Continuing the Tradition Richard Flynn Many years back when I was a graduate student writing my dissertation, the director of that dissertation, Judith Plotz, got me involved in the children's literature field and in ChLA. It began with her suggestion that I send my chapter on Jarrell's children's books to Barbara Rosen and Margaret Higonnet, who were then the editors of the annual. My experience with those tough but very helpful editors left no question in my mind that this children's literature business was serious business. Patiently but firmly, Barbara and Margaret guided me through seven rewrites. Somewhere in the middle of this process, I began attending the children's literature sessions at MLA. The first paper I heard there—delivered by the brilliant Mitzi Myers—confirmed the intellectual rigor of the field for me. When I had finished the dissertation but was not yet employed full-time in the academy, I sat in on Judith's inaugural class in children's literature at George Washington University as a kind of unofficial teaching assistant, and later that same year, with her encouragement, I presented my first paper at the ChLA in Charleston. While I don't go back as far as some in this organization, I do go back far enough to have a complete run of the Quarterly beginning with volume 12—which means I have seen the journal under the direction of the following very impressive editors: Perry Nodelman, Rod McGills, Gillian Adams, Marilynn Olson, and most recently Roberta Trites. I hope that the journal under my editorship will live up to the examples set by these fine predecessors. The arrival of a new issue of the Quarterly in the mail has always been a welcome event for me as a reader. The journal has consistently featured lively, provocative, and sometimes even controversial articles and columns. With its blend of solid historical scholarship and cutting edge theory, its illuminating special issues, and in the debates that sometimes span several issues, the Quarterly has always been eclectic in its concerns and demanding in its standards. Our inaugural issue continues this tradition. In "A Boy and his Dog: Canine Companions and the Proto-Erotics of Youth," Eric Tribunella examines boy-dog stories such as Old Yeller through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis, John Bowlby's attachment theory, and queer theory in order to examine what these books tell us about children's affective social relationships. At the same time, he argues, these books have a "disciplinary" function in promoting [End Page 149] socially acceptable gendered and sexual subjectivity, and, perhaps most provocatively, they provide the childreader with sexual/textual pleasure (the "proto-erotics" of his subtitle). Sally Stokes's study of the cross-cultural and intertextual reworkings of The Secret Garden in Noel Streatfeild's "Hollywood book," The Painted Garden (published in abridged form in the United States as Movie Shoes) is a fascinating account of both Streatfeild's creative process and an interesting slice of an historical moment in American popular culture seen through British eyes. K.A. Nuzum's "The Monster's Sacrifice" demonstrates through deft readings of Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, M.T. Anderson's Thirsty, Annette Curtis Klause 's Blood and Chocolate, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that the monster figure operates in liminal and mythic time, but is exiled from the realm of historic time. The reader's vicarious entry into the liberating and amoral realm of the mythic and the liminal is ultimately counterbalanced by his or her eventual yearning for a return to the realm of the linear. Our awareness of historicity, Nuzum argues, is ultimately what makes human existence meaningful. Finally, the Quarterly's interest in children's cultural studies continues with Regina Buccola's materialist feminist analysis of Kenner's Dusty and Skye dolls, which were marketed somewhat unsuccessfully in the 1970s. Paradoxically, while the dolls reflected the breaking down of cultural and gender stereotypes that began in the'70s, the very features that marked the dolls as "lesbian" contributed to their failure in the market-place. Buccola's skillful account of the cultural complexities...