Editors' Introduction

In the process of putting together a general issue, editors cannot help but look for hints of coherence, cosmic links between essays with separate origins and histories. So it was with a certain sense of pleasure—as well as wonder and relief—that we found shared characteristics in the essays selected for this first general issue of 2008.

All the essays in this issue deal with transformations, various kinds of shape-shifting. Almost as a bonus, the five essays ordered themselves into an apparently natural sequence: the first three center on gender (lives of girls, tomboys and women), the last two on culture (spiritual and material). "Learning to Be Modern Girls" by Heather Julien, is an analysis of the school stories Winifred Darch published for girls between 1920 and 1939. Julien focuses on the transformative possibilities offered for the "modern" girls of the early part of the twentieth century, especially for those from lower class backgrounds who morphed uneasily into upper and middle class women through the magic of education. In the second essay, "Curious Appetites," Carina Garland also addresses issues of metamorphosis in her study of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Then Michelle Abate's "Trans/Forming Girlhood" attends to the difficulties of male/female identities in 'tween literature—with particular attention to Sharon Dennis Wyeth's Tomboy Trouble. Abate's essay becomes, in turn, an apt introduction to Mary Harris Russell's essay, "The Spiritual Geography of Domestic and Narrative Spaces in Aidan Chambers' Dance Sequence." Explorations of gender identity are central to the novels of Aidan Chambers, but Russell extends the discussion as she moves gracefully between physical and spiritual transformations in the sequence. In contrast to the spiritual dimensions of Russell's essay, the final essay in the issue, Susan Honeyman's "Trick or Treat?: Halloween Lore, Passive Consumerism, and the Candy Industry," turns to material culture, to candy. Here wish fulfillment and anxiety dreams are tethered firmly to the solid business world of confectionary.

Although it is a little early to tell if explorations of transformations will continue through all three issues of the 2008 volume of Lion and the Unicorn, the special issue that follows in April, on South African children's literature, edited by Betsie van der Westhuizen, offers a glimpse of a literature reforming itself in the context of massive political change.

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind potential contributors that the Lion and the Unicorn is changing its submission guidelines. Please send all manuscripts electronically to: lionandtheunicorn@brocku.ca. We are also interested in proposals for special issues, so please contact us if there are topics you would like to see developed.