Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity

by U. C. Knoepflmacher

Overview

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies.

"Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically."—Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement

"A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture."—Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226448169
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/01/2000
Edition description:	1
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nina Auerbach is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. U. C. Knoepflmacher is professor of English at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Buttonholing the Reader: A Preface of Sorts
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Entering Childhood: The Double Perspectives of Generation and Sex
2. Resisting Growth: Ruskin's The King of the Golden River
3. Growing Up Ironic: Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring
4. Mixing Levity and the Grave: MacDonald's "The Light Princess"
5. Expanding Alice: from Underground to Wonderland
6. Shrinking Alice: from Wonderland to Looking-Glass Land
7. Erasing Borders: MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind
8. Sundering Women from Boys: Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy
9. Razing Male Preserves: From "Goblin Market" to Sing-Song
10. Avenging Alice: From Sing-Song to Speaking Likenesses
11. Repairing Female Authority: Ewing's "Amelia and the Dwarfs"
Epilogue
Index

What People are Saying About This

James R. Kincaid

This is the most important book in Victorian studies in some time, all the more important because it is so witty and carefree, so at ease with its own significance.

Editorial Reviews

Knoepflmacher is right to insist that we should take children's books seriously as a form of literary art. . . .he disobeys hisown injunction, for his way of taking such works seriously is to turn them into works for adults.
— The New Republic

Richard Jenkyns

Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically. -- Times Literary Supplement

Jan Marsh

Behind the innocent facades of Victorian fairy tales were intense debates about the nature of childhood and the motives of the male and female authors of the tales. These issues as well as the works of seven British children's authors who published from 1850 - 1870, including Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti, are treated here by Knoepflmacher (English and ancient and modern literature, Princeton University). The author believes that male writers of the time idealized childhood, whereas female writers were more grounded in actuality and that both camps were in constant conflict. While the author admits to imposing 20th-century notions of gender onto a pre-Freudian era, this is a provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture. -- Rebecca Martin, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb

Library Journal