Our first encounters with literature take place in childhood, an age saturated with narratives that range from lullabies and hymns, fairy tales and bedtime stories, alphabets and how-to books, jokes and comic strips, beginning readers and school stories, to novels of fantasy, science fiction, and adventure. As children we listen to many different stories, become acquainted with their rhythms, learn to read narratives and create our own. As adults, we continue this literary tradition through our customs, deep-rooted and beloved, of nurturing, educating, and entertaining children. These customs, and the practices they engender, have profoundly influenced social structures and cultural mores throughout the ages. Indeed, the literature of childhood both establishes the foundations of literacy and interacts with literary history in general.

—from the Preface

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Jack Zipes (Ph.D. Columbia University), General Editor, is a professor of German at the University of Minnesota. In addition to his scholarly work on children’s literature, he is an award-winning storyteller in public schools and has worked with various children’s theaters. His major publications include Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2000), Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry (1997), Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994), The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (1988), and Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (1983).

Lissa Paul (Ph.D. York University), Associate General Editor, is a professor of education at Brock University. She is the author of Reading Otherways (1998), which was a finalist for the F. Harvey Darton Award for historical criticism. Her work on children’s literature has appeared in Signal, The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and The Horn Book, among others, and she is a co-editor of the children’s literature journal The Lion and the Unicorn.

Lynne Vallone (Ph.D. SUNY Buffalo), Associate General Editor, is a professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she teaches children’s and young adult literature. She is the author of Becoming Victoria (2001) and Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1995) and the co-editor of Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment (1999) and The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915 (1994).

Peter Hunt (Ph.D. University of Wales) is a professor of English at Cardiff University, the first specialist in children’s literature to be so appointed in a British university. He is the editor of Blackwell Guides to Literature: Children’s Literature (2000), Children’s Literature: An Anthology, 1801–1903 (2000), and An Introduction to Children’s Literature (1994), as well as nine other books on the subject. His works of fiction include A Step off the Path (1985), Backtrack (1986), and Fay Cow and the Missing Milk (1989).

Gillian Avery is a historian of children’s literature based in Oxford. She is the author of Childhood’s Pattern (1975) and Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621–1922 (1994), as well as co-editor of Children and their Books (1989) and Representations of Childhood Death (2000). She was chairman of the Children’s Books History Society from 1987 to 1990.