The Fictional Role of Childhood in Victorian and Early Twentieth Century Children's Literature (review)

2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 442-445
Author(s):  
Anne H. Lundin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

scholarly journals Minimal Departures: Narratives of Younger Female Mobility in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Italian Children’s Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138
Author(s):  
Rita Caviglioli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
World War I ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
National Development ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Labor Exploitation ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Mobility narratives in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Italian literature for children reflect the dramatic conditions of vagrancy, abandonment and forced relocation, as well as the situation of child-labor exploitation and child trade through apprenticeship contracts. They also document experiences of mass emigration. In my essay I intend to: i) acknowledge that children’s conditions have been the object of an extensive multi-disciplinary debate in the 1800s and early 1900s; ii) briefly discuss the specifics of Italian children’s literature and the representation of young male mobility; iii) identify some recurring narrative patterns of female (im)mobility; iv) point to three specific narrative plots that relate the mobility of younger female characters to national-identity and national-development issues; v) analyze two of these narratives, Maria Messina’s Cenerella and Olga Visentini’s La zingarella e la principessina, which were written during or in the aftermath of World War I.

scholarly journals Trajectories in Argentine Children's Literature: Constancio C. Vigil and Horacio Quiroga

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Lauren Rea
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Horacio Quiroga ◽  
Transformative Impact

Children's author and publishing entrepreneur Constancio C. Vigil was a Uruguayan who spent most of his working life in Argentina. He was best known for his children's magazine Billiken (1919 to present). Vigil's contemporary and compatriot Horacio Quiroga also made the move across the River Plate and went on to have a transformative impact on Argentine literary culture, in part through his Jungle Tales for Children (1924). Both Quiroga and Vigil aspired to have their works for children accepted as school reading books, recognising the role of school authorities in the formation of the national canon. Vigil and Quiroga's trajectories of inclusion and exclusion, and their extraordinary contribution to the Argentine and Latin American cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century, provide a window onto the curation of an Argentine national children's literature at the same time as challenging the very nature of such a category.

scholarly journals The Nursery as Circus: Dancing the Childlike to Fauré's Dolly Suite, 1913

2017 ◽  
Vol 142 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-325
Author(s):  
Timothy F. Coombes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Physiological Traits ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Music Hall

ABSTRACTIn 1913, at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, a controversial but highly successful ballet choreographed a circus-style pantomime to the music of Fauré's Dolly Suite. With its apparently incongruent relation of dance to music, the ballet displayed, as one reviewer put it, ‘criticisms in action’. This article investigates how we might conceive the production as an act of musical and cultural criticism, by examining its close relation with contexts such as early comic film, music-hall entertainment, the children's literature market, medical and anthropological theories, and surrealist thought. The ballet implicitly challenged conventional interpretations of Fauré's music as reflecting a particular perception of childhood – one which was rather too close to the sentimental attitudes vehemently dismissed in contemporaneous literature. The production was an important manifestation of an emergent understanding of the ‘childlike’ in early twentieth-century French culture – as a condition enlightened by irrationality, with important physiological traits.

Blackness, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Dominican Children's Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Stacy Ann Creech
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Reform ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Specific Construction

From pre-Columbian times through to the twentieth century, Dominican children's literature has struggled to define itself due to pressures from outside forces such as imperialism and colonialism. This paper examines the socio-political contexts within Dominican history that determined the kind of literature available to children, which almost exclusively depicted a specific construction of indigeneity, European or Anglo-American characters and settings, in an effort to efface the country's African roots. After the Educational Reform of 1993 was instituted, however, there has been a promising change in the field, as Dominican writers are engaged in producing literature for young people that includes more accurate representations of Blackness and multiculturalism.

The Adult as Foe or Friend?: Childism in Guus Kuijer's Criticism and Fiction

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Joosen
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Memorial Award ◽  
Adult Reader ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Selection Of

Compared to the attention that children's literature scholars have paid to the construction of childhood in children's literature and the role of adults as authors, mediators and readers of children's books, few researchers have made a systematic study of adults as characters in children's books. This article analyses the construction of adulthood in a selection of texts by the Dutch author and Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Guus Kuijer and connects them with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's recent concept of ‘childism’ – a form of prejudice targeted against children. Whereas Kuijer published a severe critique of adulthood in Het geminachte kind [The despised child] (1980), in his literary works he explores a variety of positions that adults can take towards children, with varying degrees of childist features. Such a systematic and comparative analysis of the way grown-ups are characterised in children's texts helps to shed light on a didactic potential that materialises in different adult subject positions. After all, not only literary and artistic aspects of children's literature may be aimed at the adult reader (as well as the child), but also the didactic aspect of children's books can cross over between different age groups.

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