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The Lion and the Unicorn 24.3 (2000) v-ix



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Introduction

Elizabeth Goodenough


"I was a kid in age but my mind has the reality of a grown-up, 'cause I seen these things every day!"

--LeAlan Jones, 13
Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (33)

Suffering and remembering longest, children lose most in war. Recent memoirs by "hidden children" of the Holocaust, adolescent diaries from war zones, and oral histories of teenage victims of domestic and urban violence challenge the glamorous stereotypes of war stories. As a sense of lost childhood and fear of violence pervade our society, it is important to re-examine and evaluate the place of violence and war in children's books. In Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, Martin Green argues that juvenile literature, "invented" by the Puritans, was "captured by the aristomilitary caste" in the nineteenth century (220). Is this assertion accurate? And if so, in what ways do Empire and Frontier continue to influence narratives for the young? What roles do gender, classic war stories, national identity, family resilience, issues of guilt and innocence, cross-writing, amnesia and recovered memory, terrorism, and expectations of a "happy ending" play in writings about children in war?

Responding to these questions, contributors to this volume explore the complex ways violence and war have been written and interpreted for young readers since the Great War. From a variety of critical perspectives, they look at fairy tales and picture books, illustrations and photographs, histories, memoirs, and young adult novels. Together they extend a discussion of war, poverty, disaster, and injustice taken up by Children's Literature in 1987 where editors Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen observed that "in the literature of violence, the child takes on special symbolic value" (iv). The stories we tell about at-risk and risky children model our public understanding of victimization and trauma. In the last decade, Claudia Nelson, Millicent Lenz, Marina Warner, Anne Higonnet, [End Page v] Eliza Dresang, Perry Nodelman, Jack Zipes, and many other scholars have also enabled us to consider more deeply the violent ambivalence that underlies cultural fantasies and visual histories of childhood over several hundred years. On the one hand, adults protect and idealize childhood innocence; yet, on the other hand, they fear and punish those children perceived as demonic, discontented, or disorderly. In 1986, Britain's House of Commons struck down the longtime practice of punishment by caning in state-run schools by only a single vote ("And the Beat Goes Out" 40). In our rapid-fire society, connections between childhood, injury, and death headline concerns about living in a culture spinning out of control. Stories in the media mirror to the young how power is exercised, especially in war, but also in the civilized aggression of sport. Globally, several hundred thousand child soldiers kill, rape, and maim, while tens of millions of children are trafficked as bonded labor or sex slaves. Locally, a suburban father, seeking to protect his son by protesting rough play at a hockey practice, is charged with manslaughter in the fatal beating of another father.

In a climate of information overload and image-shock, the perennial question raised by Higonnet and Rosen recurs: "Will honest representations of the human capacity for evil overwhelm the young mind in despair?' (vi). Mass murder, nuclear holocaust, gang activity, and berserking--widely visualized in films, television, news stories, video games, popular music--confound efforts to demarcate children's literature according to age-appropriate labels. Maurice Sendak has said, "It is a sad comedy: the children knowing and pretending they don't know to protect us from knowing they know" (5). Speaking to this private knowledge with which children struggle, Mary Galbraith and Donald Haase's essays here examine psychological refuges constructed by imaginations in extremis. Drawing on trauma studies and Holocaust memoirs, Haase shows how fairy tales and storytelling provide secret spaces for the young to frame, interpret, and relieve atrocious anxieties related to bombings, hiding out, exile, persecution, and even Auschwitz. Within the context of identifying authors' survival strategies encoded in classic picture books...

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