Reading Victorian Schoolrooms

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms PDF Author: Elizabeth Gargano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135861226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children’s writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman’s traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms PDF Author: Elizabeth Gargano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135861226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children’s writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman’s traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.

Victorians and the Case for Charity

Victorians and the Case for Charity PDF Author: Marilyn D. Button
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476605866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This collection of all new essays seeks to answer a series of questions surrounding the Victorian response to poverty in Britain. In short, what did various layers of society say the poor deserved and what did they do to help them? The work is organized against the backdrop of the 1834 New Poor Laws, recognizing that poverty garnered considerable attention in England because of its pervasive and painful presence. Each essay examines a different initiative to help the poor. Taking an historical tack, the essayists begin with the royal perspective and move into the responses of Church of England members, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics; the social engagement of the literati is discussed as well. This collection reflects the real, monetary, spiritual and emotional investments of individuals, public institutions, private charities, and religious groups who struggled to address the needs of the poor.

Picturing the Wolf in Children's Literature

Picturing the Wolf in Children's Literature PDF Author: Debra Mitts-Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135765715
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
From the villainous beast of “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs,” to the nurturing wolves of Romulus and Remus and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the wolf has long been a part of the landscape of children’s literature. Meanwhile, since the 1960s and the popularization of scientific research on these animals, children’s books have begun to feature more nuanced views. In Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature, Mitts-Smith analyzes visual images of the wolf in children’s books published in Western Europe and North America from 1500 to the present. In particular, she considers how wolves are depicted in and across particular works, the values and attitudes that inform these depictions, and how the concept of the wolf has changed over time. What she discovers is that illustrations and photos in works for children impart social, cultural, and scientific information not only about wolves, but also about humans and human behavior. First encountered in childhood, picture books act as a training ground where the young learn both how to decode the “symbolic” wolf across various contexts and how to make sense of “real” wolves. Mitts-Smith studies sources including myths, legends, fables, folk and fairy tales, fractured tales, fictional stories, and nonfiction, highlighting those instances in which images play a major role, including illustrated anthologies, chapbooks, picture books, and informational books. This book will be of interest to children’s literature scholars, as well as those interested in the figure of the wolf and how it has been informed over time.

Into the Closet

Into the Closet PDF Author: Victoria Flanagan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136777288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Into the Closet examines the representation of cross-dressing in a wide variety of children’s fiction, ranging from picture books and junior fiction to teen films and novels for young adults. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the different types of cross-dressing found in children’s narratives, raising a number of significant issues relating to the ideological construction of masculinity and femininity in books for younger readers. Many literary and cultural critics have studied the cultural significance of adult cross-dressing, yet although cross-dressing representations are plentiful in children’s literature and film, very little critical attention has been paid to this subject to date. Into the Closet fills this critical gap. Cross-dressing demonstrates how gender is symbolically constructed through various items of clothing and apparel. It also has the ability to deconstruct notions of problematizing the relationship between sex and gender. Into the Closet is an important book for academics, teachers, and parents because it demonstrates how cross-dressing, rather than being taboo, is frequently used in children’s literature and film as a strategy to educate (or enculturate) children about gender.

Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature

Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature PDF Author: Michelle Superle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136720871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Concurrent with increasing scholarly attention toward national children’s literatures, Contemporary English-language Indian Children’s Literature explores an emerging body of work that has thus far garnered little serious critical attention. Superle critically examines the ways Indian children’s writers have represented childhood in relation to the Indian nation, Indian cultural identity, and Indian girlhood. From a framework of postcolonial and feminist theories, children’s novels published between 1988 and 2008 in India are compared with those from the United Kingdom and North America from the same period, considering the differing ideologies and the current textual constructions of childhood at play in each. Broadly, Superle contends that over the past twenty years an aspirational view of childhood has developed in this literature—a view that positions children as powerful participants in the project of enabling positive social transformation. Her main argument, formed after recognizing several overarching thematic and structural patterns in more than one hundred texts, is that the novels comprise an aspirational literature with a transformative agenda: they imagine apparently empowered child characters who perform in diverse ways in the process of successfully creating and shaping the ideal Indian nation, their own well-adjusted bicultural identities in the diaspora, and/or their own empowered girlhoods. Michelle Superle is a Professor in the department of Communications at Okanagan College. She has taught children’s literature, composition, and creative writing courses at various Canadian universities and has published articles in Papers and IRCL.

Representing Africa in Children's Literature

Representing Africa in Children's Literature PDF Author: Vivian Yenika-Agbaw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135923671
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Representing Africa in Children’s Literature explores how African and Western authors portray youth in contemporary African societies, critically examining the dominant images of Africa and Africans in books published between 1960 and 2005. The book focuses on contemporary children’s and young adult literature set in Africa, examining issues regarding colonialism, the politics of representation, and the challenges posed to both "insiders" and "outsiders" writing about Africa for children.

Enterprising Youth

Enterprising Youth PDF Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135898537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
"Recommended" by Choice Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.

The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature

The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature PDF Author: Jan Susina
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135254397
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In this volume, Jan Susina examines the importance of Lewis Carroll and his popular Alice books to the field of children’s literature. From a study of Carroll’s juvenilia to contemporary multimedia adaptations of Wonderland, Susina shows how the Alice books fit into the tradition of literary fairy tales and continue to influence children’s writers. In addition to examining Carroll’s books for children, these essays also explore his photographs of children, his letters to children, his ill-fated attempt to write for a dual audience of children and adults, and his lasting contributions to publishing. The book addresses the important, but overlooked facet of Carroll’s career as an astute entrepreneur who carefully developed an extensive Alice industry of books and non-book items based on the success of Wonderland, while rigorously defending his reputation as the originator of his distinctive style of children’s stories.

Crossover Picturebooks

Crossover Picturebooks PDF Author: Sandra L. Beckett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136577025
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This book situates the picturebook genre within the widespread international phenomenon of crossover literature, examining an international corpus of picturebooks — including artists’ books, wordless picturebooks, and celebrity picturebooks — that appeal to readers of all ages. Focusing on contemporary picturebooks, Sandra Beckett shows that the picturebook has traditionally been seen as a children’s genre, but in the eyes of many authors, illustrators, and publishers, it is a narrative form that can address any and all age groups. Innovative graphics and formats as well as the creative, often complex dialogue between text and image provide multiple levels of meaning and invite readers of all ages to consider texts that are primarily marketed as children’s books. The interplay of text and image that distinguishes the picturebook from other forms of fiction and makes it a unique art form also makes it the ultimate crossover genre. Crossover picturebooks are often very complex texts that are challenging for adults as well as children. Many are characterized by difficult "adult" themes, genre blending, metafictive discourse, intertextuality, sophisticated graphics, and complex text-image interplay. Exciting experiments with new formats and techniques, as well as novel interactions with new media and technologies have made the picturebook one of the most vibrant and innovative contemporary literary genres, one that seems to know no boundaries. Crossover Picturebooks is a valuable addition to the study of a genre that is gaining increasing recognition and appreciation, and contributes significantly to the field of children’s literature as a whole.

The Outside Child, In and Out of the Book

The Outside Child, In and Out of the Book PDF Author: Christine Wilkie-Stibbs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Christine Wilkie-Stibbs juxtaposes the narratives of literary and actual "outsider" children to explore how Western culture has imagined, defined, and dealt with various marginalized children, whether orphans, homeless, refugees, or victims of abuse.