Utilizing new historicist, feminist, and cultural studies critiques, this collection of essays provides new perspectives on early children's literary texts and the work of children's literature scholar Mitzi Myers (1939-2001).
Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.
Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children’s and young people’s history. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children, or that ‘secularization’ is the only lens to apply to childhood and religion. Putting forth the argument that religion was an abiding influence among British world children throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this volume places ‘religion’ at the center of analysis and discussion. At the same time, it positions the religious factor within a broader social and cultural framework. The essays focus on the historical contexts in which religion was formative for children in various ‘British’ settings denoted as ‘Anglo’ or ‘colonial’ during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. These contexts include mission fields, churches, families, Sunday schools, camps, schools and youth movements. Together they are treated as ‘sites’ in which religion contributed to identity formation, albeit in different ways relating to such factors as gender, race, disability and denomination. The contributors develop this subject for childhoods that were experienced largely, but not exclusively, outside the ‘metropole’, in a diversity of geographical settings. By extending the geographic range, even within the British world, it provides a more rounded perspective on children’s global engagement with religion.
For the international cast of contributors to this volume being “in fashion” is about self-presentation; defining how fashion is presented in the visual, written, and performing arts; and about design, craft manufacturing, packaging, marketing, and archives.
Marginal Notes: Social Reading and the Literal Margins offers an account of literary marginalia based on original research from a range of unique archival sources, from mid-16th-century France to early 20th-century Tasmania. Chapters examine marginal commentary from 17th-century China, 18th-century Britain, and 19th-century America, investigating the reputations, as reflected by attentive readers, of He Zhou, Pierre Bayle, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Warton, and Sir Walter Scott. The marginal writers include Jacques Gohory, Mary Astell, Hester Thrale, Herman Melville, the young daughters of the Broome family in Gloucestershire, and the patrons of the library of the Huon Mechanics’ Institute, Tasmania. Though marginalia is often proscribed and frequently hidden or overlooked, the collection reveals the enduring power of marginalia, concluding with studies of the ethics of annotation and the resurrected life of marginalia in digital environments.
Readers interested in the visual arts, in translation studies, or in popular culture, as well as a wider audience wishing to discover the tale anew will delight in this collection.
Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.
Left Out presents an alternative and corrective history of writing for children in the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1949 a number of British publishers, writers, and illustrators included children's literature in their efforts to make Britain a progressive, egalitarian, and modern society. Some came from privileged backgrounds, others from the poorest parts of the poorest cities in the land; some belonged to the metropolitan intelligentsia or bohemia, others were working-class autodidacts, but all sought to use writing for children and young people to create activists, visionaries, and leaders among the rising generation.Together they produced a significant number of both politically and aesthetically radical publications for children and young people. This 'radical children's literature' was designed to ignite and underpin the work of making a new Britain for a new kind of Briton. While there are many dedicated studies of children's literature and childrens' writers working in other periods, the years 1910-1949 have previous received little critical attention. In this study, Kimberley Reynolds shows that the accepted characterisation of inter-war children's literature as retreatist, anti-modernist, and apolitical is too sweeping and that the relationship between children's literature and modernism, left-wing politics, and progressive education has been neglected.
'This book presents a rigorous, hugely informative analysis of the early history of Dutch children’s literature, pedagogical developments and emerging family formations. Thoroughly researched, Dietz’s study will be essential for historians of eighteenth-century childhood, education and children’s books, both in the Dutch context and more widely.’ — Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK. ‘A rich, informative, well-documented and effectively illustrated discussion of the ways Dutch eighteenth-century educators tried to transform youth into responsible readers. It does so in a wide international context and masterfully connects this process to the radical politicization and de-politicization of Dutch society in the revolutionary period.’ —Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, formerly of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and the University of California at Los Angeles, USA. This book explores how children’s literature and literacy could at once regulate and empower young people in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Rather than presenting the history of childhood as a linear story of increasing agency, it suggests that we view it as a continuous struggle with the impossibility of full agency for young people. This volume demonstrates how this struggle informed the production of books in a historical context in which the development of independent youths was high on the political agenda. In close interaction with international children’s literature markets, Dutch authors developed new strategies to make the members of young generations into capable readers and writers, equipped to organize their own minds and bodies properly, and to support a supposedly declining fatherland.
The present volume connects three academic fields that share central concerns but remain surprisingly isolated from each other: world literature studies, postcolonial studies, and translation studies. It approaches translation not as a vague metaphor but as a distinct and socially embedded practice that connects literatures. In similar vein, it interrogates the smoothness of many versions of “global” theory by insisting on the specificity of place and the resistance to translatibility among languages, oeuvres and genres. The topics covered in the chapters include the formation of world literature as a progamme of study, the French concept of littérature-monde, the rise of English in nineteenth-century Sweden, the translation of Arabic literature in Europe, and the transnationalism of the avant-garde. Through such case studies, and by drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Édouard Glissant, Pierre Bourdieu and David Damrosch, among others, the international group of contributors add substantially to the theoretical and methodological consolidation of world literature as a field of research.