English 400, Fall 2004
Special Topic Seminar:
The Idea of the Child in 19th-century
British and American Literature
Professor Elisabeth Rose Gruner
Office Hours, Fall 2004: M, Th
2-3 pm and by appointment
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. Wešll 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),
and from the pattern girl to the wild boy, will be explored and examined
alongside critical and theoretical works on childhood and literature.
Texts (available
from the UR Bookstore):
Charles
Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
George Eliot,
Silas Marner
(1861)
Lewis
Carroll, Alicešs Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through
the Looking Glass
(1871)
Louisa May
Alcott, Little Women
(1869)
Robert Louis
Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
Mark Twain, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Henry James, The
Turn of the Screw
(1898)
Rudyard
Kipling, Kim
(1901)
J. M. Barrie,
Peter and Wendy
(1911)
Frances
Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)
Additional
readings on reserve or handed out in class, as announced
Further
course information, including the semester schedule, is available on Blackboard