page 106 CCL/LCJ: Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 34.1 (2008) Have children—their voices, worldviews, cultures, and reading and writing practices—been glaringly absent from the academic study of children’s literature as literature? Without doubt. Should they continue to be thus marginalized? Defnitely not. Do adults need to respect children and children’s own cultures more? Most certainly. Can an academy substantially transformed through poststructuralist, postcolonial, postmodern, reader-response, feminist, and queer theories now come to accommodate new ways of thinking about children and their reading and writing? Possibly. But also, I suspect, slowly, in a culture in which children remain second-class citizens, members of a sub-species of the human race, and consequently in which children’s literature (dismissed as “kitty litter” by one of my award- winning colleagues) does not always receive the academic respect it deserves. Do children’s writings have “tant à apporter” (Chapleau 123) to the study of children’s literature? Perhaps. But that is something we do not know . . . because we have not yet paid attention. Would paying serious attention to children’s writing and reading destabilize or enrich traditional adult academic study of children’s literature? Hopefully both. But what precisely is that “so much” that children’s writing can bring to children’s literature? What is the “so much” that we adults can discover there? Need a study of children’s writing be limited to the juvenilia of canonical adult authors? Of course not. Will all children’s writing be equally worthy of study? No. Can children’s writing be relevant to children’s literature? Perhaps, but what writing, approached in what ways, by whom, how, and to what ends? “Écriture enfantine” or “littérature enfantine” or both? As a window for adults into the secret corners of children’s lives? As What Children’s Writing? Read by Whom, How, and To What Ends? —Peter E. Cumming