Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American ChildrenÆs Literature

by Elbert; Monika M.

• ISBN13: 9780415961509
• ISBN10: 0415961505
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This collection of literary and historical criticism draws on recent scholarship on canon formation, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and national/foreign operated in nineteenth-century children's literature, and explores how this literature transmitted hegemonic notions of American citizenship and cultural values.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls	p. 1
"A Just, A Useful Part": Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth's Companion	p. 3
Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Stories	p. 19
"Hints Dropped Here and There": Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I	p. 39
"One extra little girl": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Orphans	p. 55
Politicizing Children: "Normalization" and the Place of the Marginalized Child	p. 67
"A is an Abolitionist": The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy	p. 69
Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott's Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America	p. 83
"I am your slave for love": Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Fiction for Children	p. 97
Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford's Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories	p. 115
Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood	p. 131
Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America	p. 133
"The cleverest children's book written here": Elizabeth Stoddard's Lolly Dinks's Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions	p. 149
A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era Writers	p. 165
The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child's Garden	p. 179
Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child's Mind	p. 195
"Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop": Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850-1900	p. 197
Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association	p. 213
Good Masters: Child-Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall	p. 227
Child Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child Psychology	p. 245
Contributors	p. 259
Bibliography	p. 263
Index	p. 279
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