From the Editor

Volume 22 marks the transition of the editorship of Children's Literature from the University of Connecticut, where it has been so ably edited for the past twenty-one years, to Hollins College, where we hope to continue the tradition of publishing the most original and provocative work in the field of children's literature. Hollins College, like everyone even remotely concerned with the past, present, and especially the future of children's literature—the writing, reading, studying, and teaching of it—owes an immense debt of gratitude to the founder of the journal, Francelia Butler. The story bears retelling. When, over twenty years ago, Francelia asked a male colleague why the field of children's literature was so often denigrated, he responded that a field must have a journal to be considered important. That was enough for Francelia. She promptly established one (which is not to imply that all Francelia, the fairy godmother of children's literature, had to do was wave her magic wand). Since then the annual, together with its complementary publication, the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, has been invaluable in promoting the scholarly—but accessible and unpedantic—examination of books and, increasingly, other media that children of various ages, periods, and cultures have enjoyed. I can attest from personal experience, as can the many contributors to and consultants on this volume, that Children's Literature has succeeded in luring specialists in other literatures to the field.

As most subscribers to Children's Literature know, the journal has been edited in recent years by Barbara Rosen with the assistance of colleagues and graduate students at the University of Connecticut, as well as by an occasional guest editor. I want to thank Barbara for generously sharing her editorial knowledge and wisdom. Innumerable consultants and contributors have referred to her uncanny ability to identify a manuscript's weaknesses and strengths and to nurture those strengths. Fortunately Barbara will continue to act as a consultant to the journal, as will other members of her staff at the University of Connecticut. Margaret Higonnet, who has coedited volumes of the journal with Barbara, will remain on the editorial board, and Jean Marsden, coeditor of a recent volume, has served as a consultant on this one. Anne Phillips, coeditor of volume 21, has contributed a book review to this volume, and I trust that she and those who worked with her will continue to contribute to the journal in various ways as they launch their academic careers. I would like to thank John Cech for staying on as book review editor, thus relieving me of that weighty responsibility, and Rachel Fordyce for continuing to contribute the valuable feature Dissertations of Note. I am also grateful to the consultants who have helped me with this volume, especially the dozen or so to whom I have turned repeatedly, and to the contributors for their good-natured responses to consultants' comments and for revising their essays against tight deadlines. Above all I am grateful for my collegial relationship with Cynthia Wells of Yale University Press. This volume, as these acknowledgments suggest, is very much a collaborative effort, one that builds on the past and will, I hope, lay a solid foundation for the future.

Perhaps fittingly, this volume, which marks the transfer of editorship and thus encourages reflection on the history of the journal, contains essays of retrospection and commemoration. Without conscious design on my part, the volume celebrates and critiques the Victorian past and even, as in the Bixler and Sircar essays, analyzes others' attempts to do so. Phyllis Bixler's essay on the recent Broadway musical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden (the collaborative effort of a four-woman team) demonstrates the power of a children's classic to inspire fresh works of art, which in turn invest the original with new meaning. In the Varia section Sanjay Sircar's analysis of the Australian novelist Miles Franklin's account of a 1932 Lewis Carroll centenary celebration presents the darker side of canonization—cult status and commercialization. Both deal with what has become a pervasive theme of this volume: the relationship between...