Guest Editor's Introduction

Things change, and with the inauguration of the first African-American President, things are likely to change radically, though some things stay the same. Fictional protagonists continue to go on journeys. Literary places still evoke a timeless appeal. And children's literature continues to engage in identity politics. It occurs to me therefore that while 33 1 appears to be a general issue, a common thread weaves the essays together: the idea that individuals searching for identity in children's books really represent children's literature as a genre continuing to search for an identity.

Michelle Smith's "Adventurous Girls of the British Empire" argues that the novels of Bessie Marchant focus on independent-minded heroines who travel to such far-flung corners of the British Empire as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South America, South Africa, Siberia, and Central America through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eponymous heroines such as Phyllis Talbot in Marchant's 1910 The Adventures of Phyllis: A Story of the Argentine, or Nell in Daughters of the Dominion: A Story of the Canadian Frontier (1909) are not solely engaged in establishing and maintaining the British Empire abroad by imposing on various indigenous people traditional imperialist ideologies such as "racial superiority and patriotism." Rather, according to Smith, Marchant's adventure stories facilitate her heroine's participation in the imperialism overseas indirectly through professions such as nursing. These professions demonstrated to readers how strong and healthy young women can cope with physically demanding jobs in foreign countries and, potentially, avoid the "generic marriage plot" resolution frequently used in fiction for girls. This latter point, the use of marriage plots in fiction for young girls, seems entirely relevant today.

If Bessie Marchant's adventurous nineteenth century heroines travel overseas, the essays by Paul Wake and Aaron Jackson focus on the work of early twentieth century writers A.A. Milne and T.H.White. Among other things, Wake and Jackson respectively discuss Milne and White's use of location, specifically the "space of the Hundred Acre Wood" and, from Malory's fifteenth century romance, Le Morte D'Arthur, the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. On the one hand, these two places function as idyllic, timeless, transcendent expressions born on the wings of romanticism of an early twentieth-century England entirely at peace with itself. On the other hand, Wake and Jackson caution, The Hundred Acre Wood and the Castle respectively represent an England at odds with itself. Jackson, for example, argues that White's 1938 The Sword in the Stone recycles Arthurian legend in general and the Castle of the Forest Sauvage in particular as a way of suggesting to readers the presence of a coherent national (English) identity even as Modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land wrote about the fragmentation of the individual and the incoherence of identity. In short, Jackson notes, White mobilizes Arthurian mythology to draw a parallel between England in the 1930s and the Castle in Arthur's time as places of "safety and security" from everything outside, "the outlaws, hostile natives and wild beasties that make up the nuts and bolts of children's adventure stories."

With the last two essays in 33 1, readers travel from the past to the present, from England in the nineteenth century to the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Ricky Herzog examines issues of gender deviance in the 1970s by looking at key texts such as William's Doll and Oliver Button. Michelle Abate's "One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State," studies Katharine DeBrecht's Help! Mom! series as a "powerful and growing new trend in American popular, material and literary culture." Abate convincingly argues that DeBrecht's work signals a shift in political writing for children, one that "advocates for a new type of partisan parenting and attempts to turn political propaganda into lasting literature." No doubt the incoming Administrataion will have much to day about the issues of gender, parenting, and politics.