From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Lisa Rowe Fraustino (bio) In this, my first introduction to my first volume as editor of the annual, I want to begin by thanking all of our contributors, from whom I have learned more than I thought my brain could absorb. I have learned not only from the seven authors whose accepted essays appear in these pages but also from those whose work is still in the revise and resubmit (R & R) process, and even those whose work was not a fit for us—or not yet. Equally, I learned from our expert readers, whose generous attention to the work of anonymous colleagues makes every essay better, makes the journal better, makes the editor better, makes children's literature scholarship overall better, and indirectly betters children's literature itself. With no organizing theme for this open volume, I decided to order the essays chronologically based on the text sets under discussion, beginning with a classic of the White canon, Peter and Wendy. In "'[A] commotion in the firmament': The Thermodynamics of Neverland," Clayton Carlyle Tarr looks at J. M. Barrie's 1911 novelization of his 1904 play as an exemplar of how children's literature incorporated Victorian science. Peter Pan and Tinker Bell harness energy in ways that defy the physical laws of thermodynamics, a subject that Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh. Just as the character Peter Pan never ages or dies, the thermodynamic power of storytelling allows Peter Pan to live on across generations. At the same time as Barrie staged children's play in White, patriarchal, colonialist fantasies, H.G. Wells represented nationalist masculinity through play in two little-known novels for children, Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars (1913). Chloe Flower's essay, "The Exemplary Game: Going to War with H.G. Wells's Toy Soldiers," situates these fictional war-gaming texts in British culture and the figure of the toy soldier in material history. She finds that, like the reproducible hollow toy, "the boy is a delegate for an infinitely expanding number of other, expendable male selves proceeding outward to empire and forward into England's triumphalist future." Just as children's literature has contributed to the reproduction of traditional gender roles across generations, so too has it contributed to cultural change. In "Little Miss Muffet Must Go! Mommies at Work [End Page ix] and the Radical Roots of Non-Sexist Children's Literature," Julia L. Mickenberg explores the historical impact of an early feminist picture book and discusses why it was then—and still is, to some extent—difficult to find picture book mothers working outside of the home. Eve Merriam's 1961 text was given new life in 1970 when rediscovered by the Women's Liberation movement and featured in Elizabeth Fisher's "The Second Sex, Junior Division," which Mickenberg parallels with the importance of Nancy Larrick's "The All-White World of Children's Literature." With the next essay, we skip ahead to the poststructural era, when both young adult literature and the theoretical study of it have gained influence and respect. Barbara Tannert-Smith combines topoanalysis and psychoanalysis in "'The Garden Frightens Me': Trauma, Recovery, and the Environmental Uncanny in Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now." By mapping "the traumatic route of intertextual modeling" in what Amitav Ghosh has called "the environmental uncanny," Tannert-Smith deconstructs romantic notions of landscape and human-nature entanglements in Rosoff's 2004 critically acclaimed novel about young people surviving on their own in a future World War III. J. K. Rowling's series of seven Harry Potter books came out between 1997 and 2007, and Kathryn Strong Hansen discusses the author's 2008 postscript to her Wizarding World in the next essay, "On the Margins of Harry's World: Paratext and The Tales of Beedle the Bard." Reading Rowling's footnotes placed alongside Dumbledore's in the text, Hansen argues that paratexts of the Tales undermine Rowling's expressed intent in fighting bigotry by marginalizing readers as Muggles themselves, distancing rather than fostering the connection that had made them feel included throughout the series. In recent decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to comics and graphic novels. Kai Mikkonen continues...