The New Normal

To say that the past year has required major adjustment is perhaps an understatement. We've collectively faced isolation, social distancing, online schooling—all elements of what is frequently referred to as "the new normal." In some ways, though, the first two decades of the twenty-first century seem to have been a nonstop series of "new normals" as political and social unrest around the globe have forced change, both welcome and un-. And while adults have tended to dominate conversations about these changes and their implications, young people have repeatedly reminded us that they are not only affected but also capable of calling for and effecting change themselves.

In the USA alone, we see the example of the One Mind Youth Movement of Indigenous teens, who brought attention to Standing Rock; Mari Copeny, also known as Little Miss Flint, and others fighting for clean water; the March for Our Lives protests founded by survivors of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School and organized by teens across the country; and literacy and diversity efforts by individuals like Marley Dias and groups like the Children of the Glades. There is certainly no shortage of examples of young people across the globe who are likewise working to create a better world. While Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg have been among the most visible, young activists worldwide have been fighting for equity and working to save the planet. In their efforts to create a "new normal," young people demonstrate the potential to see change as positive and proactive, in contrast to the often negative and reactive connotations that many adults may attach to the phrase. They also highlight the ways in which children and young adults may productively engage with and reimagine cultural norms on both an individual and collective basis.

The five articles in this issue consider examples of children's literature and media that engage with, reinforce, and/or subvert cultural norms, particularly but not exclusively in terms of gender. Notably, the texts in question represent almost a century and a half of historical contexts, from late-nineteenth-century books for boys to recent Disney films featuring a "new" kind of heroine, offering snapshots of the ongoing cultural constructions that typically impose definitions of "childhood" on young people. In the process, these articles interrogate not only assumptions about young people but also many of the larger forces that seek to define and control them through an insistence on the "normal."

The first article in this issue, "Kaler's Boys: The Popular Print Market and Models of Boyhood" by Ellen Butler Donovan, examines how the postbellum juvenile print market influenced constructions of gender in the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century works of James Otis Kaler, including his most famous, Toby Tyler; or Ten Weeks with a Circus (1881). By considering how Kaler deployed three models of boyhood—namely, the sentimental boy, the upwardly mobile boy, and the knowing boy—Donovan demonstrates that Kaler's novels and protagonists functioned as responses to differing demands and expectations from an increasingly varied print market.

In turn, Ashley N. Reese looks at representations of turn-of-the-century girlhood in a more recent historical novel in "A New Species of Girl: The Female Bildungsroman in Jacqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate." The novel, Reese argues, works to balance two simultaneous goals: accurately representing the challenges the title character faces as a girl who wants to pursue science in the early twentieth century while offering an empowering narrative for twenty-first-century readers. In the process, the text both extends and attempts to reimagine the conventions of girls' literature, but it struggles to assert a clear statement about gender norms.

Cristina Rhodes likewise discusses an historical novel in "Corporeal, Phenomenological, and Activist Transformations in Pam Muñoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising." Esperanza, who begins the novel as the privileged daughter of a rich rancher in post-Revolution Mexico, migrates to Los Angeles with her widowed mother and becomes involved in efforts to improve conditions for migrant farmworkers. Rhodes examines the ways in which Muñoz Ryan's novel explicitly chronicles its protagonist...