Time of Beauty, Time of Fear

The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

James Holt McGavran, James Holt McGavran, James Holt McGavran, Jr.

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781609381004
• eBook ISBN: 9781609381066
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

It is now two and a half centuries since Jean-Jacques Rousseau first wrote so evocatively of natural man in Social Contract and of experiential education in Emile. His emphasis on the early years as a crucial part of life drove the Romantic reconceptualization of childhood—the idea that children have a special knowledge of nature, politics, and spirituality to teach their elders as well as the other way around. William Wordsworth's assertion in the "Intimations Ode" that children's souls come "trailing clouds of glory" from God has continued to haunt Western literature and culture in spite of attacks from writers and critics from then until now, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Thomas Malthus, T. S. Eliot, Judy Blume, Jerome McGann, and Jacqueline Rose.

 

Displaying careful scholarship, sophisticated use of contemporary literary theory, and close readings of texts while recovering and analyzing materials from more than two centuries of British and other Anglophone cultural history, this collection of new essays traces the evolution of the Romantic child. The contributors play off one another, both within the three traditional historical periods—Romantic, Victorian, and modern/postmodern—and across intellectual and disciplinary categories.

 

Time of Beauty, Time of Fear offers a stunning array of essays. In some, the authors focus on canonical texts by such writers as Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Smith, and Mrs. Molesworth. Other authors consider the Victorian concerns with missionary literature for children and with the boyish pastime of collecting bird's nests, folk voices of the 1960s, homeschooling, the Teletubbies television program, and Alan Moore's Promethea series of graphic novels. Measured in terms of both range and quality, this volume is destined to become essential reading for scholars from numerous disciplines.

 

Contributors

Jennifer Smith Daniel

Elizabeth A. Dolan

Richard Flynn

Elizabeth Gargano

Mary Ellis Gibson

Dorothy H. McGavran

Roderick McGillis

Claudia Mills

Jochen Petzold

Malini Roy

Andrew J. Smyth

Jan Susina

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - James Holt McGavran, Jr. , and Jennifer Smith Daniel
• Missing But Presumed Alive: Lost Children of Lost Parents in Two Major Romantic Poems, “Michael” and “Christabel” - James Holt McGavran, Jr.
• Mary Wollstonecraft’s Childish Resentment: The Angry Girl, the Wrongs and the Rights of Woman - Malini Roy
• That This Here Box Be in the Natur of a Trap: Maria Edgeworth’s Pedagogical Gardens, Ireland, and the Education of the Poor - Andrew J. Smyth
• Financial Investments vs. Moral Principles: Charlotte Smith’s Children’s Books and Slavery - Elizabeth A. Dolan
• The Innocent Child in the House of History: Storytelling and the Sensibility of Loss in Molesworth’s The Tapestry Room - Elizabeth Gargano
• Oversleeping Oneself: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wake-Up Call in Wives and Daughters - Dorothy H. McGavran
• The Perils of Reading: Children’s Missionary Magazines and the Making of Victorian Imperialist Subjectivity - Mary Ellis Gibson
• The End Was Not Ignoble? Bird-Nesting between Cruelty, Manliness, and Science Education in British Children’s Periodicals, 1850–1900 - Jochen Petzold
• My Folk Revival: Childhood, Politics, and Popular Music - Richard Flynn
• Rousseau Redux: Romantic Re-Visions of Nature and Freedom in Recent Children’s Literature about Homeschooling - Claudia Mills
• Teletubbies and the Conflict of the Romantic Concept of Childhood and the Realities of Postmodern Parenting - Jan Susina
• The Sustaining Paradox: Romanticism and Alan Moore’s Promethea Novels - Roderick McGillis
• Notes on Contributors
• Index