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  • Two-Part Inventions
  • Richard Flynn

The analogy of the two-part invention, while it may not be entirely accurate in all respects, seems a fruitful way of thinking about the paired interviews and articles featured in the first issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly in 2007. Because Bach's inventions have their origins as pedagogical exercises that introduced the concept of counterpoint to his eldest son, it seems fitting to appropriate the concept for children's literary studies. Furthermore, the inventions seem metaphorically apt for the motives and counter-motives that run through the paired articles and interviews in this issue. If, at times, their polyphony veers from the harmonic to the dissonant, if they seek to escape the dominant key, they nevertheless avoid mere cacophony.

Lara Saguisag's interviews with well-known British poets Michael Rosen and Benjamin Zephaniah are notable for explorations of the relationship of traditional print to performance poetry, personal poetry to politics, and writing for children to writing for adults. Among the themes addressed is the greater visibility of British poetry for children compared with that in the United States. While the poets offer trenchant criticisms of British political and educational institutions, they nevertheless do not draw the sharp distinctions Americans make between popular and literary culture. Even with their misgivings about the political direction of the UK, both poets find positive potential in what Rosen calls an "inter-media-ated" world, in which "all the media are fused." Saguisag concludes her introduction with a call for "more vigorous critical scholarship on contemporary British poetry for children." It is my hope that these lively interviews will spark more vigorous scholarship on children's poetry in general.

Clare Bradford's and Ellen Donovan's essays on the novels of Suzanne Fisher Staples constitute a different sort of two-part invention, in that their pairing is an invention of this editor. Each of the essays was submitted separately and went through separate peer-reviewing processes. As I was preparing this issue for publication, I considered sharing the essays with the authors and inviting them to take each other's work into account. [End Page 1] But ultimately, it seemed more fruitful to let them stand side by side in their original versions. Donovan's provocative thesis, that Staples's novels "offer to children a disorderly reading experience that not only introduces them to new ideas and patterns of thinking and living but also prevents them from drawing on many of the assumptions and conventions that adept readers (even child readers) take for granted" seems to be at odds with Bradford's assertion that the novels "represent female Muslim subjects . . . as the objects of Western eyes, which see them as exotic, mysterious, and ineffably other." Because each of these articles is carefully and convincingly argued, I have thought it best to present them together in the hope that their pairing may itself provide a disorderly reading experience for readers of the Quarterly.

If the contrapuntal voices of Rosen and Zephaniah, of Bradford and Donovan, do not exactly observe eighteenth-century rules of harmony, they nevertheless seem to me to make some very exciting and innovative music.

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