Choice Review
The Victorians revised Romantic notions of the nature of childhood, just as the Romantics had challenged 18th-century, didactic texts of the Enlightenment. Knoepflmacher (Princeton Univ.) examines this sequence, refiguring literary history by comparing British children's narratives from the 1850s to the 1870s. A fascinating picture emerges of the radical differences between male and female post-Romantic constructs of fantasies and fairy tales. John Ruskin's successors--e.g., William Thackeray, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll--address young girls as auditors and readers; they blur sexual differences, sentimentalize arrested childhood, and appropriate "femininity." Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti, and Juliana Ewing challenged men's destabilization of women's gender constructs, reclaiming fairy tales as growth fables grounded in actuality and thus reappropriating a literature once their own. Their girl characters mature as the women authors realign the fairy tale with earlier literary and cultural forms of folkloric tradition based on female transmission. Knoepflmacher calls this "repairing female authority." Thought-provoking and challenging, this study asks readers to examine such works as Ruskin's The King of the Golden River, Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy, Rossetti's Globin Market, and other works. This volume joins James Kincaid's Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (1992), which addresses some of the same issues. With its photographs and illustrations, this volume is highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. A. Parker; Hiram College
Library Journal Review
Behind the innocent facades of Victorian fairy tales were intense debates about the nature of childhood and the motives of the male and female authors of the tales. These issues as well as the works of seven British children's authors who published from 1850 to 1870, including Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti, are treated here by Knoepflmacher (English and ancient and modern literature, Princeton Univ.; Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers, LJ 4/15/92). The author believes that male writers of the time idealized childhood, whereas female writers were more grounded in actuality and that both camps were in constant conflict. While the author admits to imposing 20th-century notions of gender onto a pre-Freudian era, this is a provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture and is highly suitable for academic libraries.ÄRebecca Martin, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
