthright judgments of their literary and artistic
merit.

What makes The New Republic of Childhood new? The 1980s: almost 70
percent of the books considered were published in those years. New forms
blossomed; picture books, for example—which did not merit separate
consideration in 1967—have a chapter to themselves, a chapter dealing
with more than 160 titles. New experts (such as Penny Petrone) displace
some of the old (such as Henry Schoolcraft, “the father of American
ethnology”). Most important, the political history of the last decade
has changed Egoff and Saltman, whose revisions reveal a
“re-visioning” of the place of children’s literature in Canadian
culture: for “Eskimo” read “Inuit”; for “Indian and Eskimo
Legends” read “Native Legends”; and to “Indian” add, quite
properly, that the word itself “is much disliked by the native
people.”

For those setting out to explore Canadian children’s literature in
English, The New Republic of Childhood, though a daunting read, remains
the best of outfitters.