Childhood and the Classics: Britain and America, 1850-1965
Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah H. Roberts
Abstract
This book explores the childhood reception of classical antiquity in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on two genres of children’s literature– the myth collection and the historical novel—and on adults’ literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. The book recognizes the fundamental role in writing for children of adults’ ideas about what children want or need, but also attends to the ways in which child readers make such works their own. The authors first trace the tradition of myths retold as ... More
This book explores the childhood reception of classical antiquity in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on two genres of children’s literature– the myth collection and the historical novel—and on adults’ literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. The book recognizes the fundamental role in writing for children of adults’ ideas about what children want or need, but also attends to the ways in which child readers make such works their own. The authors first trace the tradition of myths retold as children’s stories (and as especially suited to children) from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley to Roger Lancelyn Green and Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, treating both writers and illustrators. They then turn to historical fiction, particularly to the roles of nationality and of gender in the construction of the ancient world for modern children. They conclude with an investigation of the connections between childhood and antiquity made by writers for adults, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, and H.D., and with a reading of H.D.’s novella The Hedgehog as a text on the border between children’s and adult literature that thematizes both the child’s special relation to myth and the adult’s stake in children’s relationship to the classics. An epilogue offers a brief overview of recent trends, which reflect both growing uncertainty about the appeal of antiquity to modern children and an ongoing conviction that the classical past is of perennial interest.
Keywords:
classical reception,
childhood reading,
myth collections,
historical fiction,
memoirs,
late nineteenth century,
early twentieth century
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199583478 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199583478.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Sheila Murnaghan, author
Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek, University of Pennsylvania
Deborah H. Roberts, author
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Haverford College
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