Middle Age

This summer the Children's Literature Association will stage its fortieth annual conference. We are officially middle aged! Congratulations are in order. Themed "Play and Risk in Children's and Young Adult Literature," the conference will take place in Biloxi, Mississippi, and be hosted by the University of Southern Mississippi, home to a vibrant children's literature community. As we enter the organization's fifth decade of scholarly dialogue, it will be time, perhaps, to reflect on how far the ChLA has come, from the "Great Excluded" to the intellectual home for nearly a thousand scholars. We might also consider where to head in terms of scholarship, and think about the gaps and absences in our work. In considering the shape of the Quarterly, our editorial team grapples with such questions of range and inclusivity. Fortunately for all of us as scholars, middle age has not brought atrophy. There is still much work to be done, entire subjects and genres that have not received substantial scholarly attention. From Tomie de Paola to Peter Sis, from pop-up books to video games, there remains terrain that requires theorization, historicization, and close readings. Because Facebook is the playground of the middle aged (I hear young people like it, too), I spend some time there, and thought I would ask for feedback on the question of critical gaps. I heard the following: We need work on neglected genres, like drama, poetry, memoir, and nonfiction. We need work on material culture, ephemera, and archival texts. We need work on entire modes of narrative, like television, games, comics, and music. Several people commented on the dominance of fiction within our criticism; I think all of these astute observations require reflection.

We should also raise our voices in discussions about issues important to literary and cultural studies at large. Our work on multimodal narratives and electronic texts seems particularly relevant to discussions about the shape of digital humanities; more could be said within the field at large (at the MLA, in digital humanities publications, through online venues) about the place of childhood and youth to digital narratives. Not only are we adults steeped in practicing scholarship through digital modes, many children as readers and creators are, in fact, digital humanists themselves. We might also consider further intervention in wider discussions about adaptation, for instance, in order to make clear the particular dimensions and stakes of children's texts in relationship to source materials. Further theorization of children's adaptation of the "classics" would be welcomed by many who are considering larger questions about the relationship between sites of study within English departments. Work on race, ethnicity, and internationalism remains a deep critical need, under which we persistently suffer as scholars and teachers. Work on non-European and non-North American childhoods, as well as work in translation studies and comparative children's literature, could deepen our engagement with postcolonial, comparativist, and diasporic critical frameworks.

As an example of an entire category of children's literature that could use further critical attention, consider the "early reader" genre. Aimed at newly independent readers, these books have been pigeonholed as utilitarian, much in the same way that children's literature was once dismissed critically because of its associations with the didactic. A panel at the January 2013 MLA, "Theorizing the Early Reader," which was sponsored by the Division on Children's Literature and chaired by Abbye Meyer, presented three provocative considerations of the form. Karen Coats offered a sensitive reading of the tangibility of language in early readers, explaining that "In erecting a bridge between the multiliteracies of sound, gesture, space, and vision with words that substitute for these embodied experiences, early chapter books set the stage for a new kind of aesthetic development—activating, as it were, an inner aesthetic, where pictures are replaced in large part by images created through words and drawn from reader's own experiences and memories." Early readers speak to a child's developing ethical awareness, Coats argued, "introduc[ing] children to a new kind of moral education at the time that they are just beginning to be able to understand it." Jennie Miskec spoke...