Introduction (2018)

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn explore representations of boundaries and materiality in books for young audiences. The device of metafiction, in which a literary work deliberately draws attention to its fictional artifice, has become a hallmark of post-modern literature, and children’s picture books have become notable examples. Although not a new concept (Crockett Johnson’s classic, Harold and the Purple Crayon, published over sixty years ago is a notable example), the metafictional picture book has become almost a staple in the past twenty years (David Wiesner, David Macaulay, John Scieszka, and Lane Smith, to name but a few). Few have explored the metafictive possibilities of children’s picture books as has Emily Gravett. She delights in shattering the window of artifice that traditionally separates the artist and the audience. Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis, in her essay, “Defining Children’s Metafiction: Authorship and Readership in Emily Gravett’s Picturebooks,” gives us a close reading of two of Gravett’s most celebrated books, Wolves and Mouse’s Big Book of Fear. Focusing on the concepts of “metaization” or “metareference,” Athanasiou-Krikelis shows how modern-day metafictional picture books permit young readers to reinvent, as it were, the books with each reading, the readers becoming agents rather than mere onlookers. Consequently, the books are never the same and, indeed, the readers themselves become involved in the literary process—the readers become agents, and the books themselves “invite innovation through the empowering capacities of imagination.” Amanda Greenwell maps a different set of boundaries in her essay, “Remodeled Domesticity in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” Greenwell focuses on the domestic imagery used to explore and confirm Lyra’s coming of age in the final volume of the trilogy. Connecting Lyra’s neo-Victorian context with this image, Greenwell argues, allows us to interrogate the undertheorized aspects of domesticity in twenty-first century young adult literature. Greenwell offers a map for doing so. [End Page v] In his essay “Rational Souls and Animal Bodies: Cross-Species Sympathy in John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Evenings at Home (1792–96),” Richard De Ritter investigates how these exemplary rational moralists negotiate the binary opposition between reason and instinct. De Ritter focuses on one narrative, “The Transmigrations of Indur,” and how it imaginatively, realistically, and sympathetically explores animal states. The protagonist, a Brahmin named Indur, retains his rational capacity even as he reincarnates through a variety of animal forms. This story complicates the reason/instinct binary used to distinguish humans and animals and “narrows the definition of the human on racial and religious grounds.” De Ritter finishes by examining contemporary responses to the story and their discomfort with its implications, concluding that “The Transmigrations of Indur” exhibits the unstated ethnocentrism of the authors’ cosmopolitanism, and thus reveals their limits. Barbara Pini, Wendy Keys, and Damien Riggs test the transgressive limits of the award-winning young adult novel Almost Perfect (2009) by Brian Katcher. Almost Perfect has received praise from award committees and scholars for its inclusion of a trans protagonist. However, as they explain, “novels featuring trans youth may also be oppressive for trans young people, and used as a pedagogic tool to reify hegemonic categories of sexuality and gender.” Offering a close reading of the novel’s characters, plot, and themes as well as paratextual materials, Pini, Keys, and Riggs show us how “the mere presence of a trans character does not challenge homonormativity.” They conclude by directing us to some alternative texts and with the reminder that “we must continue to be vigilant and critique the trans representations ensuring that visibility is not confused with the politics of subversion.” In their essay “Cinema and the Book: Intermediality in The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” Elizabeth Bullen, Leonie Rutherford, and Ilona Urquhart take up Brian Selznick’s boundary-crossing text. Noting how “The Invention of Hugo Cabret is often defined by what it is not,” they turn to the theory of intermediality to explore how Selznick’s text is “distinguished by the nexus it establishes between book and cinema media and the ways in which it celebrates and strengthens the relationships between old...