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Introduction to the Editor's Column: Surveying Our Spacious Field

Lesley Peterson
This essay introduces the Editor's Column of JJS 7.2, which brings together six short papers on the theme, "Surveying Our Spacious Field." I explain that these papers are all based on talks given in June 2025 during the interdisciplinary symposium “Discovering, Working in, and Creating Collections” that was held at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and organized by Laurie Langbauer.

What Do We Mean by Literary Juvenilia?

Lesley Peterson
This essay is part of this issue's Editor's Column on the theme "Surveying Our Spacious Field." It notes that scholars who study writing by young people may value different things: some look for writing that seems exceptional, others for writing that seems representative. Literary juvenilia studies is a diverse scholarly community with the potential to challenge and expand current definitions of literature as well as current approaches to literature by children.

En Plein Air: Examining Child Art in Our Open Field

Victoria Ford Smith
This essay is part of this issue's Editor's Column on the theme "Surveying Our Spacious Field." Scholars working on the cultural productions of children use a variety of disciplinary approaches and deploy a spectrum of terms to describe our practices: juvenilia studies, childhood studies, and studies of child-produced culture, for example. Rather than arguing for one approach or definition, this essay celebrates the openness of our field and reflects on benefits of applying diverse methodologies. As a case study, it explores four exhibits of child art that Stieglitz staged in his famous 291 gallery in New York City between 1912 and 1916, now held in the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Catching Young Writers in the Act of Becoming

Sarah Schaefer Walton
This short essay, a contribution to the issue's Editor's Column on the theme "Surveying Our Spacious Field," considers what we miss when juvenilia slip past our notice. Drawing on experiences with John Murray’s early travel writings and the challenges of teaching literature to contemporary students, the essay argues that juvenilia studies foster empathy, broaden literary engagement, and make space for students to see their own developing voices reflected in the past. Embracing youthful writing invites a more dynamic, inclusive understanding of literary history.

Marking Up the Weirdness; or, TEI Is for Grown-Ups

David C. Hanson
This essay, part of this issue's Editor's Column on the theme "Surveying Our Spacious Field," considers some of the issues faced by editors of juvenilia tasked with crafting a representation of young authors’ texts. Referring to examples from John Ruskin's juvenilia, I argue that one of our standard tools for Web-based digital representation of text, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), while essential to digital humanities, is better suited for encoding the originals of child writers’ print sources than for representing the playfulness of their unconventional interpretations. In Early Ruskin Manuscripts (ERM), the category of Ruskin’s imitative play that has most frustrated a TEI solution is his punctuation.

History through Children's Writing

Sara R. Danger
This essay is part of the issue's Editor's Column on the theme "Surveying Our Spacious Field." It notes that fragments of youth writing do not simply appear; they find their way—sometimes long after their creation—into the hands of various audiences (readers, editors, collectors, publishers), where meaning is created through shifting interpretive lenses. I ask what is revealed when we take seriously the fragmentary, time-bound nature of youth writing: its composition within fleeting developmental stages, its mediation through adult frameworks, and the material and cultural forces that govern how it is produced, preserved, or forgotten. In attending to these layers, I am less concerned with pinning down fixed values or qualities of youth-authored texts as static artifacts. Rather, when read through the entangled conditions of their creation—developmental, institutional, material, and cultural—youth-authored texts resurface as dynamic, time-bound (and time-bending) embodied acts of authorship. Reading youth-authored texts as acts rather than artifacts challenges us to move beyond recovering what youth writing is, toward understanding what it does: how it registers and resists the forces that shape it, and how it invites us to reconceptualise authorship itself as a temporally situated, embodied, and relational act.

Authenticity and Artificiality: Juvenilia in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Anna Redcay
This essay, part of this issue's Editor's Column on the theme "Surveying Our Spacious Field," argues that contemplating juvenilia’s attributes and our perceptions of them can, in turn, offer rewarding opportunities for reflection on our scholarly practices. The essay poses a set of queries meant to generate conversation about how we select and value juvenilia, how we frame our analysis of this literary or artistic production, and how we name our own habits of engagement with children and the works they produce.

Finding Children’s Creations in the Archives: Methodological Considerations for Scholars

Elliott Kuecker
This essay discusses the methodological complications in conducting archival research to locate the cultural productions of children from the past. I argue that the struggle to locate things created by children in archives, which scholars within juvenilia studies and the related field of childhood studies frequently lament, is likely due to the limitations of archives themselves, as well as the bibliographic standards that archives follow in describing their materials. In addition to analysing where these methodological obstacles originate, I also elaborate on archival search strategies specifically for researchers seeking traces of children from the past.

What’s Happening: A Magazine by 1960s-1970s Young New Yorkers

Amy Fish
This Spotlight essay explores a recently acquired collection of writings and drawings by primarily Black teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s United States. Held by the Gottesman Libraries of Columbia University’s Teachers College, the papers of What’s Happening: An Independent Student Voice include twenty-two issues of a youth-produced magazine that circulated across and beyond New York City, as well as related correspondence and photographs. I discuss the magazine’s influence, the demanding process of its creation, and the heartfelt correspondence exchanged by its creators. Through a close reading of single contribution to What’s Happening, a 1968 comic by Robert Jackson, I explore how the magazine’s authors conceived of their own acts of creation and exchange.

A Record of Her School Days: The Diary of Nancy McClellan King

Mohala Kaliebe
This Spotlight essay describes Nancy McClellan King's 1915 diary, written in Record of My School Days, a record book printed in the early twentieth century specifically for girls to write about their time in secondary school. The book provides a structure within which Nancy writes and against which she pushes back, renegotiating the allotted space within the record book, making room for a 24-stanza ode to her time at school entitled, simply, “Poem I Made Up.” To read this Record is to watch a young author employ her own agency to adapt and assert herself within models provided for her by adults: the material structure of the book, the literary traditions of her education, and even the expected linear progression of time.

Reviews / Jane Austen. “Edgar and Emma” and “Amelia Webster.” Edited by Juliet McMaster, with Adela Burke and Aaron Mazo. Illustrations by Juliet McMaster. Juvenilia Press, 2020 / Alexandra Zapruder, editor. Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. 2002. Revised edition, Yale UP, 2015

Elaine Bander and Cristina Pividori