Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Perceptions of Childhood in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle
Author: Jennifer Sattaur
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2011-01-18
Genre:
ISBN: 1443827703

This book reads Victorian fin de siècle literature through the medium of perceptions of childhood. It examines the connection between ‘monstrous’ and idealistic symbolic representations of childhood represented by key cultural discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Specifically, anxieties about change are linked closely to anxieties about childhood, procreation, and maturation in a range of Children’s and Adults’ texts from the 1860s to the 1890s. The book demonstrates the ways in which the emergent social movements which have come to define and represent change in the fin-de-siècle period were inherently concerned with the ideas of childhood and parenthood and the ways in which they represented both the promise and the threat of the future. The texts are arranged by theme, and grouped according to whether they are seen primarily as intended for children, or for adults. In texts intended for adult readers, images of childhood are more covert and more metaphorical than those texts aimed at child readers, in which overt pedagogical concerns are often brought to bear. Nothing embodies the idea of the future more than the children who stand as a bridge between ‘now’ and ‘then.’ This book analyses the connections between Victorian perceptions of childhood and the anxieties and upheavals of the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle.

Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle

Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle
Author: Katherine Bowers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2015-06-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107073219

An essay collection that explores Russian literature and culture in relation to the late nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry

Child Labor in the British Victorian Entertainment Industry
Author: Dyan Colclough
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137496037

Child labor greatly contributed to the cultural and economic success of the British Victorian theatrical industry. This book highlights the complexities of the battle for child labor laws, the arguments for the needs of the theatre industry, and the weight of opposition that confronted any attempt to control employers.

Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians

Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians
Author: Jen Harrison
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131710465X

What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel
Author: Sandra Dinter
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000692051

Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, do not always give up on the idea of its ‘natural’ core. Accordingly, this book reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.

Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction

Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction
Author: Kevin A. Morrison
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2018-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476633592

This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.

The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism

The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism
Author: N. Cocks
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2014-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137452455

Established accounts of the child in nineteenth century literature tend to focus on those who occupy a central position within narratives. This book is concerned with children who are not so easily recognized or remembered, the peripheral or overlooked children to be read in works by Dickens, Brontë, Austen and Rossetti.

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats

The Comic Strip Art of Jack B. Yeats
Author: Michael Connerty
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 3030768937

This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.

Language, Power, and Ideology in Political Writing: Emerging Research and Opportunities

Language, Power, and Ideology in Political Writing: Emerging Research and Opportunities
Author: Çak?rta?, Önder
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2019-06-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1522594469

Politics and political literature studies have emerged as one of the most dynamic areas of scrutiny. Relying on ideological as well as socio-political theories, politics have contributed to cultural studies in many ways, especially within written texts such as literary works. As few critics have investigated the intersections of politics and literature, there is a tremendous need for material that does just this. Language, Power, and Ideology in Political Writing: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference book that focuses on the use of narrative and writing to communicate political ideologies. This publication explores literature spurring from politics, the disadvantages of political or highly ideological writing, writers’ awareness of the outside world during the composition process, and how they take advantage of political writing. Featuring a wide range of topics such as gender politics, indigenous literature, and censorship, this book is ideal for academicians, librarians, researchers, and students, specifically those who study politics, international relations, cultural studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and political and ideological studies.

Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play

Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play
Author: Michelle Beissel Heath
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2017-09-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351392131

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.