Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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The Fiction Factory, Part 2: Afterlife
Get PDFBy the beginning of the twentieth century, young writers were part of an economic system that took youth as a commercial value—up-to-the-minute youth provided a fantasy that such new modes of publication seemed to advertise—while also making use of young writers glorying in such hype. Part One of these two essays explored this new character of young people’s writing to indicate an evolving understanding of the juvenile tradition. Young writers now asserted themselves as modern hacks, celebrating their proficiency in dime formulas. In surveying the literary nationalism encoded in dime formulas, Part One also explored how dime fiction kept alive a sense of perennial youth in part through youth’s recurrent and lasting association with the American character. Young writers working in dime formulas by necessity worked within these attitudes—and the baldness of dime formulas made obvious how these so-called “American” attitudes were ideological, encoding troubling assumptions when it came to race and imperialism, part of the manifest destiny and American exceptionalism that cheap print reflected.
Part Two is about the afterlife of the dime novel—both in terms of how its formulas continued to haunt American letters, but also in terms of how ongoing literary-critical recovery of texts in the archive of the fiction factory have expanded possibilities for how to regard them. It concentrates on how ideological prescriptions continued to shape expectations, and to shape young writers’ work, in the early twentieth century—after the dime novel seemed to have waned in popularity. At the same time, it foregrounds how the critical afterlife that has sifted that archive informs an understanding of how to read this ongoing work
The Underwater Adventure of "only a little boy": Edmund Gosse\u27s Juvenilia
Get PDF This essay considers an item of Gosse’s juvenilia entitled “Sleep in the Deep” (Add. 7027/ 17) in relation to the depiction of his childhood and adolescence in Father and Son, seeking not to prove or disprove the veracity of the latter, so much as to explore how far these two texts are mutually illuminating despite being separated by almost half a century. I conclude that "Sleep in the Deep" encompasses the bewildering feelings of a boy on the brink of puberty, but who is just starting to learn how to read and how to write fiction, who is starting to doubt the solidity and integrity of the world he has inhabited thus far
Reviews
Get PDFCelia Easton reviews Sir Charles Grandison, Edited by Lesley Peterson and Sylvia Hunt, assisted by Catherine Jones, Laurel Charron, Stephanie Leblanc, Laurie Morin, Ann Vanderaa, and Katarina Valentic. Illustrated by Juliet McMaster. Juvenilia Press, 2022.
John Plotz reviews Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience by Timothy Gao. Cambridge UP, 2021
Becoming Acton Bell
Get PDFThis discussion considers how Anne Brontë’s juvenile productions--her poems and drawings executed before the age of nineteen--anticipate the themes and manner of her adult novels, published as the work of Acton Bell. In setting age nineteen as the upper boundary for her juvenilia, I choose an age somewhat earlier than we usually think of juvenilia, because at age nineteen Anne in effect moved into the adult world by taking a job to support herself as a full-time governess for the Ingham family, moving away from home to educate children who were not her relatives. I do not mean to approach the juvenilia material in a teleological way, implying that Anne was developing toward a goal which we can now discern through the gift of hindsight. Rather, I want to examine what the surviving material objects—the juvenilia drawings and poems--reveal, and then ask how these perspectives persist into the adult writings. In considering the juvenile writings and drawings in terms of what they reveal about Anne’s adult novels, I am preoccupied with "things" that she employed in her writing and visual art to convey meaning, such as trees and shrubberies in her early drawings, or birds and dogs
Chronotopes of Romance and Realism: The Lovers’ Reunion in Anne Brontë’s “Alexander and Zenobia” and Agnes Grey
Get PDFThe question of how the material imagination develops from a child to an adult writer may be approached in many ways. In the case of the Brontës, attention has tended to focus on the materiality of the miniature books in which they recorded their childhood “plays” or on the physical objects that both furnished the parsonage at Haworth and stimulated their young imaginations. In this essay, I take a different approach, considering materiality in the broadest possible sense as the physical complex of space and time that defines the universe.
Using this conception of materiality, I set out to the chart the development of Anne Brontë’s material imagination from her juvenile to her post-juvenile writing by comparing representations of time and space in her teenage poem “Alexander and Zenobia” and in her first mature literary work, the novel Agnes Grey. In considering the movement of characters through time and space in these two texts, I focus on a specific narrative motif—the lovers’ reunion—in order to identify both continuities and differences between Brontë’s younger and more mature literary methods
Table of Contents
No full textThis is the Table of Contents for Vol. 5, issue no. 2 of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, published August 2023
Things and Theatricality: James Austen\u27s Quest for Virtuous Drama
No full textThis essay considers consider four of James Austen’s early prologues and epilogues (written for family theatricals between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two) in terms of his engagement with debates both ancient and early modern over the nature of drama and the place of spectacle. More specifically, these paratexts document his ongoing concern with theorizing the ideal theatre: one in which the things of the stage serve their proper role. The discourse of antitheatricality has long associated theatrical performance with such unvirtuous qualities as artifice, dishonesty, and deception, and in his "Prologue to the Tragedy of Matilda" (1782), Austen associates the concrete objects of the stage with all that should be feared and devalued: pure, ancient theatre has been degraded by such things as the “scene gay painted” and the “canvas Palace” (8, l. 3, 5). In his "Prologue to The Rivals" (1784), by contrast, the things that signify theatrical artifice—the mask, the painted scene—are only metaphorical and thus innocuous. By 1788 Austen comes to see theatrical performance as a sign of English virtue, associated with the Restoration when “Charles, & loyalty & wit returned” (“Prologue to The Wonder,” 1788, l. 40) and reframes the "things" of the stage as objects made sacred by tradition and, specifically by association with the Christmas season
Table of Contents 5.1
No full textThis is the table of contents for Vol. 5, no. 1 of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, Special Issue on Literary Juvenilia, Material Imagination, and "Things.