Introduction

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1962), the text that Jennifer Shaddock examines in her article for this issue—the first issue for which Teya Rosenberg joins us as associate editor—encapsulates the theme of inner and outer exploration that unites our seven Winter essays. Each of our authors addresses the question of life's "wild things," whether these elements are emotional and psychological or a matter of visiting, and perhaps conquering, new territories. The articles thus take us on a voyage of discovery to four real continents, various imaginary places, and assorted taboo subjects.

While Sendak's picture book is often read through a psychoanalytical lens as critics trace the Freudian or Jungian presences in Max's emotional landscape, Shaddock offers a less usual context in which to view the story: the world of Victorian and Edwardian male adventure novels, whose vistas of primordial trees and mysterious shadowy spaces constitute a "heart of darkness" in which anything can happen. Miriam Dow, on the other hand, examines Africa writing itself; her discussion of Chinua Achebe's Chike and the River (1966) highlights Achebe's response to the ostensibly "civilizing" ideology and aesthetic of European missionary activity in his portrayal of his eleven-year-old protagonist, a boy for whom Igbo and British sensibilities are competing yet entwined cultural influences. Situated "at a dangerous and horizon-expanding crossroads," Chike himself deems the baffling and distant England the true source of wild romance.

Like Achebe's novel, Rhoda Zuk's essay on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (1837) and two twentieth-century rewritings of that text, Rosa Guy's My Love, My Love (1985) and the 1989 Disney animated feature film, takes a postcolonial approach to its subject, considering the discourses of class, gender, and "otherness" that constrain the mermaid and her avatars. Meanwhile, John Murray's work on Andersen medalist Patricia Wrightson's The Nargun and the Stars (1970) brings us to the wildness not only of the Australian outback but also of the turbulent psyche of a troubled boy and the awesome power of an elemental being, the Nargun of Aboriginal folklore.

The final three papers focus on the wild power of imagination, a power that may be used for good or for ill. Claudia Mills traces the figure of the talented and imaginative heroine—what L. M. Montgomery in one of her series christens "The Story Girl"—through an assortment of classic and recent texts in order to detail the sometimes unpalatable, even antisocial, attitudes that this figure has traditionally been used to excuse. Ulf Boëthius examines intertextuality in The Secret Garden (1911), arguing that reading the novel in the context of Émile Zola's La faute de l'Abbé Mount (1875) and Victorian sex-education manuals throws into relief Frances Hodgson Burnett's use of themes generally considered too wild to be permissible in early-twentieth-century children's novels. Burnett's imaginative retelling of the sexualized narratives upon which she draws permits her to say covertly what she could not easily have said undisguised. And Kathleen Hannah's discussion of Ezra Jack Keats's Peter series of picture books from the 1960s and 1970s emphasizes imagination in much the way (to return to the beginning of this Introduction) that many people read it in Sendak's Max: as a power that can heal anger, frustration, and the thoroughly uncivilized feelings we may sometimes entertain toward our families. Hannah argues that in the Peter books, Keats, whose relationship with his own family was difficult, creates a safe, nurturing, and far from wild family environment in which he can effectively reparent himself.

Another idea that all these essays raise, then, is the question of power imbalances, ranging from that operating between adult and child or society and individual or (sometimes) male and female, to that operating between colonizer and colonized, to that operating between storyteller and audience. In this sense our Winter issue follows naturally from our Fall issue on violence; like that set of articles, the present examinations take differing approaches to such discrepancies. Some of our authors emphasize the techniques that writers or characters may employ to turn their...