In 2007 Karin Westman bemoaned the “lack of discussion between the two terms children’s literature and modernism” in her introduction to a Children’s Literature Association Quarterly special issue on “Children’s Literature and Modernism: The Space Between” (283). Acknowledging the significance of Juliet Dusinberre’s Alice to the Lighthouse and Kimberley Reynolds’s Radical Children’s Literature, she maintained that scholarship on children’s literature read through a modernist lens tends to “get absorbed into existing critical conversations about children’s literature or existing critical conversations about modernism” (284-85). In 2013 Westman called for “children’s literature [to become] an organizing principle for literary history” (464). This proposed “Streetwise” session answers Westman’s largely unanswered call. Navigating the streets of the modern city through children’s literature and culture, it indeed promises to reorganize modernist literary history by bringing together original papers on children’s “modern classics” invented by interwar London publishers; Puffin paperbacks, London bombings, and reconstruction campaigns; modernist poet Laura Riding’s critical writings on girls’ education in New York City; and African American children’s literature and youth gardens in interwar Atlanta. Four panelists will each speak for 15 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for discussion.

In her presentation “British Children’s Classics in the Modern City: A Tale of Two Series,” Amy Webster uses ground-breaking data from her empirical study of British series of children’s classics to support her investigation of the ways British children’s literature responded to social developments in twentieth-century London as London’s publishing houses increasingly employed more women and engaged with international publishers. Webster compares children’s “modern classics” produced 1920-1940 by London publishers Methuen and Macmillan with the earliest turn-of-the-century series of children’s “classics” published by Stead’s and J. M. Dent & Sons to argue that increasing diversity among authors and titles originated in and shaped visions of the modern city.

Elizabeth West’s “Building a Better London” describes Noel Carrington’s wartime Puffin Picture Books as significant interventions in debates about England’s urban future, using innovative autolithographic techniques to join leftist political ideology with utopian visions of reconstruction. Against the professional scene of Carrington’s collaborations with left-wing illustrators, West analyzes Margaret and Alexander Potter’s The Building of London (1945) and S. R. Badmin’s Village and Town (1942) to demonstrate how these Puffins make questions of child agency central to the modern city’s social and aesthetic possibilities while suggesting urban design improvements from a child’s perspective, proposing “special playgrounds for children so they do not need to play in the streets.”

Modernist scholars have rarely attended to the ways Anglophone women modernists measured their own educations. In “Modernism for Girls: Laura Riding’s Schooling for Street Smarts,” Anett K. Jessop explores how American modernist poet Laura Riding, who received an excellent education from the Brooklyn Girls’ High School and then Cornell University, became preoccupied with early childhood learning, eventually affixing her feminist curriculum to lexicological projects. Jessop reads Riding’s “Sickness and Schooling” alongside Four Unposted Letters to Catherine and Laura and Francisca to analyze Riding’s scrutiny of conventional schooling and the dictionary as pedagogy’s principal instrument as she sought to advance visions of a more liberated girlhood.

During a time when African Americans left the rural South and its overt racism for the urban North’s possibilities of work, literature aimed at Black children by urban authors ranging from NAACP co-founder Mary White Ovington in Hazel (1913), to Jessie Faucet and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois in The Brownies’ Book (1920), to Paul Dunbar in his popular poetry, embraced and romanticized the rural. In her paper “Growing a ‘Beautiful Place’: Urban Romance of the Rural in African American Children’s Literature,” Paige Gray reads these texts against Atlanta Public Schools’ garden projects of the 1920s-1930s, documented by the Georgia Historic Landscape Initiative, transforming our vision of the modern city cultivated for and by Black children.