Victorian Children’s Literature: Girls in the Underworld
Course Description
Summary
Quintessential to the Victorian cult of the girl-child, Alice Liddell and Wendy Darling have emerged as contemporary mythic icons of both traditional and subversive femininity. In this class, we will investigate how girl-children are entrapped and enchanted in the works of men, focusing on J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, including the prototype, Alice’s Adventures Underground. We will also read biographies, letters, and the cultural discourse on the idea of children (such as Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood). Additionally, we will dive into the world of Carroll’s other mechanism of capturing girl children: photography. Ancillary texts will include essays by Carol Mavor (Pleasures Taken; Reading Boyishly), James R. Kincaid (Erotic Innocence; Child-Loving), Catherine Robson (Men in Wonderland), Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment), and U.C. Knoepflmacher (Ventures into Childhood). We will also consider contemporary representations of Alice and Wendy and how they continue to be entrapped and re-enchanted.
Learning Outcomes
- - To interpret literature through historical, social, cultural, and literary considerations as well as independently through one’s own critical discoveries and curiosities;
- To gain an overview of the image of childhood as applicable to historical and cultural considerations;
- To interpret a range contemporary and classical representations of texts within contemporary cultural considerations;
- To eloquently discourse on literature while retaining one’s individual interpretation of a text.