The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture

ISBN-13: 9780754661566 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 256 str.

Opis

Addresses the roles assigned to children in the context of 19th-century consumer culture. This collection includes topics such as toys and middle-class childhood; boyhood and toy theater; child performers on the Victorian stage; imperialism in adventure fiction; and, the idealization of childhood as a form of adult entertainment and self-flattery.

Recenzje

'From its scene-setting introduction to its closing studies of dead and dying children, this collection is a compelling read that offers new ways of thinking about such nineteenth-century phenomena and institutions as the family, the children's book, the theater, toys, imperialism, and sensation fiction. In the process, it offers a salutary reminder that neither consumer culture not the festishization and commodification of youth is a new phenomenon, while highlighting continuities between adults and children, past and present, and the nexus of desire surrounding constructions of childhood then and now.' Kim Reynolds, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Spis treści

Contents: Introduction: Small change: the consumerist designs of the 19th-century child, Dennis Denisoff. Part 1 Play Things: Toys and Theater: Experiments before breakfast: toys, education, and middle-class childhood, Teresa Michals; Paper dreams and romantic projections: the 19th-century toy theater, boyhood, and aesthetic play, Liz Farr; The drama of precocity: child performers on the Victorian stage, Marah Gubar. Part 2 Consuming Desires: 'I'm not a bit expensive': Henry James and the sexualization of the Victorian girl, Michèle Mendelssohn; For-getting to eat: Alice's mouthing metonymy, Carol Mavor; Salome's lost childhood: Wilde's daughter of Sodom, jugendstil culture, and the queer afterlife of a decadent myth, Richard A. Kaye. Part 3 Adulthood and Nationhood: Adult children's literature in Victorian Britain, Claudia Nelson; Home Thoughts and Home Scenes: packaging middle-class childhood for Christmas consumption, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra; Maps, pirates and treasure: the commodification of imperialism in 19th-century boys' adventure fiction, Ymitri Mathison. Part 4 Children and the Terrors of Cultural Consumption: Toys and terror: Lucy Clifford's Anyhow Stories, Patricia Demers; 'We have orphans [...] in stock': crime and the consumption of sensational children, Tamara S. Wagner; 'And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten': children, consumption, and commerce in 19th-century child-protection discourse, Monica Flegel; Index.

O autorze

Dennis Denisoff is a Research Chair in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.