Introduction

The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn encourage us to rethink perspectives on established ways of reading and on conventional narratives of literary history.

In “‘A Happy Heritage’: Children’s Poetry Books and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival,” Kristin Bluemel places key volumes of mid-twentieth-century British children’s poetry books and their accompanying wood engravings into a modernist literary history. The illustrations of Gwenn Raverat and Joan Hassall, with their “quiet images of traditional and especially rural British life,” provided a counterpoint to the turbulence of the 1930s, even as the lived experiences of Raverat and Hassall, as gender deviants, “put them at odds with just about every social and economic structure of the English arts, illustration, and publishing establishments.” Their lives and their art, Bluemel argues, “complicate tired narratives about the decline of English children’s literature and illustration during the interwar and war years”—and ask us to rethink the relationship of children’s literature to the cultural studies of late modernism.

Lee Talley’s essay, “Susan Cooper’s Dawn of Fear: Cross-writing, the Uncanny, and a Childhood in Wartime,” also offers a new way to read the late modernist period of British literary history. Talley provides close attention to an understudied novel by Cooper, helping us understand the place of this realist, autobiographical novel within children’s literature of war and Cooper’s oeuvre. Reading Cooper’s novel through the critical lens of cross-writing and the uncanny, Talley shows Cooper painting a portrait wherein young people are “competent and far more knowledgeable than some adults would like to admit, “not solely victims of war but also perpetrators of violence and suffering.”

In “The Stories We Adopt By: Tracing ‘The Red Thread’ in Contemporary Adoption Narratives,” Macarena Garcia González and Elisabeth Wesseling examine children’s books emerging from the global adoption network concerning the traffic from China to Spain and the United States. Adoption advocates have adapted a traditional Chinese tale about arranged marriage into a heartwarming story about an adopted child’s destiny to be loved by parents in another country. Gonzalez and Wesseling recognize the good intentions of the writers and adapters as they also reveal the problematic valences of such appropriations, both textual and personal.

The new can also come as a shock, as Andrea Schwenke Wyile reminds us in her analysis of Michèle Lemieux’s Stormy Night (1999) and Nicolas Mahler’s Poèmes (2007). Both texts are, as Wyile explains, “deeply philosophical and unusual books that challenge our assumptions about picturebooks due to the astonishing juxtapositions of the verbal and the visual on their page openings.” Fueled by metaphor rather than narrative, Wyile argues, the juxtaposed words and images “spur philosophical thinking on existential matters.” The results offer not stories, but “invitations to do philosophy, to ask questions rather than formulate answers”—a challenge to our usual ways of reading.

Philosophical inquiry is also the artistic aim of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979) and Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy of Inkheart (2003), Inkspell (2005), and Inkdeath (2008), according to Poushali Bhadury. Bhadury’s essay on “Metafiction, Narrative Metalepsis, and New Media Forms in The Neverending Story and the Inkworld Trilogy” reads these popular novels through the theories of Gérard Genette, demonstrating how the texts “dissolve diegetic boundaries” to “display a highly philosophical stance about the webbed, intertextual, contingent nature of reality or life itself.” For Bhadury, these texts may value the imagination, but they offer a violent, cautionary reminder about “excessive imaginative play.”

In their collaborative essay “Outside the Inside of the Box: The 2013 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry,” poetry award judges Michael Joseph, Donelle Ruwe, and Craig Svonkin read through the past year’s abundance of blurbs to discern the best poetry for children and young adults. They discovered “that the books, themselves, defied the conventional markers of literary power and authenticity.” They also found the best of these books to be JonArno Lawson’s Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box, with illustrations by artist Alec Dempster...