About This Course

January 3, 2010 at 11:21 am (Uncategorized)


This module examines the figure of the child in American literature, with an emphasis on its evolution through the nineteenth-century. It considers the diverse representations of childhood in literature written for adults and for children, whilst also placing these accounts in dialogue with central socio-historical movements and transatlantic exchanges (particularly the rise of state education, the child protection movement, and the birth of the child study movement), and influential philosophies of childhood

The course is sub-divided into three parts:

Part I: Constructing the American Child

Part I introduces three principle themes in representations of childhood in America: the seventeenth-century Puritan idea of infant damnation (Mather and Bradstreet); the legacy of eighteenth-century didacticism on educational reform in the early nineteenth-century (Mann and Hawthorne); and the child as a “vessel of grace” in American Romanticism in the early nineteenth-century (Emerson, Alcott, and Swedenborg). The section is framed by a consideration of the seminal representation of childhood from later in the century, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Part II: Childhood and Reform

Part II considers the evolution of the figure of the child through the century, focusing on its place in representations of gender, race, and class. It considers the use of child figures in the reform literature of abolitionists (Stowe), and in realist literary and journalistic works (Crane and Riis). A central focus is on the increased emphasis, particularly in the post Civil War literature of Alger and Alcott, on the emergence of a more distinctly gendered literature for boys and girls.

Part III: Child Study

The final section of the module examines the impact of the Child Study Movement on literature, and the interest it expressed in analyzing the mind and nature of the child. It considers this topic through an early consideration of a child’s psychology, and the challenge this analysis poses to treasured conceptions of children’s innocence, in Henry James; the impact of evolutionary theory and primitivism on ideas of childhood, including Native American responses to the motif of the child as a kind of domestic noble savage (London and Eastman); and finally, an example of children’s writing (Whiteley).

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction

  • Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.

Part I: Constructing the American Child

Week 2: Damned Infants: Puritan Childhoods

  • Cotton Mather extracts from A Token for the Children of New England, or some examples of children, in whom the fear of God was remarkably budding, before they dyed.
  • Anne Bradstreet, “The Four Ages of Man,” “In Reference to Her Children,” In Memory of Anne Bradstreet,” “On My Dear Grandchild,” extracts from “Meditations Divine and Moral,” and “To My Dear Children.”

Week 3: Forging Little Democrats

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A Gentle Boy” and The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair
  • Horace Mann, “Report No 12 of the Massachusetts School Board”

Week 4: The Innocent Eye: American Romanticism

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” and “Threnody”  in Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems.
  • Elizabeth Peabody, “Plans” from Record of a School
  • Emmanuel Swedenborg, “The State of Innocence and The Angels of Heaven” from Heaven and Hell

Part II: Childhood and Reform

Week 5: The White Girl’s Burden: Race and Slavery

  • Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Week 6: Separate Spheres: Gendering Childhood

  • Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (1867)
  • Louisa M Alcott, Little Women (1868/9)

Week 7:  Saving the Child

  • Stephen Crane, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other Stories
  • W T Steed, Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.

Part III:  Child Study

Week  8:  Vessels of Consciousness

  • Henry James, What Maisie Knew

Week 9: Of Boys and Wolves: “Boyology” and Race

  • Charles A .Eastman, Indian Boyhood
  • Jack London, Call of the Wild

Week 10: Childhood in Ruins

  • Henry James, “Turn of the Screw”

Week 11: “What Things the Eyes of Potatoes Do See:” Children’s Writing

  • Opal Whiteley, The Journal of an Understanding Heart.

READING LIST

Any Edition, but Penguin preferred.

  • Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women (1868/9)
  • Alger, Horatio, Ragged Dick (1867)
  • Stowe, Harriett Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
  • Crane, Stephen, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other Stories (1893)
  • Eastman, Charles A., Indian Boyhood (1902)
  • Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1840)
  • James, Henry, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898)
  • James, Henry, What Maisie Knew (1892)
  • London, Jack, Call of the Wild (1903)
  • Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Required Editions

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems (Mass Market Paperback, 1920: Bantam USA Reissue edition). [NB: allow at least three weeks for delivery if ordering from Amazon]

Mintz, Steven, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2004) [Required secondary text]

Whiteley, Opal (ed. Jane Boulton) Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart (1920) (Crown Publications, 1995)

A course Reading Pack is also provided.

Selected secondary texts

Levander, Caroline, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (Duke University Press, 2005)

Scott MacLeod, Ann, American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (University of Georgia Press, 1995).

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