British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914
The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turban of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities.

Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

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British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914
The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turban of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities.

Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.

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British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914

British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914

British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914

British Children's Literature and Material Culture: Commodities and Consumption 1850-1914

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Overview

The 'golden age' of children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century coincided with a boom in the production and trade of commodities. The first book-length study to situate children's literature within the consumer culture of this period, British Children's Literature and Material Culture explores the intersection of children's books, consumerism and the representation of commodities within British children's literature. In tracing the role of objects in key texts from the turban of the century, Jane Suzanne Carroll uncovers the connections between these fictional objects and the real objects that child consumers bought, used, cherished, broke, and threw away. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of 1851, this book takes stock of the changing attitudes towards consumer culture – a movement from celebration to suspicion – to demonstrate that children's literature was a key consumer product, one that influenced young people's views of and relationships with other kinds of commodities.

Drawing on a wide spectrum of well-known and less familiar texts from Britain, this book examines works from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There and E. Nesbit's Five Children & It to Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Mary Louisa Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock. Placing children's fiction alongside historical documents, shop catalogues, lost property records, and advertisements, Carroll provides fresh critical insight into children's relationships with material culture and reveals that even the most fantastic texts had roots in the ordinary, everyday things.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781350201828
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 05/18/2023
Series: Bloomsbury Perspectives on Children's Literature
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Jane Suzanne Carroll is Ussher Assistant Professor in Children's Literature at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has published a monograph, Landscape in Children's Literature (2012), as well as articles on Susan Cooper, Jules Verne, J.R.R. Tolkien, ghost stories, and children's fantasy.

Table of Contents

Introduction 'Devoured by a Desire to Possess': Children's literature, commodities and consumption
Children's books as commodities and vehicles for consumerism
Children's books and the creation of new products
Reading objects
Structure of this book
Chapter One Remarkable and perplexing items: Children and the Great Exhibition
Learning to look
Getting lost
Guiding children
Head, hand & heart
The world of goods
Conclusion
Chapter Two The wonders of common things: Worldly goods in the nineteenth century
The history of the it-narrative
Children's it-narratives
The History of a Pin
The Story of a Needle
'A China Cup'
The wonders of common things
Conclusion
Chapter Three A hailstorm of knitting needles: Otherworldly goods and domestic fantasy
Commodity fetishism
Spiritualism and fiction
The rise of domestic fantasy
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
Speaking likenesses
The cuckoo clock
Conclusion
Chapter Four 'A Disgraceful State of Things': Bad consumers and bad commodities
Bad things and bad consumers in E. Nesbit's writing for children
Bad things in Nesbit's work
The Enchanted Castle and the live thing
Bad mice and crooked sixpences: Material deviance in Beatrix Potter's work
The (mis)adventures of Mr Toad
Conclusion
Conclusions Failed palaces and magic cities
References

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