Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play PDF full book. Access full book title Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play by Michelle Beissel Heath. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Michelle Beissel Heath Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9780367885076 Category : Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children's and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as "playful literary citizenship," or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children's literary texts as well as children's literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children's play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens - even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.
Author: Michelle Beissel Heath Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9780367885076 Category : Languages : en Pages : 178
Book Description
Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children's and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as "playful literary citizenship," or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children's literary texts as well as children's literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children's play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens - even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.
Author: Michelle Beissel Heath Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351392131 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
Drawing evidence from transatlantic literary texts of childhood as well as from nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s and family card, board, and parlor games and games manuals, Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play aims to reveal what might be thought of as "playful literary citizenship," or some of the motivations inherent in later nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglo-American play pursuits as they relate to interest in shaping citizens through investment in "good" literature. Tracing play, as a societal and historical construct, as it surfaces time and again in children’s literary texts as well as children’s literary texts as they surface time and again in situations and environments of children’s play, this book underscores how play and literature are consistently deployed in tandem in attempts to create ideal citizens – even as those ideals varied greatly and were dependent on factors such as gender, ethnicity, colonial status, and class.
Author: Lewis Carroll Publisher: London ; New York : Macmillan ISBN: Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 434
Book Description
First published in 1889, this novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fictional world of Fairyland.
Author: Karen Sánchez-Eppler Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226734590 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Because childhood is not only culturally but also legally and biologically understood as a period of dependency, it has been easy to dismiss children as historical actors. By putting children at the center of our thinking about American history, Karen Sánchez-Eppler recognizes the important part childhood played in nineteenth-century American culture and what this involvement entailed for children themselves. Dependent States examines the ties between children's literacy training and the growing cultural prestige of the novel; the way children functioned rhetorically in reform literature to enforce social norms; the way the risks of death to children shored up emotional power in the home; how Sunday schools socialized children into racial, religious, and national identities; and how class identity was produced, not only in terms of work, but also in the way children played. For Sánchez-Eppler, nineteenth-century childhoods were nothing less than vehicles for national reform. Dependent on adults for their care, children did not conform to the ideals of enfranchisement and agency that we usually associate with historical actors. Yet through meticulously researched examples, Sánchez-Eppler reveals that children participated in the making of social meaning. Her focus on childhood as a dependent state thus offers a rewarding corrective to our notions of autonomous individualism and a new perspective on American culture itself.
Author: Ann R. Hawkins Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438485565 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
A vital part of daily life in the nineteenth century, games and play were so familiar and so ubiquitous that their presence over time became almost invisible. Technological advances during the century allowed for easier manufacturing and distribution of board games and books about games, and the changing economic conditions created a larger market for them as well as more time in which to play them. These changing conditions not only made games more profitable, but they also increased the influence of games on many facets of culture. Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America focuses on the material and visual culture of both American and British games, examining how cultures of play intersect with evolving gender norms, economic structures, scientific discourses, social movements, and nationalist sentiments.
Author: Ruby Lal Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139852019 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century remained agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household, and rooftops.
Author: Vanessa Smith Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 1531503608 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
Author: M.O. Grenby Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 074862984X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This critical guide provides a concise yet comprehensive history of British and North American children's literature from its seventeenth-century origins to the present day. Each chapter focuses on one of the main genres of children's literature: fables, fantasy, adventure stories, moral tales, family stories, the school story, and poetry. M. O. Grenby shows how these forms have evolved over three hundred years as well as asking why most children's books, even today, continue to fall into one or other of these generic categories. Why, for instance, has fantasy been so appealing to both Victorian and twenty-first-century children? Are the religious and moral stories written in the eighteenth century really so different from the teenage problem novels of today? The book answers questions like these with a combination of detailed analysis of particular key texts and a broad survey of hundreds of children's books, both famous and forgotten.
Author: Laurie Ousley Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527566455 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood takes its central premise, as the title indicates, from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Upon their return to The Emerald City after killing the Wicked Witch of the West, the task the Wizard assigned them, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and Lion learn that the wizard is a “humbug,” merely a man from Nebraska manipulating them and the citizens of both the Emerald City and of Oz from behind a screen. Yet they all continue to believe in the powers they know he does not have, still insisting he grant their wishes. The image of the man behind the screen—and the reader’s continued pursuit of the Wizard—is a powerful one that has at its core an issue central to the study of children’s literature: the relationship between the adult writer and the child reader. As Jack Zipes, Perry Nodelman, Daniel Hade, Jacqueline Rose, and many others point out, before the literature for children and young adults actually reaches these intended readers, it has been mediated by many and diverse cultural, social, political, psychological, and economic forces. These forces occasionally work purposefully in an attempt to consciously socialize or empower, training the reader into a particular identity or way of viewing the world, by one who considers him or herself an advocate for children. Obviously, these “wizards” acting in literature can be the writers themselves, but they can also be the publishers, corporations, school boards, teachers, librarians, literary critics, and parents, and these advocates can be conservative, progressive, or any gradation in between. It is the purpose of this volume to interrogate the politics and the political powers at work in literature for children and young adults. Childhood is an important site of political debate, and children often the victims or beneficiaries of adult uses of power; one would be hard-pressed to find a category of literature more contested than that written for children and adolescents. Peter Hunt writes in his introduction to Understanding Children’s Literature, that children’s books “are overtly important educationally and commercially—with consequences across the culture, from language to politics: most adults, and almost certainly the vast majority in positions of power and influence, read children’s books as children, and it is inconceivable that the ideologies permeating those books had no influence on their development.” If there were a question about the central position literature for children and young adults has in political contests, one needs to look no further than the myriad struggles surrounding censorship. Mark I. West observes, for instance, “Throughout the history of children’s literature, the people who have tried to censor children’s books, for all their ideological differences, share a rather romantic view about the power of books. They believe, or at least they profess to believe, that books are such a major influence in the formation of children’s values and attitudes that adults need to monitor every word that children read.” Because childhood and young-adulthood are the sites of political debate for issues ranging from civil rights and racism to the construction and definition of the family, indoctrinating children into or subverting national and religious ideologies, the literature of childhood bears consciously political analysis, asking how socialization works, how children and young adults learn of social, cultural and political expectations, as well as how literature can propose means of fighting those structures. To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood intends to offer analysis of the political content and context of literature written for and about children and young adults. The essays included in To See the Wizard analyze nineteenth and twentieth century literature from America, Britain, Australia, the Caribbean, and Sri Lanka that is for and about children and adolescents. The essays address issues of racial and national identity and representation, poverty and class mobility, gender, sexuality and power, and the uses of literature in the healing of trauma and the construction of an authentic self.
Author: Monika Elbert Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135898545 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 312
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.