English 415, Spring 2002
Special Topic Seminar:
The Idea of the Child in 19th-century
British and American Literature
This course will consider the meaning
of the child in a variety of fictional texts. While children have been characters in novels for as long as
there have been novels, much nineteenth-century fiction focuses on the
child--even in literature for adults--in ways that seem new and
thought-provoking. We’ll
start with the Romantic idealization of the child in such writers as Blake,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and go on to explore the ramifications of casting
the child as "other" -- innocent and happy? or perhaps sexualized and
demonized? -- in a variety of nineteenth-century novels from both sides of the
Atlantic. Tropes from the innocent exploited "worker" (as in Oliver
Twist) to the angelic
dying child (as in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Old Curiosity Shop) will be explored and examined
alongside critical and theoretical works on childhood and literature.
Texts
(available from the UR Bookstore):
Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein
(1818, 1832)
Charles
Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
Emily
Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
George Eliot,
The Mill on the Floss (1861)
Lewis
Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass (1871)
Louisa May
Alcott, Little Women
(1869)
Mark Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Henry James, The
Turn of the Screw
(1898)
Frances
Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)
Additional
readings on reserve or handed out in class, as announced