Claudia Nelson

Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illustrate how Victorian and Edwardian thought and culture problematized fatherhood within the family. Claudia Nelson shows how positive images of fatherhood virtually disappeared from the literature of the day as motherhood claimed an exalted position with imagined ties to patriotism, social reform, and religious influence. Nelson's research draws on the rapidly expanding genre periodicals of the time - political, scientific, domestic, and religious. The study begins in 1850, a point marking the end of the pre-Victorian role of the father in the middle-class home - as one who led the family in prayer, administered discipline, and determined the children's education, marriage, and career. In subsequent decades, fatherhood was increasingly scrutinized while a new definition of motherhood and femininity emerged. The solution to the newly perceived dilemma of fatherhood appeared rooted in traditional feminine values - nurturance, selflessness, and sensitivity. Victorian sanctification of motherhood led to three new constructs for the role of the father within the family: the "maternal father" was eulogized for his feminine moral influence and cooperation; the "separate-but-equal father" was measured by detachment and self-discipline; and the "abdicating father" conceded, with enthusiasm or regret, his familial insignificance. Consequently, the significance of maternal influence extended well into adult male life. By the end of the century, many fathers needed as much nurturing, or mothering, from their wives as did the children themselves. Social institutions reinforced this diminution in the social value of the father. The legal system assigned control over paternity to the state, while educators and reformers raised significant questions about the role of the school (and the state) as surrogate father. Moreover, modern science redefined its views on male sexuality and eugenics, reducing the father, in effect, to that of sperm donor. The critique presented in Invisible Men extends our contemporary debate over men's proper role within the family, providing a historical context for the various images of fatherhood as we practice and dispute them today.

Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910

Invisible Men

Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illustrate how Victorian and Edwardian thought and culture problematized fatherhood within the family. Drawing on political, scientific, domestic, and religious periodicals, Claudia Nelson shows how positive portrayals of fatherhood virtually disappeared as motherhood claimed an exalted position with imagined ties to patriotism, social reform, and religious influence. The study begins with the pre-Victorian role of the father in the middle-class home--as one who led the family in prayer, administered discipline, and determined the children's education, marriage, and career. In subsequent decades, fatherhood was increasingly scrutinized while a new definition of motherhood and femininity emerged. The solution to the newly perceived dilemma of fatherhood appeared rooted in traditional feminine values--nurturance, selflessness, and sensitivity. The critique presented in Invisible Men extends our contemporary debate over men's proper role within the family, providing a historical context for the various images of fatherhood as we practice and dispute them today.

Elisabeth Wesseling

Andrea Mei-Ying Wu

Focusing on significant and cutting-edge preoccupations within children’s literature scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture presents a comprehensive overview of print, digital, and electronic texts for children aged zero to thirteen as forms of world literature participating in a panoply of identity formations. Offering five distinct sections, this volume: • Familiarizes students and beginning scholars with key concepts and methodological resources guiding contemporary inquiry into children’s literature. • Describes the major media formats and genres for texts expressly addressing children. • Considers the production, distribution, and valuing of children’s books from an assortment of historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting context as a driver of content. • Maps how children’s texts have historically presumed and prescribed certain identities on the part of their readers, sometimes addressing readers who share some part of the author’s identity, sometimes seeking to educate the reader about a presumed “other,” and in recent decades increasingly foregrounding identities once lacking visibility and voice. • Explores the historical evolutions and trans-regional contacts and (inter)connections in the long process of the formation of global children’s literature, highlighting issues such as retranslation, transnationalism, transculturality, and new digital formats for considering cultural crossings and renegotiations in the production of children’s literature. Methodically presented and contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this expanding and multifaceted field.

The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture

Rebecca Morris

Bringing together children’s literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions. The volume’s five sections highlight the differences between and overlapping concerns of Chinese and American scholars, as they examine children’s literature with respect to cultural metaphors and motifs, historical movements, authorship, didacticism, important themes, and the current status of and future directions for literature and criticism. Wide-ranging and admirably ambitious in its encouragement of communication between scholars from two major nations, Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature serves as a model for examining how and why children’s literature, more than many literary forms, circulates internationally.

Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature

Julie-Marie Strange

Susan B Egenolf

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

British Family Life, 1780–1914, Volume 3

Anne Morey

Beginning with Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit and concluding with best-selling series still ongoing at the time of writing, this volume examines works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children's literature that incorporate character types, settings, and narratives derived from the Greco-Roman past. Drawing on a cognitive poetics approach to reception studies, it argues that authors typically employ a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors - palimpsest, map, and fractal - to organize the classical past for preteen and adolescent readers. Palimpsest texts see the past as a collection of strata in which each new era forms a layer superimposed upon a foundation laid earlier; map texts use the metaphor of the mappable journey to represent a protagonist's process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world; fractal texts, in which small parts of the narrative are thematically identical to the whole, present the past in a way that implies that history is infinitely repeatable. While a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook emerge from the case studies examined in each chapter, revealing remarkable thematic continuities in how the past is represented and how agency is attributed to protagonists: each model, it is suggested, uses the classical past to urge and thus perhaps to develop a particular approach to life.

Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals

Topologies of the Classical World in Children's Fiction

Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

Age Inversion in Victorian Literature

Precocious Children and Childish Adults

Ann Sumner Holmes

Maternal Instincts brings together seven new essays exploring conflicting visions of motherhood and sexuality in a period during which both terms were undergoing radical change. Representations of both concepts mutated to accommodate different cultural contexts and individual ideologies. Drawing upon sources including literature, film, medical handbooks, popular science, and legal records, the articles collected here construct a vision of motherhood as alternately idealized, discredited, and fragmented by virtue of its connection with sexualities licit and illicit.

Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925

Maternal Instincts

British Family Life, 1780–1914, Volume 2

Daniel Nelson

A vivid look at the Victorian British family emphasizing interpersonal relationships, using both non-fiction and fiction sources.

Family Ties in Victorian England

Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms “child-woman,” “child-man,” and “old-fashioned child” appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser-known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, Precocious Children and Childish Adults illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children’s literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

Lynne Vallone

The eleven contributors to The Girl's Own explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and troubling figure to Victorian commentators, especially in debates surrounding female sexuality and behavior. The Girl's Own combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll's and John Millais's iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America.

Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830-1915

The Girl's Own

British Family Life, 1780–1914, Volume 4

When Massachusetts passed America's first comprehensive adoption law in 1851, the usual motive for taking in an unrelated child was presumed to be the need for cheap labor. But by 1929 -- the first year that every state had an adoption law -- the adoptee's main function was seen as emotional. Little Strangers examines the representations of adoption and foster care produced over the intervening years. Claudia Nelson argues that adoption texts reflect changing attitudes toward many important social issues, including immigration and poverty, heredity and environment, individuality and citizenship, gender, and the family. She examines orphan fiction for children, magazine stories and articles, legal writings, social work conference proceedings, and discussions of heredity and child psychology. Nelson's ambitious scope provides for an analysis of the extent to which specialist and mainstream adoption discourse overlapped, as well as the ways in which adoption and foster care had captivated the public imagination.

Claudia Nelson

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