ABSTRACT
The scholar of children’s literature is also “Cinderella.” That complex tale of transformation and destiny tells how the scholar in rags schemes and dreams to regain a lost patrimony, a place at the table. Alison Lurie may have been the first to use the trope in her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, in which the heroine is a children’s literature scholar devalued by her colleagues. Lurie writes:
For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department-indeed, in most English departments: a step-daughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table-though to judge by enrollment figures, many of them would spout toads and lizards.1
