Introduction

Abstract

Introduction David Russell, Karin Westman, and Naomi Wood In this issue of The Lion and Unicorn, we consider space, time, and place, with particular attention to the affective experiences of characters, their texts, and their readers. Derritt Mason asks us to consider “The Virtual Child, or Six Provocations on Children’s Literature and (Pre-) Digital Culture,” so we can better understand our ideological assumptions about the past, present, and future of the child, the virtual, and children’s literature in the twenty-first century. “Anxieties about children and the virtual might feel unique to the digital age,” but, as Mason explains, there is “a longer, pre-digital history of ‘the virtual child’” as “a virtual being that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both promising and threatening,” both “virtuous” and dangerously full of “Virtù, or power, creativity.” In its genealogical approach, Mason’s purposefully “unformed, unfinished, playful provocations,” six in number, “span genre and form—fairy tales, digital apps, young adult literature, film, and poetry—to consider various iterations of the virtual child over the years, culminating in a brief examination of discourse about young activists.” Mason’s provisional conclusion: we should look to “‘the activist child’ as a noteworthy contemporary version of the virtual child.” Keeping our attention on the possibilities and limitations of the virtual, Wouter Haverals and Vanessa Joosen’s “Constructing Age in Children’s Literature: A Digital Approach to Guus Kuijer’s Oeuvre” brings together children’s literature and the computational and quantitative methodologies of Digital Humanities (DH). Their focus: “the ideological construction of age in the oeuvre of a single author,” the award-wining and popular Dutch author Guus Kuijer, who writes for both younger and older audiences. As Haverals and Joosen demonstrate, “by using word calculations and counting combinations of words” associated with the practices of macroanalysis and distant reading, it is possible “to trace implicit patterns that are impossible to perceive by the human mind, even in a corpus that is relatively small according to DH standards” and discover “trends in the [End Page v] explicit ideology in the oeuvre of a single author.” Haverals and Joosen’s essay will be of interest to those already versed in the methodologies of DH as well as readers who are just discovering their potential–and all will learn more about the representations of age and childism in contemporary works for children and adults. The relationship between child and adult also finds a place in Tison Pugh’s essay “Sobbing over Severus Snape? Sentimentalism and Emotional Ethics in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels.” Pugh reminds us that Rowling’s wide-ranging interest in genre includes the sentimental novel, best represented through the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “a justly famous representative of the sentimental tradition” which “exemplifies such candid engagement with pressing social issues of the day.” As Pugh argues, “by deploying tropes of the sentimental novel tradition, Rowling deepens the emotional stakes of her series and asks readers to broaden their ethical investment in her characters’ journeys”: “In particular, the novels urge readers to surpass the simplistic ethical choice of good versus evil to consider the ways in which morally dubious characters, particularly Severus Snape, solicit their sympathy.” While “it is easy to begrudgingly respect Snape but difficult to weep for him,” Pugh shows how, “in Rowling’s call for readers to pity the lonely, she raises the pathos of his unrequited love to sentimental heights, thus seeking to link readers affectively to a character for whom many cannot readily express sympathy or sorrow.” In doing so, Rowling also bestows a “deeper emotional and ethical register” on her fantasy series “than genre-bound fantasy” typically provides. Laura Hakala’s “Tidying Up: Space, Place, and Abolitionism in Step by Step; or Tidy’s Way to Freedom” explores the presentation of race in children’s books of the mid-nineteenth century. Hakala examines a little-known, anonymous novel from the mid-nineteenth century—Step by Step was first published in 1862—showing how it advocates for emancipation and how its heroine serves as a role model for young readers of the time. The novel was published by a splinter group of the...