From the Editor

Exposure: 1a. The action of uncovering or leaving without shelter or defense; [. . .] 1d. the action of bringing to light (something discreditable); the unmasking or 'showing up' of an error, fraud, or evil, of an impostor or secret offender. 1e. Photogr. The exposing of a sensitized surface to the action of actinic rays [. . .]; also, the time occupied by this action.

—Oxford English Dictionary

Volume 39 of Children's Literature takes us from medieval France, to the horrors of the Holocaust, to the politics of parenting. But while these dynamic essays cover a wide range of topics and approaches, they also return to common themes. The reiteration of words such as "alterity," "intersticial," and "panopticism" makes it clear that these authors are engaged in a discussion that extends beyond the boundaries of individual essays, and which is particular to this moment in literary history. While I hope that you will see a range of patterns in this volume, it is the concept of exposure—first the literal exposure of the photograph and then the figurative action of "uncovering" or "bringing to light"—that helped me see these essays as a cohesive group. As Lee Talley reminds us in her discussion of the Cottingley fairy photographs, what the photograph exposes may not be "real." Instead, the photographer's exposure shows what was there, but leaves it to the viewer to interpret the truth of what is seen. The Cottingley exposures document a fiction, a fairy tale. In so doing they blur the lines between truth and fantasy and emphasize the secrets that hide behind exposure.

These essays analyze a wide range of fairy tales and anti-fairy tales, and discuss the genre's ability to both expose and conceal horror. They thus investigate the tension between the hidden and the exposed, asking when secrets should stay private or concealed through fantasy and when they should be revealed. It becomes clear that exposure does not always reveal the truth; at times it simply complicates it.

The volume opens with Celia Lewis's essay, "Acceptable Lessons, Radical Truths: Mélusine as Literature for Medieval Youth," which cautions against bringing to light things better left hidden. Drawing on manuscript evidence, Lewis sees Mélusine as fitting into the genre of conduct books that helped adolescents absorb the lessons of medieval Christianity, feudalism, and adulthood. Yet the apparently conservative values of this tale are distorted by the fact that the patriarchal structures the story appears to support are undermined by the errors of powerful kings. Unable to allow their wives the privacy of the birthing room or the bathtub, these men destroy both their spouses' happiness and the prosperity of their own kingdoms. The men in Mélusine who assume that secrets hide perversity are shown to be wrong; unusually for its time, Mélusine presents "an implicit criticism of patriarchal dominance."

The next essay shifts from Mélusine's critique of a husband's desire to expose his wife's secrets to parents' desire to place their children under surveillance. In her lively discussion of nineteenth-century doll tales, "'I sometimes think she is a spy on all my actions': Dolls, Girls, and Disciplinary Surveillance in the Nineteenth-Century Doll Tale," Eugenia Gonzalez describes a later moment in history in which the "desire for privacy is presented as symptomatic of wrongdoing." The tales discussed here reflect the culture's theories of education, in particular the need for children to be carefully monitored, to the point that even their dolls keep them under surveillance. Ethel's Adventures, however, challenges this pattern with the story of a girl who insists on seeing dolls simply as objects, rather than as symbolic children in need of nurture. This tale introduces a new kind of relationship between girls and dolls, one which models the girl's ability to reject dolls as a source of disciplinary power.

While Gonzalez describes a tale which subverts the assumption that the child's privacy must be exposed, Anna Redcay's essay, "'Live to learn and learn to live': The St. Nicholas League and the Vocation of Childhood," describes an environment in which children are encouraged to...