Author:
Blackford, Holly Virginia, author.
Edition Statement:First edition.
ImprintKnoxville : The University of Tennessee Press, [2018]
Description296 pages ; 24 cm
Note:Introduction. Intellectual history and child study, 1871-1911 -- Huck and Maisie: adaptation and environmental conditioning -- Alice to Anne: looking-glass house and modern method -- Dorian and Peter: childhood and Greek love -- Anne and Stephen: nature and nerve -- Jim and Antonia: pan and prairie -- A bigger child: race and adolescence -- Charlie and Christopher: disability and modernity -- Coda. Expulsion and intersectionality.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Note:"By examining the connection between authors and trends in child psychology, author Holly Blackford explains why many modern novels began to focus on child cognition as a site for intellectual and artistic exploration. In each chapter of this book, select novels of the late-nineteenth or twentieth century are paired with a specific moment or movement from the history of developmental psychology. Novels such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Henry James's What Maisie Knew, or Radclyffe Hall's less-canonical The Well of Loneliness and even Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, showcase major questions about human epistemology through their child characters. From Lewis Carroll's Alice and her looking-glass to Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas and the murder of Mary Dalton to the chaotic Neverland--symbolizing the unmappable child's brain--a literary tradition of child consciousness has emerged as an experimental site for the unstable concepts of evolution, civilization, and development. {u200B}By situating literature about children within concurrent psychological discourses, Blackford demonstrates how the modern novel contributed to the world's understanding of the boundless wonders and discernible limits of child consciousness." --Provided by publisher.
