Avoiding a Quartz Contentment: Character, Culture, and Concepts of Childhood

This issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly opens with Zibby Oneal's acceptance speech given when she received the 2002 Phoenix Award for her 1982 novel A Formal Feeling. The Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association recognizes books of exceptional merit. First presented in 1985, the award is given to an author, or the estate of an author, for a children's book first published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award at publication but that has been deemed worthy of special attention given the perspective of time. In her speech, Oneal discusses how she let intuition lead her as she listened to the voice of the child character, Anne, shape the narrative of the novel. She describes how Anne "headed off on her own." (Any scholar of L.M. Montgomery's works might have been able to warn Ms. Oneal that a character named "Anne" is apt to be self-reliant.) This character led Oneal to write about grief, so Oneal takes her title from Emily Dickinson's poem about grief and complacency that begins, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes." In describing how people react to pain, Dickinson writes of "A quartz contentment, like a stone" and "the Hour of Lead" and "Freezing persons, recollect[ing]. . . Snow." Oneal's novel captures a fine and sensitive awareness that immobilization is often the result of great loss. Oneal is able to depict this effect in her novels, in part, because of her belief that character drives narrative.

Vivian Yenika-Agbaw's essay on "Individual vs. Communal Healing" in African novels of female adolescence demonstrates again how character drives narrative, this time by emphasizing the interaction of character and culture in creating the conflicts that can drive gendered novels of development.

Leona Fisher's analysis of rhetorical and narrative strategies that "bridge" readers from one ideological concept to another shares a cultural sensitivity with Yenika-Agbaw's essay. Texts that employ such passages challenge the interpellation of the child reader by providing discursive interventions that aid them in their reading.

Fisher's theoretical work shares with John Morgenstern's a concern for the child reader. The second part of an argument begun in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly's Summer 2001 issue (Vol. 26, No. 2), "The Fall into Literacy and the Rise of the Bourgeois Child" examines the "consequences of literacy on the construction of the modern conception of childhood." Morgenstern problematizes the relationship of the bourgeois child to literacy. Indeed, Rosseau's Emile on this issue's cover represents both the literacy of the bourgeois child and the classic Romantic tradition of a child character leading the way for adults.

Kenneth Kidd, like Morgenstern, interrogates the concept of childhood, but develops a new term that will have resonance for many theoretical scholars. In "Children's Culture, Children's Studies, and the Ethnographic Imaginary," Kidd defines the problem with mythologizing the study of childhood as if doing so were an objective study. Kidd cites scholars from Jerry Griswold to Richard Flynn who share a concern about the professionalization of the discipline of children's literature.

Finally, Maria Nikolajeva concludes that the professionalization of theoretical aspects of children's literature must be international to be successful. For the inaugural International Column in the Quarterly, Nikolajeva comments on an essay written by Hans-Heino Ewers that describes the development of the study of children's literature in Germany. Ewers and Nikolajeva both conclude with reflections that indicate the importance of theorizing children's literature. We are honored to offer this new column as a feature in this journal.

Studying character, culture, and concepts of childhood as sites of interrogation demonstrates the tensions inherent in the study of children's literature. Analyzing where these topics converge and diverge keeps our discipline vibrant and vital to those who would avoid stagnation-to those who would eschew any kind of quartz contentment.