Introduction: time for boys -- The boy in the breeches: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67) growing into gender -- The boy in the school: Ellenor Fenn's rhetorical tools in School Dialogues, for Boys (1783) -- The boy in the machine: Pierre Jaquet-Droz's Automaton, the Writer (1774) -- The boy in the chimney: Sweeps' apprentices, suffering bodies, and Jonathan Swift -- The boy in the gallows: crime, punishment, broadsheets, afterlives -- The boy in the printing press: Printer's devils and upward mobility -- Conclusion
Summary:
"Writing through Boyhood explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected lived experience through the long eighteenth century-not simply in children's literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. These chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys whose bodily labor was their only value, and who often did not live beyond boyhood: chimney sweeps and convicted criminals. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys-real, imagined, and sometimes both-were subject to the control of their elders, and used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire"-- 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.