Precocious Children and Childish Adults

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Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421406128
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Precocious Children and Childish Adults by : Claudia Nelson

Download or read book Precocious Children and Childish Adults written by Claudia Nelson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

Precocious Children and Childish Adults

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Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421405342
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Precocious Children and Childish Adults by : Claudia Nelson

Download or read book Precocious Children and Childish Adults written by Claudia Nelson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

Dickens and the Imagined Child

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317151208
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickens and the Imagined Child by : Peter Merchant

Download or read book Dickens and the Imagined Child written by Peter Merchant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of the child and the imaginative and emotional capacities associated with children have always been sites of lively contestation for readers and critics of Dickens. In Dickens and the Imagined Child, leading scholars explore the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination and reflect on the cultural resonance of his engagement with this topic. Part I of the collection examines the Dickensian child as both characteristic type and particular example, proposing a typology of the Dickensian child that is followed by discussions of specific children in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. Part II focuses on the relationship between childhood and memory, by examining the various ways in which the child’s-eye view was reabsorbed into Dickens’s mature sensibility. The essays in Part III focus upon reading and writing as particularly significant aspects of childhood experience; from Dickens’s childhood reading of tales of adventure, they move to discussion of the child readers in his novels and finally to a consideration of his own early writings alongside those that his children contributed to the Gad’s Hill Gazette. The collection therefore builds a picture of the remembered experiences of childhood being realised anew, both by Dickens and through his inspiring example, in the imaginative creations that they came to inform. While the protagonist of David Copperfield-that 'favourite child' among Dickens’s novels-comes to think of his childhood self as something which he 'left behind upon the road of life', for Dickens himself, leafing continually through his own back pages, there can be no putting away of childish things.

Adulthood in Children's Literature

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350049794
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Adulthood in Children's Literature by : Vanessa Joosen

Download or read book Adulthood in Children's Literature written by Vanessa Joosen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most scholars who study children's books are pre-occupied with the child characters and adult mediators, Vanessa Joosen re-positions the lens to focus on the under-explored construction of adulthood in children's literature. Adulthood in Children's Literature demonstrates how books for young readers evoke adulthood as a stage in life, enacted by adult characters, and in relationship with the construction of childhood. Employing age studies as a framework for analysis, this book covers a range of English and Dutch children's books published from 1970 to the present. Calling upon critical voices like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Peter Hollindale, Maria Nikolajeva and Lorraine Green, and the works of such authors as Babette Cole, Philip Pullman, Ted van Lieshout, Jacqueline Wilson, Salman Rushdie and Guus Kuijer, Joosen offers a fresh perspective on children's literature by focusing not on the child but the adult.

Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131705203X
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present by : Maria Sachiko Cecire

Download or read book Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present written by Maria Sachiko Cecire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.

Political Anxiety in Golden Age Children's Classics and Their Contemporary Adaptations

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110742764
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Political Anxiety in Golden Age Children's Classics and Their Contemporary Adaptations by : Jasmin Sültemeyer

Download or read book Political Anxiety in Golden Age Children's Classics and Their Contemporary Adaptations written by Jasmin Sültemeyer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As striking, counter-intuitive and distasteful as the combination of children and anxiety may seem, some of the most popular children's classics abound in depictions of traumatic relationships, bloody wars and helpless heroes. This book draws on Freudian and Lacanian anxiety models to investigate the psychological and political significance of this curious juxtaposition, as it stands out in Golden Age novels from both sides of the Atlantic and their present-day adaptations. The stories discussed in detail, so the argument goes, identify specific anxieties and forms of anxiety management as integral elements of hegemonial middle-class identity. Apart from its audacious link between psychoanalysis and Marxist, feminist, as well as postcolonial ideology criticism, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the ways in which allegedly trivial texts negotiate questions of individual and (trans)national identities. In doing so, it offers a fresh look at beloved tales like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, contributes to the dynamic field of adaptation studies and highlights the necessity to approach children's entertainment more seriously and more sensitively than it is generally the case.

Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000692051
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel by : Sandra Dinter

Download or read book Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel written by Sandra Dinter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Growing Sideways in Twenty-first Century British Culture

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Author :
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027258406
Total Pages : 243 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Growing Sideways in Twenty-first Century British Culture by : Anne Malewski

Download or read book Growing Sideways in Twenty-first Century British Culture written by Anne Malewski and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines changing boundaries between childhood and adulthood in British society and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century − where these age boundaries are widely debated, policed, and contested − to investigate alternatives to conventional ideas of growing up. Building on observations, especially in children’s literature criticism, that human growth is shaped by a grand narrative that privileges adulthood, and on terminologies of non-normative growth, particularly in queer theory, this monograph develops growing sideways as a concept that queers this grand narrative by destabilising childhood and adulthood, and the boundaries between them. The concept is refined through close readings of twenty-first century British children’s literature, television series, film, and participatory events, troubling age boundaries via specific strategies in three conceptual areas: appearance, play, and space. Exploring power structures around age and gender, this monograph traces growing sideways as a distinct and important alternative discourse of human growth.

Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9811360839
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (113 download)

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Book Synopsis Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China by : Shih-Wen Sue Chen

Download or read book Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China written by Shih-Wen Sue Chen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the development of Chinese children’s literature from the late Qing to early Republican era. It highlights the transnational flows of knowledge, texts, and cultures during a time when children’s literature in China and the West was developing rapidly. Drawing from a rich archive of periodicals, novels, tracts, primers, and textbooks, the author analyzes how Chinese children’s literature published by Protestant missionaries and Chinese educators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presented varying notions of childhood. In this period of dramatic transition from the dynastic Qing empire to the new Republican China, young readers were offered different models of childhood, some of which challenged dominant Confucian ideas of what it meant to be a child. This volume sheds new light on a little-explored aspect of Chinese literary history. Through its contributions to the fields of children’s literature, book history, missionary history, and translation studies, it enhances our understanding of the negotiations between Chinese and Western cultures that shaped the publication and reception of Chinese texts for children.

Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031383516
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (313 download)

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Book Synopsis Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods by : Kristine Moruzi

Download or read book Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods written by Kristine Moruzi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature

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Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474414656
Total Pages : 618 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature by : Clementine Beauvais

Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature written by Clementine Beauvais and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-16 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces you to the promises and problems of Charles Taylor's thought in major contemporary debates

Fantasies of Neglect

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Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813564492
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

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Book Synopsis Fantasies of Neglect by : Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Download or read book Fantasies of Neglect written by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children’s books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid’s independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children—girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.

The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317045548
Total Pages : 421 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry by : Katherine Wakely-Mulroney

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry written by Katherine Wakely-Mulroney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children’s poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children’s poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises – and why we delight in – its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children’s poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of “like sounds,” William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children’s poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

The Spiritual Guidance of Children

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Publisher : Church Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0819228419
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (192 download)

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Book Synopsis The Spiritual Guidance of Children by : Jerome W. Berryman

Download or read book The Spiritual Guidance of Children written by Jerome W. Berryman and published by Church Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an important “history-of-traditions” work in which Godly Play founder Jerome Berryman re-visions religious education as spiritual guidance and traces the history of Montessori religious education through four generations. Berryman then highlights the development of the Godly Play approach to spiritual guidance within this context and concludes with thoughts about the fifth generation and the future of the tradition.

Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319722751
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (197 download)

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Book Synopsis Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures by : Monica Flegel

Download or read book Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures written by Monica Flegel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media

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Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 149681519X
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

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Book Synopsis Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media by : Vanessa Joosen

Download or read book Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media written by Vanessa Joosen and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Gökçe Elif Baykal, Lincoln Geraghty, Verónica Gottau, Vanessa Joosen, Sung-Ae Lee, Cecilia Lindgren, Mayako Murai, Emily Murphy, Mariano Narodowski, Johanna Sjöberg, Anna Sparrman, Ingrid Tomkowiak, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, Ilgim Veryeri Alaca, and Elisabeth Wesseling Media narratives in popular culture often assign interchangeable characteristics to childhood and old age, presuming a resemblance between children and the elderly. These designations in media can have far-reaching repercussions in shaping not only language, but also cognitive activity and behavior. The meaning attached to biological, numerical age—even the mere fact that we calculate a numerical age at all—is culturally determined, as is the way people “act their age.” With populations aging all around the world, awareness of intergenerational relationships and associations surrounding old age is becoming urgent. Connecting Childhood and Old Age in Popular Media caters to this urgency and contributes to age literacy by supplying insights into the connection between childhood and senescence to show that people are aged by culture. Treating classic stories like the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and Heidi; pop culture hits like The Simpsons and Mad Men; and international productions, such as Turkish television cartoons and South Korean films, contributors explore the recurrent idea that “children are like old people,” as well as other relationships between children and elderly characters as constructed in literature and media from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This volume deals with fiction and analyzes language as well as verbally sparse, visual productions, including children's literature, film, television, animation, and advertising.

An Ethic of Innocence

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Author :
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 1438475977
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis An Ethic of Innocence by : Kristen L. Renzi

Download or read book An Ethic of Innocence written by Kristen L. Renzi and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a feminist theory of ignorance that sheds light on the misunderstood or overlooked epistemic practices of women in literature. An Ethic of Innocence examines representations of women in American and British fin-de-siècle and modern literature who seem “not to know” things. These naïve fools, Pollyannaish dupes, obedient traditionalists, or regressive anti-feminists have been dismissed by critics as conservative, backward, and out of sync with, even threatening to, modern feminist goals. Grounded in the late nineteenth century’s changing political and generic representations of women, this book provides a novel interpretative framework for reconsidering the epistemic claims of these women. Kristen L. Renzi analyzes characters from works by Henry James, Frank Norris, Ann Petry, Rebecca West, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and others, to argue that these feminine figures who choose not to know actually represent and model crucial pragmatic strategies by which modern and contemporary subjects navigate, survive, and even oppose gender oppression. “An Ethic of Innocence recalibrates the critical landscape, revealing blind spots in contemporary models for thinking about knowledge and agency within a feminine context. The author builds a persuasive case from powerful close readings of texts, which invite readers to question their assumptions. I cannot now imagine the field of feminist modernist studies without the interventions of this project.” — Barbara Green, author of Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture “This is a fascinating and very interesting intervention about the construction of knowledge/innocence within the field of literary studies. Anyone teaching or studying this period will find it of great use.” — Stephanie A. Smith, author of Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature