The Victorian Era in Twenty-First Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature and Culture

Sonya Sawyer Fritz, Sara K. Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138551206
• eBook ISBN: 9781351376266
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Victorian literature for audiences of all ages provides a broad foundation upon which to explore complex and evolving ideas about young people. In turn, this collection argues, contemporary works for young people that draw on Victorian literature and culture ultimately reflect our own disruptions and upheavals, particularly as they relate to child and adolescent readers and our experiences of them. The essays therein suggest that we struggle now, as the Victorians did then, to assert a cohesive understanding of young readers, and that this lack of cohesion is a result of or a parallel to the disruptions taking place on a larger (even global) scale.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 “The great change in human history”: The Recasting of the Fall of Man as the Crisis of Faith in His Dark Materials
• 2 “What’s in the Empty Flat?”: Specular Identity and Authorship in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
• 3 In Space No One Can Hear You Cry: Late Victorian Adventure and Contemporary Boyhood in Disney’s Treasure Planet
• 4 Are We Not (Wo)Men?: Gender and Animality in Contemporary Young Adult Retellings of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
• 5 Steampunk Kim: The Neo-Victorian Cosmopolitan Child in Philip Reeve’s Larklight
• 6 The Dangerous Alphabet and the Dark Side of Victorian Domesticity
• 7 Return of the Dapper Men and the Nonsense of Neo-Victorian Literature
• 8 Asian Masculinity, Eurasian Identity, and Whiteness in Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices Trilogy
• 9 Intertextuality, Adaptation, or Fanfiction? April Lindner and the Brontë Sisters
• 10 Growing Up Empowered by Jane: An Examination of Jane Eyre in Twenty-First-Century Children’s and Young Adult Literature
• 11 Canon for the Cradle: Materiality and Commodity in Board Book Retellings of Victorian Novels
• 12 Uptops and Sooties: Neo-Victorian Representations of Race and Class in Gail Carriger’s Finishing School Books
• Afterword: Reclaiming the Ghost in the Machine
• Notes on Contributors
• Index