The Romantic myth of childhood as a transhistorical holy time of innocence and spirituality, uncorrupted by the adult world, has been subjected in recent years to increasingly serious interrogation. Was there ever really a time when mythic ideals were simple, pure, and uncomplicated? The contributors to this book contend—although in widely differing ways and not always approvingly—that our culture is indeed still pervaded, in this postmodern moment of the very late twentieth century, by the Romantic conception of childhood which first emerged two hundred years ago. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, western Europe experienced another fin de siècle characterized by overwhelming material and institutional change and instability. By historicizing the specific political, social, and economic conflicts at work within the notion of Romantic childhood, the essayists in Literature and the Child show us how little these forces have changed over time and how enriching and empowering they can still be for children and their parents. In the first section, “Romanticism Continued and Contested,” Alan Richardson and Mitzi Myers question the origins and ends of Romantic childhood. In “Romantic Ironies, Postmodern Texts,” Dieter Petzold, Richard Flynn, and James McGavran argue that postmodern texts for both children and adults perpetuate the Romantic complexities of childhood. Next, in “The Commerce of Children's Books,” Anne Lundin and Paula Connolly study the production and marketing of children's classics. Finally, in “Romantic Ideas in Cultural Confrontations,” William Scheick and Teya Rosenberg investigate interactions of Romantic myths with those of other cultural systems.

This book views Romantic literature’s discourses of childhood, education, and reproduction through the eyes of four early nineteenth-century British authors who were uniquely implicated in those discourses. Hartley and Sara Coleridge, children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and William Godwin Jr, children of William Godwin, shared the predicament of being both ‘real’ and ‘literary’ children. All the children of authors who helped shape culturally-definitive Romantic-period ideas about childhood, they wrote back to their fathers in order to understand and to resist the ways in which they were produced by paternal texts which foreclose the possibility of the child’s own regeneration. This study proposes that through this predicament, and their responses to it, the literature of the period between the Romantic and the Victorian periods comes into focus, marked by an anxiety not of influence, but of reproduction. It suggests that one reason why this period has tended to disappear from view lies in the sense of historical and aesthetic difference, and productive failure, which this study uncovers.

In this volume a team of three dozen international experts presents a fresh picture of literary prose fiction in the Romantic age seen from cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. The work treats the appearance of major themes in characteristically Romantic versions, the power of Romantic discourse to reshape imaginative writing, and a series of crucial reactions to the impact of Romanticism on cultural life down to the present, both in Europe and in the New World. Through its combination of chapters on thematic, generic, and discursive features, Romantic Prose Fiction achieves a unique theoretical stance, by considering the opinions of primary Romantics and their successors not as guiding “truths” by which to define the permanent “meaning” of Romanticism, but as data of cultural history that shed important light on an evolving civilization.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

Essays forging a new definition of Romanticism that includes the wide range of women's artistic expression.

Introducing Children's Literature is an ideal guide to reading children's literature through the perspective of literary history. Focusing on the major literary movements from Romanticism to Postmodernism, Thacker and Webb examine the concerns of each period and the ways in which these concerns influence and are influenced by the children's literature of the time. Each section begins with a general chapter, which explains the relationship between the major issues of each literary period and the formal and thematic qualities of children's texts. Close readings of selected texts follow to demonstrate the key defining characteristics of the form of writing and the literary movements. Original in its approach, this book sets children's literature within the context of literary movements and adult literature. It is essential reading for students studying writing for children. Books discussed include: *Louisa May Alcott's Little Women * Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies *Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland *Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz *Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden *P.L.Travers' Mary Poppins *E.B.White's Charlotte's Web *Philip Pullman's Clockwork.

If the child is the father of the man, as William Wordsworth so famously declared, then what of the father that child grows to become? How does a daughter born of her mother’s death, as in the case of Mary Shelley, navigate the politics of production and reproduction within a loaded language of mythological allusion between generational authorships? How do the visual arts perpetuate or challenge cultural agendas, such as portraying patriarchal anxieties about the “effeminization” of homeland by the foreign “other”, or attempting, iconically, to “save the soul” of a nation? How do parents both encode and decode our world? With the rise of the cult of the child in the later 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic writers of Britain and Europe, and eventually of North America, were perfectly positioned to explore, by extension, what it meant to “parent,” whether it be in within the domestic or the political sphere. The essays in Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology offer a fresh, timely, and cutting edge contribution to the field of Romantic studies. The collection has its roots in conference proceedings from the 2005 Romanticism and Parenting Conference held at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. Essays acknowledge traditional discussions of such quintessentially “Romantic” themes as the child, education and familial politics while building upon contemporary innovative arguments within the contexts of Romanticism. As a result, chapters in the collection range from examining didactic children’s literature to complicating constructions of the family politic at personal, communal and nationalistic levels. While challenging and deepening an understanding of Romantic studies, the collection also points to current, dynamic issues, such as the burgeoning discussion of the experience that actual parents face in academia. Consequently, the collection reveals how the Romantic period has come to profoundly influence our own current constructions of the politics of parenting.

In this pioneering historical study, Anne Lundin argues that schools, libraries, professional organizations, and the media together create and influence the constantly changing canon of children's literature. Lundin examines the circumstances out of which the canon emerges, and its effect on the production of children's literature. The volume includes a comprehensive list of canonical titles for reference.

This volume visits death in children’s literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on the topic of death in children’s literature as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct. Essays covering literature from the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, India, and Iran display a diverse range of theoretical and cultural perspectives. Carefully organized sections interrogate how classic texts have been adapted for the twenty-first century, how death has been politicized, ritualized, or metaphorized, and visual strategies for representing death, and how death has been represented within the context of play. Asking how different cultures present the concept of death to children, this volume is the first to bring together a global range of perspective on death in children’s literature and will be a valuable contribution to an array of disciplines.

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, Romantic Prayer shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer was much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer's historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, Romantic Prayer turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer, culminating in an explicit 'philosophy' of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist, and atheist critiques—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language traditionally conceived is becoming impossible to maintain?

How did the 'flat' characters of eighteenth-century children's literature become 'round' by the mid-nineteenth? While previous critics have pointed to literary Romanticism for an explanation, Jackie C. Horne argues that this shift can be better understood by looking to the discipline of history. Eighteenth-century humanism believed the purpose of history was to teach private and public virtue by creating idealized readers to emulate. Eighteenth-century children's literature, with its impossibly perfect protagonists (and its equally imperfect villains) echoes history's exemplar goals. Exemplar history, however, came under increasing pressure during the period, and the resulting changes in historiographical practice - an increased need for reader engagement and the widening of history's purview to include the morals, manners, and material lives of everyday people - find their mirror in changes in fiction for children. Horne situates hitherto neglected Robinsonades, historical novels, and fictionalized histories within the cultural, social, and political contexts of the period to trace the ways in which idealized characters gradually gave way to protagonists who fostered readers' sympathetic engagement. Horne's study will be of interest to specialists in children's literature, the history of education, and book history.