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Article Excerpt
In reading these three disciplinary-based essays, I can't help noticing how they share a subtle concern with status and ownership. Surely this concern is inspired by the obsession with the marketplace that informs the study of children's literature in the United States, regardless of where that study is housed. Universities are underfunded; public education is underfunded; libraries are underfunded--and that situation is replicated in far too many countries around the world. Buried beneath the complex layers that these scholars explore is a fundamental concern about living in a culture that devalues both children and books. Why, then, shouldn't children's literature perpetually feel itself to be at risk, since unfunded mandates such as No Child Left Behind have shifted the value placed on children's literature closer to commodification than ever before? Perhaps one reason children's literature scholars have not worked in full interdisciplinary cooperation heretofore has been that we have often been competing for limited resources. Certainly, some of the turf wars and defensiveness that these authors allude to arise from the sense of operating in an environment of scarcity: scarcity of funding, of...

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