This tremendous collection spotlights the generative relationship between avant-garde practices and children’s books. Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer gather a cohort of scholars to explore the historical avant-garde–its emergence and its aftermath, its playfulness and propaganda, its ambiguities and provocations, its sophistication and calculated naïveté–through international artists’ deliberate focus on childhood perception and imagination. The essayists turn a new page in the study of children’s literature, measuring the geographical and ideological range of the avant-garde across the discipline, and locating the vestiges of avant-garde aesthetics and politics in now-familiar, not-quite-innocent texts and imagery.

- Nathalie op de Beeck, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA,

<i>Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde</i> luminously shows how avant-garde artists rely on self-proclaimed manifestoes and herald the reorganisation of the literary and artistic fields of children’s literature. Proposing a “great literature for the small,” for a “new child” in a new society, their vision is inspired by the Russian revolutionary movement in Denmark in the Twenties and supported in England by the strong feelings about childhood initiated by John Ruskin. Avant-garde artists experiment different techniques and trends, such as Expressionism and Cubism in Hungary, Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting characteristic of Pop Art after the Second World War in the United States, Surrealism and other artistic movements, as well as psychoanalysis, in France. Such a forward approach thus succeeds in conveying innovative matters of perception, a rebellion against a rigid set of conventions, which constitutes a major challenge to creation in the international field, as this set of brilliant essays suggests.

- Jean Perrot, Paris University,

<i>Children's Literature and the Avant-Garde</i> undertakes an ambitious task of highlighting mutual links between a number of radical art movements and children's literature. All the contributions undoubtedly display sensitivity to the heterogeneity of these trends and their different historical situatedness; each offers a glimpse into the socio-cultural embedding of art and literature. The other crucial aspect of the project is accentuated in Philip Nel's chapter, where the author points out the importance of examining the underlying senses of the books, especially those examples of avant-garde literature which do make the world's absurdities clear to the child reader (68). This meaningful conclusion to the volume echoes the hope expressed in the introduction that the contributions will expand thinking about the way in which aesthetic strategies used by the artists may affect the meaning of the books in question. As this aspect reverberates in all of the chapters, and in some it becomes a priority, the volume as a whole certainly achieves the goal.

- Katarzyna Smyczynska, Kazimierz Wielki University, on International Research Society for Children's Literature, March 2017,