| Reading Victorian Schoolrooms: Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Contributor(s): Gargano, Elizabeth (Author) |
|
 |
ISBN: 0415980348 ISBN-13: 9780415980340 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $161.50 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2007 Annotation: P This book investigates the portrayal of school life in Victorian literature, which played out a profound cultural debate between the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction that was changing the face of Victorian childhood. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and standardized hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as increasingly regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Elizabeth Gargano situates fictions by Dickens, Carlyle, Bronte, and others within the passionate education debates, and explores how the novelists not only depicted images of rigidly standardized schoolrooms in order to critique them, but also offered alternative educational methods and agendas. /P P /P |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Literary Criticism | Children's & Young Adult Literature |
| Dewey: 823.809 |
| LCCN: 2006101157 |
| Physical Information: 0.66" H x 6.38" W x 9.32" (1.76 lbs) 220 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children's writers such as Dickens, Brontė, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontė, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman's traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project. |