Masculinity in Children's Animal Stories, 1888-1928 : A Critical Study Of Anthropomorphic Tales by Wilde, Kipling, Potter, Grahame and Milne by Wynn William Yarbrough (original) (raw)
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Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2016
In "The Adventures of a Cat through Her Nine Lives," published in the Boy's Own Magazine in 1860, the reader encounters a wide variety of feline experiences, from roaming the streets as a stray to being lost at sea. While such adventures might easily be expected in a journal for young boys, the story also includes depictions of its cat protagonist's experiences of troubled romance, sexuality, domesticity, and child rearing. This article seeks to examine the role that animal stories such as this, particularly animal autobiographies, played in educating young readers about human sexuality and relations. While the "talking animals" genre of children's literature in the nineteenth century often used "animal behaviour and attitudes to give moral lessons on child behaviour" (Cosslett 73), these stories were also commonly written with the purpose of increasing awareness of animal hardship, encouraging the child reader to identify with the suffering animal so as to inculcate humanitarian feeling and behavior. But what do we make of tales for children that focus on the trauma of suffering in relationships, including domestic violence and infanticide, and how do we reconcile such texts within the larger framework of animal stories as moral exemplars and as treatises on the importance of inculcating in children a sympathy for animals? Examining a number of nineteenth-century animal stories and autobiographies focused on the lives of domesticated cats and dogs, I will argue that these texts offered opportunities for authors to educate children about romantic love and sexual relations. Children and animals are often linked in literary and cultural discourse, Gail Melson points out, because in "a worldview that radically separates humans from nonhumans, and rationality from animality, both children and pets straddle this great divide. Each is seen as not quite human and not quite animal" (35). Thus animal stories, with protagonists that were enough like children to provide opportunities for sympathetic identification,
Masculinities in English children's literature from a gender perspective
2016
As a follow-up of my master final project I am going to do some research on the area of gender stereotypes present in children’s literature. As a children educator myself I feel I have a duty to transmit good values to future generations. English teachers in Spain do rely in children’s literature as a crucial tool in their teaching tasks. However, most of the times the contents and values of these children’s stories are neglected in favour of attractive illustrations or traditional topics. My investigation will deal with several deeply connected spheres: gender, children’s literature and education. At present one of my most immediate aims is finding out how far children are affected by the constant reflection of gender stereotypes in the type of literature that is mainly addressed to them. My study will try to prove how teachers undermine gender stereotypes in their literature choices for the classroom library and up to what extent these old premises as regards gender hold a severe ...
The Necessity of an Anthropomorphic Approach to Children’s Literature
The study focuses on the necessity of an anthropomorphic approach in deconstructing the symbolic understandings of animals in children's literature, and considers how such an approach can be used to draw ethical attention to the unnatural history of animals in the Anthropocene. The paper analyses three children's novels that depict animals without representing their subjectivity in characteristically human terms. These novels are Eva Hornung's ferality tale Dog Boy (2009), Sonya Hartnett's fable The Midnight Zoo (2011) and Kate Applegate's animal autobiography The One and Only Ivan (2012). Informed by Jacques Derrida's anti-anthropocentric views and the ethical discourse of creaturely vulnerability, this essay argues that the world's present state of cascading environmental impoverishment demands an anthropomorphic approach that is not inherently anthropocentric, along with an emerging kind of creaturely consciousness.
GENDERING CHILDHOOD-READING AND MASCULINITY.docx
In my paper, I examine the gendering of childhood in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Such a reading, I argue is of critical importance to an examination of children’s reading in India as several of the key ideological formations that shaped children’s reading in imperial Britain decisively shaped the field in India as well. My account would examine the historical and political context for the emergence of masculinity as a locus of interest and inquiry. Examining masculinity as it is played out in the genre of adventure; I attempt to show that reading is implicated in the construction of colonial boyhood and that this was a process which involved questions of class and race as much as masculinity. The first part of my paper will sketch a brief account of childhood in the modern west and will touch upon parallel formations in colonial India. I will follow that up with an account of debates around reading and the manner in which these debates impinged upon the question of masculinity through an examination of the “penny dreadful” debate. Finally, I will offer an analysis of the narrative structure of adventure in order to show how questions of masculinity cannot be extricated from issues of nation, class and race.
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 1998
Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain offers an absorbing field of study for the historian of sexuality, in that it was at once aggressively opposed to behavior that it identified as "homosexual" and cordial to feelings that we would classify as "homoemotional." In the homosocial world of school, army, business, and clubs that existed around the turn of the century, middle-class men's closest relationships were often with other middle-class men; as Eric Trudgill points out, "Male friendship was a keystone of society." 1 Boys' fiction during this period likewise often appears designed to appeal to, or even help engineer, a reader who was most at his ease in a single-sex world. 2 Popular reading for male adolescents assured its audience that men might reasonably serve as the ultimate source and object of emotional drama and satisfaction in boys' lives, celebrating, in Beverly Lyon Clark's phrase, "a [male] bonding so effective that females are no longer necessary to enact the feminine." 3 Clark and other investigators of homoemotional-or, as many argue, homoerotic-imagery in Victorian children's literature have understandably concentrated on the school story, 4 a fertile area for inquiry because romance in this genre necessarily comes from the exaltation of the passionate friendship between boys. But in focusing instead on adventure tales, the present essay seeks to change the terms under which such investigations are sometimes conducted by urging that we pay 15
Animals and Their Functions in Children's Literature Since 1900
The paper focuses on animals and their functions in children’s literature since 1900. Children’s literature is one of the famous medium of entertainment for children and it is read all over the world. Animals have become common in the realms of children literature. This study is important because though animals are ruling in children’s literature for hundreds of years still a little has been researched on this topic. Mostly anthropomorphic animal characters are used in stories. Behaviorally, animals that are fully anthropomorphic are almost indistinguishable from humans; they go to school, drive cars, and deal with the same daily issues and concerns that humans have. These animal characters are effectively helping children and educating them with life lessons. Which animals were featured most often in children’s literature, would also be the focus of this paper. Dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, mice, wolves and foxes and bears are featured most often. Story books have proved to be efficient and entertaining class material, and there is no reason to turn the back on the educational use of animals in children’s literature. This thesis paper consists of analysis of 21 story books with animal characters. Significant good teachings and moral lessons were found while doing this study.
Animal Stories and the Question of Gender: An Evolutionary Pattern?
"WHAT ARE LITTLE BOYS AND GIRLS MADE OF?" Gender Issues in Children's Literature. Ed. P. Bottalla and M. Santini.
Situated at the borderline between fantasy and realism, between a tendency to personification or anthropomorphism, and a dutiful adherence to the natural history knowledge imparted by scientists, animals as literary protagonists traditionally catered to a readership made of children and adults at once. Taking into one view the whole panorama of this tradition, critics agree on the fact that 'the characteristics that animal figures exhibit are always culturally mediated': 1 whether the addressee be a grown-up reader or a child, ideological positions that result in gendering can be detected in many texts. In the specific case of children's literature, a complex mechanism of identification and displacement, which occurs when animals are the protagonists of a story, is indirectly but not less powerfully conditioned by cultural notions about gender, contextualized in the literary discourse which addresses the child reader.