Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, 1st ed. 2020
Literary Cultures and Childhoods Series

This collection of essays offers innovative methodological and disciplinary approaches to the intersection of Anglophone literary cultures with children and childhoods across the twentieth century. In two acts of re-centering, the volume focuses both on the multiplicity of childhoods and literary cultures and on child agency. Looking at classic texts for young audiences and at less widely-read and unpublished material (across genres including poetry, fiction, historical fiction or biography, picturebooks, and children?s television), essays foreground the representation of child voices and subjectivities within texts, explore challenges to received notions of childhood, and emphasize the role of child-oriented texts in larger cultural and political projects. Chapters frame themes of spectacle, self, and specularity across the twentieth-century; question tropes of childhood; explore identity and displacement in narrating history and culture; and elevate children as makers of literaryculture. A major intent of the volume is to approach literary culture not just as produced by adults for consumption by children but also as co-created by young people through their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers. 

1. Chapter 1: Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth Century Childhoods;Rachel Conrad and L. Brown Kennedy.- 2. Chapter 2: Spectacle and Parody: Burlesque Subjectivity in the American Picturebook;William Moebius.- 3. Chapter 3: The Self in Twentieth Century Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas;Karen Coats.- 4. Chapter 4: A Subjunctive Imagining: June Jordan’s Who Look at Me and the Conditions of Black Agency;Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish.- 5. Chapter 5: Seeing Red: The Inside Nature of the Queer Outsider in Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness;Holly Blackford.- 6. Chapter 6: New Spaces and New Childhoods: Challenging Assumptions of Normative Childhood in Modernist Children’s Literature;Aneesh Barai.- 7. Chapter 7: Modern Family, Modern Colonial Childhoods: Representations of Childhood and the U.S. Military in Colonial School Literature;Solsiree del Moral.- 8. Chapter 8: Reading for Success: Booker T. Washington’s Pursuit of Education in Two Children’s Books;Karen Chandler.- 9. Chapter 9: "I remember. Oh, I remember": Traumatic Memory, Agency, and the American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers;Adrienne Kertzer.- 10. Chapter 10: Yoshiko Uchida: Loss, Displacement, and Identity;Amanda C. Seaman.- 11. Chapter 11: “I Would Not Be a Pilgrim”: Examining the Construction of the Muslim Child as an Authentic Witness and a Dynamic Subject in Anita Desai’s The Peacock Garden;Nithya Sivashankar.- 12. Chapter 12: Katharine Hull, Pamela Whitlock, and the “Ransome Style”;Victoria Ford Smith.- 13. Chapter 13: Kali Grosvenor, Aurelia Davidson, and the Agency of Young Black Poets;Rachel Conrad and Cai Sherley.- 14. Chapter 14: “Send it to ZOOM!”: American Children’s Television and Intergenerational Cultural Creation in the 1970s;Leslie Paris.- 15. Chapter 15: Tupac Shakur: SpokenWord Poets as Cultural Theorists;Awad Ibrahim.

Rachel Conrad is Professor of Childhood Studies at Hampshire College, USA. She is the author of Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in their new series “Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth.” 

L. Brown Kennedy is Professor of Literature, Emerita, at Hampshire College, USA.