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Sto caricando le informazioni... The child figure in English literature (1978)di Robert Pattison
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Graveyards or wonderlands have more often than firesides and nurseries been the element in which we encounter the child in English literature, and Robert Pattison begins his narrative by asking why literary children are seldom associated with parents and family, but instead repeatedly occur as solitary figures against a background of social and philosophic melancholy. In a skillful fusion of theology, social history, and literature, Pattison isolates and analyzes the repeated conjunction of the literary figure of the child with two fundamental ideas of Western culture--the fall of man and the concept of Original Sin. His study of child figures used in English literature and their antecedents in classical literature and early Christian writing documents the symbiotic development of an idea and an image. Pattison encounters a wide range of literary offspring, among whom are Marvell's little girls, Gray's young Etonians, Blake's children of innocence and experience, the youthful narrators of Dickens and Gosse, the children of George Eliot and Henry James, and the young protagonists in the children's literature of James Janeway, Christina Rossetti, and Lewis Carroll. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)820.9Literature English English literature in more than one form History, description, critical appraisal of works in more than one formClassificazione LCVotoMedia: (2)
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I'd seen this book cited in several other books I'd read, so I finally decided to get it and find out what all the fuss was about. A mistake, frankly.
Oh, there are several valid points in here: that "childhood" was not a special state in medieval English literature, and that it was not until relatively recently that there was such a thing as "children's literature." And, when the latter finally came into existence, it was mostly for Moral Edification and Religious Education. In other words, you didn't read it, you took it, like your daily dose of cod liver oil. The goal was to convince children of the orthodox Christian view that all humans are fallen, and children among them.
That view of children's literature is, I think, mostly true. But I'd find it a lot more convincing if Pattison didn't mess everything else up. Example: Fairy tales. Pattison claims (p. 147) that fairy tales are written from a child's point of view.
Um -- wrong. Ever looked at the Grimm's Kinder und Hausmärchen? Ignore the fact that many of the tales are things we today don't want children to know about. Just think about the fact that they were all collected from adults. The longer fantastic tales of the Middle Ages, the Romances, were written for adults. (Want proof? the best Romances -- Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Wife of Bath's Tale and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- were clearly not intended for those who hadn't reached puberty. Sir Gawain features an attempted, or at least simulated, seduction. The Chaucer tales are mixed in with the pure bawdiness of, e.g., The Miller's Tale.) If you want to talk about children's literature, don't bring in adult literature!
I plowed through all that to get to the Lewis Carroll stuff, because that's what I was interested in. And what do I find? Why, Alice in Wonderland is about a fall (p. 153). The Fall, get it? Just like the Freudians are obsessed with the fact that Alice went down a Hole.
If Pattison had actually studied how Alice in Wonderland had come to be, he would have known that Alice and the other Liddell children liked Dodgson/Carroll because he didn't inflict Moralities on them all the time, and he told the first version of Alice as a spontaneous story on a boat trip on the Thames. There was no Deep Theological Moral; Dodgson was just making things up.
At least, unlike Pattison, he admitted it.
So: There is some good data in here. But don't trust any of the hidden interpretations. After all, real children's literature is generally intended to mean what it says.
[Corrections and clarifications 1/19: Added "That view of children's literature is, I think, mostly true. 1/20: changed the oil forced upon children to "cod liver oil."] (