In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are grappling with the legacies of past centuries and their cascading effects upon children and all people. We realize anew how imperialism, globalization, industrialization, and revolution...
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In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are grappling with the legacies of past centuries and their cascading effects upon children and all people. We realize anew how imperialism, globalization, industrialization, and revolution continue to reshape our world and that of new generations. At a volatile moment, this collection asks how twenty-first century literature and related media represent and shape the contemporary child, childhood, and youth. Because literary representations construct ideal childhoods as well as model the rights, privileges, and respect afforded to actual young people, this collection surveys examples from popular culture and from scholarly practice. Chapters investigate the human rights of children in literature and international policy; the potential subjective agency and power of the child; the role models proposed for young people; the diverse identities children embody and encounter; and the environmental well-being of future human and nonhuman generations. As a snapshot of our developing historical moment, this collection identifies emergent trends, considers theories and critiques of childhood and literature, and observes how new technologies and paradigms are destabilizing past conventions of storytelling and lived experience. Nathalie op de Beeck is the author of Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (2010) and co-creator of Little Machinery: A Critical Facsimile Edition (2009). Her work appears in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature (2011), The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2017), and journals including CLAQ and CLE. She is Associate Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University, USA.
Introduction -- 1. Defining the Diary -- 2. The Diary as Cultural Practice 3. Creating Pious Identity -- 4. Anne Clifford’s “Activist” Diaries? -- 5. “My own hearte out of frame”: Emotions and Religion in the Diary of Ralph Josselin -- 6. Enjoying...
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Introduction -- 1. Defining the Diary -- 2. The Diary as Cultural Practice 3. Creating Pious Identity -- 4. Anne Clifford’s “Activist” Diaries? -- 5. “My own hearte out of frame”: Emotions and Religion in the Diary of Ralph Josselin -- 6. Enjoying the Diary -- Conclusion -- Appendix. Reading the Early Modern Diary traces the historical genealogy, formal characteristics, and shifting cultural uses of the early modern English diary. It explores the possibilities and limitations the genre held for the self-expression of a writer at a time which considerably pre-dated the Romantic cult of the individual self. The book analyzes the connections between genre and self-articulation: How could the diary come to be associated with emotional self-expression given the tedium and repetitiveness of its early seventeenth-century ancestors? How did what were once mere lists of daily events evolve into narrative representations of inner emotions? What did it mean to write on a daily basis, when the proper use of time was a heavily contested issue? Reading the Early Modern Diary addresses these questions and develops new theoretical frameworks for discussing interiority and affect in early modern autobiographical texts.