Abstract
David Almond and Dave McKean’s The Savage is a hybrid prose and graphic novel which tells the story of one young man’s maturation through literacy. The protagonist learns to deal with the death of his father and his own “savage” self by writing a graphic novel. This article reads The Savage in the context of earlier, “Northern” literacy narratives—particularly Tony Harrison’s poem “Them & [uz]” and Barry Hines’ Kes—through the discourse of neoliberalism and the notion of the reluctant boy reader. It is suggested that Almond and McKean are influenced by currently dominant ideologies of gender and literacy.
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Notes
For many "Northerners," "the North" begins at the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, reaching up to the border with Scotland; for those from the South, however, it is also seen to encompass "the Midlands." It has characteristic speech patterns and is associated with heavy industry and, generally, a harder lifestyle. If this “Northern” culture seems a parochial focus, Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen note that “spatial representations of literacy are perhaps most visible in narratives conditioned by colonial domination” (1992, p. 526), and reveal that “one of the primary accomplishments of [the privileged subject’s] literacy is its capacity to regionalize the space around him” (ibid., p. 528). Aside from notions of "Northernness," these texts need to be seen in the context of an English educational system that had been completely reorganised as a result of the 1944 Education Act, frequently named after the Conservative politician, R.A. Butler. It created the "secondary modern" schools for the masses, differentiating them from the grammar schools, entry to which depended on passing the 11-plus exam. The particular context of a post-Butler educational system, and the more general context of children’s literature as a socialising genre, identifies these primary texts as conditioned by the logic of a colonial, “civilising” domination. Certainly, Hines, Harrison, and Almond have all participated in a cultural project of challenging the North’s status as “‘other’ and ultimately inferior” to “London and its immediate environs” (Russell, 2004, p. 8). Casting a critical eye on spatialised literacy narratives thus reveals ideological tensions likely to be present in literacy narratives for and about “spaces” far beyond an imaginary English “North.”
To be clear, I am not endorsing a biologically derived definition of gender. Rather, I am interested in the ways that neoliberalism harnesses gender as an individual characteristic in order to market it.
Such myths should logically privilege Northern English culture, as “the literary North has most often been urban and even more specifically, industrial” (Russell, 2004, p. 86). However, the kinds of non-civilisation opposed to literacy in such myths seem to outweigh urbanism or industrialism in favour of a subordination of the North because it is seen as “uncivilised”; indeed, as discussed later, Harrison, Hines and Almond all explicitly address questions of civilisation in relation to literacy.
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Erica Hateley is a lecturer in the School of Cultural and Language Studies in Education at Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia). She is the author of Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (Routledge, 2009), and is currently undertaking research into Australian children‘s book award winners.
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Hateley, E. ‘In the hands of the Receivers’: The Politics of Literacy in The Savage by David Almond and Dave McKean. Child Lit Educ 43, 170–180 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9160-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9160-9