Non-Human Kids of Kiddie Lit: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling and the Cultural Construction of Animal Narratives as Children’s Literature

Abstract

AbstractThis paper combines the perspectives of animal studies and reception theory to trace the audience shift of narratives foregrounding interactions between adolescent boys and animals published in the US in the first half of the twentieth century. More precisely, it argues that a text’s focus on human–animal bonds can result in its “kiddification,” a term explained by Beverly Lyon Clark as trivialization that leads to dismissal. We argue that the reasons for this shift include the solidification of the boy-and-his-dog convention in the 1940s as an example of formula fiction for juveniles, combined with the simultaneous proliferation of animal movies geared towards a family audience. The case under scrutiny is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novelThe Yearlingand its film adaptation from 1946. Despite the book’s initial success among general audiences (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939), with time Kinnan Rawlings’s novel became “kiddified” and then passed into oblivion, rarely discussed by critics who deem it undeserving of attention and unread by contemporary juveniles, who perhaps find the book difficult, long and tedious (Groff, Harper’s,https://harpers.org/archive/2014/01/the-lost-yearling/, 2014). Consequently, the foregrounding of affective human–animal bonds in the book resulted in its later association with children’s literature, which was amplified by the film adaptation as well as the publisher’s marketing strategies.