Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery

Continuing Conversations

Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, E. Holly Pike, Margaret Steffler, Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, E. Holly Pike, Margaret Steffler

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780228013891
  9780228013884
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228014843
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

From Jane Austen to contemporary fanfiction and adaptations, literary portrayals of the child and imaginings of childhood are particularly telling indicators of cultural values and when they shift.

Inspired by the responsive reading practices of L.M. Montgomery herself, those demonstrated by her characters, and those of her diverse readership, Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery works with concepts of confluence, based on organic, non-linear readings of texts across time and space. Such readings reconsider views of childhood and children by challenging power hierarchies and inequities found in approaches that privilege more linear readings of literary influence. While acknowledging differences between childhood and adulthood, contributors emphasize kinship between child and adult as well as between past and present selves and use both scholarly approaches and creative reimagining to explore how the boundaries between different stages of life are blurred in Montgomery's writing.

Children and Childhoods in L.M. Montgomery addresses Montgomery's challenges to prescribed assumptions about childhood while positioning her novels as essential texts in twenty-first-century literary, childhood, and youth studies.

Contributors include Yoshiko Akamatsu (Notre Dame Seishin University), Balaka Basu (UNC Charlotte), Rita Bode (Trent University), Holly Cinnamon, Lesley D. Clement, Vappu Kannas, Heidi Lawrence (University of Glasgow), Kit Pearson, Rosalee Peppard Lockyer, E. Holly Pike, Laura Robinson (Acadia University), Kate Scarth (UPEI), Margaret Steffler (Trent University), William Thompson (MacEwan University), Bonnie Tulloch (UBC), Asa Warnqvist (Swedish Institute for Children's Books)

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Notes
• Introduction
• Part One: Conversing with the Past: Vulnerability, Resistance, and Resilience
• Part Two: Conversing with the Present: Fantasy, the Ideal, and the Real
• Part Three: Continuing Literary Conversations: Transformative Relationships and Spaces
• Part Four: Continuing Transmediated Conversations: Anime, Fanfiction, and Television Adaptations
• Afterwords
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index