Artful dodgers : reconceiving the golden age of children's literature

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書誌事項

Artful dodgers : reconceiving the golden age of children's literature

Marah Gubar

Oxford University Press, 2009

  • : [pbk]

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注記

Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-251) and index

内容説明・目次

巻冊次

ISBN 9780195336252

内容説明

In this new account of the Golden Age of children's fiction, Marah Gubar offers a redefinition of the phenomenon known as the 'cult of the child'. Artful Dodgers looks at the works of Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M. Barrie - authors traditionally criticized for arresting the child in a position of iconic innocence - and contends that they in fact rejected this simplistic "child of Nature" paradigm in favor of one based on the child as an artful collaborator. Resisting the Romantic tendency to imagine the child as a pure point of origin, they acknowledge the pervasive power of adult influence, while suggesting that children can and have shared in the shaping of their stories. In her examinations of such classics as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island, and The Secret Garden, Gubar uncovers a childhood culture of collaboration in Victorian England in which the ability to work and play alongside adults was often taken for granted. True, this era saw a host of new efforts to establish a strict dividing line between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience. But despite strenuous reform efforts, many Victorians remained unconvinced of the separateness and sanctity of childhood, including the most influential participants in the cult of the child. Long condemned for erecting a barrier of sentimental nostalgia between adult and child, many late Victorians are here shown to have resisted this trend by instead conceiving of the child as uniquely capable of artistic and intellectual partnership.

目次

  • Preface
  • Introduction: "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast"
  • "Our Field": The Rise of the Child Narrator
  • 2. Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island
  • 3. Reciprocal Aggression: Unromantic Agency in the Art of Lewis Carroll
  • 4. Partners in Crime: E. Nesbit and the Art of Thieving
  • 5. The Cult of the Child and the Controversy over Child Actors
  • 6. Burnett, Barrie, and the Emergence of Children's Theatre
  • Index
巻冊次

: [pbk] ISBN 9780199756742

内容説明

In this groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and children's literature studies, Marah Gubar proposes a fundamental reconception of the nineteenth-century attitude toward childhood. The ideology of innocence was much slower to spread than we think, she contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it-children's authors and members of the infamous "cult of the child"-were actually deeply ambivalent about this Romantic notion. Rather than wholeheartedly promoting a static ideal of childhood purity, Golden Age children's authors often characterize young people as collaborators who are caught up in the constraints of the culture they inhabit, and yet not inevitably victimized as a result of this contact with adults and their world. Such nuanced meditations on the vexed issue of the child's agency, Gubar suggests, can help contemporary scholars to generate more flexible critical approaches to the study of childhood and children's literature.

目次

  • PREFACE
  • INTRODUCTION: "SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST"
  • INDEX

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