Radical Change (Even if Not the End of the World as We Know It)

There is no other way to say it: 2012 was the year that the world was supposed to end. Or be made anew. Possibly both. In a story that received widespread media attention—and which became a source of anxiety for many individuals—according to some readings of the Mayan calendar, the world was scheduled to come to its finale on 21 December 2012. Failing total annihilation, the Earth would undergo some major cataclysmic change; human civilization as we know it would cease or, in keeping with another viewpoint, cycle back to the beginning of recorded time.

While the winter solstice passed without apocalyptic incident around the globe, this aura of looming, profound change was apt. Even without 21 December precipitating some form of end times, the year 2012 saw massive social, political, and economic transformations around the world. Public elections were held in Libya for the first time in more than four decades. Likewise, voters in France selected François Hollande, the nation's first Socialist president since François Mitterand. Finally, in the United States, President Barack Obama publicly supported same-sex marriage, the first such acknowledgment by a sitting president in American history.

The eight critical articles and one Varia piece contained in this volume reflect the spirit of large-scale transformation which came to typify the year 2012. Taken collectively, these essays provide an illuminating index of the ways in which children's literature scholarship has been changing and even reinventing itself anew in the twenty-first century.

The volume begins with an article that reveals the exciting new insights that can gleaned when the field of children's literature is broadened to include that of childhood studies. In "Character Education and the Performance of Citizenship in Glee," Naomi Lesley situates the popular contemporary television show "within a discussion about the function of education in a democratic society." Beginning with the premise that "high school is a battleground for the development of American values and resilient citizens, and that performance is somehow involved in that mission, whether to support or undercut it," she places "Glee in the context of conversations about the mission of public schooling, anxieties about the problems that bedevil the nation's schools, and the uses of arts education." During this process, Lesley does not ignore the oft-discussed issues of queerness, campiness, and the construction of teen identity that have been the subject of much previous commentary about Glee; rather, she makes a case that "these issues take on even more urgency when placed in the context of cultural contests over the purpose of education and the future of the nation's youth."

The next essay, Megan A. Norcia's "The London Shopscape: Educating the Child Consumer in the Stories of Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Martha Sherwood," focuses on a far different set of texts from another historical era, but with an equally interdisciplinary approach. Examining narratives that feature scenes of mothers and daughters shopping in London, the author demonstrates how messages cautioning against vain and frivolous materialism, along with stressing the importance of being a smart and savvy shopper, were pressing cultural concerns "long before Picadilly became such a circus and tabloids began tracking where Kate and Pippa shop." Norcia specifically spotlights Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life (1788), Edgeworth's "The Purple Jar" (1801-02), and Sherwood's A Drive in the Coach through the streets of London (1818). As she argues, "In addition to shedding light on the period preceding the mid- to late nineteenth-century interest in growing consumerist subjectivities, Wollstonecraft's, Edgeworth's, and Sherwood's works also enrich ongoing discussions about urban space through the representation of the London "shopscape" as a setting for moral and economic lessons." Drawing on both theoretical conceptions concerning the uses of urban space and sociocritical constructions of the flâneur, Norcia unpacks the ways in which these authors "used maternal characters to instruct their daughters that the way they consumed, as well as what they consumed, determined the meaning of their lives."

Joe Sutliff Sanders continues...