Contexts

Issue 40.1 is a transition issue, the first to be produced under the aegis of the Quarterly’s latest editorial team, which includes my wonderful associate editors, Sara K. Day of Southern Arkansas University and Anne Morey of Texas A&M University, and the journal’s stellar book review editor of many years’ standing, Mark West of the University of North Carolina—Charlotte. In beginning our five-year term, we look back with heartfelt gratitude to the boundlessly talented outgoing editor Kate Capshaw and associate editors Kenneth Kidd, Anne Phillips, and Lynne Vallone. Kate’s committed and imaginative leadership has enabled the Quarterly to maintain its high standard of editorial excellence and scholarly interest by publishing articles, symposia, and manifestos on a wide range of topics in the field. The Children’s Literature Association is considerably indebted to Kate and her excellent editorial team for their devoted labors on behalf of both the Association and children’s literature scholarship more generally. And I, of course, owe her a special debt of gratitude, not only for handing over to me a journal in such robust health, but also for the many hours that she has spent patiently answering my queries and providing procedural guidance on a host of complex questions. Kate, Kenneth, Anne, and Lynne: thank you. And Sara, Anne, and Mark: thank you, too, both for the work that you have already done and for your willingness to join me on the good ship Quarterly over the next few years.

While the current issue does not have an official theme, the articles included here are nonetheless united by a shared interest in contexts and environments. The issue begins with Katharine Slater’s “Putting Down Routes: Translocal Place in The Secret Garden.” Slater considers Burnett’s classic in the context of US local color fiction, the literary form in which Burnett began her publishing career, arguing that The Secret Garden is best seen as a work whose understanding of locale has been “constituted through multiple transatlantic and global networks, both literary and lived.” Writing in the braided context of her long residence in Appalachia, her own previous works and her reading of texts ranging from Wuthering Heights to The English Dialect Dictionary, and her sense of childhood as a time when one learns about the construction of both identity and place, Burnett offers, in Slater’s view, a “subversion of spatial and scaled hierarchies” that requires us to contemplate anew the interrelationships among setting, genre, and theme.

The second article in this issue is “Dolls in Holocaust Children’s Literature: From Identification to Manipulation,” by Jocelyn Van Tuyl. Here the emphasis is on how Shoah texts for children and young adults, in forms ranging from the picture book to the nonfiction memoir, employ dolls as a means of discussing the child’s negotiation of an environment wholly at odds with our understanding of what “childhood” should be. Van Tuyl uses the recurring motif of dolls to explore what she sees as “juvenile Holocaust literature’s conflicting imperatives, its constant negotiations between necessary and forbidden knowledge” of the surrounding cultural environment, which take forms that include both authors’ use of dolls as stand-ins for their owners and the too-knowledgeable child’s use of dolls as a prop in the “performance of innocence.”

In Arielle C. McKee’s “The Kind of Tale Everybody Thneeds? Ecocriticism, Class, and the Filmic Lorax,” we move to an ecocritical topic, the 2012 film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s 1971 environmentalist picture book The Lorax. McKee is interested in how this film, whose marketing depends to a significant extent on its claiming of a moral high ground that it implicitly situates as left of the political center, simultaneously engages in what she identifies as class and ethnic stereotyping in its construction of the villains of the piece. The narrative’s “vexed ideological messages” draw, in McKee’s reading, both on calls for empowering the powerless (here represented by the Lorax and other inhabitants of the natural world) and on calls for leaving power exactly where it is, while consuming in a way that benefits entities that claim—not necessarily...