SOURCE: "Varieties of Children's Metafiction," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Fall 1985, pp. 79-92.

In the following essay, Moss includes How Many Miles to Babylon? in a discussion of the effectiveness of self-referential qualities in children's fiction.

"It's because she wants it told," he thought, "so that people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth."

So ruminates Faulkner's brooding Quentin Compson as he listens to the aged and tiny Miss Rosa Coldfield tell him of the demonic Thomas Sutpen's violent struggles to establish a dynasty and to...