Abstract
From the early 1940s until the late 1960s, Lois Lenski embarked on an exploration of American regions through children’s books. This body of work, which has become known as Lenski’s Regional Series, began by exploring the regions Lenski herself experienced each year as she traveled from Connecticut to Florida for her health. As Lenski realized the importance and success of these books, demonstrated by a Newberry Medal award for Strawberry Girl in 1946, she broadened her reach to include more geographical areas of the United States including such states as California and South Dakota. Through her books, Lenski emphasizes the importance of community and shared nationhood even across regional lines. This paper examines Lenski’s regional series first from her own purpose in aiming for objectivity and fact that she could communicate to children of other regions, instructing and exposing them to new ways of life. Second, this paper considers the paratextual elements of the Regional series, the forewords and the maps that accompany each book, to reveal the ideology that Lenski unconsciously incorporates into her stories. A product of her time, Lenski may have been influenced by the government’s American Guide Series, created by the Federal Writers’ Project, which demonstrates the same successes and flaws. Lenski’s maps in particular demonstrate the influence of a particular time, the layering of fact and fiction, and the reflection of Lenski’s personal values of certain regional characteristics. Recognition of the ideology incorporated into Lenski’s series remains important as child readers receive not objective fact, but one perspective of their nation.
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Notes
As the citation for this quotation demonstrates, this criteria comes from the current American Library Association website. The criteria were voted upon by the Association for Library Service to Children Newbery Award committee in January 1978. The criteria have been revised twice since then, in 1987 and 2008.
Although Lenski repeatedly describes her attempts to create realistic stories that portray regional life accurately, her comments admittedly focus on the plots of her stories rather than their settings. This focus, however, simply demonstrates her tendency to overlook how she represented those stories visually through her maps, as she concentrated on the stories themselves instead. Her concern for factuality rested primarily in the stories she told, rather than in the stories she drew.
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Julia Pond is a doctoral student at Illinois State University where she teaches children’s literature and writing classes. Her dissertation spans both fields of children’s literature and Southern literature by considering how Southern adolescents are acculturated through literature of multiple genres into Southern identities.
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Pond, J. The Rub Between Fact and Fiction: Ideology in Lois Lenski’s Regional Maps. Child Lit Educ 42, 44–55 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9122-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-010-9122-z