Introduction

The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn explore degrees of agency in texts for young audiences, mapping responses to climate, bullying, and ideologies of gender, race, and imperialism across three centuries.

Roxanne Harde's "'Plus, you children': Growing Ecocitizens in Three American Children's Novels" uses an ecocritical approach to explore the ways three very different YA novels, in sometimes surprising ways, promote environmental consciousness in young readers. Harde argues that Chabon's Summerland, L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and Lore's I Am Number Four can all be read from an ecocritical point of view. All three novels, using migration as a trope, ultimately illustrate the importance of the connectedness among all of humanity and the necessity of responding to natural world to effect survival. Indeed, Harde maintains that much of YA fiction reveals an ecocritical ethos. Its heroes are forced to be attentive to the environment, to realize the mutual interaction between human and nonhuman nature, and to recognize the necessity for assuming responsibility for saving the world. Focusing on three novels that are not typically regarded from an ecocritical point of view, Harde "discusses the various antagonists who want to steal life, considers the protagonists as ecocitizens, and concludes with a discussion of how these novels gesture toward social and environmental responsibility." In all three novels, we witness migrations to new lands, migrations that require attentiveness to survival, but also to integrating with the new environment, working with it, for the protagonists' survival depends on the continued survival of the new-found land. Ultimately, the message is that "growing up can mean growing into connection with the global ecosystem." Through an insightful comparison of the three novels, Harde illustrates how they all "appeal to children's imaginations with a nonoppressive, socially and environmentally responsible vision, and ask them to consider ties between environmental contamination, sexism, and racism, between toxic inequities and threats to the larger body of life upon which everything depends."

School bullying is now acknowledged as a serious social problem that can have lifelong adverse effects on victims. Yet anyone who is familiar with tradition of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century school story knows this was not always the case. Katharine Kittredge, in her essay, "'Perversity shews itself so early': Changing Perceptions of Bullying from Late Eighteenth Century to Victorian Children's Literature," traces these shifting social attitudes toward adolescent bullying as portrayed through early children's books. Kittredge points out the rationale for the acquiescence (if not outright encouragement) of bullying was to prepare boys for the rigors of manhood. Additionally, she points out, the bullying, if it intended to encourage good behavior, reinforced the class prejudices prevalent in Britain at the time. However, Kittredge also notes, "from our more gender-informed perspective, we may doubt the health and sustainability of many of the hyper-masculine traits that were promoted." In this insightful and thorough study, Kittredge closely examines some nineteen school stories from the period 1770–1810, and another thirteen texts between 1810 and 1840, specifically assessing the attitudes toward bullying found in those books. Among her findings is the notion that bullying encourages children to do better work—presumably to avoid future bullying. And, in the case of lower-class students (the most frequent targets of bullying), it teaches them to cope with the inevitable struggles they will face in life. She also discovers that many of these working-class victims eventually earn the richest rewards in life—that is, in terms of power and riches. Kittredge traces the development of the portrayal of bullying and the bully through the end of the nineteenth century, when attitudes began to shift toward our modern condemnation of the bully. She sees Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays as the pivotal text in this regard, and it was in the Victorian era that the bully became an unattractive figure and no longer the hero of the story (although Kittredge cautions that current social reality suggests that we may not have entirely abandoned all the abhorrent attitudes of the past).

During the postwar era in American history, the average age of...