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\"Robin tries to find a home for the baby she's found in her backyard.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Dystopian Scourge of Women in Gilead Society as Portrayed in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's most renowned dystopian novel, is one of those works whose memorandum appears to transcend period. It has been analyzed to demonstrate the presence of various layers of feministic and dystopian cultural concepts in the novel. A qualitative investigation of secondary resources reveals that the situation of women in the novel is portrayed as a reproach to the patriarchal construction of the contemporary world. The women characters in the novel position as testimonies of the subjugation that unescapably concentrates them, helpless against a societal and political organisation that interprets the position of women as a reproductive machine. According to Atwood’s novel, by representing the repercussions of the revolution in the United States through the fake theocracy and totalitarian law insists, women must serve the commanders of Gilead society for sexual and biological reasons. Infertile women and working slaves should both serve as servants to the elite couple; the Handmaids addresses both historical and contemporary cultural issues, particularly those affecting women. This study further points out the oppressive, matriarchal position and sexual cruelty, diminishing the autonomy of women.
Journal Article
The best of everything
Paulette's the kind of woman who likes the future all mapped out: the wedding to Denton, the Caribbean honeymoon, the gingham quilt on the baby's crib. Until one morning Garfield, Denton's friend, arrives at her door with the news that Denton won't be coming around any more, that there won't be time for her to say goodbye. Somehow Garfield finds his way into her bed, and sooner than anyone can believe there is a baby, and suddenly giving Bird, her son, the best of everything is what gives Paulette's life meaning. So why is it another little boy, Nellie, who keeps Paulette awake at night? Nellie who is being raised a few streets away, with no sign of a mum. Surely Paulette is the last person who should be getting tangled up in any of that?
BOOK
Disciplining girls : understanding the origins of the classic orphan girl story
At the heart of some of the most beloved children's novels is a passionate discussion about discipline, love, and the changing role of girls in the twentieth century. Joe Sutliff Sanders traces this debate as it began in the sentimental tales of the mid-nineteenth century and continued in the classic orphan girl novels of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. M. Montgomery, and other writers still popular today.
Domestic novels published between 1850 and 1880 argued that a discipline that emphasized love was the most effective and moral form. These were the first best sellers in American fiction, and by reimagining discipline as a technique of the heart—rather than of the whip—they ensured their protagonists a secure, if limited, claim on power. This same ideal was adapted by women authors in the early twentieth century, who transformed the sentimental motifs of domestic novels into the orphan girl story made popular in such novels as Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna.
Through close readings of nine of the most influential orphan girl novels, Sanders provides a seamless historical narrative of American children's literature and gender from 1850 until 1923. He follows his insightful literary analysis with chapters on sympathy and motherhood, two themes central to both American and children's literature, and concludes with a discussion of contemporary ideas about discipline, abuse, and gender.
Disciplining Girls writes an important chapter in the history of American, women's, and children's literature, enriching previous work about the history of discipline in America.
eBook
Dreams before the start of time
\"In a near-future London, Millie Dack places her hand on her belly to feel her baby kick, resolute in her decision to be a single parent. Across town, her closest friend--a hungover Toni Munroe--steps into the shower and places her hand on a medic console. The diagnosis is devastating. In this stunning, bittersweet family saga, Millie and Toni experience the aftershocks of human progress as their children and grandchildren embrace new ways of making babies. When infertility is a thing of the past, a man can create a child without a woman, a woman can create a child without a man, and artificial wombs eliminate the struggles of pregnancy. But what does it mean to be a parent? A child? A family? Through a series of interconnected vignettes that spans five generations and three continents, this emotionally taut story explores the anxieties that arise when the science of fertility claims to deliver all the answers.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Building the Femorabilia Special Collection: Methodologies and Practicalities
In this article I examine the potential of the Femorabilia Collection of Women's and Girls' Twentieth Century Periodicals for the study of girlhood in Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations and I explain why the collection was originally created and describe its current purpose and policy to promote future research. I consider the importance of material and reading cultures as well as approaches to understanding the content of these varied publications and discuss the difficulties of working with mass culture, ephemeral texts, and the problem of obtaining examples, and I consider the collection's particular focus on popular fiction. I consider the development of the collection, examples of methodology and practice, and its use in pedagogy, research, and public engagement.
Journal Article
\Smoky Night\ and the Un-Telling of the L.A. Riots
The year 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Eve Bunting's \"Smoky Night\" (Harcourt, 1994; illustrated by David Diaz). As a Caldecott medal winner, \"Smoky Night\" is the highest profile picturebook centered on an incident related to police brutality and the profiling of Black citizens--the Los Angeles riots, which followed the beating of Rodney King and the infamous not-guilty verdict of 1992. Although the setting is never explicitly described as L.A. in the text and police officers are conspicuously absent from the entire story, Bunting stated during an interview that the book is \"about the Riots in Los Angeles.\" It is thus noteworthy that police officers are absent from \"Smoky Night\" because the text ostensibly depicts a \"reality\" or \"truth,\" as Bunting put it (Reading Rockets, 2014), at the expense of other truths, such as the police's role in the riots. It is also noteworthy that Rodney King and Latasha Harlins are absent from this picturebook, which suggests that including certain people in the story would require telling truths about Blackness in America that would disrupt the story's ideology. In light of these absences, the authors build upon Ching's (2005) important call for the examination of children's literature as an instrument of power and his discussion of \"Smoky Night,\" in particular, to address the following research questions: (1) Which stories are told, and not told, in Eve Bunting's \"Smoky Night?\" (2) What messages does this award-winning picturebook transmit about the L.A. riots of 1992? The authors conclude that the book is comfortable for those who believe that the story offers a fair and accurate depiction of a historical event and for anyone who prefers to circumvent discussion of: (1) White people's and White police officers' direct role in catalyzing the riots; (2) Black- Korean (and other) racial tensions preceding the riots; and (3) the reality that racial tensions were heightened, not absolved, by the riots, despite the charitable role of the church in providing temporary shelter for all groups. The un-tellings of this book are destructive in that they patronize the entire South Central community--from the angry rioters to the Black, Korean, and Latino families who were not involved in the rebellion and suffered extreme loss-- by reducing their problems to ones that could easily be resolved by two cats and an observant child.
Journal Article
Fateful Beauty
When Oscar Wilde said he had \"seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime,\" his joke played on an idea that has often been taken quite seriously--both in Wilde's day and in our own. In Fateful Beauty, Douglas Mao recovers the lost intellectual, social, and literary history of the belief that the beauty--or ugliness--of the environment in which one is raised influences or even determines one's fate. Weaving together readings in literature, psychology, biology, philosophy, education, child-rearing advice, and interior design, he shows how this idea abetted a dramatic rise in attention to environment in many discourses and in many practices affecting the lives of the young between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Through original and detailed analyses of Wilde, Walter Pater, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Rebecca West, and W. H. Auden, Mao shows that English-language writing of the period was informed in crucial but previously unrecognized ways by the possibility that beautiful environments might produce better people. He also reveals how these writers shared concerns about environment, evolution, determinism, freedom, and beauty with scientists and social theorists such as Herbert Spencer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and W.H.R. Rivers. In so doing, Mao challenges conventional views of the roles of beauty and the aesthetic in art and life during this time.
eBook
Education and Utopia: Robert Owen and Charles Fourier
The aims of education, and the appropriate means of realising them, are a recurring preoccupation of utopian authors. The utopian socialists Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837) both place human nature at the core of their educational views, and both see education as central to their wider objective of social and political transformation. The greatest philosophical difference between them concerns human nature: whereas Owen saw character as plastic and open to creation, Fourier saw it as God-given and liable to discovery. The most striking practical difference concerns their institutional recommendations: whereas Owen saw schooling as taking place in largely conventional spaces, Fourier sought to integrate education into the community-his ideal society contains no schools and no teachers. Both authors had some (limited and often indirect) practical influence on educational practice, despite the failure of their wider ambitions for social reform.
Journal Article
Games of Silence: Indian Boarding Schools in Louise Erdrich's Novels
Just as there is no uniform \"Indian experience,\" so too is there no single \"Indian boarding school experience.\" [...]we should not be surprised when we encounter a similar diversity of representations in Native fiction. Because the multigenerational, communal boarding school trauma had lasting effects on Native communities, leaving them out of the story omits one of the central reasons for some of the community and family dysfunctions that Erdrich so capably describes.
Journal Article