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Formal Education: Early Children’s Genres, Gender, and the Realist Novel

Hill, Cecily Erin
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0724-7570
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429278003

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Early children's literature took the forms of complex, distinct genres that, much more than the novels being published contemporaneously with them, were employed in the didactic effect of literary structures. These works, published roughly from 1750-1850, do not assume a simple, one-to-one relationship between fictional worlds and the real world. They are aware of the complexities of representation, and, written and read predominantly by women and girls, they are especially aware of representation's effects on gender. Early children's fiction, I argue, treats literary and social forms alike as structure-at-work in the world, and this treatment had a substantive impact on fiction that shares its interest in the subtleties of gender formation and the disparate treatment of gendered beings in fiction and in fact: the nineteenth-century realist novel. From one perspective, this project is a straightforward, genre-study of early children's fiction and its influence on the Victorian realist novel. I focus on four major genres, selected for their numerousness and their continued though adapted use in fiction, and I think carefully about the bids they made on readers. Rather than teach simple morals, I argue that these works teach people to analyze in culturally-prescribed ways: to see a situation in the world, understand what it means, and react to it accordingly. By emphasizing analysis as a response to structure, this fiction signals the construction of social categories. By adopting and adapting these forms, novelists like Dickens and the Brontes engage children’s fictions’ educational goals and emphasize the degree to which reality is defined by social, material, embodied, and familial forms. Ultimately, I demonstrate that that the didacticism which we have for so long assumed was simple and straightforward is, in fact, a kind of formalism, one that codifies structures of response and embodiment that belie its reputation as pure content.
Robyn Warhol (Advisor)
Jill Galvin (Committee Member)
Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member)
Simmons Clare (Committee Member)
302 p.
British and Irish Literature; Early Childhood Education; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies
Novel; Victorian Literature; eighteenth century literature; romantic literature; childrens literature; school stories; object narrative; harm; family; novel; gender; genre; form; narrative

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hill, C. E. (2015). Formal Education: Early Children’s Genres, Gender, and the Realist Novel [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429278003

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hill, Cecily. Formal Education: Early Children’s Genres, Gender, and the Realist Novel. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429278003.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hill, Cecily. "Formal Education: Early Children’s Genres, Gender, and the Realist Novel." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429278003

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1429278003
1,383
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.