Representations of Childhood in American Modernism

ISBN-13: 9781349701414 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 234 str.

Michelle H. Phillips

Opis

This book documents American modernism's efforts to disenchant adult and child readers alike of the essentialist view of childhood as redemptive, originary, and universal. For James, Barnes, Du Bois, and Stein, the twentieth century's move to position the child at the center of the self and society raised concerns about the shrinking value of maturity and prompted a critical response that imagined childhood and children's narratives in ways virtually antagonistic to both. In this original study, Michelle H. Phillips argues that American modernism's widespread critique of childhood led to some of the period's most meaningful and most misunderstood experiments with interiority, narration, and children's literature.

Spis treści

                                                                                                         TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Acknowledgments

Introduction                                          

CHAPTER ONE:                                                                                                                  

 American Modernism, Childhood, and The Inward Turn                                                  

CHAPTER TWO:                                                                                                                   

The “Partagé Child” and The Emergence of The Modernist Novel in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew                                          

CHAPTER THREE:

An Innocence Worse Than Evil in The Turn of The Screw                                               

CHAPTER FOUR:

Nightwood: A Bedtime Story                                                                                           

CHAPTER FIVE:

The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book

CHAPTER SIX:

Drowning In Childhood: Gertrude Stein’s Late Modernism                                           

Works Cited                                                                                                                                  

O autorze

 Mason Phillips is a Lecturer in the English Department at Howard University, USA. He works in the fields of modernism, African American literature, and childhood studies and has published in numerous journals including African American Review, Children’s Literature, and PMLA.

Blurb

This book documents American modernism’s efforts to disenchant adult and child readers alike of the essentialist view of childhood as redemptive, originary, and universal. For James, Barnes, Du Bois, and Stein, the twentieth century’s move to position the child at the center of the self and society raised concerns about the shrinking value of maturity and prompted a critical response that imagined childhood and children’s narratives in ways virtually antagonistic to both. In this original study, Mason Phillips argues that American modernism’s widespread critique of childhood led to some of the period’s most meaningful and most misunderstood experiments with interiority, narration, and children’s literature.