Introduction

This article presents the handbook's purposes and organization, and then briefly outlines some of the field's history, highlighting a number of key principles and important scholarly works. Finally, it turns to important issues related to four general rubrics. These rubrics, which serve as the structuring apparatus for the handbook, emerged organically from the essays and point to key areas of inquiry in children's literature study: Adults and Children's Literature; Pictures and Poetics; Reading History/Learning Race and Class; and Innocence and Agency. The discussion of these categories is designed to introduce the essays that are grouped under each of these rubrics (chronologically within each thematic section) and to situate the issues they raise within scholarship and literary history. The essays collected serve less to demarcate the field of children's literature than to push at the generic and gatekeeping boundaries that cordon off "children's literature" as a field of study.