ABSTRACT
"Recommended" by Choice
Enterprising Youth examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children’s perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. The essays in this book reveal the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as representatives of a new order, or as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents. The question, then, is whether the business of telling children's stories becomes an adult enterprise of conservative indoctrination, or whether children are enterprising enough to read what many of the contributors to this volume see as the subversive potential of these texts. This collection of literary and historical criticism of nineteenth-century American children’s literature draws upon recent assessments of canon formations, gender studies, and cultural studies to show how concepts of public/private, male/female, and domestic/foreign are collapsed to reveal a picture of American childhood and life that is expansive and constrictive at the same time.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|66 pages
Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls
chapter Chapter Two|20 pages
Charitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Stories
chapter Chapter Three|16 pages
“Hints Dropped Here and There”: Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume I
part II|64 pages
Politicizing Children: “Normalization” and the Place of the Marginalized Child
chapter Chapter Five|14 pages
“A is an Abolitionist”: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of Literacy
chapter Chapter Six|14 pages
Overcoming Racism in Jacob Abbott's Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum America
chapter Chapter Seven|18 pages
“I am your slave for love”: Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Fiction for Children
chapter Chapter Eight|16 pages
Shut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford's Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories
part III|64 pages
Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of Childhood
chapter Chapter Nine|16 pages
Robinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century America
chapter Chapter Twelve|16 pages
The Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child's Garden
part IV|64 pages
Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child's Mind