‘Research’ in children’s literature, ‘scholarly work,’ ‘academic writing – these terms could suggest multiple approaches to the phenomena grouped under the species ‘children’s and youth literature’ around the world. One might expect that regional patterns, various kinds of group diaspora, and the migrating identities of readers would produce a variegated, loosely affiliated and multiply intersecting set of discourses as a resource for understanding texts and processes in this field. Yet the fate of elephants – their very abundance in the small territories available for their sustenance as a factor in their projected disappearance – provides a cautionary fable for critics. Elephants need too many trees, too much space. They forage until a landscape is barren.

Academics resemble elephants because once we pass over a trail the force of our jargons, assumptions and practices leaves a chewed-up sameness in its wake. Only the large sweeps of similarity, the lingua franca of key theoretical positions, move through the thickets of children’s books and turn them into savannas or plains. Local knowledges, innovative questioning, and densely textured analyses seem irrelevant in a commodified critical world. The act of recognition, the one-time aesthetic experience, the specific historical memory, becomes difficult to record or relay.

Examples of the problem are many. Three that I will examine are:

1. attention to agency and possibilities for preserving the stories of a culture in transition (e.g. the worth of written records produced by members of colonizing groups, such as missionaries or teachers working with aboriginal peoples)

2. activist narratives and witness poetry and fables absent from or scarcely codified in discourses preoccupied by deterministic forces (e.g. assumptions about childhood as ‘separate’ space from politics)

3. changing practices of canonical writers undergoing personal and cultural change well after reputations are established (e.g. the turn of a writer like Katherine Paterson from ‘literary’ patterns to direct observation of children’s lives as a muse for her later work)

It is my hope that raising a series of questions based on key examples of ‘what’s out’ as critical method will help us to decide how (or whether) elephants can live or let live in a multiply enlivened discursive world of children’s literature studies.

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