Transitions

Four years ago, in the first issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly that Joel Chaston, Anita Tarr, and I edited (Vol. 25, No. 2), I made this comment in the introductory editorial: "The Quarterly will continue to serve as a compass for scholars, helping the field explore new territories that include balancing poststructural theory with other forms of scholarship while striving always to continue this journal's tradition of supporting all aspects of the study of children's literature" (66). I believe we've met that promise, both in ways we had anticipated and in ways we had not.

For example, since 2000, the Quarterly has had seven special issues. They have been on psychoanalytic theory, the Golden Age of children's literature, poetry, narrative theory, multiculturalism, children's book publishing, and international children's literature. Some of those special issues were guest edited; some were compiled by groupings of essays on similar topics that arrived in our offices simultaneously. The special issues have ranged from traditional topics in our field to poststructural theory in its most highly articulated form.

The general issues, too, have covered broad spectrums. One issue ranges from John Morgenstern's revisionist history of the relationship between literacy and publishing to Dara Rossman Regaignon's post-colonial reading of Mary Martha Sherwood; another ranges from Naomi Wood's symbolic reading of a Virginia Hamilton novel to Judith Robertson's Lacanian reading of Harry Potter. Phoenix award winners, including Peter Dickinson and Zibby Oneal, have shared their acceptance speeches with us; Francelia Butler Lecturers Gillian Adams and Anne Scott McLeod have, too. Articles in this journal won awards from the Children's Literature Association, including Karen Coats' essay in 2000, "P is for Patriarchy: Re-Imaging the Alphabet" (88-97), Charles Butler's essay in 2001, "Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of 'Tam Lin'" (74-83), and Sharon Smulders' in 2002 with "'The Only Good Indian': History, Race, and Representation in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie" (191-202).

This issue includes the range of scholarship that typifies our general issues. "Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia," by Jean E. Graham, is a feminist reading of the literary influences on C.S. Lewis. Amanda Rogers Jones' "The Narnian Schism: Reading the Christian Subtext as Other in the Children's Stories of C. S. Lewis" deconstructs the tensions created by Christianity in the Narnia Chronicles. Lorinda Cohoon brings historical theory to bear in reading how masculinity was constructed in the nineteenth century in "Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-Bellum American Citizenship Through Boyhood in Our Young Folks and The Story Of A Bad Boy." Nathalie op de Beeck relies on feminist theory to read the conservative agenda at work in Lurlene McDaniel's novels in "Sixteen and Dying": Lurlene McDaniel's Fantasies of Mortal Endangerment." Aparna Gollapudi demonstrates the relationship between semiotics and the depiction of the oral tale in "Show and Tell: The Visual Evocation of Orality in Peter Sís's A Small Tall Tale From The Far Far North."

Given my vantage point as an editor over the last five years, I can see some scholarly evolutions in the recent past that help place in context the variety of scholarship in our field. When I first served as editor elect in 1999, poststructural theorists often felt they needed to apologize for their stance or explain their reasons for relying on their methodology, as Mike Cadden does in his 2000 essay "The Irony of Narration in the Young Adult Novel" (146-154). Sometimes, they felt the need to justify the pertinence of those theories' applicability to the corpus of children's literature, as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs does in her 2000 essay, "'Body Language': Speaking the féminine in Young Adult Fiction" (76-87). Few people spoke about children's studies in the twentieth century, although now the term is a commonplace in the field. Where literary critics were once decrying the lack of respect children's literature earned in their departments (as Peter Hunt did at the Nashville conference on Critical Approaches to Children's Literature, March 26...