Marketing Modernism for Children; or How Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil and Woolf’s Nurse Lugton… Were Made into Picture Story Books in English, Italian, and French

Why Modernist Woolf and Joyce Made it to Children’s Literature

Since it emerged as a theoretical field, Children’s literature studies have defined Children’s literature as a paradoxical space between adult and child. It is an “essentially adult trade” in which “the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product receiver)” (Rose 88, 1). I would argue that similar ambiguities about readerships within Modernism paved the way for the posthumous appropriation of tales written for a private audience by major authors such as Woolf and Joyce by the minor genre of picture story books.

In the wake of Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986), studies of Modernism and the market have focused not on the poetics of texts but rather on their edition, production, circulation, and marketing, pointing to paradoxical “strange moments […] in the history of Modernism, when modernists’ public anti-mass-market rhetoric seemed to be undercut by flirtations with consumer culture” (Morrison “Selling Modernism” 155). The great cultural divide now appears to have been bridged by Modernist artists more than had been assumed.

Both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce more or less consciously or cynically organized their self-promotion in newspapers and magazines, which “helped to construct, in Mark Morrison’s phrase, the ‘public face’ of modernism”2 (Zacks 789). Modernism’s interactions with marketing and commerce and its gradual acceptance by mainstream culture have only recently come to light. In 2010, a collection of essays edited by Jeanne Dubino placed Virginia Woolf “smack in the middle of” the Literary Marketplace, acting both “in and on the marketplace”3 (Howard 158):

Woolf deployed an array of tactics in her efforts to master the marketplace, including increasing the value of her work through the release of limited editions and autographed copies, recycling work so that it could be reprinted in multiple forms (in both periodicals and books or in more than one periodical), composing “silly” books to counterbalance her serious yet less economically viable novels, and colluding with advertisers to craft an image as a highbrow writer. (150)

Similarly, Catherine Turner reads Joyce’s Ulysses as “the marriage of modernism and commerce” (221). Published in Paris in 1922, it remained banned in America until 1934, so that

[W]hen Random House finally acquired the rights to publish the novel, its publicists had only to play on its preceding reputation. Smuggling and bootleg operations during the intervening years had generated interest in Joyce’s novel, both as a work of modernism and as an icon of popular culture, that crossed socioeconomic classes. The memorable advertisement published in the Satuday Review of Literature entitled “How to Enjoy James Joyce’s Great Novel Ulysses” suggested that anyone could appreciate the novel. (Zacks 106-107)4

The Irish artist in exile and the “High Priestess of Bloomsbury,” as Arnold Bennett disapprovingly called Woolf, likewise worked at widening their audiences. They were so good at it that, although “[t]he modernist bohemia adopted a trenchant, sometimes surly, policy of self-imposed apartheid when it came to the philistine public,” its views and ways of life gradually shaped those of the middle-class they wished to remain segregated from: “[b]y the end of the twentieth century, the culture intrinsic to market society had spread from the avant-garde enclave to society at large, transforming, in its course, the everyday lives of the very philistine masses the early modernists haughtily kept at arm’s length” (Cooper 2, 4).

It comes as no surprise, then, that, after they died in 1941, both Woolf and Joyce were “recycled” (Howard 150) and “smuggled” (Zacks 106) into the minor genre but major sector of Children’s literature, a booming market in the 1960s. That neither they nor their works were iconic yet, although both were influential and on their way to joining the canon, probably helped. In Italy, both Woolf’s and Joyce’s lighter works were translated first. Virginia Woolf was introduced “through her two most playful books, both of which she considered a joke as did Leonard” (Bolchi 200). The Italian translations of Orlando (1928, trans. 1933) and Flush (1933, trans. 1934) were published by Mandadori, who also published Joyce, before that of Mrs Dalloway (1925, trans. 1946) (200). Likewise, Joyce’s drama and poetry were translated first, so that “Joyce’s entrance into the Italian literary world did not centre on the work for which he was internationally known” but on “‘the production which went largely unappreciated and unperformed in the English-speaking world […]’ (Bulson 2001, 17)” (Zanotti 330). It was no crime of lese-majesty, then, to associate their names with Children’s literature. Rather, their transfer to that new segment paralleled their adoption into the canon.

In the 1960s, Virginia Woolf’s sales were booming (Marler 37) and James Joyce was raising increasing interest in the academia and the general public. “After the Second World War, attention to Joyce in French academic quarters was not non-existent, but it could hardly be called ample,” but by the end of the 1960s “most of Joyce’s works as well as significant secondary texts were available in French translation. Three general introductions were also published during this epoch: Jean Paris’s richly detailed and well-illustrated study Joyce par lui-même (1957); Joseph Majault’s Joyce (1963); and Jean-Jacques Mayoux’s James Joyce (1965)” (Slote 372; 373). Likewise, “[b]y [1964] there was enough secondary material emerging on Virginia Woolf for one critic to publish a survey entitled ‘L’Univers woolfien’” (Marler 37). In the 1960s “[b]oth D[ubliners] and P[ortrait of the Artist as a Young Man] were taught at the university level” (Slote 374), while J. J. Wilson “taught the first course on Woolf at Smith College in 1966” (Marler 38), the very year when Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble was released. Le Chat et le diable was published in France that same year, while “[f]or Joyce’s birthday in 1966, the Centre Culturel Américain sponsored a conference that included an international group of scholars as well as French writers such as Butor, Mayoux, and his student Hélène Cixous (Gaugeard 1966, 10). Since that event predated the first International Joyce Symposium by one year, it could well have been the first colloquium dedicated solely to Joyce” (Slote 374). The 1960s were propitious times for Modernist Woolf and Joyce to make it to Children’s literature: both they, as iconic writers in the bud, and their works, as increasingly canonical texts, were being reproduced and disseminated in English and in translation but all were still in the making, and Children’s literature was likewise a developing segment of the literary market, boosted by the emergence of children’s psychology, pedagogy, and the fledgling interest of parents in schooling and literacy.

In a way, Children’s literature is not unlike Modernism in that both create a contact zone between highbrow and middlebrow, the happy few and international readers, snobbism and cultural mass-market through reduplication and versioning. Both “recycle” (Howard 150) and replicate, “reprint[ing] in multiple forms” texts that “cross […] socioeconomic classes” (Zacks 107) and gather readers of all ages, conferring value to “silly” (Howard 150) texts—in the case of Virginia Wolf’s and James Joyce’s stories, minor texts that were not originally publication-oriented. From that perspective, the child reader is the contemporary equivalent of uneducated people or female readers for Modernist writers and publishers.

How Publishing Houses Made Woolf’s and Joyce’s Tales

However this may be, Virginia Woolf’s and James Joyce’s transfer to the market of children’s picture story books proved a long process of dissemination, resistance and ambiguity. This, I argue, is partly due to major highbrow publishing houses’ attempt to control the circulation of the tales and the high-quality values attached to their authors.

The Cat and the Devil was first illustrated by Richard Erdoes in 1964 and published by Dodd, Mead & Co (New York), a family business that published major American and British authors, such as Agatha Christie, Rupert Brooke, or George Bernard Shaw. In 1965, a British edition illustrated by Gerald Rose was published by Faber and Faber (London). It was founded in 1929 and very closely associated with Modernism, since it had been run by T. S. Eliot and its catalogue featured Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot alongside James Joyce, so that his picture book appeared in the same catalogue as his novels.

In 1966, a French translation by Jacques Borel (the first translator of Joyce’s poetry in French who also contributed to the Pléiade edition of Œuvres) illustrated by Jean-Jacques Corre was published by Gallimard (Paris), a major French publisher whose catalogue includes Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, and Céline. Le Chat et le diable was thus released alongside authoritative editions of James Joyce’s novels5 and Lettres de James Joyce (1961). Gallimard’s second version of Le Chat et le diable, illustrated by renowned Roger Blachon, came out in 1978 between the final two volumes of Lettres (II 1973, III 1981) and four years after Jacques Aubert’s translation of Gens de Dublin (1974).

Even when Joyce’s tale found its way into publishing houses specializing in Children’s books, they were connected with major authors. In 1967, it was translated into Italian by Enzo Siciliano with illustrations by Flaminia Siciliano. This was after Ulise, Melchiori’s Italian translation of Ulysses, came out “just in time for Christmas 1960” (Zanotti 348). Joyce, who had waged “influence on Italian writers” “from the mid-1950’s onwards” (346), was then “in the air,” a “‘model for the Italian writers of the sixties’” (Pedullà 1999, 201)” (348). Enzo Siciliano was a prominent man of letters, critic and prized novelist. He and his wife, a translator from the French and an actress in Uccelacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows, 1966), were on friendly terms with Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, whose Storie de la preistoria she illustrated in 1977. Il Gatto e il Diavolo was published by Emme Edizioni (Milan), a publishing house founded two years earlier, specializing in educational and highbrow, arty books for children with a focus on classics, such as Voltaire, Maupassant, Stevenson, Fitzerald, or Tolstoi.6 Likewise, when an English version of the Gallimard / Blachon appeared, it was published by Faber & Faber (London) in 1980, and in 1981 by Shocken Books (New York), an American publishing house that was originally German but closed in 1939 and relocated in Mandatory Palestine and then New York, and whose catalogue includes Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Harendt. In 1990, it was published by Canadian Breakwater Books, which mainly publishes poetry, fiction, and “kid’s lit.,” as their website puts it.

The mid-1980s and 90s, which have been called “a marketer’s heyday for children’s publishers” (Lynch-Brown, Tomlinson 242), marked a change, as the Gallimard / Blachon was translated and disseminated by middlebrow Children’s publishers. An Italian translation came out in 1985, the same year Altea published a Spanish El Gato y el Diablo. They are part of worldwide group Santillana, whose first sector is educational and Children’s books. In 1995, Insel Verlag published it in German. They had already released a version of Die Katze und der Teufel in 1976, with illustrations by Jan de Tusch-Lec. Insel Verlag has no specific Children’s literature collection but publishes classical texts for children in its WeltLiteratur collection, “Insel Bücherei.” The Zürich-based German translation of the 1964 Dodd & Mead/Erdoes was then reissued. The Gallimard/Blachon was translated into Polish by a Children’s publisher as Kot i diabeł (2008). In 1997, a bilingual English/Hungarian version, A Macska és as ördög, was released with illustrations by Péter Vladimir. In 2005, a Croatian translation entitled MaČak I Vrag with original illustrations by Tomislav Torjanac was published by a house dedicated to educational and Children’s books. In 2012, Kočka a Čert, a Czech translation with original illustrations by Sašha Švolíková was published by Argo, a leading Czech publisher with a large educational department that also publishes major international literature. The becoming Children’s literature of Joyce’s letter seems well under way as, in 2010, a softcover version was put out in the Gallimard jeunesse collection, “L’Heure des histoires,” for readers as young as three—“dès trois ans.” Their website even provides teaching material, a “fiche pédagogique enseignant,” which makes it eligible for “individual reading” or “personal reading” in class (Lynch-Brown, Tomlinson 234). It has “reached the status of children’s classics,” as Giorgio Melchiori claimed in 1988 (Sigler 539).

It is striking how closely the development I have just described—from editorial control by publishing houses central to the canon of adult literature in the 1960s to dissemination into minor, middlebrow, and children-oriented publishing houses in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to a globalisation of the text—parallels the publishing history of Nurse Lugton…7

In 1966, the first version of Woolf’s tale, Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble, was illustrated by Duncan Grant, a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group. Grant’s frontispiece plus five illustrations were commissioned by Leonard Woolf, who added a brief “Foreword” to contextualise the tale he published at the Hogarth Press:

Mr Wallace Hildick, when examining the MS of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, now in the British Museum, discovered the short children’s story which is here published under the title Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble. The story appears suddenly in the middle of the text, but has nothing to do with it. It was in fact written for Virginia Woolf’s niece Ann Stephen when she, as a child, was on a visit to her aunt in the country. (4)

This edition, unlike the first version of The Cat and the Devil, the Dodd & Mead / Erdoes, cannot conceivably have been aimed at child readers, with its purple fabric cover, gold title letters, lilac paper, and anti-narrative, austere black and white drawings. It is arguably a book of childhood rather than a Children’s book, aimed at nostalgics of their own youth or the Bloomsbury Group, which was drawing general and academic interest in the 1960s. Enzo and Flaminia Siciliano’s Italian version, Il Ditale d’oro (1976), which appeared nine years after their Il Gatto e il diavolo, was likewise published by Emme. In 1983, five years after Blachon’s Le Chat et le diable, the French version of Woolf’s tale, Frédéric Armel’s Le Dé en or, was published by Nathan, a publishing house renowned for its educational and Children’s books without Gallimard’s highbrow associations. The illustrator, Napo, declared that he was delighted to find Virginia Woolf in a list of titles Nathan owned the rights for but had to insist to illustrate it (Napo). In 1991, Harcourt Children’s Books (New York) and Bodley Head (London), which had become the Children’s literature department of Random House, co-published Nurse Lugton’s Curtain, based on a second manuscript found in the Charleston papers (University of Sussex).8 This is highly meaningful, as both Random House and Harcourt Brace are mentioned by Catherine Turner as instrumental to the construction of Modernism for highbrow and middlebrow audiences in the United States. Nurse Lugton’s Curtain is explicitly aimed at a child audience, with its simplified, more logical and less ambiguous version of the text. It is illustrated by Julie Vivas, an Autralian artist prized for her Children’s books. Like the Gallimard / Blachon The Cat and the Devil, the Harcourt Children’s, Bodley Head / Vivas Nurse Lugton’s Curtain was translated into Spanish as La Niñera Lugton (1992), Portuguese as A Cortina da Tia Bá (1993), and Polish as Niebieska zasłona (2008) by publishers with large Children’s literature departments. In May 2015 Children’s publisher Zeplin Kitap released Dadinin Perdesí, a Turkish translation with original illustrations by Melanie Mehrer.

However, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf do not occupy the same position in the canon, and the discrepancy in value observed in the Norton Anthology as well as in academia, is mirrored—and perhaps perpetuated—in Children’s literature. Joyce’s story has been called a classic of Children’s literature, even before it arguably won that title for itself, but Woolf’s has not. But in what sense is Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil a “classic”? In their illuminating article on the sociology of Children’s Literature, Jean-Claude Chamborédon and Jean-Louis Fabiani distinguish between two types of publications, according to their rhythm of production and life-span:

On pourrait pour faire apparaître la spécificité du marché de la littérature enfantine, l’opposer schématiquement à la littérature générale pour public cultivé. Celle-ci offre deux types de biens : — des « classiques », ouvrages consacrés, qui composent le « fonds » des différents éditeurs, à renouvellement lent ; — des nouveautés aspirant au statut de classiques, ce qui est au principe d’un renouvellement rapide de l’offre. La deuxième, dans l’hypothèse extrême du cas pur d’un marché sans légitimité, se caractériserait par des reprises (qui ne sont pas forcément des classiques) et par des nouveautés au rythme de renouvellement plus lent. (63)

As a market, then, Children’s literature is comparable to highbrow literature, with classics that sell steadily and two categories of new titles aspiring to the status of classics, one with titles that are replaced rapidly, and another with variations (“reprises”) on previous titles that are replaced more slowly. Woolf’s and Joyce’s picture books seem to fall in the second category. Furthermore, the stability of the tastes of educated parents engenders a stable offer based on reprints and recycling, phenomena that characterise the publication history of both The Cat and the Devil and Nurse Lugton…:

La stabilité relative de la demande (des goûts), l’absence relative de légitimité expliquent que ce soit une production à renouvellement lent, autorisant donc beaucoup de reprises ; ces reprises (en dehors d’un petit répertoire étroit de grands classiques consacrés, dont le type est Perrault) ne sont pas forcément des classiques selon la signification commerciale et économique de ce terme (biens culturels à durée de vie, donc de vente, fort longue). (64)

Despite divergent critical responses, neither Woolf’s nor Joyce’s picture story books are “classics” proper but both fall in the same category of “slowly replaced” books chosen by educated parents eager to prepare their children for major authors, although Joyce’s tale engendered more and more rapidly disseminated versions. In the first four years, there were four illustrated versions of The Cat and the Devil in three languages, and eleven versions in six languages by 2000, whereas in the first two years there were two versions of Nurse Lugton… in two languages and seven versions in six languages by 2000.9 However, only Joyce’s tale is marketed as a schoolbook whereas the latest French version of Woolf’s tale, Un Dé en or (2013), newly translated by Céline Decamps, illustrated by Jasmine Bourrel, and downloadable at Numériklivre, only dreams of the classroom, with its liminal summary and endnotes, and the faded blue lines of its pages that are reminiscent of those of schoolchildren’s exercise books. What is more, although the text and illustrations of The Cat and the Devil have remained stable, even in translation, Woolf’s Nurse Lugton… has varied. It seems to me that these discrepancies may be accounted for by the nature of the tales themselves as well as by the values projected onto the authors through their texts.

What Picture Books Make of Woolf’s and Joyce’s Tales

Hope Hodgkins’s suggestion that “the picture books by Woolf and Joyce embody each author’s aesthetic concerns, boiled down to a few casually jotted pages” (355) sums up the reception frame of and marketing claim for these editions. The hardcover of the 1991 Harcourt Children, Bodley Head / Vivas Nurse Lugton’s Curtain advertises: “by the author of Mrs Dalloway,” and the preface letter by Stephen Joyce added after 1980 to the 1978 Gallimard / Blachon The Cat and the Devil makes it clear that the James Joyce of this book is accessible to children but that, should they nevertheless have questions, these “can be answered when the children reading The Cat and the Devil grow older and go on to read Dubliners, A Portrait, and Ulysses” (Sigler 541). Picture story books by major world famous authors are advertised as introductions to their more serious, or difficult, books for adults—Joyce & Woolf for Dummies, as it were. This tallies with Chamborédon and Fabiani’s observation that as far as Children’s literature is concerned, the ordinary highbrow culture / mass culture opposition does not hold and that the market is more complex and ambivalent:

Dans le cas de la littérature pour enfants, la relation du créateur au public est compliquée par la présence des adultes (parents), de sorte que les oppositions ne sont pas absolument superposables à l’opposition productions grand public / productions d’avant-garde telle quelle a cours dans le domaine de la littérature générale. Le public, comme spontanéité créatrice, — routine et conformisme étant attribués à la censure adulte — échappe à la dichotomie classique conformisme / avant-garde, ce qui donne une force particulière à la position de l’éditeur d’avant-garde : les novations esthétiques peuvent revendiquer un public large et un succès prochain, sans reporter leurs espoirs de consécration sur la postérité. De même et inversement, les éditeurs à production « de masse » peuvent refuser de se laisser enfermer dans l’image du producteur pour grand public, préparant les futurs lecteurs des futurs Guy des Cars, en invoquant les fonctions propédeutiques et préparatoires de la lecture, formation à la lecture en général (Enid Blyton préparant à Beckett aussi bien qu’à des Cars, selon la décision que dictera aux enfants devenus grands leur libre arbitre culturel). (76)

Minor—understand Children’s—literature becomes a vantage point from where the values of major—understand Modernist, highbrow—literature may be envisioned and understood. Today’s conception of Children’s books closely resonates with the features of Modernism, as though it originated there. Indeed, has Beverly Lyon Clark not demonstrated that it was Modernism, with its stubborn interest in the major and the minor, that created the gap between Literature and Children’s Literature? But, today, Children’s literature may be defined by its very ignorance of such a gap in a way that paradoxically shares key features with Modernism: “La convergence contemporaine de la littérature pour enfants et de la littérature pour adultes dans un commun intérêt pour les formes simples, les jeux de feinte naïveté, les explorations du langage et les contraintes formelles explique enfin l’émergence récente de livres—et plus précisément d’albums—qui sont des ‘livres-d’enfants-pour-grandes-personnes’” (Nières-Chevrel §46). It could be argued, then, that Children’s literature has played a key role in the dissemination and marketing of Modernist aesthetics, poetics, and canon. As I read them, the picture story books smuggled into Joyce’s and Woolf’s lists of works partake of that general transfer of values associated with each author from the highbrow to the middlebrow, a transfer that does not go without certain forms of resistance observable in the readerships targeted.

Joyce’s tale is simple in that it falls “under the Aarne-Thompson tale type 1911, stories known as ‘Devil’s Bridge’ variants” (Sigler 537). English and French versions underline its association with medieval farce—the structure of the tricked trickster—through visual references to the Middle Ages. Erdoes’s title page is framed like a manuscript, Corre dresses the characters in typical medieval leggins and heuzes, and Blachon’s Beaugency is medieval, complete with a chamber pot being emptied onto a passer-by’s head (3R).10 Rose adds visual gags, mostly related to the body of the devil. When the devil speaks French, the movement of his hands is represented by the juxtaposition of three different positions of his arm; on the last page, the devil turns his back to the readers and seems to be leaving the book (9LR; 10L). Blachon, who has the cat play with the devil’s tail—tale?—(14L), also adds farcesque gags, while Erdoes’s devil bows like an actor at the end of the book (23L).11 The Gallimard / Corre is perhaps the most adult-oriented of these Children’s books, with its square format and black and white drawings tending to stylisation. It also plays with the pedagogical function of children’s books, with drawings that stand for words, as in the title on the title-page. This device sometimes disrupt the reading, as when three figures of Joyce in the guise of an anachronical devil with heuzes, patchy cape, and modern glasses on the right page drive off the text to the left hand side page with only two lines of the seven line text covering the double page (28-29). The devil Joyce then proliferates to seven figures gesticulating opposite a Mayor lying on his stomach, dividing the text into two lines at the top of the double page and three at the bottom (30-31). At the end of the story, the same figure, oriented now upwards, now downwards, jumps through the lines of text, dividing lines and even words (56-57. Fig. 1). All editions explore visual and verbal language, as Joyce’s devilish creativity with words elsewhere is playfully transferred onto the Children’s books. Although the devils’s language, “Bellsybabble,” as in Finnegan’s Wake, is briefly alluded to, the devil does not speak it; he speaks French. Still, Erdoes shows Bellsybabble as Egyptian and Copt-like symbols in a bubble (21LR);12 so does Corre (62-63), while Flaminia Siciliano represents “diavolebio” (7L) as flames (6R). Rose (7LR) and Siciliano (5R) also give a literal visual representation of the phrase “every woman held her tongue.”

Most of all, in Rose, Corre (see fig. 1), and Siciliano—even though less strikingly, perhaps—the devil is portrayed as Joyce himself. Siciliano even depicts a young boy with a devil’s mask holding balloons, who might very well be Stephen Joyce playing along with his grandfather’s joke (7L). The devilish boy appears opposite the signature, Nonno, grandfather, and the P.S. of Joyce’s letter, which imply an addressee. I agree with Hodgkins that “[t]he tinge of self-mockery in Joyce’s picture book is far from the serious aesthetic implied by Woolf ’s [illustrated by Vivas], but neither text is commensurate with its adult creator’s famed originality and brilliance” (363). I would add and emphasize that the illustrators make up for the lack of “originality and brilliance” in Joyce’s tale but tone them down in Woolf’s, in keeping with the widely spread belief that Joyce is a stylist and Woolf a painter of the feminine psyche.

Unlike the Joyce picture books, the Hogarth / Grant and Harcourt Children, Bodley Head / Vivas editions of Woolf’s tale have one readership prevail to the near exclusion of the other. In Joyce’s tale, young readers might identify in turn with many tricksters, the devil, the Mayor, or finally the cat and, even if the moral of the tale is carnivalesque, there still is one to be discussed. In contrast, Woolf’s tale offers no possible identification—the embroiderer is unaware of the world she creates; she protects the animals but they perceive her as an ogress; the animals are empowered through no will or action of their own but only while the nurse is asleep. Even adult critics have had a hard time making sense of that story, reading it as a metaphor of the artist’s creation, but one that is neither feminine, conscious, nor fulfilling. It is a transformation tale that brings forth no permanent change either for the nurse or the embroidered animals. Such ambiguity corresponds to neither the “moral preoccupation of the nineteenth century” which still pervades Children’s literature “though in far less insistent and preachy form” (McLeod 31), nor the contemporary shift towards the promotion of artistic practices and tastes. The austere black and white anti-narrative illustrations by Duncan Grant that only rarely correspond to the text opposite simply ignore the possibility that a child might leaf through the book. They project Grant’s nostalgia for his own Victorian childhood onto his friend Virginia’s story. Conversely, the latest Harcourt Children’s, Bodley Head / Vivas emphasizes the transformation with cinema-inspired pictures, but ignores the political undertone of the tale. The animated animals encounter a parade: “The old Queen came by in her palanquin; the general of the army passed; so did the Prime Minister; the Admiral, the Executioner; and great dignitaries on business in the town, which was a very beautiful place called Milamarchmantopolis” (Woolf / Vivas 10R). The indirect critique of imperialism with the reference to political, military and economic exploitation enforced through violence is downplayed by the double-page illustration showing a joyful parade of children in the guise of the figures of power mentioned in the tale. Here, the illustrations “translate” for children, “[a]djusting the text in order to make it appropriate and useful for the child, in accordance with what the society thinks is ‘good for the child’” (Shavit 172). As politics and violence are not deemed “good for the child,” the illustrations defuse them in an attempt, perhaps, also to “[a]djust[…] plot, characterization and language to the child’s level of comprehension and his reading abilities.” (172) Julie Vivas disregards Virginia Woolf’s suggestion of the somewhat scary and unsettling porosity between the world of the embroiderer and the world of her embroidery. So does Duncan Grant, who does not illustrate the passageway between Nurse Lugton’s Britain and her exotic landscape but gives a visual representation of their separatedness. He represents the Queen as a medieval Virgin clearly delineated and standing in contrast with the sketchy, almost blurry animals drawn in the background, reasserting the frontier between civilisation, or Nurse Lugton’s England, and its other, the embroidery’s animated exotic landscape. Like the editors of the Norton Anthology, although for different reasons, neither Grant nor Vivas appear to expect—or want—to find politics outside of Woolf’s two political essays whereas Woolf’s minor texts, her essays, her reviews, her “silly” novels—and perhaps her posthumous children’s books—are central to the politics of her writing which, precisely, questions the frontier between the centre (the civilized world of Nurse Lugton) and the margins (the idealized and yet paradoxically endangered and dangerous world of the animated animals).

Finally, some illustrators “smuggle” external values into Virginia Woolf’s story, offering a reading not of the tale only, but of the author’s work and legacy. The 1983 French translation omits part of the procession. The Queen is accompanied by a number of dignitaries (“le général en chef,” “le premier ministre, et d’autres grands dignitaires en voyage d’affaires,” Woolf / Napo 7L) but the Admiral and the Executioner are nowhere to be found. However, the political complexity and ambiguity not of the text itself, the vocabulary of which is stubbornly simple, but of its connotations and resonances, is precisely what Napo “bootlegs” back into his illustrations. Through pictorial references to Walt Disney and Le Douanier Rousseau, and imaginary half-familiar half-exotic animals, Napo reinscribes Woolf’s reflection on the tension between England and Elsewhere, or the centre and the margins, a spatial variation on the major and the minor, within the book. The frontier between old Nurse Lugton’s quaint “Olde England” and the intricate jungle of the animated animals is visually porous: on every page graphic elements escape the frames, and at the end of the story the embroiderer’s Victorian sitting room does not return to its original order but is visually contaminated by the disorder of the jungle. Unlike Grant or Vivas, Napo depicts the Nurse as an ogress, who looks very much like Disney’s Captain Hook and occupies the position of the panther in Henri Rousseau’s Le Lion, ayant faim, se jette sur l’antilope (“The Hungry Lion” 1905), thus depicting the artist and British citizen as a predator (Fig. 2). Napo addresses a political child, one who might be interested in anti-Imperialism or, at least, in the representation of domination.14

Reproduced by permission of the illustrator.

The 1976 Italian edition omits the powerful procession altogether. Flaminia Siciliano also “bootlegs” a political discourse within the tale, one that is not there in the first place but reflects Woolf’s feminism in her major novels and essays as it was promoted in Italy in the 1970s—where Three Guineas was translated in 1975. The delicate, spirally, black and white drawings inspired by surrealism strive to provide an equivalent for Woolf’s feminine writing. Flaminia Siciliano replaces the creator / destroyer paradox of Nurse Lugton… with another through interpicturality: the passive / active figures of Sleeping Beauty and the Madonna. Lugton becomes a far less contentious but perhaps more inspirational young Mary-like figure. The last double-page illustration echoes Botticelli’s Madonna con il Bambino e due angeli (“Madonna and Child and Two Angels” c. 1468-69) and Madonna con il Bambino e cinque angeli, or Madonna del Magnificat (“Madonna of the Magnificat” c.1470) (Fig. 3). The representation of female creativity is much more conventional and conservative than in the tale since the religious undertones return her to her ancient function as sacred vessel. Flaminia Siciliano addresses young girls in search of positive feminine role models, projecting Woolf’s interest in the feminine psyche expressed in other works such as Mrs Dalloway, which was very influential in Italy at the time, onto Il ditale d’oro. There might be similar contraband politics in Siciliano’s Il Gatto e il diavolo, with a hint that “la gente di Beaugency” (1L), a well-off 1940s crowd, with pearl necklaces, cigarettes, bow-ties and sunglasses are more than willing to let the devil and the mayor play their tricks as long as it allows them to cross the bridge and prosper. Still, the satirical dimension is in keeping with the carnivalesque tone of Joyce’s tale.

Joyce’s tale has been called a “classic,” I would argue, precisely because its farcesque dimension inscribes it within a reception frame common to major and minor literature. It pleases both children and adults, with its traditional structure, pamphlet-like reference to the actual Mayor of Dublin and visual allusions to Joyce, and open political satire. Woolf’s, on the contrary, is much more ambiguous and indirect, as it stubbornly refuses to become major but considers its themes—creativity, domination, empowerment—in minor mode, one that is more disturbingly and contentiously political.

The publication histories of Nurse Lugton… and The Cat and the Devil are strikingly similar, not only in the 1960s and 1970s when the tales were first bootlegged in Children’s literature but also today, with an increasing dissemination of both stories in translation in a large variety of languages with original illustrations, after a period of reduplication of one set of illustrations that have become “standard”—Blachon’s for Joyce and Vivas’s for Woolf—in the 1990s.

As I read it, the proliferation of Virginia Woolf’s and James Joyce’s posthumous picture story books sheds a new light on Modernism, which no longer appears the product of isolated—Romantic—geniuses, as it emphatically promoted itself. As we observe it through the prism of the minor genre but major market of Children’s Literature, it appears to be a gradual, collective, and partly retroactive construct. Modernism is “co-authored” (Zacks 7) by writers, publishers and illustrators. It ought to be studied not simply as a group of texts but also as a mode of production and marketing of books and authors. In this case, however independent of hierarchies that gradual, collective process of transfer from major literature to Children’s, or supposedly minor literature, might seem, it should be noted that it has translated the received hierarchy between Woolf and Joyce within the new, more popular market. The popularisation of Woolf and Joyce through their appropriation by Children’s picture story books has in fact paradoxically preserved the hierarchy the tales themselves playfully question—Joyce rewriting a standard tale in a letter to his grandson, Woolf contentiously rethinking the culturally constructed frontier between England and the faraway territories it controls.

The editions I have focused on in this essay show a discrepancy in publishing, marketing, and reception which may be accounted for by the narrative contrast between the tales, Joyce’s trickster tricked structure being much more familiar and straightforward than Woolf’s tangentially political and falsely circular tale. I would argue, however, that it also reflects the contrasting perception of James Joyce’s and Virginia Woolf’s works as well as of their image as highbrow, Modernist authors. Joyce’s tale, based on elements that may be reassigned to major literature, produces stable iconotexts that variously find a contact zone between major literature and Children’s literature. As a result, a standard version emerges, which tends to limit the emergence of new variations. On the contrary, Woolf’s tale, which makes it difficult for readers to reassign its minor elements to major conventions or traditions, engenders a much more contrasted series of variations, and seems to stubbornly eschew the binary system of values. Each new creative version of Nurse Lugton… finds a new articulation between minor and major in that it explores and actualises—or denies altogether—the political potential of the tale.