Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children''s Literature

An interdisciplinary study that explores the impact of evolutionary theory on Victorian children's literature.

List of contents

Introduction: how the child lost its tail; 1. The child's view of nature: Margaret Gatty and the challenge to natural theology; 2. Amphibious tendencies: Charles Kingsley, Herbert Spencer, and evolutionary education; 3. Generic variability: Lewis Carroll, scientific nonsense, and literary parody; 4. The cure of the wild: Rudyard Kipling and evolutionary adolescence at home and abroad; 5. Home grown: Frances Hodgson Burnett and the cultivation of feminine evolution; Conclusion: recapitulation reconsidered.

About the author

Jessica Straley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Utah. She has published articles on evolutionary theory, vivisection, and Victorian literature in Victorian Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature, and has contributed a chapter to Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts, edited by Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell (2016).

Summary

An original and wide-ranging study that examines the convergence of evolutionary theory, educational reform, and Victorian children's literature. It includes discussions of evolutionary ideas underpinning the work of Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Product details

• Authors: Jessica Straley, Jessica (University of Utah) Straley, Straley Jessica
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.01.2019
• EAN: 9781107566811
• ISBN: 978-1-107-56681-1
• No. of pages: 270
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture; Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Children's & Young Adult Literature, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Children's & teenage literature studies, Children’s and teenage literature studies: general