Beginning Year 30

Abstract

Beginning Year 30 Richard Flynn As the Quarterly begins its 30th volume, it makes sense to pause and reflect on just how far the ChLA Quarterly has come in 30 years. The journal began its life as a newsletter in 1974 at a time when most of academe considered children's literature a kind of subliterature—"kiddie lit.," as it was usually disparagingly referred to was generally kept outside the purview of departments of English, as it was hardly in need of critical exegesis. Or so thought the already beleaguered guardians of the canon, threatened by demands, particularly from women and African Americans, that there were (or at least should be) more things in the curriculum than were dreamt of in the gatekeepers' philosophy. Older readers of this journal—and I count myself among them—can recall countless incidents in which their colleagues regarded their involvement in children's literary studies with bemusement or outright contempt. As the appearance of the first issue of volume 30 of the Quaterly attests, things have changed. Younger scholars coming up in the profession (some of whose essays are printed in this issue), regard as quaintly historical the time when children's literature was thought of, in the late Francelia Butler's phrase, as "the great excluded." Some of them have been trained at institutions such as Illinois State or the University of Florida that have children's literature concentrations at the PhD level. But perhaps such changes are not as sweeping as they might appear. There is still a better than even chance that the newly-minted Ph.Ds from these programs will find themselves teaching at institutions where English majors are not allowed to take children's literature for major credit. While much has been accomplished in the past thirty years, there is yet more to do. Children's literature demands that one consider the social, psychological, and ideological matrices in which that literature is produced as well as the material, historical, and social climates in which that literature is disseminated and read. While the articles in the issue cover seemingly disparate subjects, they all recognize the ways in which children's literature is imbricated in various ideologies and psychologies, and they all recognize the ways in which the child reader—the child subject—is at the heart of the project. Furthermore they show that the psychological and the ideological are intertwined. The essays in this issue explore these intersections in nuanced rather than programmatic ways. Jennifer [End Page 1] Marchant's reading of girl-animal stories through the lens of Kristevan psychoanalysis begins with an account of her own attraction to dragon stories. By exploring readers' emotional and psychic attachment to animal characters, Marchant is able to illuminate the more political questions of adolescent development and gender construction. Caroline Jones's reading of the construction of female sexual subjectivity in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice series recognizes the ways in which Naylor's formula fiction both challenges and participates in the sexual conservatism of our time. Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth's discussion of the children's literature of the former East Germany notes the ways in which children's literature, by the 1980s, moved beyond the narrowly didactic in a climate of state censorship. The complexities of audience address—in particular, the implied address to the future adult the child reader would become—ultimately made children's literature accessible to a multi-layered audience. Finally, Debashis Bandyophay's essay on the supernatutral stories of Ruskin Bond shows how Bond's stories become the medium through which he explores the hybridity of his Anglo-Indian identity and questions of colonialism. Beginning with this issue, the Quarterly will have a new presence as part of Johns Hopkins University Press's Project Muse. At the same time, we are instituting a new occasional feature, the ChLAQ Forum, that will allow us to publish essays or groups of essays that raise what are, in the opinion of the editors, particularly provocative areas of inquiry. We have instituted this new feature because we missed the kind of lively exchange that used to be featured in the Literary Theory column. Recognizing that it is now the rule...