Children's literature, the common law, and other disputable arts
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This is a dissertation on children's literature as a source of law. Literature produced for and read by children far precedes the 1744 date generally given for the start of Anglo-American children's literature. Not coincidentally a generation after the novel's rise, what this date actually represents is the beginning of the possibility of a distinct form, created to address the socialization threat posed by mass literacy in a market already crowded by delightfully questionable chapbooks and questionably delightful religious tracts. The extent to which children's literature can fairly be considered a genre is in direct proportion to the perceived distance between childhood and adulthood. When this perception emphasized lack (of literacy, of knowledge, etc.), the texts were skill-based socialization tools of varying styles in a host of competing forms—fairy tales, hybrid chapbooks, adaptations of adult novels—which directly addressed parents with promises to "lay up the laws" in children's hearts. As the perception of difference (innocence, naturalness, etc.) gained momentum as a priority in the nineteenth century, a set of tastes and affinities are attributed to childhood which are tied to certain formal and thematic expectations to which adults could now assume that a children's text would adhere. In terms of legal socialization, then, the much lauded transition from didactic to imaginative work in the mid-nineteenth century, characterized by a general relaxation of overt moralizing, was, rather than an end to didacticism, a displacement at the point of application: from general distribution of juridical pronouncements (religious law, custom, criminal law, etc.) to one of judgment embedded in narrative. Children's literature starts to constitute a distinct genre and achieves some measure of critical success through this process of formal sublimation, one which, while perhaps proving a more effective means of producing consent to law—or rather, a more literary means—does so at the expense of an interpretative monopoly on what law is or should be. Not monopoly, then, but compromise: this is what I found by following form and law, an alternative legal history, neither realistic nor utopic, but a bit of both, a place we tell our children not how to live in this world but how this world could be livable.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Wallis, Meredith Ellen |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Meyler, Bernadette |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Advisor | Meyler, Bernadette |
| Advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Meredith Ellen Wallis. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Meredith Ellen Wallis
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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