Cara Bartels-Bland on Prydain

 

We are delighted to have Cara Bartels-Bland (St Cross College, Oxford) speaking on the Newbery Medal-winning author Lloyd Alexander in a week's time.

Cara's title is 'Mapping Boundaries: Otherworlds and Mortal Worlds in Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain', and her talk will take place in the History of the Book Room, Oxford English Faculty, on 11 February 2013 at 5.15pm.

Dame Penelope Lively at the University Museum

Last Friday, Penelope Lively gave Somerville College's James Bryce Memorial Lecture at the University Museum. The setting for the talk, evocative as it is at any given time, couldn't help but strike the fan of Lively's children's books especially: The House in Norham Gardens has scenes set just down the stairs in the Pitt Rivers Museum. (As does His Dark Materials, making the Pitt Rivers itself an artefact of children's literature, though Lively positioned it more irreverently via James Fenton's description: 'shut / 22 hours a day and all day Sunday'.) Lively's lecture, which took shape around themes of memory, remembering, and history, also gave a substantial record of her reading in childhood and youth. 

Reading that shaded into writing: early encounters with classical mythology via Andrew Lang, which were followed by her own retellings (although Penelope was front and centre and full of virtue in the Odyssey, Lively ascribed other attributes to her namesake). Forbidden reading, reading as 'cherishing a subversive practice' amid the 'stern philistinism' of her boarding school. The Oxford use of reading to describe undergraduate study ('reading History', 'reading English'), with the phrase glossing such study as 'long-term inclination rather than mandatory application'. The distinction between 'undirected, unstructured reading' and 'deliberate reading', or research, as it pertains to her career as a writer. 

Lively's readings ranged over an hour, and it wasn't nearly long enough.

Above: A house in Norham Gardens, circa 1875.

Centre for the History of Childhood in Michaelmas

The Centre for the History of Childhood at Magdalen College will hold four Michaelmas sessions dedicated to new work on the history of childhood and young people in Britain and its empire since 1700. The details are as follows:

17 October: Laurence Brockliss & George Rousseau: ‘Orphans and the History of Childhood’: a discussion based around Cheryl L. Nixon, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature. Estate, Blood and Body (Ashgate, 2011).

31 October: Hugh Morrison (Otago), ‘Competing Kingdoms? British Settler Children, Religion and Imperial Identity c.1890-1930’.

14 November: Hilary Marland (Warwick), ‘“Bounding Saucy Girls”: Visions and Practices of Health and Girlhood in Britain 1874-1920s’.

28 November: Heather Ellis (Liverpool Hope), ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the West, 1800-2000’.

All meetings take place in the Old Practice Room, Magdalen, at 5 pm.

The CfP for the 2013 Child and the book conference, to be held at the University of Padua, has also been released: see here for details.

Book Launch: Carmen Bugan's Burying the Typewriter

On 8 June, Carmen Bugan will launch her childhood memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood under the Eye of the Secret Police in Oxford. This exciting event will be held in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. Hope to see you at 5.30 at Wolfson to celebrate Carmen's new book!

Matthew Kerr on The Water-Babies

Matt, a final-year D.Phil. candidate in the English Faculty, came to CLYCC from a slightly different angle than many speakers: his interest in Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1862–63) stems not from research into children's literature per se, but research into the sea in the nineteenth-century novel. Matt's paper provided some marine contexts for Kingsley's 'fairy tale', as well as associated comments on the relationship between adult and child therein. It is indicative, for example, that the dynamic between disbelief and belief which is so crucial to Kingsley should be incarnated by Professor Ptthmllnsprts (is this the thorniest name to pronounce in the whole of literature in English?—Matt handled it valiantly) and the little girl Ellie, and that the pair's exchange should take place at the archetypal littoral zone of the shoreline. The fantastic rewriting of Tom's drowning in The Water-Babies was positioned by way of drowning motifs in Tennyson's 'In Memoriam A. H. H.' and divers other Victorian sources, with Matt noting that pseudo-scientific writings about drowning at this time (in the British Medical Journal, for instance) relate to psychoanalytical paradigms for both memory and childhood. One's life flashing before one's eyes entails a crystalline recollection of childhood events, a watery version of Susan Stewart's statement that '[w]e imagine childhood as if it were at the other end of the tunnel: distanced, diminutive, and clearly framed’.

W. Heath Robinson's illustration of Professor Ptthmllnsprts and Ellie, taken from the 1915 Houghton Mifflin edition of The Water-Babies.

Trinity 2012 Termcard

An all-nineteenth-century programme this term, by coincidence! We are once again stationed in the English Faculty's Seminar Room A (ex-Meyerstein) at 5.15pm.

Hope to see you there!

7 May (Third Week): ‘Feeling for Depth: The Water-Babies in and around the Victorian Sea’. Matthew Kerr, Somerville
On the last page of his popular Glaucus or, The Wonders of the Shore (1855), Charles Kingsley tells his readers that, if they cannot get to the seaside themselves, they may purchase a special mixture of ‘salts’ needed to manufacture ‘Mr. Gosse’s artificial sea-water’—this, he is satisfied, ‘will form a perfect substitute’. What was in Gosse’s salt is not clear, but it is easy to imagine that some Londoners may have found alternative uses for it. Richard Rowe, for one, may have been glad of the recommendation: the sound of London costermongers made him ‘pine so for a whiff of “the briney”’ that he found he ‘must undress and give myself a second tub, and put some Tidman’s sea-salt in it’. For the Victorians, the sea magnetically drew both thoughts and bodies towards itself. In this paper Matt, a final-year D.Phil. candidate at Somerville, considers the ambiguities of, and contexts for, Kingsley’s own longing for immersion as expressed in his famous children’s novel The Water-Babies (1863).

21 May (Fifth Week): ‘“The Laughing Philosopher”: Thomas Hood’s Comic Imagination and Its Place in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature’. Karen Williams, Roehampton University
The figure of the child is central to the work of the nineteenth-century poet and illustrator Thomas Hood. Representing an ambivalent blend of innocence and wisdom, Hood uses his child figures to present laughter and play as an antidote to the drudgery and hardships of life in an increasingly industrialised London. This paper discusses how, by connecting the laughing child with the classical trope of Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher, Hood employs seemingly innocuous humour and simple childlike forms—ballads, nursery rhymes, fairy tales—to interrogate serious issues in contemporary society. In so doing, Hood writes an extensive canon of literature both for and about children that deserves much greater recognition in the wider trajectory of children’s literature. Karen is currently undertaking her PhD at Roehampton’s National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (NCRCL).

4 June (Seventh Week): ‘“Not Classic, But Quite Correct”: Reinventing Classical Mythology for the Nineteenth-Century Juvenile Drama’. Dr Rachel Bryant-Davies, University of Cambridge
Juvenile Dramas, often based on popular London shows, cover an astounding variety of venues, genres, and topics. Their backdrops and character cut-outs offer unparalleled evidence for reconstructing these performances, both in the theatre and at home, and assessing their reworkings of classical antiquity. This paper will consider two key examples: Planché’s first classical extravaganza Olympic Revels (1831) and an ‘equestrian burlesque’ The Siege of Troy (1833). While the former proudly introduced ‘authentic’ classical costuming, the latter delighted in its carnivalesque confusion of multiple ancient pasts. These now obscure spectacles and their souvenirs not only show diverse audiences interacting with this recreated antiquity, but also reveal children as active agents of classical reception.

Tamara Moellenberg on the Child Soldier Novel

Tamara began with a clip from the film Skin (2008), in which a black child is born to two white Afrikaner parents in apartheid-era South Africa. The girl, Sandra, is brought into a courtroom that will decide her legal ethnicity: a courtroom in which the child’s body, not her words, provide the only acceptable form of testimony. Throughout her paper, Tamara explored parallel tensions between body and speech in a number of recent child soldier novels. For example, Chris Abani’s novel Song for Night, published in 2007, is narrated by a mute child soldier in 1960s Nigeria who develops his own form of home sign. This method of communication relies on the truth in, or the truth of, the child’s body—an exteriorisation of interiority. In effect, Tamara proposed, the child’s body provides a way of talking about suffering and physical pain that is resistant to or even defiant of verbal witness, but is at the same time potentially problematic. Moreover, the crisis of credibility around the child soldier novel (Tamara referenced the controversy over Ishmael Beah’s 2007 A Long Way Gone), must provoke a broader reassessment of the nature of testimony, as opposed to the need to challenge false testimony.

Tamara will present further research at the Child and the Book conference at Cambridge later this month—registration and further information now available here.