Bad Boy Research Articles

New sightings of Christopher Marlowe in London

Two lawsuits – one certainly relating to Christopher Marlowe, the other probably relating to him – have been discovered among the records of the court of King’s Bench at The National Archives in Kew, London. In the first, one Edward Elvyn, a friend from his student days at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, sued ‘Christopher Marley’ in debt for the unpaid sum of £10 lent to him in London in April 1588. In the second, James Wheatley, a hackney-man from the parish of Allhallows London Wall, brought suit against ‘Christopher Marlo’ in conversion for the non-delivery of a horse and tackle that the latter had hired from him in August 1587. These documents help to fill a yawning gap in Marlowe’s biography by locating him in the theatrical community living around Bishopsgate, in London’s north-east suburbs, immediately after leaving Cambridge on completion of his studies there. His difficulties with the hackney-man are tentatively linked with the horse-courser episode in Doctor Faustus, which, it is suggested, may have implications for the dating of the play. The transgressive nature of Marlowe’s behaviour, as revealed by the new documents, appears to confirm at an early date his reputation as the ‘bad boy’ of Elizabethan theatre.

Cranes

Cranes Hwang Sun-Won (bio) Translated by Peter H. Lee The northern village lay snug beneath the high, bright autumn sky, near the border at the thirty-eighth parallel. White gourds lay one against the other on the dirt floor of an empty farmhouse. Any village elders who passed by extinguished their bamboo pipes first, and the children, too, turned back some distance off. Their faces were marked with fear. As a whole, the village showed little damage from the war, but it still did not seem like the same village Songsam had known as a boy. At the foot of a chestnut grove on the hill behind the village, he stopped and climbed a chestnut tree. Somewhere far back in his mind he heard the old man with a wen shout, "You bad boy, climbing up my chestnut tree again!" The old man must have passed away, for he was not among the few vil-lage elders Songsam had met. Holding on to the trunk of the tree, Songsam gazed up at the blue sky for a time. Some chestnuts fell to the ground as the dry clusters opened of their own accord. A young man stood, his hands bound, before a farmhouse that had been converted into a Public Peace Police office. He seemed to be a stranger, so Songsam went up for a closer look. He was stunned: this young man was none other than his boyhood playmate, Tokchae. Songsam asked the police officer who had come with him from Ch'ont'ae for an explanation. The prisoner was the vice-chairman of the Farmers' Communist League and had just been flushed out of hiding in his own house, Songsam learned. Songsam sat down on the dirt floor and lit a cigarette. Tokchae was to be escorted to Ch'ongdan by one of the Peace Police. After a time, Songsam lit a new cigarette from the first and stood up. "I'll take him with me." Tokchae averted his face and refused to look at Songsam. The two left the village. Songsam went on smoking, but the tobacco had no flavor. He just kept drawing the smoke in and blowing it out. Then suddenly he thought that Tokchae, too, must want a puff. He thought of the days when they shared [End Page 166] dried gourd leaves behind sheltering walls, hidden from the adults' view. But today, how could he offer a cigarette to a fellow like this? Once, when they were small, he went with Tokchae to steal some chest-nuts from the old man with the wen. It was Songsam's turn to climb the tree. Suddenly the old man began shouting. Songsam slipped and fell to the ground. He got chestnut burrs all over his bottom, but he kept on run-ning. Only when the two had reached a safe place where the old man could not overtake them did Songsam turn his bottom to Tokchae. The burrs hurt so much as they were plucked out that Songsam could not keep tears from welling up in his eyes. Tokchae produced a fistful of chestnuts from his pocket and thrust them into Songsam's?…?Songsam threw away the cigarette he had just lit, and then made up his mind not to light another while he was escorting Tokchae. They reached the pass at the hill where he and Tokchae had cut fodder for the cows until Songsam had to move to a spot near Ch'ont'ae, south of the thirty-eighth parallel, two years before the liberation. Songsam felt a sudden surge of anger in spite of himself and shouted, "So how many have you killed?" For the first time, Tokchae cast a quick glance at him and then looked away. "You! How many have you killed?" he asked again. Tokchae looked at him again and glared. The glare grew intense, and his mouth twitched. "So you managed to kill quite a few, eh?" Songsam felt his mind clear-ing itself, as if some obstruction had been removed. "If you were vice-chairman of the Communist League, why didn't you run? You must have been lying low with a secret mission." Tokchae did...

The Intellectual Bully of Baltimore

The Intelectual Bully of Baltimore Richard O'Mara Marion Elizabeth Rodgers , Mencken: The American Iconoclast: The Life and Times of the Bad Boy of Baltimore. Oxford University Press, 2005. 662 pages. $35; Terry Teachout , The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken. HarperCollins, 2002. xviii + 396 pages. Illustrated. $29.95, $15.95 pb. I've been walked through H. L. Mencken's life before, each time convinced the claim has been overworked. Yet each time more is brought forth about the man—how he lived, worked, and related to people; successive biographers, critics, idolaters bore in closer in ten or more works since 1925, much to the reader's interest and the subject's disparagement. William Manchester (Disturber of the Peace) wrote an affectionate tribute. Carl Bode (Mencken) was correct, objectively academic. Terry Teachout (The Skeptic, now available in paperback) may have seized the essence of the man: it was all in the writing. Mencken proved that extraordinary style, when animated by a specific skeptical disposition, could trump substance, even want of it. I have just emerged from Marion Elizabeth Rodgers's long book, jammed with more facts about the man than stones on a shingle beach, but the mystery, to me at least, remains: I don't know for certain why H. L. Mencken was so famous, though I am ready to admit he was, still is. A single fact related by Vincent Fitzpatrick, the scholar and Mencken biographer who keeps the Mencken Room on the third floor in the Enoch Pratt Central Library in downtown Baltimore, persuaded me. According to the sharp-eyed minions of the clipping service Dr. Fitzpatrick employs, Mencken remains the most frequently quoted American author, even today. (Well, it's either he or Mark Twain.) Every year Fitzpatrick fills hundreds of pages of a scrapbook with articles about Mencken or with quotations from his work. In fact, a few years back, while living in Mexico, I sent Fitzpatrick a copy of Mencken's posthumous advice to those who might want to honor his spirit, urging them to "forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." That's what I call staying power. That's what I call global reach. Marion Rodgers worked hard on this book; she seems to have tracked down and talked to every living person who had some kind of connection with Mencken. She read millions of words in libraries and private collections, his dossier in the fbi. Her book, says the blurb on its cover, is "the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and influential men." Why do I think Oscar Wilde? Why do I think The Picture of Dorian Gray? Yet I am grateful to her. Anyone with even the faintest interest in the "Sage of Baltimore," the "Glare of the Sunpapers," or, her preferred epithet, the "Bad Boy of Baltimore," should be as well. Owing to all that industry [End Page 146] she's gotten to things few people knew about before, and she treats more thoroughly incidents only touched upon by other biographers—such as her account of Mencken's brief tenure as editor of the editorial page of the Evening Sun. I never met the man; he died nine years before I landed at the Sunpapers. (This is the way Baltimoreans referred to the two papers published here; they still do, though only the morning paper remains.) My only connection, tenuous indeed, is that I worked for six years on the editorial page whose staff Mencken terrorized during the three months he served as its editor. I have met three, and briefly knew two, of the victims of that horrific tenure: Robin Harriss and Gerald Johnson, a noted Maryland historian whose bust is positioned in the Pratt's soaring Central Hall. Mencken was put in charge by the publisher, Paul Patterson, and told to rattle the Ivory Tower. This he did—and in the process revealed himself as a raging ideologue and vicious propagandist. He thought the staff a pack of second-raters, harried them, rejected their ideas, rewrote their copy, nudged aside those whose opinions, especially on FDR and the New Deal, collided with his. He ordered two of...

Looking for Christopher Marlowe

Looking for Christopher Marlowe Lagretta Tallent Lenker (bio) Riggs, David . 2004. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt and Co.$30.00 hc. 411 pp. Cheney, Patrick , ed. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge University Press. $75.00 hc. $24.99 sc. 312 pp. Honan, Park . Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy. Oxford University Press. $32.50 hc. 421 pp. Renaissance drama continually fascinates our postmodern sensibilities. On the most obvious level, the study and near-worship of all things Shakespearean has grown to the status of an industry, ranging from ever-evolving, highly theoretical scholarship [End Page 213] to play productions (one can hardly call them revivals) and films of varying quality, to the near-theme park atmosphere that surrounds those revered landmarks, the Globe Theater and the Stratford-Upon-Avon properties. It is no wonder that this fascination continues to flourish—Shakespeare plays both exude the hope and joy of life (Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It) and ruminate on the dark, mysterious aspects of human existence (Hamlet and King Lear). And anyone who has read or seen the plays recently realizes that both light and dark elements almost always pervade each play in the tragic-comic milieu that constitutes the hallmark of Shakespeare's art. We find, no doubt, much in these plays that reflects our own postmodern condition, which boasts of near-miraculous advances in technology and science and simultaneously presents scenes of unimaginable horror with the advent of global terrorism. If we examine more closely the Renaissance canon, however, we may conclude that the dramatist whose work more nearly mirrors and recognizes our world of beauty and terror is not the Bard, but his immediate forbearer, Christopher Marlowe. The recognition of this postmodern affinity with the work of the "bad boy" of the Renaissance forms one of several links among the three volumes reviewed in this essay. Each work also acknowledges and participates in a shift in the focus of Marlowe scholarship from the traditional and understandable absorption in Marlowe's sketchy but oh-so-intriguing biography to an attempt to forge a more singularly critical response to his poems and plays. Of course, the persona of the seemingly irredeemable malcontent pervades Marlowe scholarship, consciously or unconsciously; however, these works, two single authored books and a collection of essays, acknowledge this predilection and attempt to overcome its temptation. Yet each work, of necessity, also participates in the murky, uncertain study of a man about whom little is known and much is suspected. In fairness to anyone searching for the historical Marlowe, many barriers exist, including the seven variations on his surname that have been connected with his life and work. To compensate for this troublesome situation, for years critics concentrated on the more sensational aspects of Marlowe's life, his glorious poetry—his "mighty line"—and his singularly important contribution to English prosity—iambic pentameter blank verse. However, beginning in the late 1990s, possibly with Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning (revised in 2002), Renaissance biography (and consequently scholarship) took a different direction. Sometimes labeled "speculative biography," this new approach sanctions the supplementation of historical facts about the subject and his or her writings with plausible explanations of events using general cultural conditions or historical events. This approach unsurprisingly draws fire from purists and praise from contextualists; perhaps the true value lies in the via media, in a blend of appreciation and skepticism [End Page 214] for emphasis on both solid historical knowledge about an individual and the evidence offered by the record of the times in which he or she lived. David Riggs had the ill-fortune to publish The World of Christopher Marlowe soon after the premiere of Stephen Greenblatt's Will and the World. Had the situation been reversed, The World of Christopher Marlowe might have received wider critical acclaim. For while Riggs follows the expected biographer's course of considering the known facts about his subject's life and of linking the circumstances of that life to themes and plot lines of the poems and plays, this biographer also conjectures about how the times in which his subject lived influenced his art. This strategy, also employed...

Serialized citizenships: periodicals, books, and American boys, 1840-1911

Part 1 List of Illustrations Part 2 Acknowledgments Part 3 Introduction Chapter 4 1. Educating Boys for American Citizenship: Jacob Abbott's Contributions to the Youth's Companion Chapter 5 2. Working-Class Boys and Self-Improved Citizenship: George Light's Editorials in the Young American's Magazine of Self-Improvement Chapter 6 3. Typing American Renaissance Boys: Citizenship Compromises in Oliver Optic's The Boat Club Chapter 7 4. Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Postbellum Boyhood Citizenships in Our Young Folks and The Story of a Bad Boy Chapter 8 5. Shall I Be Your Boy?: Conversational Citizenships in the St. Nicholas Serialization of Little Lord Fauntleroy Chapter 9 6. Beeton's Boy's Own Magazine and Boys' Life: Serialized Directions for Boyhood Citizenships in the Twentieth Century Part 10 Works Cited Part 11 Index Part 12 About the Author

Rebels: youth and the Cold War origins of identity

Holden Caulfield, the beat writers, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and James Dean—these and other avatars of youthful rebellion were much more than entertainment. As Leerom Medovoi shows, they were often embraced and hotly debated at the dawn of the Cold War era because they stood for dissent and defiance at a time when the ideological production of the United States as leader of the “free world” required emancipatory figures who could represent America’s geopolitical claims. Medovoi argues that the “bad boy” became a guarantor of the country’s anti-authoritarian, democratic self-image: a kindred spirit to the freedom-seeking nations of the rapidly decolonizing third world and a counterpoint to the repressive conformity attributed to both the Soviet Union abroad and America’s burgeoning suburbs at home. Alongside the young rebel, the contemporary concept of identity emerged in the 1950s. It was in that decade that “identity” was first used to define collective selves in the politicized manner that is recognizable today: in terms such as “national identity” and “racial identity.” Medovoi traces the rapid absorption of identity themes across many facets of postwar American culture, including beat literature, the young adult novel, the Hollywood teen film, early rock ‘n’ roll, black drama, and “bad girl” narratives. He demonstrates that youth culture especially began to exhibit telltale motifs of teen, racial, sexual, gender, and generational revolt that would burst into political prominence during the ensuing decades, bequeathing to the progressive wing of contemporary American political culture a potent but ambiguous legacy of identity politics.

A Dominating Imaginary Friend, Cruelty to Animals, Social Withdrawal, and Growth Deficiency in a 7-year-old Girl with Parents with Schizophrenia

Shapiro, Henry L. M.D.1; Prince, Jefferson B. M.D.2; Ireland, Rachel M.D.3; Stein, Martin T. M.D.4 Author Information

A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl (review)

Reviewed by: A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl Karen Coats Stone, Tanya Lee A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl. Lamb, 2006228p Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90946-2$16.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-74702-0$14.95 Ad Gr. 9-12 A studly senior, initials T. L., prowls his way mercilessly through the halls of a high school, scoping out girls vulnerable to his predatory charm, only to dump them once the relationship is sexually consummated or it becomes obvious that it won't be. His story is told through the affecting free verse of three of his conquests, Josie, Nicolette, and Aviva, each of whom initially insists that she is confident in her own attractiveness and resistant to the games of players like T. L. His first glance, however, turns them into puddles of goo, and they each willfully mistake his attention as an affirmation of their specialness in his universe, ignoring the overheard jibes of his friends and fully believing his made-for-teen-movie lines. Josie, the youngest of the three, is the most self-aware both during and after her seduction, and she decides to "out" T. L. by turning the blank pages at the back of the library copy of Forever into a bulletin board for the burned, directing both Nicolette and Aviva there when it becomes obvious that they have joined that not-very-select club. This is an appealing topic, and Stone creates credible voices for her girls. The message of strength is undercut, though, by tired clichés and stereotypes, especially as the girls, at first so assertive about their empowered sexuality, wilt into needy and deceived victims, and the boys are given no credit for any emotional depth or complexity. Moreover, there is the clear message that this kind of pain is necessary for female emotional growth and that being savvy enough to avoid it is somehow a mark of immaturity, as these girls pity their friends who haven't yet crushed and been crushed. This will nonetheless speak to a large audience of girls willing to martyr themselves on the altar of heartless high-school demigods; recommend it to girls who take grrl rockers' "pain is power" lyrics as their late-night anthems. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The New World (review)

Reviewed by: The New World Leo Killsback (bio) The New World directed by Terrence Malick Based on the previews of this film, I had already set low expectations for The New World. Nevertheless, a group of friends and I went with open minds, open hearts, and happy faces. As anxious as we were to witness this supposed epic, we set aside our biases as young educated Natives for the sake of all the hard work that was put into it, according to HBO. But our anxious departure would not be similar to our anxious arrival. The movie began with wide shots of beautiful coastal and woodland landscapes, an impression of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607: wild, open, free, awaiting the arrival of European civilization. There was no need to introduce the plot because the director must assume that we, the audience, had already watched the Disney version or heard the tall tale in our sixth-grade classrooms. Any introduction would have been repetitive in telling the story from America's earliest folklore, the story of the famous Pocahontas and John Smith. The introduction of John Smith (Colin Farrell) in this version of folklore was quite unique in contrast to his Mel Gibson persona in the Disney version. We learned from the beginning that this John Smith was a renegade, the "bad boy" if you will. Bound in chains and tried for mutiny, the bad Smith character develops into the hero, the savior, the lover boy, and the white male who is easily taken in by the tribe. There is no real difference between this John Smith and John Dunbar in Dances With Wolves. The European arrival to "The New World" is much like the astronauts' arrival on The Planet of the Apes. There seems to be no sign of intelligence. Although there are beings that do possess both human and animal characteristics, for the most part they are as wild as the deer and as pitiful as toddler children in need of guardians. It was a shame to see the Powhatan kingdom, a confederacy that was as advanced and organized as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, depicted as less than human in this twenty-first-century movie. Maybe America's film industry has not yet matured from the old John Wayne days. The random movements of the Powhatan people were akin to those of monkeys, or like the indigenous people depicted in the latest King Kong. They lacked any sophistication or anything human. The Natives, or in The New World's case, the "naturals," wore thick layers of paint throughout the movie, as if they had no concept of bathing, although it is known that bathing was an advanced American Indian hygienic practice that awed even the most civilized of Europeans. Nevertheless, their thick layers of paint may convince audiences that [End Page 197] either Indians wore paint without ever bathing or that they woke up every morning to glob their faces and bodies in frenzies of primitive vanity. And King Powahatan's turkey-feathered crown and raccoon tail robe were not fooling anyone. Just go to any commercial powwow, usually identifiable by the rich sponsoring Indian casino, and watch the blond-haired, blue-eyed dancer wearing the same outfit. These wild paint designs and outfits have no tribal affiliation and serve one purpose: to make people look wild. They should have stopped with the Disney cartoon. The portrayed inferiority of the Natives places them in a category like no other in the existing body of contemporary Indian movies. They spoke, barked, and howled randomly like animals, yet our white hero was still able to decipher their primitive talk. They had no sense of culture, religion, art, or social and political organization, yet the settlement of white males outlasted the ancient civilization as if the whites' innate superiority was enough to topple the primitive kingdom. The Natives had no sense of anything other than hunting, warring, and playing. Their men fought, while their women played, as if the lives of indigenous Americans were no different than those of modern suburban middle-school children. They were generous, unselfish, and honest, something that modern Americans still perceive as primitive or childish. The village scene...

Lactate—The bad boy of metabolism, or simply misunderstood?

Lactate has been studied in great depth, particularly in the field of exercise physiology, yet its role in metabolism remains in many ways an enigma to the physiologists, causes consternation to clinicians and confusion to those in training. The aim of this article is to marry what we know about lactate physiology with its clinical relevance and implications in everyday medical practise. The initial approach to this requires an understanding of basic lactate metabolism from which one can then examine the relevance of high blood lactate (hyperlactataemia); whether this is harmful or beneficial and how it relates to critical illness.

Open Ice (review)

Reviewed by: Open Ice Maggie Hommel Hughes, Pat Open Ice. Lamb, 2005 [288p] Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90906-3$17.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-74675-X$15.95 Reviewed from galleys M Gr. 8-12 A blindside collision on the ice, a blow to the head, and all goes black—and when high-school hockey star Nick regains consciousness, the doctor tells him he'll never be able to play hockey again. For Nick, whose whole life centers on his skill in the rink, this is a devastating blow, and he is determined to play again until ongoing chronic headaches, dizziness, and memory loss make it clear his hockey career is over. Resentful and belligerent, Nick suffers from and exacerbates the consequences of his injury: his hottie girlfriend dumps him, he isolates himself from teammates, his grades plummet, and he lashes out at his family. Athletes facing similar challenges may find solace in reading about another's experiences, even if they don't identify with the protagonist's personal path. Nick, however, remains basically shallow and [End Page 186] self-absorbed to the end, despite his range of emotions, and his whininess, failure to consider anyone other than himself, and bizarre, racially insensitive outbursts prevent the reader from sympathizing. The text is stiff, with awkward dialogue and stock characters, and attempted teen edginess in the form of brand-name references and locker-room leering misses the mark. Nor is there much ice hockey action to liven the plot, since the book begins at the point of Nick's injury. Steer readers to more winning hockey reads such as Lynch's Iceman, Crutcher's The Crazy Horse Electric Game (BCCB 5/87), or Wieler's Bad Boy (BCCB 4/92). Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

From Bad Boy to Dead Boy: Homophobia, Adolescent Problem Fiction, and Male Bodies that Matter

In her contribution to a special issue of Canadian Children’s Literature on “Transgressing Gender Norms in Canadian Young Adult Fiction” (2002), Paulette Rothbauer offers an insightful overview of Canadian young adult novels that feature gay and lesbian characters as part of the issue’s overall goal to examine the range of “imaginative possibilities for gendered behaviour” (Findon 6) available in the larger group of books. This overview becomes more revealing when read alongside Kenneth Kidd’s introduction to his guest-edited issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly on “Lesbian/Gay Literature for Children and Young Adults” (1998): noting the strong compatibility between coming out and the conventions of young adult fi ction, Kidd notes that “close to one hundred” young adult titles (114) with gay and lesbian characters had been published in the U.S. and in Britain since John Donovan’s groundbreaking novel I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969). But Rothbauer’s list of such novels published in Canada totals only 15 titles, all published between 1989 and 2001, with a total of 26 central or supporting gay and lesbian characters (either adolescents or adults). Reminding us that “the presence and the

Book Review: Bad Boy of Gospel Music: The Calvin Newton Story

Book Review: Bad Boy of Gospel Music: The Calvin Newton Story

Removing Knowledge

Removing Knowledge

The English Expressions Good Boy and Good Girl and Cultural Models of Child Rearing

The expressions good boy and good girl are widely used in Anglo parental speech directed at children to praise them for their actions. Used in this way, these expressions have no equivalents in other European languages. In tracing the history of these expressions, and their negative counterparts bad boy and bad girl, this paper seeks to show that they reflect a unique cultural model of child rearing, which links evaluation of a child’s behaviour with evaluation of the child him- or herself. It is argued that this model, which might seem natural and universal, but which is in fact culture-specific, has its roots in England’s and America’s Puritan past. Using the NSM semantic methodology, the paper explores the changes and continuities in this cultural model against the backdrop of broad linguistic usage.

Use and Disposal of Uranyl Acetate in the Electron Microscope Laboratory: Glow in the Dark or Walk in the Park?

Abstract Let's face it—uranyl acetate is the perennial bad boy of chemicals, at least from the standpoint of disposal. A necessary evil in the electron microscopy laboratory, it presents a quandary for those trying to comply with hazardous materials regulalions, an effort complicated by its nominal radioactivity. Disposal costs of radioactive materials can be daunting. A past posting to the Microscopy Society of America listserver gave an estimate of US$7000 per liter and local follow up indicated that, although probably high, that may not be an unreasonable figure. In these times of diminished subsidies and expectations of increased cost recovery by academic service facilities like ours, this is of paramount concern. The Electron Microscopy Core Facility at the University of Missouri-Columbia follows guidelines issued by our campus Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) office regarding hazardous materials and their disposal.

Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-Bellum Boyhood Citizenships in Our Young Folks and The Story Of A Bad Boy

Necessary Badness:Reconstructing Post-Bellum Boyhood Citizenships in Our Young Folks and The Story Of A Bad Boy Lorinda B. Cohoon (bio) "This is the Story of a Bad Boy. Well, not such a very bad, but a pretty bad boy; and I ought to know, for I am, or rather I was, that boy myself." —Aldrich, The Story of A Bad Boy, 1869 In the United States during the last years of the twentieth century, many non-fiction texts about boys were published. Best-selling titles included Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men (1996), William Pollack's Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (1999).1 Insisting that boys are "wired differently" (Gurian 45) and that they are in "serious trouble" (Pollack xix), these arguably misogynistic texts critique the presence of women in the workplace and blame feminism for boys' violence in schools and for their "bad" behavior in other social arenas. In "Boyology in the Twentieth Century," Kenneth Kidd finds that in the early twentieth century there was a similar proliferation of manuals that addressed, much as do their late twentieth-century counterparts, the nature/nurture makeup of boys and the best methods of raising them.2 "Naturally bad" boyhoods seem to be one of the most prevalent late twentieth-century constructions of boyhood. Often, these texts embrace "literary" and "cultural" myths and use them to provide evidence for society's crimes against boys.3 How did these "bad" American boy constructions get put into place, and in what ways are the best-selling manuals connected to the American boyhoods of children's literature? Partly because of the use of the literary bad boy to construct narratives about American boyhood and partly because of how these narratives resist the progress of the feminist project, it is important to examine the history of these literary bad boys and to find out about their [End Page 5] links to ongoing constructions of boyhood citizenship. The history of inquiring into the nature of boys goes back further than the early twentieth-century and some of this history can be found in texts written, not for parents, but for boys. Conventionally, overviews of American children's literature have defined boyhood as ahistorically stable. Histories of children's literature provide some records of how American boyhood has been "textually" constructed, but well-known works about American boys such as Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have become the definitive sites for explaining literary American boyhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 In Rediscoveries in Children's Literature, Suzanne Rahn notes this problem when she argues, "[t]he effect of focusing all serious attention on a small number of books and authors is to diminish awareness of the richness and variety of children's literature. It becomes impossible to grasp the development of children's literature, or the context in which individual books were written" (xv-xvi). American bad boyhood then has a history that is tied to literary histories and, specifically, to histories of children's literature. From Hawkeye to Huck Finn and from Holden Caulfield to Newcharlie in Jacqueline Woodson's award winning Miracle's Boys, bad boy characters continue to construct powerful versions of boyhood in the United States.5 Using an interdisciplinary approach informed by post-structuralist, feminist, and cultural theories, this article investigates Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy, a lesser-known boys' text that was serialized in a children's periodical during the 1860s, as a location to begin to uncover the complex construction processes behind the ongoing packaging of American boyhoods as bad. Aldrich's text focuses mostly on white, middle-class boyhood, and it constructs American boyhood as arising from this limited group. During the post-bellum era, there were, of course, many other kinds of boyhoods being lived and experienced in the United States. The bad boy, in its white middle-class permutation, however, has influenced ongoing constructions of boyhood and has spread this influence to...

Transitions

Transitions Roberta Seelinger Trites Four years ago, in the first issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly that Joel Chaston, Anita Tarr, and I edited (Vol. 25, No. 2), I made this comment in the introductory editorial: "The Quarterly will continue to serve as a compass for scholars, helping the field explore new territories that include balancing poststructural theory with other forms of scholarship while striving always to continue this journal's tradition of supporting all aspects of the study of children's literature" (66). I believe we've met that promise, both in ways we had anticipated and in ways we had not. For example, since 2000, the Quarterly has had seven special issues. They have been on psychoanalytic theory, the Golden Age of children's literature, poetry, narrative theory, multiculturalism, children's book publishing, and international children's literature. Some of those special issues were guest edited; some were compiled by groupings of essays on similar topics that arrived in our offices simultaneously. The special issues have ranged from traditional topics in our field to poststructural theory in its most highly articulated form. The general issues, too, have covered broad spectrums. One issue ranges from John Morgenstern's revisionist history of the relationship between literacy and publishing to Dara Rossman Regaignon's post-colonial reading of Mary Martha Sherwood; another ranges from Naomi Wood's symbolic reading of a Virginia Hamilton novel to Judith Robertson's Lacanian reading of Harry Potter. Phoenix award winners, including Peter Dickinson and Zibby Oneal, have shared their acceptance speeches with us; Francelia Butler Lecturers Gillian Adams and Anne Scott McLeod have, too. Articles in this journal won awards from the Children's Literature Association, including Karen Coats' essay in 2000, "P is for Patriarchy: Re-Imaging the Alphabet" (88-97), Charles Butler's essay in 2001, "Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of 'Tam Lin'" (74-83), and Sharon Smulders' in 2002 with "'The Only Good Indian': History, Race, and Representation in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie" (191-202). This issue includes the range of scholarship that typifies our general issues. "Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia," by Jean E. Graham, is a feminist reading of the literary influences on C.S. Lewis. Amanda Rogers Jones' "The Narnian [End Page 1] Schism: Reading the Christian Subtext as Other in the Children's Stories of C. S. Lewis" deconstructs the tensions created by Christianity in the Narnia Chronicles. Lorinda Cohoon brings historical theory to bear in reading how masculinity was constructed in the nineteenth century in "Necessary Badness: Reconstructing Post-Bellum American Citizenship Through Boyhood in Our Young Folks and The Story Of A Bad Boy." Nathalie op de Beeck relies on feminist theory to read the conservative agenda at work in Lurlene McDaniel's novels in "Sixteen and Dying": Lurlene McDaniel's Fantasies of Mortal Endangerment." Aparna Gollapudi demonstrates the relationship between semiotics and the depiction of the oral tale in "Show and Tell: The Visual Evocation of Orality in Peter Sís's A Small Tall Tale From The Far Far North." Given my vantage point as an editor over the last five years, I can see some scholarly evolutions in the recent past that help place in context the variety of scholarship in our field. When I first served as editor elect in 1999, poststructural theorists often felt they needed to apologize for their stance or explain their reasons for relying on their methodology, as Mike Cadden does in his 2000 essay "The Irony of Narration in the Young Adult Novel" (146-154). Sometimes, they felt the need to justify the pertinence of those theories' applicability to the corpus of children's literature, as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs does in her 2000 essay, "'Body Language': Speaking the féminine in Young Adult Fiction" (76-87). Few people spoke about children's studies in the twentieth century, although now the term is a commonplace in the field. Where literary critics were once decrying the lack of respect children's literature earned in their departments (as Peter Hunt did at the Nashville conference on Critical Approaches to Children's Literature, March 26...

Theorising Inner-city Masculinities: 'Race', class, gender and education

Inner-city boys continue to be stereotypically associated with a range of social and educational 'problems', despite feminist calls for more nuanced and complex analyses to be undertaken of the racialised and classed aspects of masculinities. This article engages with the question of how to theorise diverse, working-class male pupils' masculinities within an inner-city, multicultural context. Data drawn from discussions with boys at one inner-city London school are used to illustrate the boys' complex constructions of 'culturally entangled' masculinities. Particular attention is given to the boys' constructions of 'bad boy' masculinities that are positioned in opposition to education and which we discuss in relation to themes of hegemony, patriarchy and racial/class inequalities.

Lysophosphatidic acid, LPA: a bad boy becomes good

The biologically active growth factor LPA has gained broad interest after it was proposed as a possible marker for ovarian cancer [1]. Although much is known about LPA signaling, its physiological and pathological relevance remains unclear. Recent data from Tokumura et al. [2-4] may change our perception of LPA and cause LPA researches to focus on its physiological aspects. LPA functions may also be reflected in the expression of LPA producing enzyme lysophospholipase D (LPLD), which is increased in serum and correlates with the progress of pregnancy [2,3]. Recent exciting data, from the same and other groups, has recognized this enzyme as autotaxin, a cell motility stimulating phosphodiesterase implicated in tumor progression [3,5,6]. At first glance, it may appear contradictory that a factor associated with tumor progression may serve normal physiological functions [7]. To appreciate this better the normal physiology of reproductive systems should be contemplated. Only a few tissues are known to grow under normal physiological conditions and notable among these are the ovary, endometrium, placenta and the growing syncytiotrophoblast. Growth and differentiation of the ovary and endometrium (/placenta) is accompanied by processes which have been likened to inflammation and wound-healing. Unfortunately, these aspects of LPA biology appear to focus the interest of reproductive biologists and gynecologists only, and not the rest of the scientific community. Not only, are reproductive systems part of normal physiological function, but also they provide amenable models for the study of controlled growth and differentiation. May be we should accept that the pathological role of LPA could be a reflection of its physiological functions. In this perspective, Autotaxin may presumably take center stage in future drug discovery associated not only with cancer treatment but also with fertility control. Figure 1 Secretory ecto-phospholipases produce biologically active lipid, lysophosphatidic acid (LPA). LPA should be released into extracellular fluid to signal through its specific G-protein coupled receptor (LP-R) [7]. Secretory ecto-enzymes like Lysophospholipase ...