Transitions

Abstract

Transitions Gillian Adams We are pleased to report that Marilynn Strasser Olson, Associate Professor of English at Southwest Texas State University, was chosen by the ChLA Board of Directors at the Missouri Conference this June to be the new editor of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Because issues are planned ahead, the editorial transition is of necessity a gradual one. From June on, all unsolicited manuscripts not slated for one of my special issues have been Marilynn's primary responsibility. Marilynn is also setting up the special issues that will appear under her editorship, and suggestions for such issues, as well as new essays, should be sent to her at her address on the masthead. I will continue to handle other Quarterly correspondence until my term as editor is over, in December 1995. We are grateful to the chair of the Department of English at Southwest Texas State University, Lydia Blanchard, who has offered her full support during the transition and has been unfailingly cooperative. The Quarterly will be housed in a spacious, fully equipped office in the remodeled English building. Access to amenities such as a flat-bed scanner has already made a difference. Mary-Agnes Taylor, Professor Emeritus of English at Southwest Texas State University, is retiring as Associate Editor as of the Winter issue. We will sorely miss Mary-Agnes's wit, editorial acumen, and good advice, but we are glad that she will now be able to join our ranks as a contributor. Claudia Nelson, Assistant Professor of English at Southwest Texas State University, has been appointed associate editor. Claudia comes to us with extensive editorial experience as a former managing editor of College Literature and a former book review editor of Victorian Studies; she recently was guest editor of our special issue on fathers and sons (Fall, 1993). We regret that we must say good-bye to Jill May, who has resigned as an editorial consultant; her hard work on behalf of the Quarterly is well known. Thank you, Jill. The ChLA Board of Directors has agreed to replace her with Lois Kuznets. Lois has already been a knowledgeable and perceptive reader of many submissions, and we are pleased that the masthead will now reflect her efforts on our behalf. We also regret that Perry Nodelman is stepping down as editor of the Literary Theory and Children's Literature column. Perry's pioneering essays have had a major impact on the development of children's literature criticism and are now classics. Roderick McGillis, my predecessor as editor of the Quarterly, has graciously agreed to become the new column editor. Rod's latest book, tentatively titled Beyond Formalism Again: Literary Theory and Children's Literature, is forthcoming from Twayne. The essays in this issue mark another transition, from the gender criticism, particularly as it applies to literature for older children and adolescents, which has dominated recent issues. It has become a critical truism that most children's literature both reflects and resists adult cultural norms. Resistance usually takes place through a literary and illustrative subversion that ranges from the obvious to the extremely subtle, sometimes relying on codes or conventions known only to a small group of adult observers. The essays in our special section on children's rhymes demonstrate other forms of resistance, either in terms of the persistent adoption by children of rhymes that celebrate violence and other forms of anti-social mayhem or in terms of responses to such rhymes by illustrators. In Ode Ogede's essay Nigerian children endorse community values but criticize adults and other children for not living up to them. We have chosen to accompany this special section with essays that also concentrate on works for young children and that further explore resistant and subversive responses to adult cultural values. The word subvert comes from the classical Latin subverto, to turn upside down, and Gertrude Stein's work, which has turned upside down many of our assumptions about what a written text ought to be, only relatively recently has begun to attract the close scrutiny that it deserves. Peter Schwenger discusses Rose's attempts in Stein's The World Is Round to solve the problems of the constitution...