The Child in British Literature

The Child in British Literature PDF Author: A. Gavin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230361862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book

Book Description
The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.

The Child in British Literature

The Child in British Literature PDF Author: A. Gavin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230361862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book

Book Description
The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood.

History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature

History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature PDF Author: Jackie C. Horne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317121694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Get Book

Book Description
How did the 'flat' characters of eighteenth-century children's literature become 'round' by the mid-nineteenth? While previous critics have pointed to literary Romanticism for an explanation, Jackie C. Horne argues that this shift can be better understood by looking to the discipline of history. Eighteenth-century humanism believed the purpose of history was to teach private and public virtue by creating idealized readers to emulate. Eighteenth-century children's literature, with its impossibly perfect protagonists (and its equally imperfect villains) echoes history's exemplar goals. Exemplar history, however, came under increasing pressure during the period, and the resulting changes in historiographical practice - an increased need for reader engagement and the widening of history's purview to include the morals, manners, and material lives of everyday people - find their mirror in changes in fiction for children. Horne situates hitherto neglected Robinsonades, historical novels, and fictionalized histories within the cultural, social, and political contexts of the period to trace the ways in which idealized characters gradually gave way to protagonists who fostered readers' sympathetic engagement. Horne's study will be of interest to specialists in children's literature, the history of education, and book history.

A Question of Upbringing

A Question of Upbringing PDF Author: Anthony Powell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409037827
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
'He is, as Proust was before him, the great literary chronicler of his culture in his time.' GUARDIAN 'A Dance to the Music of Time' is universally acknowledged as one of the great works of English literature. Reissued now in this definitive edition, it stands ready to delight and entrance a new generation of readers. In this first volume, Nick Jenkins is introduced to the ebbs and flows of life at boarding school in the 1920s, spent in the company of his friends: Peter Templer, Charles Stringham, and Kenneth Widmerpool. Though their days are filled with visits from relatives and boyish pranks, usually at the expense of their housemaster Le Bas, a disastrous trip in Templer’s car threatens their new friendship. As the school year comes to a close, the young men are faced with the prospects of adulthood, and with finding their place in the world.

The Education of a British-Protected Child

The Education of a British-Protected Child PDF Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 0307272907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book

Book Description
From one of the greatest writers of the modern era, an intimate and essential collection of personal essays on home, identity, and colonialism Chinua Achebe’s characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. From a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria to considerations on the African-American Diaspora, from a glimpse into his extraordinary family life and his thoughts on the potent symbolism of President Obama’s elections—this charmingly personal, intellectually disciplined, and steadfastly wise collection is an indispensable addition to the remarkable Achebe oeuvre.

The Children's Book

The Children's Book PDF Author: A. S. Byatt
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307373835
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 626

Get Book

Book Description
From the renowned author of Possession, The Children’s Book is the absorbing story of the close of what has been called the Edwardian summer: the deceptively languid, blissful period that ended with the cataclysmic destruction of World War I. In this compelling novel, A.S. Byatt summons up a whole era, revealing that beneath its golden surface lay tensions that would explode into war, revolution and unbelievable change — for the generation that came of age before 1914 and, most of all, for their children. The novel centres around Olive Wellwood, a fairy tale writer, and her circle, which includes the brilliant, erratic craftsman Benedict Fludd and his apprentice Phillip Warren, a runaway from the poverty of the Potteries; Prosper Cain, the soldier who directs what will become the Victoria and Albert Museum; Olive’s brother-in-law Basil Wellwood, an officer of the Bank of England; and many others from every layer of society. A.S. Byatt traces their lives in intimate detail and moves between generations, following the children who must choose whether to follow the roles expected of them or stand up to their parents’ “porcelain socialism.” Olive’s daughter Dorothy wishes to become a doctor, while her other daughter, Hedda, wants to fight for votes for women. Her son Tom, sent to an upper-class school, wants nothing more than to spend time in the woods, tracking birds and foxes. Her nephew Charles becomes embroiled with German-influenced revolutionaries. Their portraits connect the political issues at the heart of nascent feminism and socialism with grave personal dilemmas, interlacing until The Children’s Book becomes a perfect depiction of an entire world. Olive is a fairy tale writer in the era of Peter Pan and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows, not long after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At a time when children in England suffered deprivation by the millions, the concept of childhood was being refined and elaborated in ways that still influence us today. For each of her children, Olive writes a special, private book, bound in a different colour and placed on a shelf; when these same children are ferried off into the unremitting destruction of the Great War, the reader is left to wonder who the real children in this novel are. The Children’s Book is an astonishing novel. It is an historical feat that brings to life an era that helped shape our own as well as a gripping, personal novel about parents and children, life’s most painful struggles and its richest pleasures. No other writer could have imagined it or created it.

The Image of Childhood

The Image of Childhood PDF Author: Peter Coveney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description


Antarctica in British Children’s Literature

Antarctica in British Children’s Literature PDF Author: Sinead Moriarty
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000262715
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
For over a century British authors have been writing about the Antarctic for child readers, yet this body of literature has never been explored in detail. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature examines this field for the first time, identifying the dominant genres and recurrent themes and tropes while interrogating how this landscape has been constructed as a wilderness within British literature for children. The text is divided into two sections. Part I focuses on the stories of early-twentieth-century explorers such as Robert F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature highlights the impact of children’s literature on the expedition writings of Robert Scott, including the influence of Scott’s close friend, author J.M. Barrie. The text also reveals the important role of children’s literature in the contemporary resurgence of interest in Scott’s long-term rival Ernest Shackleton. Part II focuses on fictional narratives set in the Antarctic, including early-twentieth-century whaling literature, adventure and fantasy texts, contemporary animal stories and environmental texts for children. Together these two sections provide an insight into how depictions of this unique continent have changed over the past century, reflecting transformations in attitudes towards wilderness and wild landscapes.

Skills for Literary Analysis (Teacher)

Skills for Literary Analysis (Teacher) PDF Author: James P. Stobaugh
Publisher: New Leaf Publishing Group
ISBN: 1614583218
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book

Book Description
The Teacher Guide for Skills for Literary Analysis: Lessons in Assessing Writing Structures.

Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-century England

Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-century England PDF Author: Monica Flegel
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754664567
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
Considering a wide range of texts by authors such as Locke, Rousseau, Caroline Norton, Henry Mayhew, Frances Trollope, and Charles Dickens, Monica Flegel provides an interpretive framework for understanding the formation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The emergence of the NSPCC, Flegel argues, had material effects on the lives of children, and profound implications for the role of class in representations of suffering and abused children.

Beowulf as Children’s Literature

Beowulf as Children’s Literature PDF Author: Bruce Gilchrist
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487515855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
The single largest category of Beowulf representation and adaptation, outside of direct translation of the poem, is children’s literature. Over the past century and a half, more than 150 new versions of Beowulf directed to child and teen audiences have appeared, in English and in many other languages. In this collection of original essays, Bruce Gilchrist and Britt Mize examine the history and processes of remaking Beowulf for young readers. Inventive in their manipulations of story, tone, and genre, these adaptations require their authors to make countless decisions about what to include, exclude, emphasize, de-emphasize, and adjust. This volume considers the many forms of children’s literature, focusing primarily on picture books, illustrated storybooks, and youth novels, but taking account also of curricular aids, illustrated full translations of the poem, and songs. Contributors address issues of gender, historical context, war and violence, techniques of narration, education, and nationalism, investigating both the historical and theoretical dimensions of bringing Beowulf to child audiences.