1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821864603321

Autore

Gubar Marah

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Oxford ; ; New York, : Oxford University Press, 2009

ISBN

0199714479

9780199714476

9780199868490 (ebook) :

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

xii, 264 p. : ill

Disciplina

820.9/928209034

Soggetti

Children's literature, English - History and criticism

English literature - 19th century - History and criticism

Children in literature

Adolescence in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

Intro -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION: "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast" -- CHAPTER ONE: "Our Field": The Rise of the Child Narrator -- CHAPTER TWO: Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island as Anti-Adventure Story -- CHAPTER THREE: Reciprocal Aggression: Un-Romantic Agency in the Art of Lewis Carroll -- CHAPTER FOUR: Partners in Crime: E. Nesbit and the Art of Thieving -- CHAPTER FIVE: The Cult of the Child and the Controversy over Child Actors -- CHAPTER SIX: Burnett, Barrie, and the Emergence of Children's Theatre -- NOTES -- WORKS CITED -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

Sommario/riassunto

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.