Spring 2007 Courses

ENGL 294-05: Inventing Children's Literature (Hurley)

T/TH 10:10-11:40am, THTR 204

This class examines the emergence of children's literature in the late eighteenth-and nineteenth centuries—up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It investigates, in other words, the emergence of a literature written, produced, and circulated for children. It does so by looking at the history of recognizing children as an audience for texts. The history of children's literature does not always behave as we might expect. Some texts that we now recognize as children's literature, such as fairy tales, were not originally written for children at all; others, like The Pilgrim's Progress (one of the most popular books for children in nineteenth-century), would never be recognized as children's literature today. Sometimes, books that were written for adult audiences become children's literature over time (The Last of the Mohicans might be one example). Or, books that were indeed written for children come to be regarded with scorn by adults who no longer believe that children can read such books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for instance).

What has come to be recognized as children's literature often revolves around questions of innocence, experience, and the construction of knowledge for children, all of which take shape in particular literary ways that embody assumptions about the child as a potentially ideal citizen (within a matrix of assumptions about class, race, gender, and sexuality). The fact that the writers, producers, and distributors of children's literature have almost always been adults may well bear out Jacqueline Rose's claim that children's literature is impossible: that it is "a portion of adult desire," an effect of adult nostalgia for, observations of, and even fantasies about, children. Even if children's literature is a screen for adult idealizations of children, it still generates a literature that revolves specifically around the child as a repository of cultural ideals and the source of our most cherished assumptions. As a result, this course will focus in particular on questions of literary form: the ways texts deploy language to craft and address the child of children's literature. This focus on the form of will enable us to navigate the ongoing invention (and reinventions) of children's literature and to investigate, in historical context, what counts as children's literature, according to whom, and why.

Primary texts include the following: A selection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and others; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Little Women; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; Peter Pan and Wendy

The course will also include works of theory and criticism by scholars such as Jacqueline Rose, Gillian Avery, Jack Zipes, Bruno Bettelheim, James Kincaid, John Locke, Beverley Lyon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Perry Nodelman.

Spring 2007 Course Listings