From the Editors

As this volume goes to press, we mark the tenth anniversary of the involvement of Hollins University in the editing of Children's Literature (the first volume edited at Hollins, volume 22, appeared in 1994). When Elizabeth Keyser began editing Children's Literature, she did so in the tradition of its founder, Francelia Butler, with an Olympia portable typewriter in a home office. Elizabeth remains grateful that the editorship forced her to exchange the typewriter for a laptop computer. Over the years, much more has changed. Children's Literature now has an office on the Hollins campus, and Lisa Radcliff is proving an able editorial assistant. Rather than submitting two typescripts of the manuscript to Yale University Press each year, we now submit the entire volume on two disks. Several years ago Christine Doyle took over the book review editorship from John Cech and has worked with even more autonomy than John did to make the book reviews an indispensable guide to the best children's literature criticism and scholarship. Every year Children's Literature receives many more books than it can possibly review just as, in the past, it has received many more submissions than it could hope to publish. In order to accommodate the increasing number of worthy submissions, Children's Literature began to grow. What was once a volume of less than 250 pages has, in recent years, swelled to almost 300.

This year, however, the editors have begun to share a concern raised by Carlos J. Alonso in his January 2001PMLA editorial. As some of our readers may recall, Alonso, after citing a gradual decline in the number of annual submissions accompanied by a growing dependence on solicited contributions, wrote: "Could it be that once the declining number of submissions crossed a certain threshold, the number of high-quality manuscripts yielded by the process [of submission-review-selection] shrank below the level needed to sustain the journal's publication? It stands to reason that every journal must have such a minimum threshold, and it may be that PMLA's slide in submission has finally reached that magic number" (11). Children's Literature, of course, has long relied on solicited manuscripts in the sense that the editors have encouraged submission of conference papers that seemed like superior articles in the making. But these solicited essays have, with few exceptions, undergone the same review process as the unsolicited. And we are witnessing a decline in the submission of both sorts. Thus we wish to remind our readers that Children's Literature, perhaps unlike its grander parent PMLA, is a contributor-friendly journal. It has a long tradition, established at the University of Connecticut, of helping first-time contributors and seasoned scholars edit their work so as to make it appropriate for this venue—and if it seems more appropriate for publication elsewhere, we are happy to suggest alternatives and to help place it. We know that often younger scholars wish or need to publish quickly, and publication in Children's Literature can sometimes take two years or more from first submission—almost as long as book publication. Remember, though, that the annual really is a book and confers some of the prestige of book publication. (Those who receive the paperback with their membership in ChLA tend to forget that it also appears in hardcover; we editors, however, are reminded by the Yale University Press editorial staff who persist in referring to the essays as "chapters"!)

That said, let us turn to the fine essays in this volume. Reading the entire manuscript is always a surprising journey, as individual essays coalesce into a whole. We were struck this year by the way the question of agency resonates through this volume. Are children the recipients of culture, rebels against it, or active contributors to it? Are they simply exploited by adults or can they in turn manipulate their elders? How do we balance the pleasure to be found in texts with their potential dangers? Although the authors whose essays appear in this volume disagree at times on the answers to these questions, they agree with...