The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's Literature

This journal considers all aspects of children's and young adult literature: critical analysis, authorship, illustration, publishing, as well as social and cultural influences."<i>The Looking Glass: new perspectives in children's literature</i> (ISSN 1551-5680) is typical of these journals. First published as a set of webpages in 1997, its parent organization was the Toronto Centre for the Study of Children's Literature (TCSCL), then housed at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. From July 1998, it was independent of any institutional support and was published by volunteers in the United States. In 2007 La Trobe University in Australia began providing hosting and technical support, utilising the [now de-commissioned] OJS open access journal system.Its provenance is in the desire of its world-wide community to present scholarship of children's and young adult literature. It has no budget, no funding, the general editor lives and works in Australia, and has never actually met the two major sub-editors who are in Texas and Virginia respectively. This identity immediately highlights several features of academic discourse inherent in the open access movement.Firstly, it is produced by a community of interested scholars across the world, not a formal body located in a particular place or institutional structure. There is no external authority that might be attached to the journal by representing an academic organization. Instead, its focus is the open exchange of perspectives, analyses, and readings from that community of interested scholars and practitioners.Secondly, its subject area of children's literature is one often ignored or even rejected as worthy of serious attention by the traditional bastions of academic discourse. "It is not," the view seems, "real literature!" when any politician, pop star or princess is able to produce and publish children's books. If they are not just exercises in Disneyfied merchandising (this view holds), then they must be earnest tools for teaching morals, literacy, behaviour, attitudes, indeed anything that adults feel children should have. Virtually all university teaching in children's literature is part of either education or librarianship courses. Rarely is it seen as a discipline study, of aesthetic, artistic creation, in its own right.Therefore, in its aim to contribute to academic discourse, The Looking Glass faces major conceptual and attitudinal barriers, and these are largely defined by the traditional definition of 'academic discourse'."-- Above summary taken from <i>"Open Access and Web 2.0 in the Academy: Changing and Exchanging Scholarship in Children's Literature"</i> by David Beagley - see https://doi.org/10.26181/22200340.v1