From the Editor

Lewis Carroll's canonical Alice stories have frequently been the subject of essays published in Children's Literature. In this volume, Carroll's text reappears, but through the lens of Eastern authors and readers. For example, the image on the cover of this volume may appear to be John Tenniel's illustration of Humpty Dumpty shouting in the messenger's ear in Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. It is instead an image from an 1892 Bengali children's book, described in the first essay in the volume. An image of Alice surfaces again in an essay on the Japanese literary imagination, this time as an anime adaptation.

These hybrid images reflect what Catherine Butler calls "diffuse cultural interaction." They ask us to consider how literal and imaginative exodus shapes literary texts and how the migration between geographic and temporal landscapes allows for cross- and multicultural storytelling. While the eight essays gathered in volume 48 of Children's Literature celebrate the liberatory potential of fiction in general and fantasy in particular, they also recognize the restrictive structures that show up in these flexible spaces. The texts—tales, novels, picture books, and animations—discussed in this volume provide access to other cultures, geographic landscapes, and perspectives. From the Bengali children whose future was built on both ancient Indian tales and the literature of the colonizer, to fantasy writers who look to narratives of the past to name injustice and imagine alternatives, these essays model how by disentangling the threads of the past, in its limitations and its richness, we can change the present and the future.

The volume opens with Sreemoyee Dasgupta's essay, "A 'Moderately' Bengali Alice: Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati." Reading Kankabati as aligned with and against Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Dasgupta points to the opportunities for dissent and "political daring" provided by children's fantasy in colonial India. She also acknowledges the limits placed on the agency of both children and adults who must survive under colonial rule and concludes that the plot of Kankabati relies on "a symbiosis of stasis and motion" rather than a linear heroic quest.

With "The Pig Who Went to Market: Entrepreneurship and Exploitation in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Little Pig Robinson," Jen Cadwallader suggests that unlike other examples of the genre, which link hard work with economic success, Potter's Robinsonade highlights the "market forces aligned against children" with a protagonist who ends up in a paradise "far, far from home." While the typical escape story for children takes the child to a fantasy land that turns out to be destructive rather than delightful, the island on which Pig Robinson finds himself is idyllic; there is no need for him to long for a return home to his own (literal) function as an object of capitalism.

The next essays take as their focus speculative novels centered on female young adult protagonists. In "The Lioness and the Protector: The (Post)Feminist Dialogic of Tamora Pierce's Lady Knights," Whitney S. May looks at two of Pierce's Quartets, the Alanna and Kel series. May investigates the "dialogical interventions" that these series portray, interventions that both provide critique of feminism and model its potential for collaborative dialogue. Michelle Beissel Heath argues for the power and opportunities provided by restraint in her essay, "Reveling in Restraint: Limiting the Neo-Victorian Girl." More sanguine than Dasgupta, who suggests that the restraints of colonialism offer only limited opportunities for dissert and agency, Heath claims that restraints "can also be the means by, through, or despite which change, power, contentment, and even pleasure can be found."

The volume turns next to two essays on Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper series: "Imagining Possible Futures: Afrofuturism and Social Critique in Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper" by Megan Jeanette Myers and "Learning Unbounded: Emancipatory Education in Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper Fantasy Series" by Ashley Hope Pérez. Both essays make powerful claims about the ways the series' young adult protagonists are able to change their futures by re-seeing the past. Myers places Shadowshaper in the...