Introduction: "Imagination and Pleasure, Experience and Labor"

This issue of The Lion and the Unicorn marks the transition from the editorship of Lissa Paul and Sandra Beckett to that of David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood. The new editors thank Lissa and Sandra for their aid in making the change, and we look forward to continuing the distinctive contribution The Lion and the Unicorn makes to the serious criticism of children's literature. The Lion and the Unicorn historically has distinguished itself by its special issues, its interviews with contemporary authors, and its annual acknowledgment of children's poetry. We plan to perpetuate these traditions, and likewise encourage cross-disciplinary innovation in the criticism and theorization of children's literature and its allied genres in film, television, and graphic novels.

In this our inaugural issue, we consider the relative demands of imagination and pleasure, experience and labor. Children are frequently associated with the first rather than the second, but our authors show that the real relationships are much more complex and interesting. We begin with U. C. Knoepflmacher's "Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall: Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings" and its thought-provoking parallels between Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic circle associated with The Yellow Book and Kenneth Grahame's depiction of Toad and the other homosocial characters of The Wind and the Willows. Grahame's repudiation of the delights of excess are belied in the potent depictions of Toad's and, especially, Rat's desires, though the narrative insists upon the superiority of stasis and domestic pleasure. An excess of desire continues in Hannah Field's analysis of the fetish in relation to Beatrix Potter's Tailor of Gloucester. Oscar Wilde's catalogs of precious and sensuously appealing fabrics are well-known. Field shows how even staid and sensible Beatrix Potter succumbs in this admittedly anomalous text to the pleasures of luxuriant color, texture, and drape. In contrast with Grahame's "paradise of bachelors," who seem uniquely free of the need to labor, Potter, in Field's reading, illuminates the laborious investment of love, artistry, and craft that ultimately makes the Mayor of Gloucester's coat more noteworthy than the mayor himself, and the book itself a fetish-object.

Jenny Holt extends this exploration of the significance of labor in the seemingly anomalous context of children's play. As her historical survey "'Normal' versus 'Deviant' Play in Children's Literature: An Historical Overview" reveals, the so-called Golden Age of children's literature during England's Edwardian period privileged imaginative play based on fantasies and fairy tales, while viewing with suspicion solitary or practical investment in objects and processes. By contrast, writers inspired by Rousseau and Locke—such as Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Day—saw play and work as equally important in middle-class children's education; they demanded that children recognize and respond to the labor others contributed to their well-being.

Paradoxically, when children's literature of the Golden Age posited all children as free to imagine and play, depictions of the consequences of labor upon working-class children, especially their hunger, harsh conditions, and toil, were minimized and erased. Angela Hubler's essay "Faith and Hope in the Feminist Political Novel for Children: A Materialist Feminist Analysis," like Holt's, is concerned with the ways children's literature reflects—or fails to reflect—processes in the real world. Hubler argues cogently for the value of books that depict the political process explicitly. According to Hubler, the majority of novels about young girls' coming of age privilege psychological integration and self-esteem over analysis of and collective action against injustice. Hubler studies two novels for girls that successfully and engagingly depict as an integral part of personal growth social engagement: analyzing structural injustice and combating it through collective action. Jackie Horne's discussion of race and racism in the Harry Potter series, like Hubler's analysis of gender discrimination, is concerned with the strengths and weaknesses of individualist versus structural analysis of injustice. Distinguishing between a broadly universalizing and individualist "multiculturalist" notion of antiracism on the one hand, and a social-justice view that stresses...