DOCSLIB.ORG

Self-Consciousness and Childhood in the Long Nineteenth Century

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Self-Consciousness and Childhood in the Long Nineteenth Century SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHILDHOOD IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY by Amanda Phillips Chapman B. A. in English, Troy University, 2004 M. A. in English, University of Alabama, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2015 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Amanda Phillips Chapman It was defended on April 13, 2015 and approved by Marah Gubar, PhD, Associate Professor, MIT Literature Nancy Glazener, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh English Thora Brylowe, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh English Bruce McConachie, PhD, University of Pittsburgh Theater Arts Dissertation Advisor: Troy Boone, Phd, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh English ii Copyright © by Amanda Phillips Chapman 2015 iii SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHILDHOOD IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY Amanda Phillips Chapman, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2015 My dissertation argues that self-consciousness should take its place beside innocence and precocity as one of a constellation of terms crucial for understanding how paradigms of childhood and children’s literature developed side by side. By focusing on attitudes towards children and self-consciousness, I illuminate the ways in which discourses for and about children affected not only children’s culture but also British culture at large. My chapters examine the positive value placed on self-consciousness in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century children’s literature; the reconceptualization of childhood and self-consciousness by Romantic writers, who attached a new anxiety about self-consciousness to the figure of the child; the incredible popularity of Peter Pan, which results from the eternal boy’s combination of unselfconsciousness and theatricality; and the ways in which the British public school ethic of good form as well as the literary tradition of the school story reflect increasingly stringent demands that children be unselfconscious. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE . VII 1.0 INTRODUCTION . .1 2.0 EXCHANGING MASKS FOR MIRRORS: THE SELF-CONSCIOUS CHILD IN THE LATE GEORGIAN ERA . .21 2.1 BEFORE THE MIRROR, THE MASK . .23 2.2 THE BOOK AS MIRROR . .30 2.3 THE DIARY AS MIRROR . 40 3.0 NO “SMACK OF HAMLET”: THE REJECTION OF SELF-CONSCIOUS CHILDHOOD . .53 3.1 CHARLES LAMB’S HAMLET . 56 3.2 THE ROMANTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . 61 3.3 ROUSSEAU, SCHILLER, AND THE CHILD . 67 3.4 COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH, AND AN ANTI-SELF-CONSCIOUS CHILDREN’S LITERATURE . 74 3.5 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE IN TRANSITION: HOLIDAY HOUSE AND THE FAIRY BOWER . 79 v 4.0 THE RIDDLE OF PETER PAN’S EXISTENCE: AN UNSELFCONSCIOUS STAGE CHILD . .95 4.1 VICTORIAN ANTI-SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . 97 4.2 CHILDREN, THEATER, AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS . .103 4.3 PETER PAN . 110 5.0 A “DISQUIETING REFLECTION”: GOOD FORM AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOL BOY . 125 5.1 THE CULT OF CHIVALRY AND BOYS’ LITERATURE . 130 5.2 THE SCHOOL STORY AND GOOD FORM . .140 5.3 THE MYTH OF THE SCHOOLBOY BURNOUT . .154 5.4 MORBID SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND PUBLIC SCHOOL GHOSTS 159 6.0 EPILOGUE . .168 NOTES . .175 BIBLIOGRAPHY . .189 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. “Children Playing With a Mask,” O. G. Rejlander (1894) . 27 Figure 2. “T is for Tot,” Oliver Herford, The Little Book of Bores (1900) . .105 Figure 3. Children acting the ‘Play Scene’ from “Hamlet,” Charles Hunt (1863) . 107 vii PREFACE Most of the work of this dissertation was supported by a Richard C. and Barbara N. Tobias Fellowship and a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship. For the two years of living the dream of pure research and writing, I am immensely grateful to those who endowed these fellowships, those who so graciously granted them to me, and those who convinced them that they should— namely my wonderful committee members, who have by now written scads of recommendation letters on my behalf. Of course those same committee members—Troy Boone, Marah Gubar, Nancy Glazener, Thora Brylowe, and Bruce McConachie—have contributed to the completion of this dissertation in innumerable other ways that leave me lovingly indebted to them. I especially want to thank my advisor, Troy Boone, who told me two years ago, on the occasion of my choosing my dissertation topic, to go with the possibly crazy but definitely much more exciting option. He was right. Thanks are owed to the members of my writing group, who asked just the right questions and said all the encouraging things: I owe you, Swathi Sreerangarajan, Elizabeth Oliphant, and Jessica FitzPatrick. To Schuyler Chapman, the best I can do is say thank you and desperately hope I was just as supportive when it was your turn. And to Adlai: you and this dissertation got your start at about the same time; I’m proud of this book you kindly let me write, but I’m much more proud of you. viii 1.0 INTRODUCTION “[A]ll sin, my dear child, is thus formed in our hearts, sometimes long, long before it breaks out, it becomes us therefore, carefully to watch our thoughts…” -Mary Martha Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family (1818)1 “As a matter of fact, the natural child is an innocent, joyous, inconsequent thing, free from vanity, self-importance, and every form of self-consciousness.” -Ernest Dowson, “The Cult of the Child” (1894)2 Almost every survey of nineteenth-century British children’s literature remarks upon the inevitable presence of Mary Martha Sherwood’s The History of the Fairchild Family on the bookshelves of Victorian children. Though the story of the Fairchilds spanned three books written over the course of thirty years, the first volume in particular, published in 1818 and in print continuously for a century, seems to have been a fixture in the nursery. In part because of its ubiquity, when the end of the nineteenth century occasioned a host of retrospective reviews in popular periodicals of the last hundred years of children’s literature, critics tended to single out The Fairchild Family for especially acute condemnation. Given the post-Wordsworth reimagining of the child as a precious earthly manifestation of heavenly virtue,3 many of the criticisms leveled at Sherwood had to do with the strict Evangelicism of her text, which harped 1 on the natural depravity of her child characters. Most late-century detractors, for instance, pointed with horror to a scene in which Mr. Fairchild takes his young children to view the body of a man two days dead, employing the grisly spectacle as an object lesson in sin and death.4 It is not difficult to understand why an age dominated by the image of the child as a bright angel would shrink from such a scene. Harder to parse are the terms in which L. B. Lang, writing for Longman’s Magazine in 1893, censures the Fairchild parents—and, by extension, real life parents who continued to provide their children with copies of The Fairchild Family: One might have thought that the danger of self-consciousness arising from these perpetual religious conversations would have become obvious to the feeblest mind, but both parents appear to have regarded this unlucky habit as evidence of grace. The children are eternally watching themselves, probing themselves, writing down their bad thoughts, talking about themselves. It is Self, Self, Self from morning till night, and the more they talk about Self the more delighted their parents are….if people—and children—could forget themselves altogether, even if they sometimes forgot their faults too, both they and the world would be considerably the better. Nothing is so fatal to well-doing or well-being as the perpetual contemplation of self. But Mrs. Fairchild would consider these remarks rank heresy.5 Lang is not alone in this vein of criticism; a writer for The Quarterly Review thirty years earlier had excoriated Sherwood for her tendency to write the kind of pattern good boy who not only displays model behavior but furthermore, worse, is “able to make edifying remarks on his own conduct.”6 In what way is it dangerous for children’s literature to cause self-consciousness to arise in child readers? Why should a character in a child’s book not be able to reflect on his own conduct? What makes “Self, Self, Self” an apparently self-evident evil in a child’s book? Why is it desirable for children to “forget themselves altogether”? Mrs. Fairchild, and many 2 other parents and child-experts of the early nineteenth century, would indeed consider these remarks rank heresy, for, as I will show, they considered self-contemplation of paramount importance for children. So what changed between 1818 and 1893 to transform childhood self- consciousness from an agreed-upon good to a near-unanimously condemned evil? This book answers that question. In constructing an answer, my book argues that “self- consciousness” must take its place beside “innocence” and “precocity” as one of a constellation of terms crucial for understanding how paradigms of childhood and children’s literature developed side by side. I intend to broaden the field of inquiry in children’s literature studies and childhood studies to include historical factors in the construction of childhood and children’s literature that have been overshadowed by a prolonged focus on Victorian preoccupations with children’s sexuality and agency. Innocence is perhaps the most frequently interrogated of the terms applied to children in popular nineteenth-century discourse. As a critical focus within childhood studies, innocence tends to highlight questions about child sexuality and the denial of adult sexual knowledge to children. As any reader of Wordsworth knows, precocity in children was a principal nineteenth-century preoccupation.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and John Keats's Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction
    Towards a Poetics of Becoming: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and John Keats’s Aesthetics Between Idealism and Deconstruction Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät IV (Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften) der Universität Regensburg eingereicht von Charles NGIEWIH TEKE Alfons-Auer-Str. 4 93053 Regensburg Februar 2004 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Rainer EMIG Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dieter A. BERGER 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION .............................................................................................................. I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... II ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... VI English........................................................................................................................ VI German...................................................................................................................... VII French...................................................................................................................... VIII INTRODUCTION Aims of the Study......................................................................................................... 1 On the Relationship Between S. T. Coleridge and J. Keats.......................................... 5 Certain Critical Terms................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • LAZ Update Request Nonteks 7-2020
    Request to Update Content Not Reviewed and Approved by the State Review Panel Proclamation Year: 2019 Publisher: Learning A-Z, LLC Subject Area /Course: English Language Arts and Reading Program Information: Program Title: Raz-Plus ELL Texas Edition Program Title: 9 7 8 0 6 9 2 1 9 6 5 4 0 Identical Raz-Plus ELL Texas Edition Program Title: Identical 9 7 8 0 6 9 2 1 9 6 5 4 0 Program ISBN: Component Information You must submit a separate form for each component title and ISBN. Component Raz Plus ELL Texas Edition Title: Component 9 7 8 0 6 9 2 1 9 6 5 4 0 ISBN: Identical component Raz-Plus ELL Texas Edition Title: Identical Component 9 7 8 0 6 9 2 1 9 6 5 4 0 ISBN: Request to Update Content Not Reviewed and Approved by the State Review Panel Access Information Use the table below to provide access information to the adopted version of the instructional materials and the proposed new content. URL Username Password Adopted www.raz-plus.com TXREV2 RAZPLUS2 content: New content: www.raz-plus.com txadoption Learning123 Publisher’s rationale for the update The updates provide minor updates and corrections, additional leveled text, passages, and resources to expand the program’s content library. See the attached spreadsheet for a list of all new material. Side-by-side comparison: Any content that has been changed in the component listed on the previous page should be documented in this side-by-side comparison. You must submit a separate request for each component.
    [Show full text]
  • “The Long-Defended Gate”: Juvenilia, the Real Child, and the Aesthetics of Innocence, 1858-1939
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by D-Scholarship@Pitt “THE LONG-DEFENDED GATE”: JUVENILIA, THE REAL CHILD, AND THE AESTHETICS OF INNOCENCE, 1858-1939 by Anna Madeleine Redcay Bachelor of Arts, Princeton University, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2012 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Anna Madeleine Redcay It was defended on October 7, 2011 and approved by Troy Boone, Associate Professor of English Jean F. Carr, Associate Professor of English; Director of Women’s Studies Amanda Godley, Associate Professor of English Education Dissertation Advisor: Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of English; Director of Children’s Literature Program ii Copyright © by Anna Madeleine Redcay 2012 iii “THE LONG-DEFENDED GATE”: JUVENILIA, THE REAL CHILD, AND THE AESTHETICS OF INNOCENCE, 1858-1939 Anna Madeleine Redcay, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2012 Scholars frequently protest against reference to the real child in relation to adult-authored children’s literature. My dissertation exposes the fundamental flaw in extending this injunction to the literary production of real children. By recovering the wildly popular, critically acclaimed and bestselling juvenilia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I contend that child- authored texts make manifest individual children’s absorption and manipulation of culture. Although critics such as Beverly Lyon Clark aptly note a growing bifurcation of children’s and adult’s literature at the turn of the century, I argue that adult and child authors alike participated in the construction of the “real child” as a trope of literary representation.
    [Show full text]
  • Making Amusement the Vehicle of Instruction’: Key Developments in the Nursery Reading Market 1783-1900
    1 ‘Making amusement the vehicle of instruction’: Key Developments in the Nursery Reading Market 1783-1900 PhD Thesis submitted by Lesley Jane Delaney UCL Department of English Literature and Language 2012 SIGNED DECLARATION 2 I, Lesley Jane Delaney confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ABSTRACT 3 ABSTRACT During the course of the nineteenth century children’s early reading experience was radically transformed; late eighteenth-century children were expected to cut their teeth on morally improving texts, while Victorian children learned to read more playfully through colourful picturebooks. This thesis explores the reasons for this paradigm change through a study of the key developments in children’s publishing from 1783 to 1900. Successively examining an amateur author, a commercial publisher, an innovative editor, and a brilliant illustrator with a strong interest in progressive theories of education, the thesis is alive to the multiplicity of influences on children’s reading over the century. Chapter One outlines the scope of the study. Chapter Two focuses on Ellenor Fenn’s graded dialogues, Cobwebs to catch flies (1783), initially marketed as part of a reading scheme, which remained in print for more than 120 years. Fenn’s highly original method of teaching reading through real stories, with its emphasis on simple words, large type, and high-quality pictures, laid the foundations for modern nursery books. Chapter Three examines John Harris, who issued a ground- breaking series of colour-illustrated rhyming stories and educational books in the 1810s, marketed as ‘Harris’s Cabinet of Amusement and Instruction’.
    [Show full text]
  • O X Fo Rd Reading Cir C
    7 SECOND EDITION EADIN R G D C R I O R F C L X E O N H I C G H R O U L B A S S R H O O H R R E S B A I U R G H • C L Teaching Guide 1 Contents Introduction iv 1. The Secret of Seaview Cottage 1 2. Cat 8 3. Meet Tom Sawyer 13 4. The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls 20 5. A Drive in the Motor Car 25 6. Nicholas Nye 33 7. My Big Brother 38 8. Ode to Autumn 46 9. A Little Princess 52 10. An Ode to the Rain 60 11. The Long Exile 66 12. English is Tough 72 13. The Valley Of Spiders 77 14. Night Mail 83 15. The Yellow Face 90 16. Matilda who Told lies 97 17. The £1,000,000 Banknote 102 18. Bees 108 19. Piano 113 20. Oliver Twist 117 21. The Beggar and the King 124 iii 1 Introduction The Teaching Guides of Oxford Reading Circle provide some guidelines for the help of the teacher in the classroom. This Teaching Guide includes: • an introduction on how to use Oxford Reading Circle in class. • suggestions for pre-reading tasks or warm-ups to the main lesson. • suggestions for while reading tasks with in-text questions. • suggestions for post-reading activities, based on basic concepts of literature presented progressively with respect to difficulty level within and across each grade. • suggested answers and hints to the exercises in the book. • additional questions related to the text.
    [Show full text]
  • DOCTORAL THESIS Vernon Lushington : Practising Positivism
    DOCTORAL THESIS Vernon Lushington : Practising Positivism Taylor, David Award date: 2010 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 29. Sep. 2021 Vernon Lushington : Practising Positivism by David C. Taylor, MA, FSA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD School of Arts Roehampton University 2010 Abstract Vernon Lushington (1832-1912) was a leading Positivist and disciple of Comte's Religion of Humanity. In The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain T.R. Wright observed that “the inner struggles of many of [Comte's] English disciples, so amply documented in their note books, letters, and diaries, have not so far received the close sympathetic treatment they deserve.” Material from a previously little known and un-researched archive of the Lushington family now makes possible such a study.
    [Show full text]
  • December 2019
    december 2019 All items arePeter fully described Harrington and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk n1 london We are exhibiting at these fairs: Christmas 2019 opening hours: 11 January 2020 york Fulham Road York Racecourse Knavesmire Road, York Mon 25 Nov – Mon 23 Dec https://www.pbfa.org/fairs/york-1 Mon–Tue: 10am–6pm Wed–Sat: 10am–7pm 24–26 January Sun: closed stuttgart Württembergischer Kunstverein Tue 24 Dec: 10am–2pm Schlossplatz 2, Stuttgart Wed 25 Dec – Thu 26 Dec: closed http://www.stuttgarter-antiquariatsmesse.de/ Fri 27 Dec – Sat 28 Dec: 10am–6pm 7–9 February Sun 29 Dec: closed california Mon 30 Dec: 10am–6pm Pasadena Convention Center Tue 31 Dec: 10am–2pm 300 E. Green St, Pasadena, CA Wed 1 Jan 2020: closed https://www.cabookfair.com/ Thu 2 Jan 2020: Normal business hours resume Dover Street Mon 25 Nov – Mon 23 Dec Mon–Fri: 10am–7pm Sat: 10am–6pm Sun: closed Tue 24 Dec: 10am–2pm Wed 25 Dec – Wed 1 Jan 2020: closed Thu 2 Jan 2020: Normal business hours resume Front cover image from Robert Hewitt Brown’s Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy, VAT no. gb 701 5578 50 item 20. Illustration opposite from Georges Barbier & Francis de Miomandre’s Dessins Peter Harrington Limited. Registered office: WSM Services Limited, Connect House, sur les danses de Vaslav Nijinsky, item 144. 133–137 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon, London SW19 7JY. Design:n2 Nigel Bents. Photography: Ruth Segarra. December 2019: PeterRegistered Harrington in England and Wales No: 3609982 Peter Harrington 1969 london 2019 catalogue 159 all items from this catalogue are on display at dover street mayfair chelsea 43 doveR stReet 100 Fulham Road london w1s 4FF london sw3 6hs uk 020 3763 3220 uk 020 7591 0220 eu 00 44 20 3763 3220 eu 00 44 20 7591 0220 usa 011 44 20 3763 3220 usa 011 44 20 7591 0220 www.peterharrington.co.uk 1 2 1 2 ALDINGTON, Richard.
    [Show full text]
  • Dean Frederic Farrar (1831-1903): Educationist
    Dean Frederic Farrar (1831-1903): Educationist Author: Brendan Rapple Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/4417 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. 1995 Dean Frederic Farrar (1831‐1903): Educationist by Brendan Rapple Abstract: Though his best‐selling novel of school life Eric, or, Little by Little: A Tale of Roslyn School has over the years been the subject of much attention, the wider educational thought and practice of Frederic William Farrar, teacher, novelist, scientist, classicist, theologian, and Dean of Canterbury, has for the most part been neglected by scholars. This paper discusses certain aspects of Farrar the educationist, including his distinctive evangelical attitude toward children; his fervent criticism of the prevailing Classical public school curriculum; his advocacy that much more science be taught; his strong antipathy to corporal and other punishment; his distaste for the increasing athleticism in the public schools; his view of the main purpose of education, namely the inculcation of morality, religious conviction, and intellectual rigor. British Journal of Educational Studies 43(1):57-74. This version (author's manuscript) posted at eScholarship@BC, Boston College. http://dcollections.bc.edu/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=91473 1 Rapple, Brendan. "Dean Frederic Farrar (1831-1903): Educationist," British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. XXXXIII, No. 1 (March 1995): 57-74. Frederic William Farrar, whose life closely coincided with the limits of the Victorian era and who was himself the very quintessence of stereotypical Victorianism, attained high prominence in diverse fields of endeavor. A friend of Darwin, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society for his studies in philology.
    [Show full text]
  • Education and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Persons and Potential: Education and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain By Charlotte Gill Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History of Vanderbilt University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For Honors in History April 2016 On the basis of this thesis defended by the candidate on ______________________________ we, the undersigned, recommend that the candidate be awarded_______________________ in History. __________________________________ Director of Honors – Samira Sheikh ___________________________________ Faculty Adviser – James Epstein ___________________________________ Third Reader – Catherine Molineux Persons and Potential: Education and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain By Charlotte Gill Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1 Education in the Antislavery Age ...................................................................................................... 12 Educating the Poor in the “Age of Benevolence” …………………………………………………………………………….. 13 Education and Morality among the Bastions of Abolition ………………………………………………………………… 15 Personhood and the Potential for Education …………………………………………………………………………………… 18 Teachings and Tales for the Home .................................................................................................... 32 Education and the Family ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 37 Education and the Fictional Tale as Tool ………………………………………………………………………………………….
    [Show full text]
  • Ajws Grantmaking Strategies in Support of Lgbti Rights
    DEFENDING LGBTI RIGHTS DEFENDING ENSURING EQUALITY, SAFETY AND HEALTH FOR SEXUAL MINORITIES September 2010 Table of Contents OVERVIEW 1 WHY LGBTI RIGHTS MATTER 3 AJWS GRANTMAKING STRATEGIES IN SUPPORT OF LGBTI RIGHTS 4 AJWS APPROACH TO LGBTI GRANTMAKING 8 RECOMMENDATIONS 10 GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS 11 INDEX OF FEATURED AJWS GRANTEES AND PARTNERS 12 Rabbi Eliezer said, “Other people’s dignity should be as precious to you as your own.” — Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 2:10 COVER Participants on AJWS’s Study Tour to Uganda and Kenya in 2011 met these LGBTI activists on a visit to Minority Women in Action. PHOTO EVAN ABRAMSON OVERVIEW Jewish World Service (AJWS). Committed to advancing the rights of the world’s most marginalized people, Donny Reyes was approached by six police officers as AJWS supports over 400 grassroots, community-based he was exiting a taxi outside his office in Tegucigalpa, organizations in Africa, Asia and the Americas that Honduras in March 2007. The officers demanded to are working to create a just and equitable world. We see his identification and then ordered him into their believe that human rights are universal, indivisible and police car. When he refused, the police beat him, saying, interdependent, and that all persons are entitled to their “We have to clear these queers from here.” Reyes was full expression. When we speak of LGBTI rights, we are then arrested, taken to a police station and thrown not calling for “new,” “special” or “additional” rights. We in a cell with 57 other men. An officer locked him in, are calling for the fundamental human rights to which all allegedly shouting to the prisoners: “Look, I’m bringing individuals are entitled.
    [Show full text]
  • The Wind in the Willows and Its Immediate Audience
    Of School and the River: The Wind in the Willows and its Immediate Audience Kathryn V. Graham Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 23, Number 4, Winter 1998, pp. 181-186 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/chq.0.1154 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chq/summary/v023/23.4.graham.html Access provided by Virginia Polytechnic Inst. __ACCESS_STATEMENT__ St.University __ACCESS_STATEMENT__ (Viva) (7 Feb 2014 09:24 GMT) Children's Literature Association Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 4, 1998-99 181 Of School and the River: The Wind in the Willows and its Immediate Audience by Kathryn V. Graham The Wind in the Willows is most innocently appreciated In that sense, this obliquely cautionary and educational tale as nostalgic animal fantasy: a pastoral celebration of animal written by an initiate of the system is schoolboy lore cus- life along the riverbank, where the four primary "animal tomized to meet the needs of a one-boy audience.1 gentlemen" Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad enjoy a series of picaresque adventures that often involve "messing about in ****** boats" but always end with a return to their snug and com- fortable homes. The novel's episodes promote friendship, Interestingly, the one piece of schoolboy fiction we are courtesy, competence, courage, and generosity in an idyllic sure Grahame read, Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), result- world where sex, work, violence, and death are beyond the ed from the identical impulse: Thomas Hughes wrote the horizon. Experienced readers contextualize the story in var- novel as he pondered what to tell his eight-year-old son ious ways.
    [Show full text]
  • Jeanne Marie Le Prince De Beaumont (1711-1780): Biographical Essay for Chawton House Library and Women Writers
    Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711-1780): Biographical Essay for Chawton House Library and Women Writers By Peggy Schaller Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont created works of fiction and non-fiction, authored essays and epistolary novels,1 and published what many now consider the first educational journals for children. A French author who resided in England from 1748 to 1763, Beaumont2 is primarily recognized today for the children‟s tales she popularized in those journals written during her fifteen years as governess, pedagogue, and author in London. Her version of “Beauty and the Beast,” part of her famous Magasin des Enfants (Young Misses Magazine 1756), is described by Joan Hinde Stewart as “without doubt the best-known work of fiction published by any woman in the eighteenth century” (Gynographs 26). Her influence on such British educators as Lady Charlotte Finch, royal governess to the children of George III, and Sarah Trimmer, the turn-of-the-century author, publisher, and educator, has been well documented by Enlightenment scholars and modern day historians alike. In addition, the Young Misses Magazine bears a resemblance to Sarah Fielding‟s The Governess (1749) for its dialogue format between young girls and their governess. Unfortunately, attention to the magazines also often obscures her other work and so improperly pigeonholes her in the category of pedagogue, even though much of her writing broached a broad expanse of contemporary socio- political issues. In fact, Beaumont surpassed even her contemporary French women authors Emilie du Châtelet and Françoise de Graffigny in public influence, although modern day critics have made their names more recognizable to contemporary readers.
    [Show full text]