Playing with words: child voices in British fantasy literature 1749-1906【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Undertaking and completing this project would not have been possible without
the support, knowledge, and mentoring of many people. I first became interested in
children’s literature in an undergraduate course taught by Sara Danger, and I am grateful
for her mentorship and friendship. The seeds for several of the chapters that follow first
began to germinate in courses taught by Eric Gidal, Judith Pascoe, Florence Boos, Jeff
Cox, Teresa Mangum, and Lori Branch. I remain thankful for these professors who
encouraged me to pursue questions of children and childhood within the context of their
courses. Outside of the classroom, Florence Boos’s kind mentorship and commentary on
chapters proved to be a rich blessing. Likewise, conversations with Lori Branch in the
early stages of this project sparked helpful ideas and solidified my conviction in the
central questions of the dissertation. I also wish to express my gratitude to the University
of Iowa Graduate College and the Ballard Seashore Fellowship for providing me the
funds to research, write, and revise in this final year.
As the supervisor of this dissertation, Teresa Mangum has given generously of her
time and wisdom. She read multiple drafts and responded with a motivating combination
of questions, critique, and encouragement—the last of which helped keep this project
(and me) moving forward. Perhaps even more significantly, she understood the need to
keep the work of writing a dissertation in balance with the other demands and desires of a
full life. For this, I will forever be grateful.
I am thankful for my husband Brandon and his steadfast belief in me. His
encouragement and laughter made all the difference. And lastly, I am so very thankful
for Margaret and Abram and the way they filled the time of writing this dissertation with
both joy and purpose.
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ABSTRACT
Two children, Dan and Una, sit in the woods and listen to a story of Britain’s
early history told to them by Sir Richard, a spirit conjured from the past for this
instructive purpose. In this tale, Sir Richard gains treasure by defeating the “devils” that
terrorize a village of African people. In many ways, this framed narrative sets up the
expected hierarchy found in children’s literature wherein the adult actively narrates a
story and the child silently listens and learns. However, the children of Rudyard
Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill do something else—they question and challenge. At the
end of the story, Dan declares, “I don’t believe they were Devils” and backs up his
disbelief by drawing on other books he has read. While much scholarship on children’s
literature reads child characters through the lens of adult desire and finds them voiceless
and empty, I seek out moments wherein these imagined children, like Dan and Una,
challenge adult dissemination of knowledge. Building upon recent scholarship that sees
the child less as a straightforward projection of desire and more complexly as a site for
conflicting ideologies and tensions, my dissertation enters into the critical conversation
concerning the figure of the child and suggests a fresh, new approach to reading adultchild
relations in children’s literature. Urging readers to focus on the ways in which
fantasy literature imagines and represents child characters’ relationships to language—as
readers, authors, storytellers, and questioners—I argue that, whether deliberately or
unselfconsciously, these works imagine a child capable of interacting with language in
order to seize power and thus unsettle the force of adult desire. Even as the characters
themselves remain the products of adult creation, the relationship to language they model
for their implied readers transcends a simple one-to-one correlation of adult authorial
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desire and a child reader’s internalization. Each of my four chapters focuses on a pair of
authors: Sarah Fielding and Mary Martha Sherwood, Lewis Carroll and George
MacDonald, Frederika Macdonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Rudyard Kipling
and E. Nesbit. Instead of mere escapism and fancy, these portraits of childhood address
debates surrounding the emerging genre of the novel, religious censorship, educational
legislation, imperial ideology, medical discourses, and textbook publication. By
juxtaposing these novels in pairs alongside these significant historical contexts, my
project brings the child’s voice, which we often ignore, to the surface. Like Dan and his
declaration of disbelief, the readers imagined by these important works of fantasy refuse
to sit in silence and instead play with words to question, create, and challenge.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
Adult and Child in the Field of Children’s Literature 2
Following the Trail of Child Voices 9
CHAPTER
I FROM ONE GOVERNESS TO ANOTHER:
???????????READING CHILDREN IN FIELDING AND SHERWOOD 16
Little Eves and The Dangers of Reading 20
Reading Children in the Eighteenth Century 29
Not-so-light Revisions: Re-writing Reading in The Governess 49
From Instruction to Delight? Not Quite 65
II THE POSSIBLITIES OF THE CHILD VOICE
IN CAROLL AND MACDONALD 69
Alice’s Experimentation with Voices of Cultural Authority 72
Child-Poet as Hero 89
Leaving Wonderland: Words in the Real World 103
III INDIA IMAGINED:
CHILD STORYTELLERS AND THE FANTASY OF EMPIRE 108
Specters of Degeneracy: Fears for the Next Generation 112
Medical Discourse and the Danger of India 115
Frederika Macdonald and Growing up Imperial 119
Wondering and Resistant: Macdonald’s Puck and Pearl in India 124
Bringing Empire Back: Sara Crewe’s Imperial Fantasies 138
Imperial Logic and the Child Storyteller 147
IV SHAPING THE FANTASY OF HISTORY:
CHILD VOICES IN RUDYARD KIPLING AND E. NESBIT 149
Educational Changes and the Reading of History 151
Children and Empire in Puck of Pook’s Hill 156
Nesbit’s Children as Heirs of Empire 169
History as Fantasy and the Child Reader 193
CONCLUSION 195
BIBLIOGRAPHY 200

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