The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel

Author: Laura C. Berry

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published:

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780813934570

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The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.


Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel

Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel

Author: Madeleine Wood

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-30

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 303045469X

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This book produces an original argument about the emergence of ‘trauma’ in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siècle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud’s early writings and Jean Laplanche’s ‘general theory of seduction’.


Narrative Bonds

Narrative Bonds

Author: Alexandra Valint

Publisher:

Published: 2025-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780814257791

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While narrative fracturing, multiplicity, and experimentalism are commonly associated with modernist and postmodern texts, they have largely been understudied in Victorian literature. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel focuses on the centrality of these elements and address the proliferation of multiple narrators in Victorian novels. In Narrative Bonds, Alexandra Valint explores the ways in which the Victorian multi-narrator form moves toward the unity of vision across characters and provides inclusivity in an era of expanding democratic rights and a growing middle class. Integrating narrative theory, gothic theory, and disability studies with analyses of works by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker, this comprehensive and illuminating study illustrates the significance and impact of the multi-narrator structure in Victorian novels.


The Victorian Country Child

The Victorian Country Child

Author: Pamela Horn

Publisher: Alan Sutton Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780750914994

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'A totally fascinating account of Victorian country life' -- The Good Book Guide This book describes the varied aspects of country life in the last century from a child's point of view. The author discusses all aspects of their day-to-day experiences, including living conditions, food, school life, work on the land, agricultural policies and how they affected children, local and cottage industries, the Church and its influence, and crime and punishment.


Child-loving

Child-loving

Author: James R. Kincaid

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 9780415910033

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The question "What is a child?" is at the heart of the world the Victorians made. In Child-Loving, James Kincaid writes a fresh chapter in the history of the Victorian era. Dealing with one of the most intimate and troubling notions of the modern period - how the Victorians (and we, their descendants) - imagine children within the continuum of human sexuality, Kincaid's work compels us to consider just how we love the children we love. Throughout the nineteenth century, the child developed as a symbol of purity, innocence, asexuality - the angelic child perhaps not wholly real. Yet the child could also be a figure of fantasy, obsession, suppressed desires. Think of Lewis Carroll's Alice (or, a few years later, James Barrie's Peter Pan). The image of the child as both pure and strangely erotic is part of the mythology of Victorian culture. And so, Kincaid argues, the Victorians viewed children in ways that seem to us now complex and perhaps bizarre. But do we fare much better today? Contemporary society sees children at risk, in need of protection from pedophiles. Yet as our culture recoils from the horror of child molestation, we offer children's bodies as spectacle in the media and advertising, giving children the erotic attention we wish to deny. Built on a decade of research into literary, medical, cultural, and legal materials, Child-Loving traces for the first time the growth of our conceptions of the body, the child, and sexuality, and the stories we tell about them.


Acting Naturally

Acting Naturally

Author: Lynn M. Voskuil

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780813922690

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Voskuil argues that Victorian Britons saw themselves as "authentically performative," a paradoxical belief that focused their sense of vocation as individuals, as a public, and as a nation.


The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Novel

Author: Francis O'Gorman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0470779853

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This guide steers students through significant critical responses to the Victorian novel from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day.


The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel

Author: Lisa Rodensky

Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 829

ISBN-13: 0199533148

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The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.


A Companion to the Victorian Novel

A Companion to the Victorian Novel

Author: Patrick Brantlinger

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0470997206

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The Companion to the Victorian Novel provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901. Provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period. Explains issues such as Victorian religions, class structure, and Darwinism to those who are unfamiliar with them. Comprises original, accessible chapters written by renowned and emerging scholars in the field of Victorian studies. Ideal for students and researchers seeking up-to-the-minute coverage of contexts and trends, or as a starting point for a survey course.


Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England

Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England

Author: Monica Flegel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-23

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 131716234X

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Moving nimbly between literary and historical texts, Monica Flegel provides a much-needed interpretive framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late nineteenth century. Flegel considers a wide range of well-known and more obscure texts from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, including philosophical writings by Locke and Rousseau, poetry by Coleridge, Blake, and Caroline Norton, works by journalists and reformers like Henry Mayhew and Mary Carpenter, and novels by Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Morrison. Taking up crucial topics such as the linking of children with animals, the figure of the child performer, the relationship between commerce and child endangerment, and the problem of juvenile delinquency, Flegel examines the emergence of child abuse as a subject of legal and social concern in England, and its connection to earlier, primarily literary representations of endangered children. With the emergence of the NSPCC and the new crime of cruelty to children, new professions and genres, such as child protection and social casework, supplanted literary works as the authoritative voices in the definition of social ills and their cure. Flegel argues that this development had material effects on the lives of children, as well as profound implications for the role of class in representations of suffering and abused children. Combining nuanced close readings of individual texts with persuasive interpretations of their influences and limitations, Flegel's book makes a significant contribution to the history of childhood, social welfare, the family, and Victorian philanthropy.