Playing in the dirt : nineteenth-century children and their environmental literature -- Children's environmental literature in the nineteenth-century United States and beyond -- "Frightful stories" : savage nature, civilized culture in the juvenile miscellany -- "What do we mean by nature?" : animals, Americans, and agency -- "Such great results" : engendering environmental agency, 1854-1875 -- "Love in a Noah's Ark" : animals, children, and America -- From Little machinery to the technology of war : children's environmental literature after 1900.
Summary:
"Virtually every famous nineteenth-century writer (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson)-and many not-so-famous-wrote literature for children; many contributed regularly to these periodicals, and many entered the field of nature writing, responding to and forwarding the century's huge social and cultural changes. Appreciating America's unique natural wonders dovetailed with children's growth as citizens, but children's journals often exceeded a pedagogical intent, intending also to entertain and delight. Though these volumes aimed at a relatively conservative middle-class and affluent audience, some selections allowed both children and their parents room for imaginative escape from restrictive social norms. Covering a period that initially regarded children's natural bodies as laboring resources, Stronger, Truer, Bolder traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America's nineteenth-century emergence as an industrial power. Karen Kilcup shows how children's literature mirrored those changes in various ways. In its earliest incarnations, it taught children (and their parents) facts about the natural world and about proper behavior vis-à-vis both human and non-human others. More significantly, as periodical writing for children advanced, this literature increasingly promoted children's environmental agency and envisioned their potential influence on concerns ranging from animal rights and interspecies equity to conservation and environmental justice. Such understanding of and engagement with nature not only propelled children toward ethical adulthood, it also formed a foundation of responsible American citizenship"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.