From the Editor

In a 2011 article entitled “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson proposes the word “misfit” to point to the ways the disabled body challenges expectations of normalcy. The “misfit” helps us see the relational nature of existence—the body that doesn’t match the shape and expectations of its environment reveals the “dynamic encounter between flesh and world” (592). While most of the essays that make up volume 45 of Children’s Literature do not explicitly draw on disability studies, they are united in their attempts to consider how those characters who don’t “fit” challenge their (fictional) communities and (actual) readers. The misfits described in this volume—from Alice through the Looking-Glass, who resists idealizing childhood innocence; to Charley in Call Me Charley, who challenges racist models of the black body; to Singing Rain in the American Girl series, who claims her place on the back of a wild horse despite her blindness—help us see the limits of locating identity in either individuals or institutions rather than in the interactive space between them.

In the volume’s first essay, Veronica Schanoes asks what it means to see Alice as a “fabulous monster” and concludes that the well-behaved Alice of Looking-Glass, unlike the unruly heroine of Alice in Wonderland, is monstrous in her representation of the “pure, innocent child.” “Queen Alice and the Monstrous Child: Alice through the Looking-Glass” argues that it is Alice’s pursuit of Queenhood that rescues her from an excess of innocence by allowing her to grow up. Adulthood, in this model, is escape rather than corruption; Alice’s problems stem not from an immature body but from the beliefs about childhood that restrict her.

The next three essays in the volume are placed in an Edwardian rather than Victorian context, but they too point to the ways texts for children disrupt overdetermined identities. In “The Language of Attire in Edith Nesbit’s Bastable Stories,” Alexandra Jeikner explores the ways that the petticoat—and clothing more generally—challenges normative identities in the Bastable stories. Drawing on examples of undressing and cross-dressing, Jeikner argues that the Bastable children are able to undermine stable categories of sex, class, and nationality through “the language of attire.”

David McCooey and Emma Hayes move this conversation on malleable boundaries to a discussion of “in-betweenness” with “The Liminal Poetics of The Wind in the Willows.” Grahame’s generic border-crossing between the pastoral and the epic allows The Wind in the Willows to explore ideas of home, restlessness, and the imagination. In a confusion of categories, this novel, and children’s literature more generally, draws our attention to the space between binaries. Similarly, Bonnie Gaarden’s “Flight Behavior: Mr. Darling and Masculine Models in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy” both recognizes the powerful ways culture shapes lives and suggests that Peter and Wendy privileges playful boyhood over models of adult masculinity. Barrie’s “quixotic pledge of allegiance to the whimsical freedom of boyhood play” emerges out of Mr. Darling’s attempts and failures to find social or personal success in other models of masculinity.

Amanda M. Greenwell’s essay, “Jesse Jackson’s Call Me Charley: Protesting Segregated Recreation in Cold War America,” underscores the privilege of play with a discussion of Jackson’s 1945 novel. Rather than portraying play as a respite from social problems, the realist novel Call Me Charley demonstrates that recreation in 1940s America is a site of racial discrimination. Greenwell demonstrates the ways that this novel moves beyond a “race-liberal friendship narrative” to a protest against the “pervasive exclusion of black children from communal and quintessential American recreation.”

Angela E. Hubler makes a similar argument about the importance of acknowledging systems of discrimination rather than simply focusing on individual experiences of oppression in her essay, “It Is Not Enough to Speak: Toward a Coalitional Consciousness in the Young Adult Rape Novel.” Hubler critiques novels such as Speak for focusing on the psychology of the individual to the point of excluding acknowledgment of the institutional structures that enable rape. Hubler draws our attention to less commonly studied...