The Precocious Child In Victorian Literature And Culture

Author : Claudia Nelson
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2012-07-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781421406121

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Precocious Children and Childish Adults by Claudia Nelson Pdf

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.

Author : Roisín Laing
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2024-05-20
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031413827

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The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture by Roisín Laing Pdf

Author : Roisín Laing
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2024-06-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3031413814

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The Precocious Child in Victorian Literature and Culture by Roisín Laing Pdf

This book examines representations of precocity in Victorian textual culture – canonical literature, children’s fiction, scientific texts, and writing by children – to argue that precocity challenges the idea of progress. It considers how practitioners of literature and science from Wordsworth to Freud represented human development, and the way in which Darwin’s “non-progressive model of evolution” troubled the existing model of progression by stages (from childhood inexperience to adult maturity and understanding). Roisín Laing argues that the precocious child undermines the equation of growth with progress, and thereby facilitates other ways of imagining both individual and species development. The idea represented by the precocious child in Victorian culture – that the adult is not necessarily an improvement on the child, the human not necessarily an improvement on the ape – still troubles us today.

Author : Brenda Ayres,Sarah Elizabeth Maier
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2019-11-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000760125

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Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture by Brenda Ayres,Sarah Elizabeth Maier Pdf

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.

Author : Amberyl Malkovich
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135074258

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Charles Dickens and the Victorian Child by Amberyl Malkovich Pdf

This book explores the ideas of children and childhood, and the construct of the ‘ideal’ Victorian child, that developed rapidly over the Victorian era along with literacy and reading material for the emerging mass reading public. Children’s Literature was one of the developing areas for publishers and readers alike, yet this did not stop the reading public from bringing home works not expressly intended for children and reading to their family. Within the idealized middle class family circle, authors such as Charles Dickens were read and appreciated by members of all ages. By examining some of Dickens’s works that contain the imperfect child, and placing them alongside works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Stretton, Rossetti, and Nesbit, Malkovich considers the construction, romanticization, and socialization of the Victorian child within work read by and for children during the Victorian Era and early Edwardian period. These authors use elements of religion, death, irony, fairy worlds, gender, and class to illustrate the need for the ideal child and yet the impossibility of such a construct. Malkovich contends that the ‘imperfect’ child more readily reflects reality, whereas the ‘ideal’ child reflects an unattainable fantasy and while debates rage over how to define children’s literature, such children, though somewhat changed, can still be found in the most popular of literatures read by children contemporarily.

Author : Laura C. Berry
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2024-05-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813934575

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The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel by Laura C. Berry Pdf

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.

Author : Jessica Straley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2016-06-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107127524

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Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature by Jessica Straley Pdf

An interdisciplinary study that explores the impact of evolutionary theory on Victorian children's literature.

Author : Jennifer Sattaur
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2011-01-18
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9781443827706

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Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle by Jennifer Sattaur Pdf

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.

Author : Laura Peters
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : History
ISBN : 0719052327

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Orphan Texts by Laura Peters Pdf

"The study argues that the prevalence of the orphan figure can be explained by considering the family. The family and all it came to represent - legitimacy, race and national belonging - was in crisis. In order to reaffirm itself the family needed a scapegoat: it found one in the orphan figure. As one who embodied the loss of the family, the orphan figure came to represent a dangerous threat to the family; and the family reaffirmed itself through the expulsion of this threatening difference. The vulnerable and miserable condition of the orphan, as one without rights, enabled it to be conceived of, and treated as such, by the very institutions responsible for its care." "Orphan Texts will of interest to final year undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and those interested in the areas of Victorian literature, Victorian studies, postcolonial studies, history and popular culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Amelia Bonea,Melissa Dickson,Sally Shuttleworth,Jennifer Wallis
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2019-04-09
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780822986607

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Anxious Times by Amelia Bonea,Melissa Dickson,Sally Shuttleworth,Jennifer Wallis Pdf

Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or “diseases of modernity” resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various “neurotic remedies,” in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Anxious Times examines perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. The authors explore anxieties stemming from the potentially harmful impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations within rapidly changing external environments. Their work reveals how an earlier age confronted the challenges of seemingly unprecedented change, and diagnosed transformations in both the culture of the era and the life of the mind.

Author : Dennis Denisoff
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0754661563

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The Nineteenth-century Child and Consumer Culture by Dennis Denisoff Pdf

This diverse collection addresses not only the roles assigned to children in the context of nineteenth-century consumer culture, but also children themselves as agents in the formation of that culture. Topics include child performers on the Victorian stag

Author : Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2018-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476669038

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Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction by Kevin A. Morrison Pdf

This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.

Author : James M. Curtis
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2023
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781666940268

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Childhood and Innocence in American Culture by James M. Curtis Pdf

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."

Author : G. Benziman
Publisher : Springer
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2011-11-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780230348837

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Narratives of Child Neglect in Romantic and Victorian Culture by G. Benziman Pdf

Contextualizing the topos of the neglected child within a variety of discourses, this book challenges the assumption that the early nineteenth century witnessed a clear transition from a Puritan to a liberating approach to children and demonstrates that oppressive assumptions survive in major texts considered part of the Romantic cult of childhood.

Author : Thomas E. Jordan
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1987-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781438408057

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Victorian Childhood by Thomas E. Jordan Pdf

This book presents a broad range of original data on childhood in Victorian Britain. It combines a social science approach to data with historical context, resulting in a highly readable account based on sound historiography. Against a backdrop of the industrial revolution, an expanding economy, and a rising standard of living, Victorian Childhood explores life and death, child development, the family, work, education, social life, cities, crime, and advocacy and reform. Presenting data on the deteriorating health of children during the nineteenth century and on their increasing displacement of adults in the workplace, the author demonstrates that they did not share proportionately in the increased standard of living. Jordan's book is a unique piece of scholarship in its range, focus, and presentation. Original sources such as diaries and memoirs not previously cited elsewhere, literature from the period, and anecdotes from the children themselves animate the statistical background and provide vivid pictures of their lives.