Journal of Juvenilia Studies
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The Political Worlds of Boxen and Narnia: Small Bodies in Big Spaces
Get PDFC. S. Lewis is not generally considered a political writer. However, the Boxen tales, written when Lewis was between the ages of six and fourteen, depict an adult world of political intrigue and stultifying small talk. This paper offers a reading of Boxen, alongside George Orwell’s political writing and Lewis’s own mature work, to argue that political commentary underpins much of Lewis’s writing—a commentary that begins in the Boxen stories but does not end there. If the Boxen stories depict political scheming and negligent leadership, the Narnia Chronicles describe a paracosm founded on the Greek polis, or the ideal state. The two worlds complement one another, and both are important to a full appreciation of Lewis’s political thought.
 
Editorial
Get PDFA brief history of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, with acknowledgements, and a welcome to readers
Teaching "the young idea how to shoot": The Juvenilia of the Burney Family
Get PDF"The Burney family stood at the centre of cultural life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and excelled in several forms of artistic expression, especially in writing. Among the manuscripts preserved in the family archive are some collections of juvenilia produced by the children of Charles Rousseau and Esther Burney, Frances Burney’s elder sister. These literary projects helped the young authors to build confidence in their writing, refine their craft, and find a voice. This paper examines two: the first is an early example of a family-produced magazine that is patterned after one of the first-ever periodicals aimed at children. The second collection is a series of anthologies containing poems, plays, and stories written by Sophia Elizabeth Burney and dedicated to her novelist aunt. The plays seem designed to be performed in amateur theatricals; the stories contain images of female suffering, sharp satire on social pretentions, and a raucous (even violent) sense of humour that evoke the novels of Frances Burney. The newly discovered manuscripts reflect an environment that evidently encouraged creative play, self-expression, and artistic production. The study of these juvenile works yield insight into the creative world of the Burneys and, more generally, into the world of the child reader and writer in late eighteenth-century England
In Search of the Authorial Self: Branwell Brontë\u27s Microcosmic World
No full text Branwell Bronte’s childhood is a remarkable story of imaginative excess and misdirected creativity. His early experiments with miniature magazines and miniscule script suggest the limited world of the child, yet the paracosmic world he and his sisters created is one of vast proportion, with grandiose ideas that both empower and hinder the development of the young writer.
Only a year younger than his sister Charlotte, Branwell was both partner and often leader in the creation of events in the prolific writing project associated with their invented world of Glass Town and Angria. This creative enterprise facilitated Branwell’s experimentation as editor, journalist, historian, poet and novelist, but it also enabled him to mask in bravado and hyperbole (and to avoid addressing) his lack of confidence and helped to legitimise, to himself at least, a false view of his position in the world.
This article finds an explanation for Branwell’s eccentric behaviour and increasing inability to distinguish himself from his creation, Northangerland, in a consideration of the paracosm and, in particular, of the developmental problems associated with the idea of “being in a world of one’s own” that can develop from long involvement in an imaginative world (Cohen and MacKeith 1). Evidence suggests that Branwell found it hard to cope with ordinary life and the expectations placed upon him as an only boy. Nevertheless, Branwell’s early magazines, poetry and histories also suggest a playful, agile young mind stimulated by stories he has read, by classical legends of discovery, by war and politics, by the reading of newspapers and magazines—a mind keen to engage with the world despite his youth. Thus Glass Town and Angria also allowed Branwell to exercise power and channel his creative agency.
 
Pamela Brown\u27s The Swish of the Curtain: A Programme for Life?
No full textoai:jrnl_juvstud:article/10Pamela Brown published her novel The Swish of the Curtain in 1941 when she was only sixteen, and it has had remarkable staying power, outlasting the many books she published as an adult, and achieving adaptation on radio and television. The novel has also given its name to a chain of drama programs for children across England. Brown’s well-told tale of a group of stage-struck teenagers who luck into a theatre and proceed to stage successful productions has some autobiographical elements, as she draws on her own stage activities with her friends in Colchester (fictionalised as “Fenchester”). But, interestingly, she made the progress of her characters a model for herself, and proceeded to carve out a similar path towards Drama School, a career on stage, and authorship. 
Reviews
Get PDFJuliet McMaster\u27s Jane Austen, Young Author (Ashgate [now marketed by Routledge], 2016), reviewed by Devoney Looser; Ethel Turner\u27s Tales from the Parthenon and That Young Rebel, edited by Pamela Nutt with others (Juvenilia Press, 2014 and 2015), reviewed by Alexandra Prunean; Laurie Langbauer\u27s The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750-1835 (Oxford UP, 2016), reviewed by David Owen
Exhibiting Children: The Young Artist as Construct and Creator
Get PDFThis intimate exchange between real children and the stories we tell about them is at the fore of juvenilia studies, as scholars examining texts children produce must balance attention to the young person as author or artist with a critical awareness of systems of publication, reception, and analysis that are typically managed by adults. The focus of this paper is an investigation into the challenges of researching and writing about child-produced culture amid the often-overpowering constructs of childhood that surround it, taking two young artists as case studies: Daphne Allen, and Pamela Bianco, whose work can be challenging to access in ways that arise in part from the idiosyncrasies of their cultural moment, understood here as one that combined lingering Romanticism and burgeoning modernism. Analysis of the two child artists suggests that both were savvy and self-aware in negotiating, through their art, the discourses that surrounded them; it also presents methodologies that may be useful to other scholars in the field of juvenilia studies more broadly