ABSTRACT
We believe that with this collection of articles the groundwork has been laid for future studies of children’s folklore. The articles themselves vary between older or newer approaches to the discipline—in that respect they are fairly representative of the field as it currently stands—and they also indicate the areas in which more work needs to be done. In an attempt to advance the field, we begin this final chapter by analyzing past scholarship before preceding with suggestions for future directions. Mechling, for example, is confident that the “interpretive” trend will become the major force in children’s folklore; that we will have more studies like those of Beresin and Hughes of specific children in specific places and in consequence a more multifarious set of children’s subcultures—and less children’s folklore composed simply of collections or only of an historical kind. The authors in this Sourcebook are split about evenly among traditional, ethnographic, performance, and interpretive kinds of approach.
