Introduction (2011)

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood This issue’s contributions circulate around reading and re-reading: how reading starts with the individual parsing words on the page but soon connects a private act to public action. Dennis M. Welch asks us to re-read the title page of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience so we can realize the poet’s “critical interest in education, especially in literacy.” Welch demonstrates how Blake is in conversation with theories of childhood education and experience, in particular the views of Rousseau, and how Blake advocates for the child not at the expense of the adult, but sees the two as equally active, sympathetic partners in a child’s education. Blake’s Songs, Welch concludes, present “subtle but nonetheless critical responses that honor children’s lives, identities, and reading and their pleasures, imaginations, and understanding.” Mary Jeanette Moran reminds us that Nancy Drew is not the only girl sleuth worthy of our attention in her essay “‘There’s a Desk Waiting for you in the Herald Office’: Metafiction and Empowerment in the Judy Bolton Mysteries.” Moran shows how Judy Bolton offers a counterpart to fellow amateur detectives Cherry Ames, Vicki Barr, and Nancy Drew through her her “commitment to sleuthing” across several stages of her life and by “regularly engaging in the production, analysis, and critique of texts as part of the mystery-solving process.” As a result, Moran argues, the series’ focus on textual interpretation “encourag[es] readers to take an active role in shaping and interpreting texts along with Judy and her friends.” Further, Moran notes, “Sutton’s use of fairy tales and newspaper writing shows how girls can read and write their way to a respected place in their societies despite the presence of gender restrictions.” In her essay “Building a Better Reader: The Gertrude Stein First Reader and Three Plays,” Dana Cairns Watson asks us to re-read Stein’s works for children. Rather than being primarily representative of violent authority at work in the world, Watson suggests, “what if, instead, Stein’s writing [End Page v] teaches children individual creative autonomy and freedom from the usual templates of adult experience—a limiting stable identity being one of these?” Watson offers a close reading of Stein’s works as primers for the child reader in which Stein models ways of reading, “demand[ing] that readers exercise this mental flexibility, stretching their understanding to see relationships and variations.” The result, Watson argues, is not only a desire for children to be “thoughtful readers” but also “the encouragement to escape formulaic identifications of the self.” In her re-reading of an established classic alongside a new award-winning text, Anastasia Ulanowicz presents a thought-provoking discussion of two works of historical fiction—Esther Forbes’s classic Johnny Tremain and M. T. Anderson’s monumental The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing—in light of political milieu in which each was written. She posits that Forbes, writing during the Second World War, captures the patriotic spirit and national confidence inspired by the conflict with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In Johnny Tremain, the popular story of a young boy’s conflicting loyalties during the American Revolution and his ultimate decision to join the Patriots, Ulanowicz notes the portrayal of the concept of American exceptionalism. In sharp contrast is Anderson’s work, published in two volumes in 2006 and 2008, which Ulanowicz interprets as an iconoclastic novel, urging the reader to rethink earlier interpretations of American history, particularly the notions of American exceptionalism and the Adamic myth. Instead, Ulanowicz argues, Anderson’s complex and chilling tale of an eighteenth-century community of intellectuals performing scientific experiments on African slaves, is intended to foreshadow a scandalous legacy in American history, one of violence, imperialism, and nation-building, and one that haunts us yet today in the wars in the Middle East and the terrorist threats at home. In their collaborative essay “‘The City, the Country, and the Road Between’: The 2011 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry,” poetry award judges Michael Heyman, Michael Joseph, and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. offer the fruits of their reading, selecting Susan Blackaby...