Books for Children, Books for Adults Age and the Novel from Defoe to James [Paperback]

This book explores how ideas about age changed for novels and their readers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Tracing the emergence of different reading audiences, this groundbreaking study explores why some books originally written for a mixed-age readership eventually became children's literature, while others became adult novels. Spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it discusses authors including Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Charles Dickens and Henry James.Tracing the emergence of different reading audiences, this groundbreaking study explores why some books originally written for a mixed-age readership eventually became children's literature, while others became adult novels. Spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it discusses authors including Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Charles Dickens and Henry James.In this groundbreaking and wide-ranging study, Teresa Michals explores why some books originally written for a mixed-age audience, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, eventually became children's literature, while others, such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, became adult novels. Michals considers how historically specific ideas about age shaped not only the readership of novels, but also the ways that characters are represented within them. Arguing that age is first understood through social status, and later through the ideal of psychological development, the book examines the new determination of authors at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Henry James, to write for an audience of adults only. In these novels and in their reception, a world of masters and servants became a world of adults and children.1. Introduction; 2. Rewriting Robinson Crusoe: age and the island; 3. Dating Pamela: Mr B., Goody Two-Shoes, and the age of consent; 4. Rational moralists, highland barbarians, and the taste for adventures; 5. Educating Dickens: Old Boys, Little Mothers, and school time; 6. 'The time of real amusement': Henlƒ+