From the Editors

I spent last summer traveling with a group of graduate students in England. Our focus was "The Landscape of British Children's Literature" and our discussions ranged from thinking about how our physical presence in the landscape changes the imaginative landscape we inhabit while reading to investigating how particular aspects of landscape—shores, islands, gardens, underground railways, etc.—act symbolically in texts. It is perhaps not surprising that I now read the essays gathered in this volume with issues of place and space very much on my mind and with an old saying of my mother's, "where you sit defines the view," on my tongue. These essays lead me to reflect on the ways our interpretations are shaped by where we sit: both our physical location and the beliefs to which we lay claim. Like the well-known image of the old hag who is also a beautiful lady, these essays reveal that what we see first isn't all there is to see; shifting our focus reveals double images of character, theory, or genre. The nine articles and Varia piece gathered in Children's Literature, 38 are a tribute to the flexibility of vision of their authors. I'm delighted to imagine the many readers of this volume—each sitting in a different place around the world—joined for the moment in the act of expanding their view of children's literature and the world it inhabits.

The volume opens with Andrew Loman's essay, "The Sea Cook's Wife: Evocations of Slavery in Treasure Island," and his claim that, read in historical context, this novel "dissolv[es] meaningful moral distinctions between pirate and good British sailor." Loman's carefully crafted analysis of the historical context of Treasure Island identifies two divergent readings of the novel. From one perspective, it is an imperial romance, with an adventure plot that obscures the origins of the treasure and avoids "the moral stringency of realism." However, the novel's references to the slave trade shine a spotlight on the human cost of the treasure hoard. Treasure Island must thus also be read as "anti-imperial critique."

John Hutton begins his essay with the apparent commonplace that words and pictures work together in texts. However, in "Walter Crane and the Decorative Illustration of Books" Hutton helps us to see that this notion does not originate in late twentieth-century literary criticism, but was usefully explored by Walter Crane in the nineteenth century. Hutton finds that for Crane, "[l]ayout, rather than literary theory, became the organizing principle of his analytical approach," and that Crane's "printer's vocabulary" leads to complex texts that encourage multiple readings.

We move next from Britain to the United States, and from discussions of currency and printing presses to the sticky subject of the hungry child. In "Gastronomic Utopias: The Legacy of Political Hunger in African American Lore," Susan Honeyman explicates the dangerous attraction of molasses to draw our attention to the use of food as an oppressive tool. Placed in the context of a variety of gastronomic utopias, Honeyman's discussion of the Brer Rabbit tales shows that "[t]he similarities between the cultures of hunger depicted in African American folklore and children's literature in general are striking, suggesting hunger as a common political theme for marginalized groups." But Brer Rabbit resists oppression even as he helps us identify it; he thus serves as a model of strategies for resisting the pull toward community when that community ignores the needs of its least powerful members.

Eric Tribunella takes us from the rural communities of gastronomic utopias to the city. Tribunella begins with Baudelaire's notion of the flâneur and makes the convincing case in "Children's Literature and the Child Flâneur" that child protagonists of urban fiction are usefully understood in light of this tradition. Their critical gaze and sense of wonder allow the adults around them (including the authors and readers of their stories) to better cope with the trials of modernity. While the child flâneur may struggle with exposure (his or her success depends, as Baudelaire says, on "remain[ing] hidden...