From the Editor

I write at a moment when images of armed Americans surging into the US Capitol building appear on every screen I see, when the speeches of senators calling for unity elide a recent history of rhetorical and political divisiveness. I write at a time when deaths from COVID-19 approach 2 million globally, when poverty and racism continue to shape who is cared for and who is scapegoated. What does children's literature scholarship have to offer when the news reads like a dystopian young adult novel?

Perhaps it offers us the chance to shape ourselves into thinking citizens rather than an agitated mob, to see patterns and aesthetic strategies rather than embracing a single fiction as truth. Take, for example, the cover of volume 49 of Children's Literature. We chose this image from a Swedish children's book for its connection to this volume's forum on the political uses of children's literature. This text speaks to the appeal of revolt, the lure of burning it all down and starting again in some sort of fresh space. It speaks to the carnival that is about catharsis and community, to the desire to act in unison, to the invitation to step outside of the lonely space of individual thought and action. When we chose this image of the "nailing gang," the book's absurdity and playfulness were at the forefront of my thoughts.

Today, I find it hard to see the image of boys with hammers held high, determined to nail everything in sight, including a police officer, without superimposing images of outraged citizens in Washington, DC, brandishing fire extinguishers and flags. In both cases, the energy of those who would be seen and heard tramples on images of law and order, demands that hierarchies of power be overturned. These two moments—one fictional, one newly historical—ask us to consider how the stories we hear and tell shape our understanding of the world and our own access to power. In Spikarligan (The Nailing Gang), a broken society is saved by the actions of children who assert their own authority with the action of their hammers. There is an appealing narrative here about the disenfranchised taking matters into their own hands. Yet this is also a narrative about hypermasculinity and the ways a mob gathers power. How might this picture book, this fantasy of revolt and remaking, help us interpret the historical events of January 6, 2021? This story about boys who love woodworking, who start by using hammers and nails in a way that suits the purpose of these tools, and who are encouraged by teachers and parents in their nailing, helps us see what can happen when the joy of inserting steel into wood becomes obsession, when the desire to act on the world takes over from rational thought. These boys are simultaneously messianic, remaking their damaged society, and ridiculously destructive. My shifting interpretation of this image from Spikarligan speaks to a claim made in many of the essays in this volume: context changes meaning.

As a group, the twelve essays gathered in this volume remind us that claims of revolution are always subject to reinterpretation; our understanding of the past and the present rely on the images that capture our imagination and the narratives that shape our origin stories. These essays encourage us to consider the wide variety of strategies used to help children make sense of history, politics, and their own agency through literature. They invoke the potential of children's literature to help us pause and reconsider. That reading and interpretation are complex activities is not a claim that will come as a surprise to this audience. I hope that the case studies gathered here will provide some unexpected perspectives on how meaning is layered into text and communicated to readers.

The volume opens with a forum on the uses of children's literature in political contexts, assembled by Anna Nordenstam and Olle Widhe. This group of essays allows us to think deeply about the ways children's texts convey political messages. In the introduction to the forum, Nordenstam and Widhe argue that a...