Elizabeth Thiel

The Fantasy of Family

Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The myth of the Victorian family remains a pervasive influence within a contemporary Britain that perceives itself to be in social crisis. Nostalgic for a golden age of "Victorian values" in which visions of supportive, united families predominate, the common consciousness, exhorted by social and political discourse, continues to vaunt the "traditional, natural" family as the template by which all other family forms are gauged. Yet this fantasy of family, nurtured and augmented throughout the Victorian era, was essentially a construct that belied the realities of a nineteenth-century world in which orphanhood, fostering, and stepfamilies were endemic. Focusing primarily on British children's texts written by women and drawing extensively on socio-historic material, The Fantasy of Family considers the paradoxes implicit to the perpetuation of the domestic ideal within the Victorian era and offers new perspectives on both nineteenth-century and contemporary society.

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First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: CRC Press
• Seitenzahl: 216
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Oktober 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 458g
• ISBN-13: 9780415980357
• ISBN-10: 0415980356
• Artikelnr.: 23595012

Autorenporträt

Elizabeth Thiel is Senior Lecturer in Children's Literature at Roehampton University. A former journalist, her research interests lie in both historical and contemporary texts for children. She has published on Victorian writer Brenda and forthcoming publications include work on degenerate 'innocents' in nineteenth-century literature and on adaptations of Dickens for the child reader.

Inhaltsangabe

INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
Redefining the Past
CHAPTER TWO
Snatched From "The Seed-plot" of Degeneracy: The "rescue" of the destitute
child in tales of street arab life
CHAPTER THREE
Forever Cursed: Stepmothers, "otherness" and the reinscription of myth in
transnormative family narratives
CHAPTER FOUR
"Uncles are one thing...[but] aunts are always nasty!": Relational failures
and the discourse of gender bias in foster family stories
CHAPTER FIVE
Mother, Ally, Friend - or Foe? : The "dependable" female author as one of
the family
CONCLUSION
Into the Future: The enduring potency of the nineteenth-century domestic
ideal
APPENDIX
LIST OF WORKS CITED
NOTES
INDEX