Victorian Childrens Literature: Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power [Paperback]

This book reveals how the periods transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation. At the heart of this study is this question: what is the relationship between Victorian childrens literature, its readers, and their psychic development?  Ruth Y. Jenkins uses Julia Kristevas theory of abjection to uncover the presence of cultural anxieties and social tensions in works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Carroll, Stevenson, Burnett, Ballantyne, Nesbit, Tucker, Sewell, and Rossetti.  

 

Introduction: Emerging Identities and the Practice of Possibility.- Imagining the Abject in Kingsley, MacDonald, and Carroll: Disrupting Dominant Values and Cultural Identity in Childrens Literature.- Gender, Abjection, and Coming of Age: Games, Dolls, and Stories.-Constructing the Self: Connection and Separation.- Giving Voice to Abjection: Experience and Empathy.- Engendering Abjections Sublime: Frances Hodgson Burnetts The Secret Garden.- Embodying Herethics: Rossettis Speaking Likenesses.- ConclusionAbjections Sublime: Imagining Love.- Notes.- Bibliography.                          

Ruth Y. Jenkins is Professor of English at California State University, Fresno, USA. She is the author of Reclaiming Myths of Power: The Victorian Spiritual Crisis and Women Writers and numerous articles on Victorian literature and culture, childrens literature, feminist, cultural, and writing theory.  

This book reveals how the periods transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunitiesl³#