Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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Table of Contents
No full textThis is the table of contents for JJS 4.1, Special Issue on Juvenilia, Trauma, and Intersectionalit
Growing Up Burney
Get PDFThe pressure of family identity and politics affected more than one generation of Burneys. Beyond Frances Burney, and her intense relationship with her father Charles Burney, were other family members who also felt the pressure to “write & read & be literary.” These tendencies can be seen most clearly in the works of juvenilia preserved in the family archive. A commonplace book bound in vellum has been discovered that preserves more than one hundred poems, mostly original compositions written by family and friends. The activity of commonplacing reflects a community in which reading and writing are valued. Collected by the youngest sister of Frances Burney, they seem to have been copied after she married. The juvenile writings of her nieces and nephews preponderate, whose talents were encouraged, as they give versified expression to their deepest feelings and fears. Literary influences of the Romantic poets can be traced, as the young authors define themselves in relation to these materials. Reflecting a kind of self-fashioning, the commonplace book helps these young writers explore their sense of family identity through literary form. This compilation represents a collective expression of authorship which can inform us about reading and writing practices of women and their families in the eighteenth century
JJS 3.2 Editorial
No full textThis is the Editorial for JJS 3.2, written by Rob Breton and David Owen
Introduction to Editor\u27s Column
No full textThis essay introduces the Editor’s Column of this issue of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, a special feature consisting of five essays exploring complexities of trauma, intersectionality, and juvenilia through focusing on a youth-authored text. The five essays emerge from different disciplinary perspectives, attend to a range of historical and geographical locations, and focus on young writers who are from marginalised backgrounds and/or are not typically at the center of scholarly attention. This introductory essay raises the point that further conceptual work is needed regarding trauma and forms of oppression; questions of age, power, and intersectionality; and the nature of our access to young people’s perspectives in relation to intersectionality and trauma. The essay concludes by suggesting that engaging with questions of trauma, intersectionality, and juvenilia requires specifying, broadening, and deepening our frames
“The Peripatetic Philosopher”: Unlocking the Trauma of Richard Jefferies
No full textThis article considered the juvenilia of Richard Jefferies in light of the traumatic experiences of his early childhood, which included the sudden loss of his elder sister and a move from the country to the city to live with his aunt and uncle. Using a psychobiographical approach the article considers the impact of the prejudice directed towards him from the local Swindon community during his mid-to-late teens, which spurred him forward in honing his skill as an observational writer. Consonant with this process was the discovery and expression of his authentic voice, which was tempered by the financial need to write for the local newspapers. The article illustrates how his treatment of an area of waste land near his boyhood home affords insight into his emotional wellbeing and his maturation as an author and thinker. Through the close reading of passages written between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, alongside excerpts from his mature works, the article identifies a new unexplored dimension to the author and his works at a formative time in his career
Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems
No full textSilence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems
The title of the book of poems published in 1941, The Double Man, defines much of W.H. Auden’s life, constantly driven by a sense of duality and paradox. The double functions as a complex, subtle phenomenon in Auden’s case: It highlights an unresolvable tension between his private and public persona. The search for a compromise between personal wishes and social duties is a recurring theme in Auden’s later works but appears with particular intensity in the poems of his youth, resulting in a complex entanglement in which the poet’s identity is often (traumatically) negotiated. Since Auden’s life extended throughout most of the 20th-century—he was born in 1907, in York, and died in Vienna in 1973—his work provides a useful lens through which to examine some of the events that would change the world in unprecedented ways. For much of his career, he was worried about the impact his homosexuality would have on his attempt to fashion himself as a public poet, as the risk of public scandal and even imprisonment was high in Britain and the US until the late 1960s, and the issue of his homosexuality remains one of the most significant contexts for the study of Auden and of the ways he imagined himself. The impossibility of coming out in the 1920s, when he was an adolescent, posed a heavy burden on him and determined to a great extent his future identity and thus his way of life as a whole. Until now, however, the question of how Auden’s earlier poetic output, that is the 1922-1927 poems, has been “marked and structured and indeed necessitated and propelled by the historical shapes of homophobia, for instance, by the contingencies and geographies of the highly permeable closet” (Sedgwick 165), has remained largely overlooked, and much uncertainty still exists about the extent to which the poet’s “coming out” experience circulated in the vicinity of trauma and was marked by it
Collaboration and Connection: Intergenerational Authorship in Al Rabeeah and Yeung\u27s Homes: A Refugee Story
Get PDFJuvenilia scholarship typically privileges a lone child author writing without adult intervention. This essay explores questions about intergenerational authorship and juvenilia through a focus on Homes: A Refugee Story, a work of “creative non-fiction” produced through the collaboration of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and his former teacher Winnie Yeung. Homes chronicles the experience of al Rabeeah in Syria prior to his emigration with his family to Canada as a young teen. The essay authors draw on a joint interview they conducted with al Rabeeah and Yeung, who characterized their mode of collaborating as one between the young “storyteller” and adult “writer,” and discussed how they negotiated their roles in light of questions regarding agency, privacy, ethics, and trauma. The essay concludes by suggesting that fluid definitions of child writing and child agency may be particularly important when it comes to trauma narratives
"Because I won\u27t ever forget": Towards Livingness in Youth Poetry
No full textPoetry within trauma-informed literacies has been influential to understanding youth writing. As the tendency to focus on the individual rather than structures of power remains, the authors of this essay point to collective resistance and connect youth writing to other creative texts in their engagement of black life, livingness, and pedagogical possibilities. Specifically, they draw on black feminist theories and methodologies to consider race, gender, class, diaspora, and time-space in poetry and juvenilia studies. The discussion concludes with questions about learning and writing as counter-expressions