http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/793114314

Artful dodgers reconceiving the golden age of children's literature

"In this groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and childhood studies, Marah Gubar proposes a fundamental reconception of the nineteenth-century attitude toward the child. The Romantic ideology of innocence spread more slowly than we think, she contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it--children's authors and members of the infamous "cult of the child"--Were actually deeply ambivalent. Writers such as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J.M. Barrie often resisted the growing cultural pressure to erect a strict barrier between child and adult, innocence and experience. Instead of urging young people to mold themselves to match a static ideal of artless simplicity, they frequently conceived of children as precociously literate, highly socialized beings who--though indisputably shaped by the strictures of civilized life--could nevertheless cope with such influences in creative ways"--Abstract.

Open All Close All