Introduction (2018)

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood The essays for this issue of The Lion and Unicorn explore the relation of self and other, the balance between the individual and the collective. Mary Jeanette Moran investigates Terry Pratchett's depiction of tensions between the self and the group in "'Balance Is the Trick': Feminist Relationality in The Amazing Maurice and the Tiffany Aching Series." Using feminist theorists of "care ethics" such as Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held, Moran examines how the female characters in Pratchett's children's books achieve—or fail to achieve—the "delicate balance" between relationality and autonomy. The example of Pratchett's female characters critiques Enlightenment norm of autonomous selfhood by showing its toxic effects, especially when authorities subsume all other identities into themselves. In contrast to those norms, Pratchett's protagonists achieve a more delicate balance between the self and the group by asserting individuality by building on the relationships that have constructed and enabled that individuality: "Balance is the trick." Lisa Chu Shen's essay, "The Feminine Other: The Representation of Female Characters in Cao Wenxuan's Male Coming-of-Age Novels," explores the coming-of-age novels of China's most celebrated writer children's writer, Cao Wenxuan, the 2016 Hans Christian Andersen Medalist. Shen's essay concentrates on four novels, Straw Houses (Cao Fangzi), Red Tiles, Black Tiles (Hongwa Heiwa), Genniao, and Ximi, each of which describes the coming-of-age of a male protagonist. Shen demonstrates how Cao's coming-of-age narratives can be viewed as "responses to modernity in twentieth-century China in the same way that the Bildungsroman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a response to Europe's transitioning into the modern era." Shen focuses on what she describes as the paradoxical relationship between the male protagonists and the female characters in each novel. On one hand, the relationship reflects traditional thinking, in which the adolescent female serves as the object of beauty and [End Page v] sexual desire, but on the other hand, the coming-of-age process is assisted by sensitive guidance offered by adult female mentoring, which contrasts sharply with the traditional concepts of homosocial bonding and patriarchal social structure. The author argues that Cao's female characters at first glance seem stereotypical portraits of fragility and beauty and clearly inferior to the male characters. In fact, a close look at Cao's characterization reveals women who are clever, resourceful, and strong-willed, who are, at times, portrayed as superior to the male characters. Consequently, the "reification of the Westernized notion of masculinity, however, is being revised in Cao's novels through the consistent theme of male-female bonding." Cao's works, Shen suggests, reflect the anxiety in modern Chinese society as it navigates through a cultural shift that is being felt throughout the world. In her essay "Visual Post-Memory Narratives of Janusz Korczak's Children," Ada Bieber re-orients typical accounts of Janusz Korczak, the renowned guardian of children in the Nazi-era Warsaw Ghetto, by focusing on two picture books that use children's rather than adult focalization. Bieber argues that "focalizing through juvenile first-person narrators from the interior of the orphanage as an heterotopic space marks out both picture books as post-memory narratives of childhoods threatened and destroyed by the Nazis." The picture-books' techniques of layered collage and palimpsestic arrangement, and the presentation of the children's interiority, function as "post-memory," the dynamic in which Holocaust survivors and their descendants use fragments of the traumatic past to construct memories, stories, and traditions of those who were lost. In her analysis, Bieber notes the innovative use of space as interiority to convey the situation of the many who did not survive, adding necessary nuance to the stories of those who did. Ivy Linton Stabell explores the narrative consequences of several best-selling "hazardous histories" in her essay "'"It's Grisly!" "It's Disgusting!"': Children's History" through the Tourist Gaze." As Stabell explains, "Though narratively situated close to the action, these books' readers remain rooted on the outside, deterred from full engagement with history's causes and consequences, and, significantly, dissuaded from seeing how interrogation...