Claudia Nelson

Beginning with Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit and concluding with best-selling series still ongoing at the time of writing, this volume examines works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century children's literature that incorporate character types, settings, and narratives derived from the Greco-Roman past. Drawing on a cognitive poetics approach to reception studies, it argues that authors typically employ a limited and powerful set of spatial metaphors - palimpsest, map, and fractal - to organize the classical past for preteen and adolescent readers. Palimpsest texts see the past as a collection of strata in which each new era forms a layer superimposed upon a foundation laid earlier; map texts use the metaphor of the mappable journey to represent a protagonist's process of maturing while gaining knowledge of the self and/or the world; fractal texts, in which small parts of the narrative are thematically identical to the whole, present the past in a way that implies that history is infinitely repeatable. While a given text may embrace multiple metaphors in presenting the past, associations between dominant metaphors, genre, and outlook emerge from the case studies examined in each chapter, revealing remarkable thematic continuities in how the past is represented and how agency is attributed to protagonists: each model, it is suggested, uses the classical past to urge and thus perhaps to develop a particular approach to life.

The first critical edition of the beloved classics that established Edith Nesbit as a major children's writer provides extensive guidance to help today's reader navigate the enchanting world of the Bastable family. Nelson situates Nesbit's groundbreaking stories in the context of British popular culture at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

The five volumes of this collection focus on various aspects of family life. Drawing on rare printed sources and archival material, this collection will provide a balanced, contextualized picture of family life, during a period of intense social change. It will appeal to scholars of social history, gender studies and the long nineteenth century.

Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms "child-woman", "child-man", and "old-fashioned child" appears often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post - Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser - known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, "Precocious Children and Childish Adults" illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children's literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms "child-woman," "child-man," and "old-fashioned child" appear often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border-crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post-Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront?, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, "Precocious Children and Childish Adults" illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children's literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent study from a major figure in the field.

Invisible Men focuses on the tremendous growth of periodical literature from 1850 to 1910 to illustrate how Victorian and Edwardian thought and culture problematized fatherhood within the family. Drawing on political, scientific, domestic, and religious periodicals, Claudia Nelson shows how positive portrayals of fatherhood virtually disappeared as motherhood claimed an exalted position with imagined ties to patriotism, social reform, and religious influence. The study begins with the pre-Victorian role of the father in the middle-class home—as one who led the family in prayer, administered discipline, and determined the children’s education, marriage, and career. In subsequent decades, fatherhood was increasingly scrutinized while a new definition of motherhood and femininity emerged. The solution to the newly perceived dilemma of fatherhood appeared rooted in traditional feminine values—nurturance, selflessness, and sensitivity. The critique presented in Invisible Men extends our contemporary debate over men’s proper role within the family, providing a historical context for the various images of fatherhood as we practice and dispute them today.

The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction—that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today. Drawing upon a wide variety of 19th-century fiction and nonfiction, Nelson examines the English Victorian family both as it was imagined and as it was experienced. For many Victorians, family was exalted to the status of secular religion, endowed with the power of fighting the contamination of unchecked commercialism or sexuality and holding out the promise of reforming humankind. Although in practice this ideal might have proven unattainable, the many detailed 19th-century descriptions of the outlook and behavior appropriate to fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and other family members illustrate the extent of the pressure felt by members of this society to try to live up to the expectations of their culture. Defining family to include the extended family, the foster or adoptive family, and the stepfamily, Nelson considers different roles within the Victorian household in order to gauge the ambivalence and the social anxieties surrounding them—many of which continue to influence our notions of family today.