Just My Imagination?

Terms such as "imagination" and "creativity" have been so thoroughly co-opted by our overmediated culture that they have become virtually meaningless. At the very least they are subjects that are almost impossible for critics to invoke without irony or even sarcasm. "Imagination" and "creativity" are most often employed as marketing terms in late-capitalist culture (Disney has an "Imagination! Pavilion" at Epcot). They are marked as "childlike" in the escapist sense—a retreat from the world of maturity. But rescued from the corporate context and reframed as the human capacity for discovery and generative play, they may still describe desirable aims: we still wish to encourage children to be imaginative and creative, to be actively engaged with making meaning in the world rather than becoming passive consumers.

This is not always easy. The extent to which corporate marketing strategies are implicated in contemporary children's culture is the subject of Jennifer Geer's fascinating account of Disney/Miramax's attempt to market the DVD release of its film Finding Neverland as "family fare." In addition to the film's failure as biography (by virtue of its serious distortion of the facts) Finding Neverland is also an aesthetic failure—it isn't even compelling melodrama. And I certainly cannot imagine many children who would find the film appealing. Geer's account of the ways in which the DVD extras distort the tenor of the film as well as earlier films by stars Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet makes for fascinating reading that is at once amusing and horrifying. By emphasizing "childlike" imagination and creativity and glossing over the fact that death is the film's central subject, Disney/Miramax's marketing amounts to a kind of bait and switch, in which "imagination" and "creativity" become cheap and tawdry jokes.

In striking contrast to Disney's crass and cynical manipulation of consumers, Liz Wright's article on Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy shows how Fisher embraced Montessori educational techniques to combat the effects of consumer culture during the progressive era. Arguing that Understood Betsy is "a novel that examines the relationship between peer pressure and consumption," focusing on its protagonist's "transformation from mindless shopper to careful consumer," Wright notes that its message of resisting "the construction of the girl as consumer" is drowned out today in the cacophony of corporate construction of the postmodern child-consumer.

Michelle Abate discusses the continuity between the lesbian pulp fiction of Marijane Meaker (writing as Vin Packer) and her successful young adult novel, Deliver Us from Evie (as M. E. Kerr). Noting the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fascination with the mid-twentieth century, Abate gives us a nuanced reading of the Packer novel and 1950s culture and notes the ways in which pulp elements inform the 1994 young adult novel. Drawing on Elizabeth Guffey's distinction between "nostalgia" and "retro," Abate shows how Evie engages 1950s homophobia with "camp sensibility and postmodern irony," plays with pulp conventions but ultimately rejects the "tragic pulp ending."

Paul Fox's provocative article on Barrie's Peter and Wendy argues that the map of Neverland is complex and multilayered; readers enter the liminal space between the "real" and the "imaginary" and ultimately between child and adult. "Peter and Wendy operates as a gestalt text," writes Fox, "which cannot be reduced to a simple summary of the manifold, human potentialities it charts." I have no doubt that Fox's article will stir some generative debate in children's literature studies, at least I hope that it will. Indeed, I find myself questioning and struggling with his reading while being sympathetic with his insistence on addressing aesthetic concerns. By rejecting simple notions of "identity," Fox argues, Barrie's text favors the "fictive capacity to create new identities and new relationships."

It is painfully apparent that the aesthetic sensibilities of children and their adults are studied and exploited by contemporary corporate purveyors of child culture. Is it just my imagination, or, taken together, do these articles suggest that those who care about children's culture must, without ignoring politics and history, turn our attention to the realm of the...