Editor's Introduction

It is, perhaps, a given that the Lion and the Unicorn (L&U) would mark the centenary of the First World War with a special edition because it has been in the consciousness of many children's literature scholars for a number of years, including co-editor Jacquilyn Weeks and myself. Indeed, Stacy Gillis and Esther MacCallum-Stewart opened their introduction to the 2007 L&U special edition on Children's Culture and the First World War by noting the centenary's approach. Likewise, major international projects such as the Leverhulme International Research Network, which hosted conferences in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia between 2011and 2013, drew together a significant body of work, demonstrating the variety and complexity of current scholarship on children's literature and culture of the First World War.¹

Writing about Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, Dan Todman observes that the First World War was "a cornerstone of British culture" (17). The articles in this special edition remind us that it was, and perhaps continues to be, a cornerstone of not just British culture, but also the cultures of many nations, and for many different reasons. This is often because writing for children about the First World War was, and frequently still is, embedded in discourses of national identity, either alone or in contradistinction to that of other nations and, as Peter Hunt observes of Western children's literature about the war, "local historical differences make generalizations difficult to sustain" (319). Consequently, it behooves us to try, as far as our linguistic skills will allow, to situate our knowledge of any particular nation's writing on and of the First World War within and against that of other nations.

Many of the essays in this special edition are concerned with the ways in which national politics and culture directly shaped the way that the war was presented to young readers. Taking a comparative approach, Laura Leden's contribution examines issues of politics and gender in Nordic translations of L. M. Montgomery's Rilla of Ingleside (1921). Whereas Montgomery's original novel presents women as heroic figures on the home front, and depicts the First World War patriotically, Leden sets out the changes that are evident in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and German translations of the source text. By examining censorship and purifaction in the texts, Leden highlights how discourses pertaining to nationality, pacifism, female heroism, and cultural didactic norms resulted in very different adaptions of the novel, differences that reveal each country's experience of the war, as either an ally, an occupier, or an occupied nation.

In her piece, Lindsay Myers points to the relationship between Italian national identity myths and the presentation of the war in Lia Levi's historical novel, Cecelia va alla guerra, first published in 2000 and yet to be translated into English. Pointing to the reawakening of a national rhetoric in the late 1990s, Myers argues that Levi's book refigures the conflict as a war between the Austrians and the Italians, with the end of the war being parochially marked by Italian Unification rather than a European armistice. What Myers' contribution reminds us of, then, is that the act of commemoration is far from universal. Moreover, while we might expect young readers today to be presented with novels that encourage them to question the "truths" of the First World War, and to recognize and interrogate its continued cultural legacies, this, unfortunately, is not always the case.

Rather than highlighting a unified national voice, Anthony Pavlik's contribution points to a multiplicity of voices in American boys' series fiction of the war. Looking closely at two series in the years leading up to America's entry into the war in 1917, Pavlik argues that some American children's literature spoke back to British propaganda that aimed to draw America into the war and resisted crude depictions of German combatants. In doing so, the books reveal the conflicting and shifting ideologies that characterized diverse American attitudes in the years leading up to 1917.

While Pavlik notes the presence of resistance to British propaganda in American series fiction for boys...