Download or read book The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture written by Roisín Laing and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Precocious Children and Childish Adults written by Claudia Nelson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.
Download or read book Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture written by Brenda Ayres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the "proper way" of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals in literature taught Victorian children how to be behave. If you are a postmodern posthumanist, you might argue, "But the animals in literature did not write their own accounts." Animal characters may be the creations of writers’ imagination, but animals did and do exist in their own right, as did and do humans. The original essays in Animals and Their Children in Victorian explore the representation of animals in children’s literature by resisting an anthropomorphized perception of them. Instead of focusing on the domestication of animals, this book analyzes how animals in literature "civilize" children, teaching them how to get along with fellow creatures—both human and nonhuman.
Download or read book The Victorian Period in Twenty First Century Children s and Adolescent Literature and Culture written by Sara K. Day and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and culture ultimately reflect our own disruptions and upheavals, particularly as they relate to child and adolescent readers and our experiences of them. The essays therein suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of young readers, and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale.
Download or read book The Child the State and the Victorian Novel written by Laura C. Berry and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.
Download or read book Victorian Children s Literature written by Ruth Y. Jenkins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-22 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals how the period’s transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation. At the heart of this study is this question: what is the relationship between Victorian children’s literature, its readers, and their psychic development? Ruth Y. Jenkins uses Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to uncover the presence of cultural anxieties and social tensions in works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Carroll, Stevenson, Burnett, Ballantyne, Nesbit, Tucker, Sewell, and Rossetti.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Children s Literature and Culture written by Claudia Nelson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume: Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.
Download or read book Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin de Si cle written by Jennifer Sattaur and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reads Victorian fin de siècle literature through the medium of perceptions of childhood. It examines the connection between ‘monstrous’ and idealistic symbolic representations of childhood represented by key cultural discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Specifically, anxieties about change are linked closely to anxieties about childhood, procreation, and maturation in a range of Children’s and Adults’ texts from the 1860s to the 1890s. The book demonstrates the ways in which the emergent social movements which have come to define and represent change in the fin-de-siècle period were inherently concerned with the ideas of childhood and parenthood and the ways in which they represented both the promise and the threat of the future. The texts are arranged by theme, and grouped according to whether they are seen primarily as intended for children, or for adults. In texts intended for adult readers, images of childhood are more covert and more metaphorical than those texts aimed at child readers, in which overt pedagogical concerns are often brought to bear. Nothing embodies the idea of the future more than the children who stand as a bridge between ‘now’ and ‘then.’ This book analyses the connections between Victorian perceptions of childhood and the anxieties and upheavals of the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle.
Download or read book Nonsense Common Sense written by John Grossman and published by Workman Publishing Company. This book was released on 1992 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 100 poems from the Victorian era on the virtues of home and family, the seasons, proper behavior, animal friends, patriotism, and silliness.
Download or read book Childhood and Innocence in American Culture written by James M. Curtis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection approaches the deconstruction of American "childhood" from a wide variety of critical, interdisciplinary lenses and gestures toward the construction of a more realistic, twenty-first century definition of "childhood"--one which is defined by the real-life struggles of childhood and not by romanticized notions of "innocence."
Download or read book Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel written by Sandra Dinter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, do not always give up on the idea of its ‘natural’ core. Accordingly, this book reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.
Download or read book Literary Cultures and Nineteenth Century Childhoods written by Kristine Moruzi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.
Download or read book Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures written by Monica Flegel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.
Download or read book Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children s Literature written by Jessica Straley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary theory sparked numerous speculations about human development, and one of the most ardently embraced was the idea that children are animals recapitulating the ascent of the species. After Darwin's Origin of Species, scientific, pedagogical, and literary works featuring beastly babes and wild children interrogated how our ancestors evolved and what children must do in order to repeat this course to humanity. Exploring fictions by Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles Kingsley, and Margaret Gatty, Jessica Straley argues that Victorian children's literature not only adopted this new taxonomy of the animal child, but also suggested ways to complete the child's evolution. In the midst of debates about elementary education and the rising dominance of the sciences, children's authors plotted miniaturized evolutions for their protagonists and readers and, more pointedly, proposed that the decisive evolutionary leap for both our ancestors and ourselves is the advent of the literary imagination.
Download or read book The Impact of Victorian Children s Fiction written by J. S. Bratton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1981. Many of the classics of children’s literature were produced in the Victorian period. But Alice in Wonderland and The King of the Golden River were not the books offered to the majority of children of the time. When writing for children began to be taken seriously, it was not as an art, but as an instrument of moral suasion, practical instruction, Christian propaganda or social control. This book describes and evaluates this body of literature. It places the books in the economic and social contexts of their writing and publication, and considers many of the most prolific writers in detail. It deals with the stories intended to teach the newly-literate poor their social and religious lessons: sensational romances, tales of adventure and military glory, through which the boys were taught the value of self-help and inspired with the ideals of empire; and domestic novels, intended to offer girls a model for the expression of heroism and aspiration within the restricted Victorian woman’s world.
Download or read book Sylvie and Bruno written by Lewis Carroll and published by London ; New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1889 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1889, this novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fictional world of Fairyland.
Download or read book Ballet Shoes written by Noel Streatfeild and published by Random House Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three orphan girls. A pair of pink slippers. A lifetime in the spotlight. Read the classic that has captivated generations! Pauline, Petrova, and Posy love their quiet life together. They are orphans who have been raised as sisters, and when their new family needs money, the girls want to help. They decide to join the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training to earn their keep. Each girl works hard following her dream. Pauline is destined for the movies. Posy is a born dancer. And Petrova? She finds she'd rather be a pilot than perform a pirouette. This beautiful children's classic is perfect for girls who love to dream about ballet, friendship, and finding their own special talents. Adult readers may remember them as the "Shoes" books from You've Got Mail!
