1st Edition
Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature
"Recommended" by Choice
Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.
Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls
1. "A Just, A Useful Part": Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s
Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth’s Companion
Lorinda B. Cohoon, University of Memphis
2. Slumbering Charity and The Plight of the Poor in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction for
Children
Monika Elbert, Montclair State University
3. Hints Dropped Here and There: Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas (vol. 1)
Melissa Fowler and Janet Gray, College of New Jersey
4. "One extry little girl": The Nineteenth-Century Orphan in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s
Writing for Children
Roxanne Harde, University of Alberta
5. Political Crossroads: Images of Citizenship for Children during the Political
Reconstruction of the LDS Church
Shauna Bigham,
Politicizing Children: The Civil War and its Aftermath
1. "A is an Abolitionist": The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy
Martha Sledge, Marymount Manhattan College
2. "Overcoming Racism: Rainbow's Dignity and Poise in Jacob Abbott's Stories of
Rainbow and Lucky"
Eric Sterling, Auburn University
3. "I am your slave for love": Race, Sentimental Culture, and Stowe’s Fiction for Children
Lesley Ginsberg, University of Colorado
4. To Heal and Preserve: Southern Perceptions of the Civil War and Reconstruction in
Burke’s Weekly for Boys and Girls
J.E. Myers and J.L. Gmuca
Sentimentalism vs. Realism: "Normalization" and The Place of the Othered Child
1. Harriet Prescott Spofford’s Hester Stanley Stories: Xenophobia in Children’s
Literature
Rita Bode, Trent University
2. Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America
Shawn Thomson, University of Kansas
3. " The cleverest children’s book written here": Elizabeth Stoddard’s Lolly Dinks’s Doings and the Subversion of Social Conventions
Maria Holmgren Troy, Karlstad University
4. A Sentimental Childhood: Memoirs by White and by Native American Authors
Melanie Dawson, College of William and Mary
Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child’s Mind
- "Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop": Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850-1900
- Natural History for Children and the Agassiz Association
Eric S. Hintz, University of Pennsylvania
J.D. Stahl, Virginia Tech
3. Good Masters: Child-Animal Relationships in 19th-Century Children’s Fiction and
Educational Psychology
Joan Menefee, University of Wisconsin (Stout)
4. The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child’s Garden
Anne Lundin, University of Wisconsin
5. Child Consciousness in the American Novel: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and What Maisie Knew
Holly Blackford, Rutgers University
Biography
Monika Elbert
"...the essays are well-researched and well-written...the volume includes 18 black-and-white period illustrations and a thorough bibliography." -- E.R. Baer, Choice
"Readers will learn more about old favorites such as Stowe, Alcott, and Twain, discover new areas for research, and develop new perspectives on nineteenth-century American children's literature…this is an important contribution to American children's literature scholarship, one that should be in every university library. The authors and the editor are to be commended for their work; I look forward to seeing how their scholarship shapes and inspires additional research on both nineteenth- and twentieth-century American children's literature." --Anne K. Phillips, Children’s Literature