Editors:
Asks us to engage major intellectual movements and political crises to reconfigure our conception of how childhoods were understood and represented during a twentieth-century marked by war, by political struggle over civil and political rights, and by the cultural clash of post-colonial, racial, class-based, and gender identities
Goes beyond simply 'including' the 'peripheral' to take up stances that reposition us as readers and critics and to re-center our view of the whole
Examines a broad range of texts, from poetry, through novels, to comics
Part of the book series: Literary Cultures and Childhoods (LICUCH)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Framing the Twentieth Century: Spectacle, Self, and Specularity
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Front Matter
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Representations of Childhoods: Questioning or Re-Imposing Received Tropes
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Front Matter
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Identity and Displacement: Narrating History and Culture
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Front Matter
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Children as Culture-Makers: Young People, Agency, and Literary Cultures
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Front Matter
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About this book
This collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children’s television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literary culture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers.
Keywords
- Children's literature
- Race
- Politics
- War
- Civil rights
- Agency
- British and Irish Literature
- childhood studies
Editors and Affiliations
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Hampshire College, Amherst, USA
Rachel Conrad, L. Brown Kennedy
About the editors
Rachel Conrad is Professor of Childhood Studies at Hampshire College, USA. She is the author of Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in their new series “Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth.”
L. Brown Kennedy is Professor of Literature, Emerita, at Hampshire College, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods
Editors: Rachel Conrad, L. Brown Kennedy
Series Title: Literary Cultures and Childhoods
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-35391-9Published: 13 September 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-35394-0Published: 14 September 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-35392-6Published: 12 September 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 285
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Children's Literature, European Literature, North American Literature, Sociology of Family, Youth and Aging