Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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Table of Contents, JJS 6.1
No full textThis is the Table of Contents for the Journal of juvenilia Studies, volume 6, issue number 1, published December 2023
Chatterton\u27s Precious Things: Tokens of Professional Self-Promotion
Get PDFIf Thomas Chatterton had been born to Generation Alpha, my children’s generation, he would have been one of those obnoxiously attention-hungry, fashionable, razor-sharp social-media influencers. Self-promotion drove Chatterton. Precocious and sensitive, he used whatever literary and visual tropes seemed most popular to his inexperienced, but culturally acute eyes. His poetics was gorgeously fashionable and fraudulent, an inchoate grab at whatever professional relationships or commercial opportunities were likely to enhance his literary and pecuniary standing, and his success. More than anything, he wished to demonstrate his skills as a professional gentleman of letters, to those he perceived as his coterie circle of peers, patrons and publishers.
The material experiment that Chatterton is best known for still is the Rowley manuscripts, and their often-repeated story of antiquarian fraudulence and forgery. But when I began researching Chatterton’s poetry and other textual forms, I discovered that his interest in the material was not only some kind of ill-informed, adolescent, historical conmanship; instead, it was a broad-based, ambitious and purposeful attempt to harness the power of material things for his own professional advantage. That said, in this paper I do use the Rowley manuscripts as a case study, because they are the most well-developed and frankly entertaining of Chatterton’s precious things
“Words are Things”: Byron’s Fugitive Pieces
Get PDFConspicuously little critical attention has been devoted to Byron’s earliest publication, less even to his first collection, Fugitive Pieces (1806), a little book of poems—‘trifles’, as he calls them—written in his teenage years and meant only to be circulated privately among friends. Even for those critics who do not dismiss Fugitive Pieces as simply puerile, the consensus that ‘it did not as yet embody his final thoughts’ (Cochran) leads to the conclusion that Byron’s first books are unmistakeably personal works (McGann), that is to say, works that express a mental interiority in its infancy. While this is doubtlessly true, the material and linguistic dimensions of Byron’s early poetic experiments are at risk of being lost in an overtly biographical reading. ‘Words are things’, says Byron at various points across his oeuvre. Rather than positing Byron’s juvenilia as expressive of a certain character, a stage in his personal development, I want to trace a certain continuity of ideas, specifically regarding the (still embryonic) relationship between thinghood and the word
Editorial
Get PDFThis is the editorial for vol. 5, issue no. 2 of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies
Intimations of Maturity in Jane Austen\u27s Youthful Writing
No full textNotwithstanding the striking differences between Jane Austen’s novels, with all their subtlety and nuance, and her rowdy and over-stated juvenilia, certain recurring elements of her fiction can be traced throughout: for instance, the recurring incident of the “bombshell signature” of the run-away couples, which appears in Henry & Eliza, Pride and Prejudice, and elsewhere. Characters in The Three Sisters and Lesley Castle show signs of the kind of developing moral consciousness typical of the novels.
The author writes as the illustrator of many of the juvenilia
"I don\u27t want to put my toys away": H. G. Wells, Gameplaying and the Narrative Floor
No full textAt a public celebration of his seventieth birthday hosted by the PEN Club in London in October 1936, H. G. Wells expressed dismay at the experience. “I just hate it,” Wells told the gathering that included such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, G. B. Stern and André Maurois. “I feel like a youngster at a wonderful party sitting on the floor with all my games spread out before me. When you tell me I am 70, it is as if my nurse were coming to me to say, ‘Bertie, it is getting late—time to put those toys away.’ … I don’t want to put my toys away.” In this startling act of speculative reminiscence, Wells figures himself as a youngster and the toy-covered floor of a child as the material backdrop to his creative activities. “So few of my games are nearly finished,” he continues the metaphor. “Just now I’m playing with films. … I want to write another novel….” (“Wells at 70”). This is not the first time Wells had figured the floor as the material backdrop to creative acts of the imagination. He begins his 1911 hobby book, Floor Games, by noting that “The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor, and the home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far short of happiness. It must be covered with linoleum or cork carpet, so that toy soldiers and such-like will stand up upon it.” Wells sees access to a “floor upon which games may be played” as being crucial to the creative development of young children. “Upon such a floor may be made an infinitude of imaginative games,” he writes, “not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life” (9-10). As Gene and Margaret Rinkel note, Wells based Floor Games on “lingering childhood memories” of playing with his older brother Freddie on a linoleum floor of their family home at 47 High Street, Bromley. He and Freddie would play on the floor of Atlas House “with soldiers, bricks, boards, and planks. They became captains, lord mayors, and little generals. Bertie improvised and arranged cities, railroads, buildings, seas, and boats” (Rinkel and Rinkel 118).
This essay builds on the work of such scholars as Gene Rinkel and Margaret Rinkel and Teresa Trout to consider how Wells’ childhood gameplaying influenced his literary storytelling, and argues that we need to consider not just the toys he played with or the games he invented as a child, but also the material backdrop for these toys and games, the floor. What is interesting about the floor as an element of gameplay is that it stands both inside and outside the game. On the one hand, it is the foundation of the game, the stable ground on which gameplayers place their toys—for Wells, this meant bricks and soldiers, boards and planks, clockwork railway rolling stock and rails. The floor circumscribes the game world and stays the same while the other elements of the game are in the flux. On the other hand, the floor is a piece of mundane reality that cannot be entirely co-opted into the game because it belongs to the real world as much as to the game. The linoleum- or cork-carpeted floor keeps the game anchored in mundane reality because it is what is left when the game is packed up. As Wells whimsically concedes in Floor Games, “Occasionally, alas! it must be scrubbed—and then a truce to Floor Games” (10). Floor games involve a constant negotiation between the fantasising child who is engrossed in the game and the intervening adult who augurs the intrusion of real-world concerns into the fantastical microcosm
Introduction to Special Issue on Literary Juvenilia, Material Imagination and "Things"
Get PDFThe two guest editors here introduce the theme of the special issue and the seven essays collected within it
The Juvenile Tradition and the Fiction Factory, Part I: Wide-Awake Young Writers
Get PDFThis first in a series of two essays considers the relation of the juvenile tradition to cheap, mass-produced dime fiction in America from the 1860s on. Part One provides a survey of fiction-factory writing by now-unrecognized young writers in the latter half of the nineteenth century; my interest lies in recovering what juvenile writers who worked in that industry thought about it. This essay focuses on how they embraced new opportunities for authorship that mass-market publication provided. Such an assembly-line mode of literary production carried a new understanding of its authors as workers in the fiction factory. Rather than regret the loss of inspiration or genius in their writing identity, however, young dime writers hailed their role as “hack” writers by asserting youth’s modern character as “wide-awake”—aware, practical, savvy, and successful.
Reviews
Get PDFThis article contains reviews of Felicia Hemans\u27s Selected Early Poems, edited by Christine Alexander, Pamela Nutt, and others (Juvenilia Press, 2021), reviewed by Eric Bontempo; Rachel Conrad\u27s Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency (U of Massachusetts P, 2019), reviewed by Sara Danger; and Bug Girl, by Sophia Spencer and Margaret McNamara (Penguin Random House, 2020), reviewed by Rebecca Welshman
