Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity - Rilegato

Knoepflmacher, U. C.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0226448150 ISBN 13: 9780226448152

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 1998

Riassunto

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies.

"Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically."--Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement

"A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture."--Library Journal

Su questo libro

Product Description:

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales lurks the spectre of a 19th-century debate about the very nature of childhood. This study offers re-readings of Victorian classics, probing deeply into relations between adults, children, and the beloved authors of children's books. The author attempts to show how male and female constructions of childhood in these fairy tales differed radically. Male writers - John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald, and Lewis Carroll - often displayed an uneasy relation to adult gender roles. By privileging a special girl reader, they attempted to blur sexual differences and sentimentalize an arrested childhood. Female authors, on the other hand - Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti and Juliana Ewing - tried to wrest fairy tales away from the male authors who had appropriated the genre. These women's tales relate fables of growth that are more grounded in actuality than men's, and that often allow their girl characters to mature.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0226448150
• ISBN 13: 9780226448152
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 444