Overview
- Considers the representation of childhood across texts produced for young people and adult readerships
- Examines a broad range of literary works, including children’s magazines and texts written by children themselves
- Discusses novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy
Part of the book series: Literary Cultures and Childhoods (LICUCH)
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Conceptualising the Infant and Child in Nineteenth-Century Print
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Front Matter
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Gender, Nature and the Animal
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods explores the construction of the child and the development of texts for children in the nineteenth century through the application of fresh theoretical approaches and attention to aspects of literary childhoods that have only recently begun to be illuminated. This scope enables examination of the child in canonical nineteenth-century novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, and Thomas Hardy alongside well-known fiction intended for young readers by George MacDonald, Christabel Coleridge, and Kate Greenaway. The century was also distinctive for the rise of the children’s magazine, and this book broadens the definition of literary cultures to include magazines produced both by, and for, young people. The volume examines how the child and family are conceptualised, how children are positioned as readers in genres including the domestic novel, school story, Robinsonade, and fantasy fiction, how literary childhoods are written and politicised, and how childhood intersects with perceptions of animals and the natural environment. The range of chapters in this collection and the texts they consider demonstrates the variability and fluidity of literary cultures and nineteenth-century childhoods.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Michelle J. Smith is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her most recent monograph is Consuming Female Beauty: British Literature and Periodicals, 1840-1914 (2022). Her other authored books are From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840-1940 (2018, with Clare Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (2011).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods
Editors: Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith
Series Title: Literary Cultures and Childhoods
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38351-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-38350-2Published: 29 September 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-38353-3Due: 30 October 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-38351-9Published: 28 September 2023
Series ISSN: 2946-479X
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4803
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 253
Number of Illustrations: 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Children's Literature, Comparative Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Social History