Project MUSE®: Children's Literature Association Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Children's Literature Association Quarterly.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1976) through current issueLatest Articles: Children's Literature Association QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®Children's Literature Association Quarterly1553-12010885-0429Latest articles in Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Four Wizards, Six Hobbits, and One Poor, Obsolete Elm-tree: Tolkien and Childhood
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987748
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Doing just about anything feels difficult these days. It’s as if the Storm of Mordor has blotted out the sun, and simply staying abreast of the news has become a flagellation. Turning to J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasies and fairy tales can sometimes feel like an escape, but as Tolkien himself reminds in “On Fairy-stories,” too often “escape” is used with a “tone of scorn and pity,” as if by reading The Smith of Wootton Major I’m flying from the stuff that matters, turning away from Real Life. However, Tolkien insists that real escape may in fact be “heroic.” Why should a person, Tolkien avers, “be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallFour Wizards, Six Hobbits, and One Poor, Obsolete Elm-tree: Tolkien and Childhood2026-04-07text/htmlen-USFour Wizards, Six Hobbits, and One Poor, Obsolete Elm-tree: Tolkien and Childhood2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®137722026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Fairy Tale Debate with Andrew Lang in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987749
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J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that “On Fairy-stories” was “quite an important work, at least for anyone who thinks me worth considering at all” in a 1955 letter to the Houghton Mifflin Company (Carpenter, Letters 220). This essay provides Tolkien’s discussion of the function and purpose of fantasy while addressing three central questions: “What are fairy-stories?”, “What is their origin?”, “And what is the use of them?” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories” 11). Verlyn Flieger has argued that after his essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” “On Fairy-stories” remains Tolkien’s landmark essay, and it continues to be his most reprinted essay (9). Brian Rosebury, in J. R. R. Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, argues that “On
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallThe Fairy Tale Debate with Andrew Lang in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Fairy Tale Debate with Andrew Lang in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®629612026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Pebbles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987750
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The “smoke” was not what she pictured when she thought of “smoke.” An octopus, the gripping things that pull in unprepared, unassuming prey. Tendrils? The little girl held the book closer to her face, staring at the impression titled “Trolls.” She turned the book, looking at the picture this way and that, searching for explanations of what was spattered before her eyes. The markings could be leaves, there at the bottom. The trolls, their skin, it looked like leaves as well or maybe pebbles. The trees and their texture matched the trolls. Where did they come from? Did the trees and the trolls and the ground all emerge from the same spot? Did they suddenly rise out of the earth? What were their origins? Did something
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallPebbles2026-04-07text/htmlen-USPebbles2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®47752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07You’re Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987751
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I read The Hobbit because my sister was reading it. She seldom talked about the books she read, so this was a special event. Other people were reading it. A fellowship of readers was forming, and I wanted to be a part of it. Reading The Hobbit became the first reading event in my life, I think, and though many have followed, none has surpassed this one in excitement or bewilderment. I didn’t know what I was supposed to experience. I knew I was reading something important, and that thrilled me. The dark, mysterious stranger come a’knocking; the rough-and-tumble dwarves; the air of edgy, manly boldness on the brink of a dangerous adventure; a dude who could change into a bear; the merciless dragon at the end of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallYou’re Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me2026-04-07text/htmlen-USYou’re Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®239712026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Ruskin and The Hobbit: Two Golden Treasures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987752
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John Ruskin has long been recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century, a man who wrote about art criticism, architecture, history, culture, natural science, and political economy.1 He was also a competent artist in his own right, and in 1851 he published a well-recognized, highly popular children’s book, The King of the Golden River, a tale with striking similarities to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). Surprisingly, however, the possibility of Ruskinian influence on The Hobbit has never been taken up in the world of Tolkien studies. The same is true of Ruskin’s introduction to the 1868 edition of German Popular Stories, a response to fairy literature that shares much with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallRuskin and The Hobbit: Two Golden Treasures2026-04-07text/htmlen-USRuskin and The Hobbit: Two Golden Treasures2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®710092026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Hobbit Is a Mystery if You Squint Real Hard, or How a Teenager Learned to Like Wizards as Much as the Hardy Boys
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987753
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My first introduction to The Hobbit was the 1977 animated film by Arthur Rankin, Jr., and Jules Bass. I did not realize it was a book until much later than you would expect, and I did not actually read it until I was in college. I was a horror kid; I grew up on my mother’s Tales from the Crypt comics and episodes of The Munsters, so anything having to do with spells or swords was wholly uninteresting to me. Wizards seemed like the kind of thing the weird kids drew on their folders during English class. But I loved cartoons, and The Hobbit movie was weird enough that it looked like a lot of the old Spiderman cartoons I would watch while eating lunch. You would think that, as horror fan, my favorite scenes would be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallThe Hobbit Is a Mystery if You Squint Real Hard, or How a Teenager Learned to Like Wizards as Much as the Hardy Boys2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Hobbit Is a Mystery if You Squint Real Hard, or How a Teenager Learned to Like Wizards as Much as the Hardy Boys2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®103542026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Daytripper
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987754
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I read The Hobbit in a single day when I was ten. It was a long, uninterrupted, and, in every sense except reading, unproductive day for me. I’ve never forgotten it.I don’t remember how the book came to me1 or why I decided to read it when I did. I suspect my brother, Scott, somehow turned me on to it, as he did with most of the cultural interests that ended up sticking with me. What I recall, mostly, is a scene:The Hobbit happened to me in Granddad’s leather recliner, in my grandparents’ den, in that part of the house that, I was told, Granddad had added onto the original house back when I was too young to know. This was a wood-paneled room with a big round braided rug whose spiraling pattern I sometimes traced on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallDaytripper2026-04-07text/htmlen-USDaytripper2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®119282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Good Form and Riddling Talk: Imperialist Rhetoric in The Hobbit and Peter Pan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987755
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In the spring of 1910, J. R. R. Tolkien took a day off from his studies at King Edward’s School to attend a performance of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. When he arrived home, the eighteen-year-old excitedly wrote in his diary that the play was “indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live” (Carpenter 47–48). So began Tolkien’s lifelong admiration of J. M. Barrie and his Never Land stories. Numerous scholars, including John Garth, propose that Tolkien’s appreciation for Peter Pan emerged from his identity as an orphan, as Barrie’s focus on children “severed from their mothers by distance and death” undoubtedly heightened Tolkien’s emotional response (77). Still others highlight how Peter
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallGood Form and Riddling Talk: Imperialist Rhetoric in The Hobbit and Peter Pan2026-04-07text/htmlen-USGood Form and Riddling Talk: Imperialist Rhetoric in The Hobbit and Peter Pan2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®921652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Hebrew Hobbit, or Tricked into the World
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987756
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When I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the first time at ten, I immediately recognized Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the Grey. I’d met them both before: Bilbo, the seemingly punctilious Hobbit, whenever I looked in a mirror. And Gandalf the Grey, two years earlier when Isaac Green, my soon-to-be best friend, waltzed one strange spring day into my Kitah Gimel classroom at Temple Beth Torah, Alhambra, California’s Hebrew School. Tolkien had, with Gandalf and Bilbo, read into my soul. And there he found a shy boy who insisted he didn’t want any adventures, thank you very much. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! Yet I somehow still invited Gandalf over for tea. Wizards after all are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallThe Hebrew Hobbit, or Tricked into the World2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Hebrew Hobbit, or Tricked into the World2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®115382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Both Condescending and Enchanting: Understanding Disparate Attitudes toward the Intrusive Narrator of The Hobbit (and “Farmer Giles of Ham”)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987757
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For just over a decade, I spent a portion of each summer teaching The Hobbit to a class of academically talented children. Not all of them loved to read, and not all of them loved to read fantasy, but for the most part, they were there because they loved stories. They were happy when I assigned them reading homework. Yet, unfailingly, they came into my classroom after reading the first few chapters of The Hobbit with betrayal in their eyes, complaining that it was slow and boring. They did not like the songs and poetry, and, most painful to me, they did not like the narrator. Every year, I reassured them and told them they would like the book eventually, and many did. While they were reluctant about their second
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallBoth Condescending and Enchanting: Understanding Disparate Attitudes toward the Intrusive Narrator of The Hobbit (and “Farmer Giles of Ham”)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USBoth Condescending and Enchanting: Understanding Disparate Attitudes toward the Intrusive Narrator of The Hobbit (and “Farmer Giles of Ham”)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®762962026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07My Life with Tolkien: From South Africa to the World
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987758
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J. R. R Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, in 1892. He lived there until he was three years old. Fifty years later, during World War II, he sent new chapters of The Lord of the Rings to his son Christopher, who was stationed in South Africa. Tolkien’s South African readers thus feel that we have a unique claim on him and a special affinity with his writings. I am happy to share my own experiences in Middle Earth and my efforts to share Tolkien with the world.I was introduced to his fantasy creation quite late in life, unlike all the children whom I eagerly led into his magical world once I became a school teacher. In 1970 I was enjoying my first year at Wits University in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallMy Life with Tolkien: From South Africa to the World2026-04-07text/htmlen-USMy Life with Tolkien: From South Africa to the World2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®255902026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Secret Garden: Broadview Edition ed. by Shelly King and Heather K. Cyr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987760
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How many annotated editions of The Secret Garden does the world need? Maybe we’ll find out someday, but in the meantime, this compact, 351-page paperback is a welcome addition to the shelves. Along with the full text of Burnett’s novel, it includes forty-two essays and excerpts from other works; these demonstrate the editors’ theories in one convenient volume.Broadview Press is a Canadian independent academic publishing house. Editor Shelley King is professor emerita at Queens University in Toronto. Heather K. Cyr is chair of the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver.The editors attribute the book’s “perennial favourite” status to the fact that Burnett was that rare author who could
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallThe Secret Garden: Broadview Edition ed. by Shelly King and Heather K. Cyr (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Secret Garden: Broadview Edition ed. by Shelly King and Heather K. Cyr (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®109822026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society by Yasmine Motawy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987761
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In Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society, Yasmine Motawy considers the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, the nature of Egyptian society, and children’s place within it, giving special attention to picture books and how they have shaped and reflected Egyptian society for children.The book itself is divided into five chapters. The first two address the forces affecting society and the role of children’s books that emerged in it. According to Motawy, the return of Egyptians accustomed to living in the wealthier Gulf states fostered a demand for modernization in Egypt and expanded literacy. Through literacy, children could be expected to grow educationally, socially, and politically
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallChildren’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society by Yasmine Motawy (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USChildren’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society by Yasmine Motawy (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®67362026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Lewis Carroll: Collections and Collectors by Edward Guiliano (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987762
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This volume will be of interest to Lewis Carroll scholars, but it will also appeal to book historians and book collectors. Many faculty in the field of children’s literature have become, by necessity, book collectors to undertake their research. The office shelves and home offices of those publishing on children’s or young adult literature are full of out-of-print texts. It may be one of those chicken-or-egg situations: are individuals who read and collect books as children destined to become teachers of children’s literature, or does the field encourage them to become book collectors? I suspect it is a bit of both.Edward Guiliano, a Victorian literature scholar who publishes on both Carroll and Charles Dickens
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallLewis Carroll: Collections and Collectors by Edward Guiliano (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USLewis Carroll: Collections and Collectors by Edward Guiliano (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®135852026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07A Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book ed. by Dianne Johnson-Feelings and Jonda C. McNair (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987763
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The Brownies’ Book was one of the first monthly magazines published to educate, inspire, and uplift its audience, particularly Black children and other “Children of the Sun.” W. E. B. Du Bois edited The Brownies’ Book with Augustus Dill, business manager, and literary editor Jessie Fauset. Though its distribution was short-lived—twenty-four issues were published from January 1920 to December 1921—the magazine had a lasting impact. As children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop notes in the foreword, “although it [The Brownies’ Book] sought to engage and entertain readers, it was also purposeful, even didactic to some extent. Its stated objectives are echoed by later twentieth-century Black writers and artists
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallA Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book ed. by Dianne Johnson-Feelings and Jonda C. McNair (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USA Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book ed. by Dianne Johnson-Feelings and Jonda C. McNair (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®89312026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Philanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840–1930: The Charitable Child by Kristine Moruzi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987764
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“Magazines,” Kristine Moruzi writes in Philanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, were “vitally important to the development of children’s charitable publics” (52), and “[t]he period between 1840 and 1930 is central to this examination because it was characterized by the expansion of periodicals for young people and the concomitant concerns about appropriate reading for a young audience” (3). Moruzi’s book is an impressive discussion of the often-neglected topic of children’s magazines. Yet it also stands out as a missed opportunity to recognize the role that the abolitionist movement played in establishing children’s print culture as a medium for charitable giving, as well as to discuss gender differences in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallPhilanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840–1930: The Charitable Child by Kristine Moruzi (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USPhilanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840–1930: The Charitable Child by Kristine Moruzi (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®165052026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature by Amanda M. Greenwell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987765
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Amanda M. Greenwell’s The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature analyzes children’s gazes in American literature from 1930–2018 to depict how their line of sight is “a powerful narrative tool for social critique, specifically regarding narrow understandings of national belonging” (4). Building from children’s studies scholarship that’s laid the groundwork for childhood to be seen as a powerful site to subvert and disrupt cultural norms, The Child Gaze digs deeply into a niche aspect of how the child in literature is enacting their gaze to not only point out these cultural norms as problematic, but to perform their own resistance through looking. The three pillars of scholarship for this book as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallThe Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature by Amanda M. Greenwell (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature by Amanda M. Greenwell (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®104082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust by Kristen Poole (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987766
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Kristen Poole begins Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination with a “Letter to the Reader,” a nod to the seventeenth-century authors she studies, that welcomes critics, historians, and “intellectually curious” readers to her book. Poole’s informal style is peppered with asides and observations that reinforce this relationship as epistolary, personal. Grounded equally in the literature and culture of the seventeenth century and in Pullman’s series, Poole offers valuable insights and possibilities for cross-fertilization.As its title suggests, the monograph connects Pullman’s world-building with seventeenth-century literary thought, scientific preoccupations, and religious milieu. Pullman is not the only
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/301/image/coversmallPhilip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust by Kristen Poole (review)2026-04-07text/htmlen-USPhilip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust by Kristen Poole (review)2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®96752026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07