Editors' Introduction
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This issue of The Lion and the Unicorn includes six essays that address a wide range of children's and adolescent texts, from the use of voice in identity formation in George MacDonald's fantasy novels, to the postcolonial perspective on Greenland's Inuit and their Scandinavian colonizers offered in Mette Newth's historical fiction. A quick review of the titles of the essays on the back cover of the journal might suggest six independent essays, but there is a surprising amount of overlapping critical concerns posed by the authors. These essays fit together surprisingly well and the authors speak to one another at many junctures.
Megan Norcia, Rocío Davis, and Christina Desai examine the production of ethnic and national identity. Similar to Norcia and Davis, Hilary Crew shows how contemporary children's and adolescent texts are used to revise, or reintroduce, cultural histories that have been concealed or erased. Karen Keely discusses how a popular children's author used her children's texts and public personality to promote social issues.
Ruth Jenkins traces the use of voice and language in shaping adolescent identity formation in George MacDonald's Princess books, while Desai analyzes how Allen Say's illustrations in The Boy of the Three-Year Nap, El Chino, and Emma's Rug provide a subtle and oftentimes ironic gloss to texts' exploration of the Asian American experience. Using Laurence Yep's Dragonwings as her primary example, Davis studies the ways contemporary Asian American writers use historical fiction to empower children through messages of validation and self-representation. Confronting aspects of a concealed historical past is also at the heart of Crew's study of issues of colonialism in Mette Newth's harrowing young adult novels The Abduction and The Transformation. Using the frame of Postcolonial Studies, Crew shows how the Norwegian author constructs a history that is absent from the discussion of Robert Peary and his arctic expeditions in most informational books published for younger readers. Keely's essay provides a careful historical [End Page v] contextualization of the ways in which Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy use the adventures in an orphanage to enter the public discussion and debate concerning the use of eugenics. Keely shows how Webster was a moderate in her approach to eugenics and sought to improve environments, but also supported laws mandating involuntary sterilization and segregation of the mentally disabled. Norcia reads L. T. Meade's Four on an Island as a clever revision of the adventure tale, as popularized by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and numerous subsequent Robinsonnades, as a domestic enterprise featuring the female Adventurous Angel as Crusoe's appropriate heir in the process of empire building through the maintenance of domestic space.
These form a lively group of essays that provide surprising and new ways of thinking about children's and adolescent texts. We thank the authors for contributing them to L&U.
In February 2004, the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education chose to feature Kevin Shortsleeve's "The Wonderful World of the Depression: Disney, Despotism, and the 1930s: Or, Why Disney Scares Us," which appeared in the January 2004 issue of L&U, as one of its scholarly articles of the day. Shortly after the publication of the April 2004 L&U special issue on "Children and Science Fiction" edited by Janice Bogstad and Michael Levy, it was pleasant to open up the May 2004 issue of PMLA and find a special issue on "Science Fiction and Literary Studies." Great journals think alike.
L&U is working on a couple of other special issues in the future. These include one on "Handmade Literacies," edited by Michael Joseph and Lissa Paul, and another based on papers from the Children's Literature International Summer School and Symposium, edited by Kimberley Reynolds.
Perhaps one day PMLA will publish a special issue on "Children's Literature and Literary Studies." Maybe if the editors at PMLA read L&U editorial board member Beverly Lyon Clark's Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America (Johns Hopkins, 2003), they will.
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