Imperialism and juvenile literature

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780719024207
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526123558
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this truer than in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. It both reflects popular attitudes, ideas and preconceptions and it generates support for selected views and opinions. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times: in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. It seeks to examine in detail the articulation and diffusion of imperialism in the field of juvenile literature by stressing its pervasiveness across boundaries of class, nation and gender. It analyses the production, distribution and marketing of imperially-charged juvenile fiction, stressing the significance of the Victorians' discovery of adolescence, technological advance and educational reforms as the context of the great expansion of such literature. An overview of the phenomenon of Robinson Crusoe follows, tracing the process of its transformation into a classic text of imperialism and imperial masculinity for boys. The imperial commitment took to the air in the form of the heroic airmen of inter-war fiction. The book highlights that athleticism, imperialism and militarism become enmeshed at the public schools. It also explores the promotion of imperialism and imperialist role models in fiction for girls, particularly Girl Guide stories.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• General editor's foreword
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• New Grub Street for boys
• The Robinson Crusoe story
• Ballantyne’s message of empire
• With Henty to Africa
• ‘Healthy papers for manly boys’: imperialism and race in the Harmsworths’ halfpenny boys’: papers of the 1890s and 1900s
• Imperialists of the air-flying stories 1900–1950
• Hunting and the natural world in juvenile literature
• Noble specimens of manhood: schoolboy literature and the creation of a colonial chivalric code
• British imperialism and the reproduction of femininity in girls’ fiction, 1900–1930
• Index