Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle PDF Author: Jennifer Sattaur
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443827703
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle PDF Author: Jennifer Sattaur
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443827703
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle

Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Katherine Bowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107073219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
An essay collection that explores Russian literature and culture in relation to the late nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry

Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry PDF Author: Dyan Colclough
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137496037
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Child labor greatly contributed to the cultural and economic success of the British Victorian theatrical industry. This book highlights the complexities of the battle for child labor laws, the arguments for the needs of the theatre industry, and the weight of opposition that confronted any attempt to control employers.

Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians

Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians PDF Author: Jen Harrison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317104641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.

Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle

Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle PDF Author: Stephen Arata
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521563526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
It has been widely recognised that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin de siècle representation of three forms of decline - national, biological and aesthetic - and reveals how late Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siècle.

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel PDF Author: Sandra Dinter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000692051
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction

Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction PDF Author: Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism

The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism PDF Author: N. Cocks
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137452455
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Get Book Here

Book Description
Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. This book is concerned with children who are not so easily recognized or remembered, the peripheral or overlooked children to be read in works by Dickens, Brontë, Austen and Rossetti.

Decadent Conservatism

Decadent Conservatism PDF Author: Alex Murray
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192673963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatives turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organisation that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, through to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Decadent Conservatism challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late-Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of Individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, Folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer war, this study offers a new, and much messier, picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as social, political, and cultural history of the period 1880-1920.

Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play

Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play PDF Author: Michelle Beissel Heath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351392131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as "playful literary citizenship," or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children’s literary texts as well as children’s literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children’s play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens – even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.