Artful Dodgers - Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature - by M. Gubar

In this groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and children's literature studies, Marah Gubar proposes a fundamental reconception of the nineteenth-century attitude toward childhood. The ideology of innocence was much slower to spread than we think, she contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it--children's authors and members of the infamous "cult of the child"--were actually deeply ambivalent about this Romantic notion. Rather than wholeheartedly promoting a static ideal of childhood purity, Golden Age children's authors often characterize young people as collaborators who are caught up in the constraints of the culture they inhabit, and yet not inevitably victimized as a result of this contact with adults and their world. Such nuanced meditations on the vexed issue of the child's agency, Gubar suggests, can help contemporary scholars to generate more flexible critical approaches to the study of childhood and children's literature.

• Offers a new interpretation of the often mentioned but rarely discussed "cult of the child," one which (for the first time) takes into account the Victorians' own richly self-aware discourse on this topic and uses it to depart from the trendy notion that the Victorians "eroticized innocence" (an idea popularized by James Kincaid)
• Makes use of previously ignored texts by female children's authors to offer a new account of the rise of the child narrator, as well as unearthing a wealth of new evidence about the presence of Victorian children on the stage and in the audience to map out children's theater as a distinct dramatic subgenre
• Challenges the critical commonplace that children's authors and members of the cult of the child wholeheartedly embraced Romantic notions about childhood innocence

Winner of the Children's Literature Association's Best Book Award

"One of the finest things about this remarkable book is that it does what so much scholarship strives for and so seldom does: it advances the entire field, and by a huge margin."--James R. Kincaid, author of Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture

"Challenging received wisdom about Golden Age writing and children's literature more broadly, Gubar resets the critical stage, rereading canonical texts, reintroducing forgotten ones, and offering a fascinating analysis of children's theatre. A major work of scholarship."--Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida

"Artful Dodgers adds to understandings of the period as a whole. It contributes to a range of vital debates regarding literary form, central nineteenth-century writers, including Carroll, Stevenson, and Barrie, and the hierarchies residing in age and gender. Gubar's book is pioneering in demonstrating that Victorian adult writers depicted children much more complexly than modern readers have recognized."--Laurie Langbauer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This book will reframe basic assumptions underlying its field. Refusing to condescend either to children or to the Victorians who wrote about them, Marah Gubar generously evokes the surprising-and unsettling-capacities of children and children's literature."--Andrew H. Miller, Indiana University
"Gubar makes a significant and timely contribution by proposing that the vision of the child as blank slate may be less widespread among Golden Age children's writers than among today's critics. This important and authoritative book requires readers to confront their own prejudices."--Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University

"Artful Dodgers is a lucid, informative, and stimulating work...It deserves wide attention among scholars of both Victorian and children's literature, not only for the range and acuity of its readings, but also for its reflections on critical method...It is full of incisive close reading, rigorous yet flexible in method, richly and variously contextualized. It is literary study of a high order." -James Eli Adams, New Books Online

"Enormously readable and a pleasure to learn from...Gubar's work in "reconceiving" Victorian and Edwardian children's literature is groundbreaking." --Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

"Artful Dodgers' reconception of British Golden Age fiction is a signal, deeply original study that epitomizes the kinds of work essential to theorizing and practicing children's literature studies: real archival research." --The Lion and the Unicorn

"Injects a much-needed dose of common sense into ethereal academic discussions and status quo thinking even while enriching rather than diluting the conversation. The arguments put forth in its seven chapters are articulate and well constructed, founded on wide-ranging research, careful thinking, and close reading of the texts rather than on political ideology. Gubar's independent approach to understanding the literature of the nineteenth century is astute and engaging and should be required reading for Victorian scholars of both adult and children's literature." --Children's Literature Association Quarterly

"Award: groundbreaking contribution to Victorian and children's literature studies." --Goodreads

"Award: substantial and wide-ranging study." --Inis Magazine