Introduction (2014)

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood The essays for this issue of The Lion and the Unicorn remind us that the worlds of children’s and young adult literatures are culturally diverse, offering complex portraits of individuals negotiating national ideologies within everyday experiences. In the past decade, the U.S. political landscape has inspired a number of political parodies of children’s books, including Chandler Madison’s rightist, The Gorax and His Green Machine, and the leftist, Pat the Politician, produced by the Imagineering Company and illustrated by Melissa Hutton. Michelle Abate, in her essay, “‘And Don’t Forget to Vote!’: Political Parodies of Popular Picture Books and the New American Broadside,” traces the roots of these parodies to the colorful tradition of the nineteenth-century broadside. She argues that these texts “contain rhetorical, commercial, and material connections that reveal them as both polyphonic and transhistorical.” Examining Origen and Golan’s Goodnight Bush and Don’t Let the Republicans Drive the Bus! on the political left, and The Cat and the Mitt by Dr. Truth and Dr. Paul by Ouilette on the political right, Abate demonstrates the similarities in form, substance, and purpose between the broadsides and the parodies. Importantly, Abate also addresses the question of why children’s books have become the fodder for modern political parody, arguing that “[w]ith their non-threatening picture book formats and already-familiar characters and color schemes, these texts seek to make engagement in current political debates as easy and accessible as ‘child’s play.’” Finally, Abate posits that this appropriation of children’s literature for public protest actually brings the children’s book format “back to the streets,” reestablishing it as a form for the masses—not just for the educated bourgeoisie. In his essay, “Winnie-the-Conservationist: An Ecofeminist Reading of Tuck Everlasting,” Peter C. Kuntz reexamines Natalie Babbitt’s now nearclassic fantasy through the lens of ecofeminism. Acknowledging that the novel actually preceded the advent of eco-feminist criticism, Kuntz argues [End Page v] that Babbitt, in fact, addresses many of the concerns of that critical point of view. Most prevalent is Babbit’s portrayal of the oppression of nature (the antagonist’s exploitive scheme to sell the magic spring water) and of the oppression of women by a male-dominated society. Recounting the declining impact of eco-feminist criticism, Kuntz points to evidence that ecofeminism may, in fact, be a critical approach that can beneficially inform the study of children’s literature. For children, he maintains, just as women and nature, have frequently been the disenfranchised victims of a male-centered social construct, and books like Tuck Everlasting can perhaps lay “the groundwork for an emancipation from the patriarchal logic of the domination of land and women while also destabilize[e] the limited understandings of the child as innocent, unsophisticated, and simple-minded.” Moving from topics of disenfranchisement to involuntary conscription, Chantel Lavoie’s essay “Rebelling against Prophecy in Harry Potter and The Underland Chronicles” studies the protagonists’ response to becoming “chosen ones,” given the notoriously open-ended and ambiguous nature of prophecy. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Suzanne Collins’s Underland Chronicles take very different approaches to prophecy as determiner of heroic action, raising questions about free will and destiny. Though Collins’s Gregor takes more agency in reading prophecy contextually and historically in order to defy it, Rowling’s Harry offers the possibility of connecting with transcendent meaning, however indirectly. How do you represent a tragedy of personal and national proportions? Emily Murphy turns to performance studies to explore the aesthetic and ideological choices made by Mordicai Gerstein for his picture book about Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers. In her essay, “Life on the Wire: Post–9/11 Mourning in Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked between the Towers,” Murphy reads Gerstein’s book alongside other post-9/11 narratives to reveal the intertextuality of its creation and its role in “establish[ing] a new paradigm for approaching 9/11 in literary texts.” “Petit’s walk is one that is appreciated as a moment of aesthetic beauty precisely because it shows us the body in motion,” Murphy...