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Author Soderberg, Laura, author

Title Vicious infants : dangerous childhoods in antebellum U.S. literature / Laura Soderberg
Published Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

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Description 1 online resource
Series Childhoods: interdisciplinary perspectives on children and youth
Contents Bound Children: Sidestepping the Social Contract in Apprenticeship Literature -- The Incorrigible Child: Juvenile Delinquency and the Fearful Rise of the Child Self -- Prodigious Births: Black Infancy, Antebellum Medicine, and the Racialization of Heredity -- Too Many Children: U.S. Malthusianism, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Novel-Ending Births -- Conclusion
Summary "Childhood as scholars often recognize it-innocent, vulnerable, and above all, precious-is anchored in the cultural imagination of the early nineteenth-century United States, when an attitude of child worship drove sentimental politics and literature. But, not all childhoods were defined by love, education, and nurture. Singled out by nineteenth-century legal and medical establishments, children already marginalized by slavery, ethnicity, and poverty were increasingly branded as "incorrigible," delinquent, and antisocial. Vicious Infants offers a counterhistory of literary childhood as both perceived social threat and site of resistance, revealing that many children were not only cut off from family and society, they were also preemptively excluded from the rewards of citizenship and adulthood. Turning to prison documents, medical journals, overlooked periodical fiction, and literary works from William Apess, Harriet Wilson, Herman Melville, Susan Paul, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Laura Soderberg recovers alternate narratives of childhood and provides an important window into the cultural links between race, reproduction, and childhood in the antebellum period"-- Provided by publisher
Analysis børne- og ungdomslitteratur
bsup
Notes Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Univeristy of Pennsylvania, 2016
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on print version record
Subject American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Children in literature.
Social problems in literature.
Child labor in literature.
Juvenile delinquency in literature.
African American children in literature.
SOCIAL SCIENCE / General
African American children in literature
American literature
Child labor in literature
Children in literature
Juvenile delinquency in literature
Social problems in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2020053357
ISBN 9781613768457
1613768451
9781613768440
1613768443