Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

Author: James Holt McGavran

Publisher:

Published: 2009-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780820334875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

These essays document and examine the transformation of children's literature during the Romantic period, and trace Romanticism's influence on Victorian children's literature using a variety of critical approaches, including neo-historicist, feminist, mythic, reader-response, and formalist.


Romanticism and Childhood

Romanticism and Childhood

Author: Ann Wierda Rowland

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-05-24

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1107376815

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How and why childhood became so important to such a wide range of Romantic writers has long been one of the central questions of literary historical studies. Ann Wierda Rowland discovers new answers to this question in the rise of a vernacular literary tradition. In the Romantic period the child came fully into its own as the object of increasing social concern and cultural investment; at the same time, modern literary culture consolidated itself along vernacular, national lines. Romanticism and Childhood is the first study to examine the intersections of these historical developments and the first study to demonstrate that a rhetoric of infancy and childhood - the metaphors, images, figures and phrases repeatedly used to represent and conceptualize childhood - enabled Romantic writers to construct a national literary history and culture capable of embracing a wider range of literary forms.


Introducing Children's Literature

Introducing Children's Literature

Author: Deborah Cogan Thacker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-06-29

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1134629753

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Introducing Children's Literature is an ideal guide to reading children's literature through the perspective of literary history. Focusing on the major literary movements from Romanticism to Postmodernism, Thacker and Webb examine the concerns of each period and the ways in which these concerns influence and are influenced by the children's literature of the time. Each section begins with a general chapter, which explains the relationship between the major issues of each literary period and the formal and thematic qualities of children's texts. Close readings of selected texts follow to demonstrate the key defining characteristics of the form of writing and the literary movements. Original in its approach, this book sets children's literature within the context of literary movements and adult literature. It is essential reading for students studying writing for children. Books discussed include: *Louisa May Alcott's Little Women * Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies *Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland *Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz *Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden *P.L.Travers' Mary Poppins *E.B.White's Charlotte's Web *Philip Pullman's Clockwork.


Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Author: Martina Domines Veliki

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2021-09-13

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9783030504311

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.


Literature and the Child

Literature and the Child

Author: James Holt McGavran

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 1998-04

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1587292912

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Romantic myth of childhood as a transhistorical holy time of innocence and spirituality, uncorrupted by the adult world, has been subjected in recent years to increasingly serious interrogation. Was there ever really a time when mythic ideals were simple, pure, and uncomplicated? The contributors to this book contend—although in widely differing ways and not always approvingly—that our culture is indeed still pervaded, in this postmodern moment of the very late twentieth century, by the Romantic conception of childhood which first emerged two hundred years ago. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, western Europe experienced another fin de siècle characterized by overwhelming material and institutional change and instability. By historicizing the specific political, social, and economic conflicts at work within the notion of Romantic childhood, the essayists in Literature and the Child show us how little these forces have changed over time and how enriching and empowering they can still be for children and their parents. In the first section, “Romanticism Continued and Contested,” Alan Richardson and Mitzi Myers question the origins and ends of Romantic childhood. In “Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts,” Dieter Petzold, Richard Flynn, and James McGavran argue that postmodern texts for both children and adults perpetuate the Romantic complexities of childhood. Next, in “The Commerce of Children's Books,” Anne Lundin and Paula Connolly study the production and marketing of children's classics. Finally, in “Romantic Ideas in Cultural Confrontations,” William Scheick and Teya Rosenberg investigate interactions of Romantic myths with those of other cultural systems.


Romanticism and Parenting

Romanticism and Parenting

Author: Carolyn Weber

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1443809179

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

If the child is the father of the man, as William Wordsworth so famously declared, then what of the father that child grows to become? How does a daughter born of her mother’s death, as in the case of Mary Shelley, navigate the politics of production and reproduction within a loaded language of mythological allusion between generational authorships? How do the visual arts perpetuate or challenge cultural agendas, such as portraying patriarchal anxieties about the “effeminization” of homeland by the foreign “other”, or attempting, iconically, to “save the soul” of a nation? How do parents both encode and decode our world? With the rise of the cult of the child in the later 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic writers of Britain and Europe, and eventually of North America, were perfectly positioned to explore, by extension, what it meant to “parent,” whether it be in within the domestic or the political sphere. The essays in Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology offer a fresh, timely, and cutting edge contribution to the field of Romantic studies. The collection has its roots in conference proceedings from the 2005 Romanticism and Parenting Conference held at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. Essays acknowledge traditional discussions of such quintessentially “Romantic” themes as the child, education and familial politics while building upon contemporary innovative arguments within the contexts of Romanticism. As a result, chapters in the collection range from examining didactic children’s literature to complicating constructions of the family politic at personal, communal and nationalistic levels. While challenging and deepening an understanding of Romantic studies, the collection also points to current, dynamic issues, such as the burgeoning discussion of the experience that actual parents face in academia. Consequently, the collection reveals how the Romantic period has come to profoundly influence our own current constructions of the politics of parenting.


Children of the Mire

Children of the Mire

Author: Octavio Paz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780674116290

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis- -vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.


Radical Wordsworth

Radical Wordsworth

Author: Jonathan Bate

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 0300228910

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution. He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."


John Clare

John Clare

Author: Jonathan Bate

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 9780374179908

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

John Clare (1793-1864) was the greatest labor-class poet that England ever produced. Here at last is his full story told by the light of his voluminous work, his birth in poverty, his work as a laborer, his promise as a writer, then his moment of fame in the company of John Keats and the toast of literary London.