ABSTRACT
The premise of this collection of essays about imaginative texts directed to young people is that these fictions are sites where children, importantly, can be and sometimes are figured as rulers. But the subheading of the volume, Where Children Rule, also implies that there is something odd about the conjunction of children and ruling, that the coincidence of the two ideas is necessarily bounded by a specific and limited location, a “where,” but perhaps also by other conditions of possibility. In addressing the question of the relation of children, rule, and children’s literature, it is the unexpectedness of the conjunction from which we want to begin. Can children rule? How can the two ideas be thought together? What, if anything, is the relation of the ideas of children’s rule to the development of literature designed for children?
