Introduction (2014)

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn consider the complex and various audiences for children’s and young adult literatures across genres and periods. Our issue begins with the text of Kate Capshaw’s presentation to a packed room of scholars, teachers, and publishers at the 41st annual conference of the Children’s Literature Association in June 2014, hosted by the University of South Carolina and the Carolina Children’s Literature Consortium. Capshaw’s invited talk, “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields,” served as the conference’s annual Francelia Butler Lecture—a keynote lecture created to honor the foundational contributions Butler made to the academic study of children’s literature. Capshaw’s talk explores the timely issue of diversity in texts for young readers and within the field as a whole. “We in a place where, especially in terms of race in the United States, our scholarship is bereft,” Capshaw explains, and a place where “[c]hild readers suffer from a lack of books, and we suffer from a lack of scholarship, scholarship that can filter down into our classrooms to feed our students and their students.” Capshaw asks her audience to consider the various institutional forces that created the current conditions, and she concludes with a call to action: to be “courageous enough to intervene where we can—how we read, what we discuss, how we institutionalize children’s literature, what we introduce to our students.” In her essay “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Book: Humor, Mediation, and Distance in Carroll, Thackeray, and Stevenson,” Laura Kasson Fiss examines Victorian authors who use different approaches to bridging the gap between child and adult. Since Lewis Carroll, W. M. Thackeray, and R. L. Stevenson all invoke the traditional storytelling scene of teller and listener, they are faced with the problem of how to deal with the distancing effect of print. Humor and other forms of narratorial mediation, [End Page v] such as direct address or cued activities, show these authors both pushing at and constructing boundaries. Carroll illustrates the divide in Through the Looking-Glass as Alice moves from drawing room to a wonder-land, visually and textually immersing a reader in the book. Carroll’s additions to the text over time, however, express a discontinuity between adult purchaser, child reader, and text. Thackeray offers in The Rose and the Ring variations on pantomime, on fireside storytelling, and on interactive games. The relationship imagined by this burlesque fairy tale is alert to the theatrical potential of the text while offering sly commentary in the running heads and illustrations available only to a reader. In A Child’s Garden of Verses, Stevenson voices the child rather than speaking to the child reader. This immersive tactic effaces the distance between child and adult by offering print as a substitute for or a memorial of direct interaction. Like Fiss, Anne Morey considers the construction of the child reader and her relationship to books. Morey, however, is concerned with the institutionalization of that relationship. In her essay “The Junior Literary Guild and the Child Reader as Citizen,” she provides the first history of an important American children’s book club, the Junior Literary Guild, which operated in the United States from 1929 until the mid-1950s. Her account stresses the organization’s rhetorical positioning “in the afterglow of the Progressive Era,” specifically its negotiation of “contradictory ways of framing the child reader as potential citizen.” If Fiss’s literary children are tucked away in a private sphere of fireside, nursery, or sickroom, Morey shows how they are enjoined to membership in the public sphere. Adrian Schober revisits Robert Cormier’s oeuvre with an eye to genre and context in his essay, “Rereading Robert Cormier: Realism, Naturalism and the Young Adult Novel.” During the controversies that raged over whether to call Cormier’s hyperbolic plots and characters “realistic” or not, few considered Cormier’s own descriptions of his process and influences. Schober shows Cormier’s indebtedness to naturalist giants such as Flaubert, Zola, Dreiser, and Crane. Moving the discussion away from expressions of concern about the effects on young people...