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Explores how emerging ideas of infancy and childhood gave Romantic writers and readers new ways of understanding history and literature.
These essays document and examine the transformation of children's literature during the Romantic period, and trace Romanticism's influence on Victorian children's literature using a variety of critical approaches, including neo-historicist, feminist, mythic, reader-response, and formalist.
This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.
Priscilla Gilman had the greatest expectations for the birth of her first child. Growing up in New York City amongst writers, artists, and actors, Gilman experienced childhood as a whirlwind of imagination, creativity, and spontaneity. As a Wordsworth scholar, she celebrated and embraced the poet's romantic view of children—and eagerly anticipated her son's birth, certain that he, too, would come "trailing clouds of glory." But her romantic vision would not be fulfilled in the ways she dreamed. Though Benjamin was an extraordinary child, the signs of his precocity—dazzling displays of memory and intelligence—were also manifestations of a developmental disorder that would require intensive therapies and special schooling, and would dramatically alter the course Priscilla had imagined for her family. In The Anti-Romantic Child, a memoir full of lyricism and light, Gilman explores the complexity of our hopes for our children, our families, and ourselves, and the way in which experience can alter and lead us to reimagine those hopes and expectations. Using Wordsworth's poetry as a touchstone, she speaks intimately of her poignant journey through crisis and disenchantment to a place of peace and resilience. Through her courageous account, we discover how events and situations often perceived as setbacks can actually inspire and enrich us. Developing a supple and open mind is important, this book reminds us, not only with respect to our children but also with respect to our relationship with any person whose otherness is at first disorienting. As she goes beyond her family's trials and ultimate triumphs, Gilman illuminates the flourishing of life that occurs when we embrace the unexpected. The Anti-Romantic Child is an incredible synthesis of memoir and literature, one that resonates long after you finish the last page.
The Romantic myth of childhood as a transhistorical holy time of innocence and spirituality, uncorrupted by the adult world, has been subjected in recent years to increasingly serious interrogation. Was there ever really a time when mythic ideals were simple, pure, and uncomplicated? The contributors to this book contend—although in widely differing ways and not always approvingly—that our culture is indeed still pervaded, in this postmodern moment of the very late twentieth century, by the Romantic conception of childhood which first emerged two hundred years ago. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, western Europe experienced another fin de siècle characterized by overwhelming material and institutional change and instability. By historicizing the specific political, social, and economic conflicts at work within the notion of Romantic childhood, the essayists in Literature and the Child show us how little these forces have changed over time and how enriching and empowering they can still be for children and their parents. In the first section, “Romanticism Continued and Contested,” Alan Richardson and Mitzi Myers question the origins and ends of Romantic childhood. In “Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts,” Dieter Petzold, Richard Flynn, and James McGavran argue that postmodern texts for both children and adults perpetuate the Romantic complexities of childhood. Next, in “The Commerce of Children's Books,” Anne Lundin and Paula Connolly study the production and marketing of children's classics. Finally, in “Romantic Ideas in Cultural Confrontations,” William Scheick and Teya Rosenberg investigate interactions of Romantic myths with those of other cultural systems.
In this wide-ranging and richly detailed book Alan Richardson addresses many issues in literary and educational history never before examined together. The result is an unprecedented study of how transformations in schooling and literacy in Britain between 1780 and 1832 helped shape the provision of literature as we know it. In chapters focused on such topics as definitions of childhood, educational methods and institutions, children's literature, female education, and publishing ventures aimed at working-class adults, Richardson demonstrates how literary genres, from fairy tales to epic poems, were enlisted in an ambitious program for transforming social relations through reading and education. Themes include literary developments such as the domestic novel, a sanitized and age-stratified literature for children, the invention of 'popular' literature, and the constitution of 'Literature' itself in the modern sense. Romantic texts - by Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Yearsley among others - are reinterpreted in the light of the complex historical and social issues which inform them, and which they in turn critically address.
Focusing on the major literary movements from Romanticism to postmodernism, Thacker and Webb examine the concerns of each period and the ways in which these concerns influence and are influenced by children's literature.
On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution. He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."
John Clare (1793-1864) was the greatest labor-class poet that England ever produced. Here at last is his full story told by the light of his voluminous work, his birth in poverty, his work as a laborer, his promise as a writer, then his moment of fame in the company of John Keats and the toast of literary London.
Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar), course: Hauptseminar First Generation Romantic Poets, language: English, abstract: William Wordsworth provides material for an extensive study of children and childhood in Romanticism with his oeuvre. The notion of "The child is father of the man" appears to be ingrained in earlier works such as the volume "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) as well. The poems discussed in this paper are ‘We are Seven’ and ‘Anecdote for Fathers'. Is the child a teacher or the origin of the adult? Or is it something inferior? How does the portrayal of the children in the two poems differ and in what ways are they similar? The interpretation and comparison of these poems will provide an insight into Wordsworth’s Romantic child. In these two ballads adult narrators describe their encounters and conversations with a child. The focus here is clearly on the descriptive aspect (e.g. the child’s appearance and behaviour). To get an historical background of the prevalent ideas of childhood and children of Wordsworth’s contemporaries, a short summary of the two dominant philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, who both coined the Romantic views on childhood, is provided (Chapter 2). The analysis of the poems themselves is divided into several subcategories: the portrayal of the child (3.1.), the child in relation to the adult (3.2.), the child’s use of language (3.3.) and the child’s worldview (3.4.). The categories have been chosen in consideration of the research questions whether Wordsworth’s children are portrayed positively.
