From the Editor

This volume features nine substantial essays that cover a wide range, both generically and chronologically, of American literature for young people. As always, I am grateful to the many readers who helped me select these essays and their authors to revise them. I am also grateful to Christine Doyle for a superb job during her first year as book review editor, and again I would like to thank Pamela Harer for the twenty-five-year cumulative index, which I hope will prove a valuable bibliographical tool, and Rachel Fordyce for her invariably helpful feature. I look forward to collaborating on the next volume, for the year 2000, with my Hollins University colleague Julie Pfeiffer. She, like Cynthia Wells and the other Yale University Press editors I have worked with over the years, has proved a great source of moral support. Finally, I would like to thank the eager and enthusiastic contributors, many of whom are new to these pages as well as to the profession.

Katharine Capshaw Smith, in her ground-breaking essay on black pageantry, quotes W. E. B. Du Bois as declaring, "I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda." According to Capshaw Smith, "the political, the didactic, the reformative all coalesced for Du Bois in the pageant format." Volume 27 of Children's Literature has also finally coalesced around the idea of "the political, the didactic, the reformative," as well as the formative—the stages or process through which the infant, child, preadolescent, and adolescent passes on his (in this volume more often her) way to maturity. Although the literature discussed in these essays transcends propaganda, it does have what today we would call an agenda, whether it be defending the authority of the Bible against heretical interpretations, as in the case of Eliza Bradburn's The Story of Paradise Lost, For Children, or arguing for the rights of nonhuman life, as in the case of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh. More interesting than these overt agendas, however, are the strategies for their communication that the contributors so ably discuss. And perhaps most fascinating of all are the ways in which the authors can be found to subvert not only the values they would transform or reform but also aspects of their own apparent programs.

Julie Pfeiffer opens volume 27 with an analysis of Bradburn's early-nineteenth-century adaptation of Paradise Lost for children. Bradburn, who attempts to maintain a delicate balance between extolling the work's poetic virtues and exposing its doctrinal flaws, adopts a framing technique common to much of the literature discussed in this volume. Pfeiffer describes how what has often been taken to be a patriarchal poem is domesticated by Bradburn's female narrator, a mother who introduces the poem simultaneously to her own children and to the child reader. Bradburn's Mamma, according to Pfeiffer, follows Milton's Raphael in instructing children to "solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid" and "dream not of other worlds." Yet in their discussion of Eve's responsibility for the Fall, Mamma and her female children prove themselves to be resisting readers and proto-feminists.

Lydia Maria Child, the "omnipresent" aunt of Etsuko Taketani's essay, frames the vision of antebellum America portrayed in her magazine The Juvenile Miscellany. Opposing the common view that children were depicted as depoliticized and ahistorical in early American children's literature, Taketani argues that in Child's work, at least, "the body and voice of the child serve as a site on which the discourse of domestic colonialism is examined, if not always disrupted." By associating children with disenfranchised groups such as Native Americans, the Irish, and freed slaves, Child, according to Taketani, subtly but devastatingly critiques domestic colonialism and patriarchy. A century later W. E. B. Du Bois and other creators of black pageantry for children also used child characters and actors to expose as a construct the canonical view of American history. Interestingly, many of the pageant creators were black female schoolteachers, according to Capshaw Smith, and their characteristic use of a female narrator served to perpetuate a matriarchal oral...