Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-century American Children's Literature

by Elbert, Monika M.

• ISBN13: 9780203928448
• ISBN10: 020392844X
• Copyright: 2008-04-18
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Summary

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

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Foreward List of Figures Introduction Monika Elbert 1. Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls "A Just, A Useful Part": Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth's Companion Lorinda B. Cohoon Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Stories Monika Elbert "Hints Dropped Here and There": Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I Melissa Fowler and Janet Gray "One extra little girl": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Orphans Roxanne Harde 2. Politicizing Children: "Normalization" and the Place of the Marginalized Child "A is an Abolitionist": The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy Martha Sledge Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott's Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America Jeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling "I am your slave for love": Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Fiction for Children Lesley Ginsberg Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford's Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories Rita Bode 3. Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America Shawn Thomson "the cleverest children's book written here": Elizabeth Stoddard's Lolly Dinks's Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions Maria Holmgren Troy A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era Writers Melanie Dawson The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child's Garden Anne Lundin 4. Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child's Mind "Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop": Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850-1990 Eric S. Hintz Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association J.D. Stahl Good Masters: Child-Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall Joan Menefee Child Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child Psychology Holly Blackford Contributors Bibliography Index