The Fantasy of Family - Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal - by E. Thielseeders: 16
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DescriptionThe Fantasy of Family Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal by E. Thiel Contents: Introduction 1 Redefining the Past Part One: Theory and The Family Part Two: Transnormative Families—Causes and Effects 2 Snatched From “The Seed-plot” of Degeneracy: The “rescue” of the destitute child in tales of street-arab life Drunk and Disorderly: The negligent mother in Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer (1867), Jessica’s Mother (1867), and Lost Gip (1873) “Motherless, Fatherless and Friendless”: Portraits of the orphan in Brenda’s Nothing to Nobody (1873) and Froggy’s Little Brother (1875) 3 Forever Cursed: Stepmothers, “otherness,” and the reinscription of myth in transnormative family narratives The Precarious Nature of Home Sweet Home: Lucy Lane Clifford’s “The New Mother” (1882) A Subtly Subversive Approach:Harriet Childe-Pemberton’s Birdie: A Tale of Child-Life (1888) Discordant Voices: Filial jealousy and authorial “compromise” in Caroline Birley’s We Are Seven (1880) The Folly of Voluntary Slavery: Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Young Step-mother or A Catalogue of Mistakes (1861) 4 “Uncles are one thing . . . [but] aunts are always nasty!” Relational failures and the discourse of gender bias in foster family stories Negative Influences and Familial Discord:Mary Louis Molesworth’s Rosy (1882) Usurping the Mother: Harriet Childe-Pemberton’s “All My Doing; or, Red Riding Hood Over Again” (1882) The Archetype of the “Good, Kind Uncle”: Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House: A Book for the Young (1839) In Sinclair’s Footsteps: Brenda’s “Lotty and Georgie” books and the man with the yellow moustache 5 Mother, Ally, Friend, or Foe? The “dependable” female author as one of the family Part One:Women’sWork Part Two: A Multiplicity of Voices Conclusion Into the Future: The enduring potency of the nineteenth-century domestic ideal The myth of the Victorian family remains a pervasive influence within a contemporary Britain that perceives itself to be in social crisis. Nostalgic for a golden age of "Victorian values" in which visions of supportive, united families predominate, the common consciousness, exhorted by social and political discourse, continues to vaunt the "traditional, natural" family as the template by which all other family forms are gauged. Yet this fantasy of family, nurtured and augmented throughout the Victorian era, was essentially a construct that belied the realities of a nineteenth-century world in which orphanhood, fostering, and stepfamilies were endemic. Focusing primarily on British children's texts written by women and drawing extensively on socio-historic material, The Fantasy of Family considers the paradoxes implicit to the perpetuation of the domestic ideal within the Victorian era and offers new perspectives on both nineteenth-century and contemporary society. Sharing Widget |
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