Past, Present, and Future

It is fitting that my last issue as editor of the Quarterly should look back to my first, Spring, 1992. In that issue, Celia Anderson guest-edited a special section on American children's literature devoted to the West. The issue included an often-cited theory column by Perry Nodelman on orientalism and children's literature, a cultural pluralism column on white supremacy in Horatio Alger, and reviews of books by Kirsten Drotner and Francelia Butler. In the intervening period we have had special issues on child abuse, juvenilia, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, nursery rhymes and children's songs, ecology, and most recently, international children's literature; we are greatly indebted to the dedicated and able editors of those issues. We have had three general issues as well, including another on American children's literature.

That the present general issue returns for a third look at American children's literature is also fitting. Until recently (with the exception of a few researchers in the United States and Canada and canonical authors), serious scholars have tended to neglect our children's literature and film, particularly of the earlier periods. Kenneth Kidd's article on the beginnings of a literary concern with raising boys, as evidenced by a serial in Our Young Folks (1865-66), is a demonstration of the riches that await, as is Anne Morey's analysis of Frank Baum's silent films. Todd Gilman's exploration of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and Gail Sobat's discussion of works by Virginia Hamilton and Toni Morrison remind us that it is always worth taking another look at familiar material as well. And Nancy Tolson's Cultural Pluralism column on a new regional Black aesthetic and William Touponce's literary theory column urging a greater focus on the pleasure of the text offer new critical perspectives on other U.S. writers. Hugh Crago's essay review asks searching questions about the methodology of The Braid of Literature; the book reviews by David Hicks and Bruce Ronda underscore the problems of resurrecting forgotten American works, even when they are as delightful as Christopher Cranch's Hugger-Mugger stories, and indicate that the definitive book on U.S. children's literature has yet to be written.

But I am as much concerned with children's literature's future as with its past, and Nancy Huse's 1995 presidential address, "The Lore of Childhood: Taking Away the Stories, Taking the Stories Away," which opens this issue, provides a starting point for my ruminations. Huse touches on a major issue, audiences divided by age, sex, ethnicity, region, and economic status, and whenever we are tempted to talk about "the child" or "the reader," we must keep her story and similar stories in mind. Huse's talk illustrates how much interpretive communities have changed from the ones we once belonged to and in many cases once taught; although she does not tell us what her own story of Thumbelina is about, it probably differs from the three she describes. We at the Quarterly would like to think that the theoretical and scholarly tales that our authors tell about texts do not "take away" stories, but enrich them. Nevertheless, we are all familiar with the charge that, particularly for the inexperienced reader, interpretation may ruin a story. According to the articles that appear in journals such as The New Advocate and The Journal of Children's Literature, basalization does so, at least temporarily. Thus it is important, as Touponce argues, that we pay more attention to reading for pleasure. It is that type of reading that drew us to literature in the first place and that we are still eager to have our students experience.

Still, our literary pleasures cannot be identical to those of our children or students because of social and technological changes involving cultural codes, text delivery systems, and audiences. Criticism and the teaching of literature are now facing a brave new world. Modern college students have lost about half the vocabulary they had in the 1940s, although some of it has been replaced with terms, many technical, that did not exist at the...