Literary Cultures And Eighteenth Century Childhoods

Download or read book Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods written by Andrew O'Malley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

Download or read book The Making of the Modern Child written by Andrew O'Malley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the concept of childhood in the late-18th century was constructed through the ideological work performed by children's literature, as well as pedagogical writing and medical literature of the era. Andrew O'Malley ties the evolution of the idea of "the child" to the growth of the middle class, which used the figure of the child as a symbol in its various calls for social reform.

Download or read book Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century written by Anja Müller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection of essays re-examines conventional ideas of the history of childhood, exploring the child's increasing prominence in eighteenth-century discourse and the establishment of the category of age as a marker of social distinction alongside race, class and gender. While scholars often approach childhood within the context of a single nation, this collection takes a comparative approach, examining the child in British, German and French contexts and demonstrating the mutual influences between the Continent and Great Britain in the conceptualization of childhood. Covering a wide range of subjects, from scientific and educational discourses on the child and controversies over the child's legal status and leisure activities, to the child as artist and consumer, the essays shed light on well-known novels like Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones, as well as on less-familiar texts such as periodicals, medical writings, trial reports and schoolbooks. Articles on visual culture show how eighteenth-century discourses on childhood are reflected in representations of the child by illustrators and portraitists. The international group of contributors, including Peter Borsay, Patricia Crown, Bernadette Fort, Brigitte Glaser, Klaus Peter Jochum, Dorothy Johnson and Peter Sabor, represent the disciplines of history, literature and art and reflect the collection's commitment to interdisciplinarity. The volume's unique range of topics makes it essential reading for students and scholars concerned with the history and representation of childhood in eighteenth-century culture.

Download or read book The Children's Book Business written by Lissa Paul and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By focusing on the children’s book business of the long eighteenth-century, this book argues that the thinking, knowing children of the Enlightenment are models for the technologically-connected, socially-conscious children of the twenty-first. The increasingly obsolete images of Romantic innocent and ignorant children are bracketed between the two periods.

Download or read book Childhood and Children's Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800 written by Andrea Immel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.

Download or read book Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy written by Martina Domines Veliki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-29 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

Download or read book Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Chantel Lavoie and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children’s literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys such as chimney sweeps and convicted criminals, whose bodily labor was considered their only value and who often did not live beyond boyhood. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys—real, imagined, and sometimes both—were subject to the control of their elders and were used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire. This book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth.