Introduction

Two works of literature written for younger readers seem an apt place to begin a discussion about the relationship between children's literature and media: M. T. Anderson's Feed and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Feed presents readers with a grim vision of technology, in which corporate-controlled media interpellate American teenagers as docile workers and consumers who are barely able to form a complex thought. Little Brother, on the other hand, constructs adolescent characters and readers who, because they are clever and more media savvy than many of the adults in their world, are able to resist and subvert totalitarian governmental control by creating their own communications networks and media identities. To be sure, the concrete reality of young people's lives and their relationship with literature and the media is far more complex and nuanced than the extremes these two texts suggest, and probably lies somewhere between and beyond the theoretical spaces they imply. Nonetheless, the dichotomies suggested by Feeds and Little Brothers views of a National Entertainment State give us useful terms and concepts for beginning a discussion regarding the relationships among young people, new media, and history and the way these three areas have converged to produce unsettling questions about children's culture.

This relationship might initially be phrased as a series of questions: What is the role of children's literature and of the child in our increasingly global, increasingly media-saturated world? What sort of child reader is imagined in an online role-playing game, YouTube video, or digital hypertext? When books spawn films, websites, fan fiction, video games, action figures, board games, and theme parks, where does meaning reside? What roles do such factors as nationality, race, gender, and socioeconomic class play in the construction of identity and subjectivity when being literate means acquiring "new media literacies" and when cultural capital is measured in terms of gadgets and bytes? To what extent are economic territories opened up by the expansion of children's markets? Might these be just another case, as Marx and Engels would say, of the bourgeoise "settling everywhere, nestling everywhere" (Marx and Engels), or might they represent exciting new possibilities for young people around the globe to claim ownership over media by creating parodies or mash-ups that subvert copyright laws? Regardless of how these questions are answered, the recent proliferation of electronic and digitized media platforms, the co-mingling and intermingling of new literary genres and aesthetics, combined with subjectivities and identities influenced by post-Fordist media productions, all raise new and complex questions for scholars in children's literature studies.

One thing is clear: literature cannot be studied in a vacuum. It is part of an interdisciplinary web caught up in areas of study as far ranging as narrative theory, cinema studies, education, library science, media studies, and philosophy. We watch YouTube trailers for novels, play word games on Facebook, read video game narratives, listen to books on iPods, and view novels on iPads. None of these multimodal, multimedia texts exists in isolation because they are all part of a complex web of meaning making in which our viewing of a film can shape our reading of a novel as easily as a literary allusion can enrich the lyrics of a song. In the 2010 Francelia Butler Lecture delivered at the Children's Literature Association meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Margaret Mackey highlighted the importance of studying children's literature and media in relation to one another as part of a larger ecology. Many of the papers delivered at the 2010 ChLA conference, and the ones included in this forum, explore this dialogue among literary and media texts in sophisticated ways that raise new questions in our field and that open up exciting possibilities for interdisciplinary work.

Richard Flynn's paper, "Toward a Digital Poetics for Children," explores poetry for children published in electronic spaces and finds potential that is not fully realized. Flynn reviews the digital landscape, seeking "opportunities for children to explore poetry via new media, with particular attention on fostering experiences in which children may find themselves actively engaged with poetic language," but he...