New Book: Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods

I'm very proud of my latest edited collection with Kristine Moruzi, Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods, which has just been published in Palgrave's Literary Cultures and Childhoods series. It was intellectually reinvigorating to think about the construction of the child in adult texts alongside of the development of children's literature and periodicals. Moreover, it was rewarding to assemble some of our favourite scholars in the field to think about this topic, including those who were heavily influential on our doctoral work about Victorian children's literature, such as Claudia Nelson, and those who are reframing the field as early-career researchers. 

The volume includes chapters that consider 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. It 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. 

It was especially exciting to begin thinking about how children are depicted as readers in Victorian children's literature in the chapter I wrote with Kristine, which discusses a range of children’s books that feature child readers, including Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Juliana Ewing’s Six to Sixteen (1872) and L.T. Meade’s The Sweet Girl Graduate (1891). 

TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods: An Introduction"
Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith

Conceptualising the Infant and Child in Nineteenth-Century Print

"Child Figures, Conceptualisations of Time, and Notions of Progress in Nineteenth-Century British Literature"
Elizabeth A. Galway

"The Victorian Baby of Popular Fiction"
Tamara S. Wagner

"The Child Reader: Children’s Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century"
Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi

"'Being Editors': Childhood Over Time"
Virginia Zimmerman

Place and Nation

"Constructing the 'Scientific' Child in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Children’s Periodicals"
Shih-Wen Sue Chen

"Idols on Display: Pacific Object Lessons for the British Child"
Michelle Elleray

"'Bring[ing] back the fairy times': Framing the Child in Frances Browne’s Granny’s Wonderful Chair"
Beth Rodgers

"'little conversations': Child Communities and Political Agency in the Writing of Frederick Douglass"
Marissa Carrere

"Feeding Dickens’s Dysfunctional Families: Advocating Social Surrogacy in The Adventures of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations"
Sidia Fiorato, Susan Honeyman

Gender, Nature and the Animal

“'No other air, and no better water, than were to be obtained in her native parish': The Intellectual World of Jane Taylor’s Display: A Tale for Young People"
Jane Stafford

"Alienated Girlhood in Works by Christabel Coleridge"
Claudia Nelson

"'To a Joyous Land': Nature and Gender in Kate Greenaway’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
Alexandra Valint

"Captive Animals and Disabled Children at the London Zoo"
Jessica Straley

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