Morag Styles

Louise Joy

David Whitley

"Poetry and Childhood is the first academic book to give serious critical attention to the poetry of childhood. The collection is based on a prestigious conference organised by Morag Styles for the British Library and the University of Cambridge."--Back cover.

Poetry and Childhood

This book assesses the mediating role played by 'affections' in eighteenth-century contestations about reason and passion, questioning their availability and desirability outside textual form. It examines the formulation and idealization of this affective category in works by Isaac Watts, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Hays, William Godwin, Helen Maria Williams, and William Wordsworth. Part I outlines how affections are invested with utopian potential in theology, moral philosophy, and criticism, re-imagining what it might mean to know emotion. Part II considers attempts of writers at the end of the period to draw affections into literature as a means of negotiating a middle way between realism and idealism, expressivism and didacticism, particularity and abstraction, subjectivity and objectivity, femininity and masculinity, radicalism and conservatism, and the foreign and the domestic.

Eighteenth-Century Literary Affections

Literature's Children offers a new way of thinking about how literature for children functions didactically. It analyzes the nature of the practical critical activity which the child reader carries out, emphasizing what the child does to the text rather than what he or she receives from it. Through close readings of a range of works for children which have shaped our understanding of what children's literature entails, including works by Isaac Watts, John Newbery, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame, J.R.R. Tolkien and Malcolm Saville, it demonstrates how the critical child resists the processes of idealization in operation in and through such texts. Bringing into dialogue ideas from literary theory and the philosophy of education, drawing in particular on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, it provides a compelling new account of the complex relations between literary aesthetics and literary didacticism.

The Critical Child and the Art of Idealization

Literature's Children

I am living proof that no one can predict or determine their future. When a devastating illness strikes your family, in some cases, no matter what steps you take or how you plan you will have no control over the outcome. One day, out of the blue, my father was diagnosed with cancer and then just a few months later, my husband was diagnosed with cancer as well. Watching a father and a husband battle a fatal disease together was more than a family should ever have to endure. Despite all the doctor consultations and treatment plans, nothing would suppress this insidious disease. Although they both fought bravely and effortlessly for only a short time, they both lost their lives to cancer. My family and I endured a double loss, losing two family members, at the same time, only a few days apart. Our lives were changed forever and unfortunately, we learned the hard way that life is a precious gift which can be taken away at any time and should never be taken for granted.

(No More Soup)

Mother and Daughter

This book presents an accounting framework to critically review existing studies of aid's macroeconomic effects and as a basis for four country studies on Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua, Tanzania and Zambia. This framework focuses on the impact of different types of aid on the level and composition of key macroeconomic aggregates such as imports, investment and government expenditure. The importance of the relationship between aid and policy reform is also stressed. The case studies find that aid has had a generally positive contribution, though recommendations to further improve aid impact are also given.

Theory, Empirical Evidence and Four Country Cases

Aid and Macroeconomic Performance

Katherine Wakely-Mulroney

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children’s poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children’s poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises – and why we delight in – its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children’s poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of “like sounds,” William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children’s poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

Louise Joy

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