Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity

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Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature--and ownership--of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," Knoepflmacher probes deeply into the relations between adults and ...
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Overview

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature--and ownership--of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," Knoepflmacher probes deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and between the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales."

As Knoepflmacher shows, 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 the men's, and that more often allow their girl characters to mature.

Far from being outdated, these disputes are poignant at a time when our inherited notion of childhood as a precious preserve seems seriously threatened. 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.

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Editorial Reviews

Richard Jenkyns
Knoepflmacher is right to insist that we should take children's books seriously as a form of literary art. . . .he disobeys hisown injunction, for his way of taking such works seriously is to turn them into works for adults.
— The New Republic
Jan Marsh
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. -- Times Literary Supplement
Library Journal
Behind the innocent facades of Victorian fairy tales were intense debates about the nature of childhood and the motives of the male and female authors of the tales. These issues as well as the works of seven British children's authors who published from 1850 - 1870, including Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti, are treated here by Knoepflmacher (English and ancient and modern literature, Princeton University). The author believes that male writers of the time idealized childhood, whereas female writers were more grounded in actuality and that both camps were in constant conflict. While the author admits to imposing 20th-century notions of gender onto a pre-Freudian era, this is a provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture. -- Rebecca Martin, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb
Library Journal
Behind the innocent facades of Victorian fairy tales were intense debates about the nature of childhood and the motives of the male and female authors of the tales. These issues as well as the works of seven British children's authors who published from 1850 - 1870, including Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti, are treated here by Knoepflmacher (English and ancient and modern literature, Princeton University). The author believes that male writers of the time idealized childhood, whereas female writers were more grounded in actuality and that both camps were in constant conflict. While the author admits to imposing 20th-century notions of gender onto a pre-Freudian era, this is a provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture. -- Rebecca Martin, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb
Richard Jenkyns
Knoepflmacher is right to insist that we should take children's books seriously as a form of literary art. . . .he disobeys hisown injunction, for his way of taking such works seriously is to turn them into works for adults. -- The New Republic
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780226448152
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • Publication date: 8/28/1998
  • Series: Prehistoric Archeology and Ecology Ser.
  • Edition description: 1
  • Edition number: 226
  • Pages: 464
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Buttonholing the Reader: A Preface of Sorts Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations
1. Entering Childhood: The Double Perspectives of Generation and Sex
2. Resisting Growth: Ruskin's The King of the Golden River
3. Growing Up Ironic: Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring
4. Mixing Levity and the Grave: MacDonald's "The Light Princess"
5. Expanding Alice: from Underground to Wonderland
6. Shrinking Alice: from Wonderland to Looking-Glass Land
7. Erasing Borders: MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind
8. Sundering Women from Boys: Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy
9. Razing Male Preserves: From "Goblin Market" to Sing-Song
10. Avenging Alice: From Sing-Song to Speaking Likenesses
11. Repairing Female Authority: Ewing's "Amelia and the Dwarfs"
Epilogue Index

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