71 research outputs found
The Religious Imagination of E. Nesbit (1858-1924)
No full textThe Religious Imagination of E. Nesbit (1858-1942) investigates the
influence of Christian ideas and values across the oeuvre of Edith Nesbit (1858-
1924). A committed Socialist, Nesbit was a highly regarded author of adventure
and fantasy stories for children, and she is best known to this day for this work.
However, she also published gothic and romance novels, wrote multiple
collections of poetry, and delivered lectures and wrote a book on child
development. The contemporary view of Nesbit is as a children’s author,
specialising in humorous fantasy adventures, an author shaped by Edwardian
rejection of Victorian mores, and one strongly influenced by her Socialist
connections. However, as this thesis will argue, religious ideas were central to her
work: they shaped her imagination and motivated her ideological concerns, which
she explored using forms traditionally found in religious or pietistic texts. This
thesis uses a variety of historical-critical, literary critical and biographical
approaches to explore the impact of religious thinking in Nesbit’s oeuvre.
Accordingly, this study is developed through close reading of selected examples of
her work from several moments across her career: her poetry, her prose, her
children’s writing. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates how religious thinking
provides a crucial yet underexamined lens for understanding Nesbit’s imaginative
and moral vision, a vision shaping and shaped by her political commitments and
her concern for and attentiveness to childhood as a crucial moment of moral
formation. Operating within a distinctly theological framework, Nesbit’s depiction
of the supernatural, the fantastic and the magical form is a particular focus of this
thesis allowing a reassessment of a Victorian author who defies simplistic
categorisation in terms of religious adherence and expression
E. Nesbit y sus innovadoras aportaciones a la novela infantil
No full textAt the beginning of the twentieth century, when English society was undergoing development, E. Nesbit became a recognised writer. Her work, still displaying some Victorian literary features, outstands as a pioneer in granting power, freedom, imagination, enjoyment and spontaneity to young characters. One century later many writers are still using those literary patterns introduced by this author when she established genres such as domestic fantasy and gang stories.A principios del siglo XX, cuando la sociedad inglesa se hallaba en plena transformación, se consolida como escritora E. Nesbit. Su obra, todavía deudora de ciertas rasgos literarios victorianos, despunta como pionera en otorgarles a los personajes infantiles poder, libertad, imaginación, diversión y espontaneidad. Todavía un siglo después muchos escritores siguen empleando los modelos literarios introducidos por esta autora cuando estableció géneros como la fantasía doméstica y las historias de pandillas
The narrative voice in the children's fantasy novels of E. Nesbit
No full textThe study sought to examine E. Nesbit's unique narrative style in addressing her young readers. Nesbit brought a fresh voice to her books that made a connection between her and her readers that lasted for generations. This study explored her methods in achieving this literary technique. By employing both narratological research methods and descriptive content analysis of E. Nesbit's fantasy novels, the researcher sought to show Nesbit's substantial contribution to the development of fiction for children. This study focused on Nesbit's narrative style in her children's fantasy novels. Its purpose was to explore the question: what characterizes her narrative style?
Children's books center on narrative: in a sense they are about narrative — and until relatively recently, narrative has been the poor relation in both theory and criticism (Hunt 1990). Compared to other contemporary directions of inquiry, narrative theory is still taking its very first steps within children's literature criticism (Nikolajeva 2003). The narrative style of an author is what puts the reader into an implicit relationship with the author. Narratology, the study of the narrative, helps to answer questions that arise from reading children's literature: why narrative appeals, how the storyteller tells her story, what keeps the reader turning the page, and how to recognize what is important for the narrative. Nesbit had a distinctive narrative style which created a bond with her readers. This study utilized narratology to understand that narrative style.
The study found that Nesbit spent much of her writing career in finding a voice by which to address the new child reader (Hunt 2001, 461). The strong emphasis she placed on the partnership of narrator and narratee made the child's interests rather than the adult's the real concern in her stories (Wall 1991, 149). This was borne out by the findings of the content analysis.
The variables, drawn from narratology, that were used in the content analysis were: mediated narrator; focalization; emotional distance; and tone. The results reflect what may be concluded from a critical analysis of her eight children's fantasy novels: Nesbit used the mediated narrator technique frequently to engage her narratee in her stories; focalization was on the child character; there was no emotional distance between the narrator and the narratee; and the tone in her early and late novels was humorous while the House of Arden books were more serious.
Emotional distance was not used for these analyses or any further analyses because it was found that the author was never emotionally distant from the child. Crosstabulations were conducted between the categorical variables across the eight books to reveal any significant relationships.
The mediated narrator, which engaged the narratee in direct dialogue, stepping out of the story for conversation, occurred 12.4%, in total, for all eight books. This engagement of the narratee is characteristic of Nesbit, as it established a conversation with the implied child reader. Focalization, in which the narrative was told from the children's point of view or was focused on the children, occurred 91%, in total, for all eight books. There was no emotional distance established in any of the books between the narrator and the narratee. She always saw matters from the point of view of the child; there was never any distance between them. Finally, the tone was humorous 89.3% in the eight books; the later books were more serious. In the Arden books and in scenes in The Story of the Amulet, Nesbit addressed her social concerns to varying degrees.
She shaped her narratives to create the illusion of speaking to the narratee directly by constantly taking the narratee into her confidence by sharing information and insights into the characters and actions in the book (Wall 1991)
UKSG Annual Conference 2016: Highlights from the sponsored students and early career professionals
No full textJisc, SAGE and Springer Nature kindly sponsored attendance at the conference for six early career professionals and students. The lucky winners of these places were students Susan Hill (Aberystwyth University), Amy Rippon (City University London) and Beth Tapster (University of Sheffield). The early career professionals were Jennifer Bayjoo (Leeds Beckett University), Ruth MacMullen (York St John University) and Sam Nesbit (University of Sussex). They are pictured with their sponsorship goodie bags above, between Insights co-editors, Lorraine Estelle and Steve Sharp: from left to right: Sam, Jennifer, Beth, Amy, Ruth and Susan
Does dissociation mediate the relationship between childhood abuse and auditory hallucinations? An investigation using clinical samples with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.
No full textPrevious research has found that the relationship between childhood trauma and auditory hallucination is mediated by dissociation (Perona-Garcelan et al., 2012a, 2014) and that the specific types of dissociation that mediate this relationship are depersonalisation and absorption (Cole et al., 2016; Perona-Garcelan et al., 2012a, 2014). The current study aimed to extend this literature base by testing dissociation as a mediator of the relationship between childhood abuse and auditory hallucination frequency and associated distress using two diagnostic groups; DID (n = 50) and schizophrenia (n = 50). In addition, this study aimed to test whether dissociation is a mediator of the relationship between childhood abuse and non-auditory hallucinations. The battery of quantitative questionnaires included those assessing childhood abuse, different manifestations of dissociation (e.g., pathological dissociation, depersonalisation), auditory hallucination frequency and distress and non-auditory hallucinations In the DID group depersonalisation mediated between childhood abuse and distress associated with auditory hallucinations. Childhood abuse and auditory hallucination frequency was mediated by pathological dissociation in the DID group and was mediated by depersonalisation in the schizophrenia group. Also, childhood abuse and non-auditory hallucinations were mediated by dissociation in all modalities in the schizophrenia group and all except gustatory in the DID group. This study builds on the research demonstrating that in essence auditory hallucinations are dissociative and adds that non-auditory hallucinations can also be conceptualised as dissociative
Edith Nesbit's contemporary fairy tales: The influence of childhood experiences on artistic manifestation
No full textThis research conducts a comprehensive examination of the influence exerted by early life experiences on an author's literary corpus, with a particular emphasis on Edith Nesbit (1858-1924), the author of children’s novel, and her incorporation of childhood memories to enrich the contemporary fairy tale genre. Utilizing Melanie Klein’s (1882-1960) theoretical framework, a renowned Austrian-British psychoanalyst, the investigation endeavours to deliver an exhaustive analysis of Nesbit's artistic persona. Nesbit's children's narratives, as modern fairy tales, embody an internal realm of unconscious reverie akin to Klein's concept of phantasy. Central to Nesbit's tales are young protagonists who confront challenges associated with separation from caregivers, the establishment of identity, reality appraisal, body image maturation, and object relations. Edith Nesbit's harrowing childhood experiences shaped her into the imaginative author she ultimately became. By delving into the realm of fantasy and creativity, Nesbit achieved a sense of completeness and resilience, allowing her to overcome her feelings of loss and vulnerability. This research aims to shed light on the complex link between a writer's formative years and their creative expressions by examining the remnants of Nesbit's early life experiences. Furthermore, by emphasizing Edith Nesbit's ability to transform her experiences into her artistic body of work, this study also demonstrates the power of artistic expression as a means of self-exploration and healing
The death of William Golding: authorship and creativity in darkness visible and the paper men
No full textIn the seventies and eighties William Golding was deeply responsive to the critical, anti-authorial ethos that followed the publication of Roland Barthes's "La mort de I'auteur" (1968). In Darkness Visible (1979) and The Paper Men (1984) he investigates means by which to reaffirm authorial presence. Working through paradox, he performs the authorial death in these novels, and establishes language’s inadequacy as a means of conveying absolute meaning, authorial "vision," truth or revelation. Having done so he nonetheless gestures towards the divine, towards the possibility of a vatic communication. In this manner the novels work upon principles of contradiction and collapse. What remains is a discourse of hope, promise, desire, without means of substantiating such optimism. Thus Golding might be said to have practiced a form of negative theology, and to have anticipated in this respect some recent trends in literary theory
Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle
No full textThis book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird
A metacognitive tool: Theoretical and operational analysis of skills exercised in structured concept maps
No full textAbstractDeveloping meaningful learning is not only difficult to achieve but also time consuming, because it requires a large number of different skills to develop and master. Many studies have shown that organizing knowledge in concept maps helps teachers and students to develop such a meaningful learning (Nesbit, J.C., Adescope, O.O., 2006. Learning with concept and knowledge maps: a meta-analysis. Rev. Educ. Res. 76:3, 413–446). Based on the work of Tyler (Tyler, R.W., 1950. Basic principles of Curriculum and Instruction. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) and Anderson (Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R., Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Raths, J., Wittrock, M.C., 2001. A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A revision of Bloom׳s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman, New York), this study proposes to characterize and to organize precisely, rigorously, and operationally in a two-dimensional matrix, the skills exercised during the elaboration of concept maps, here referred to as context-dependent and hierarchically structured concept maps (sCM). These skills correspond to those actually needed in transfer of knowledge, and the matrix could be used as an instructional tool to assist learners and teachers in this transfer. In addition it allows them to pay attention to the cognitive processes and types of knowledge involved during sCM elaboration. Making explicit the taxonomic levels of cognitive efforts implemented while organizing knowledge in a concept map could constitute a useful metacognitive tool to focus the teachers and learners׳ attention and efforts towards achieving higher-order thinking skills and meaningful learning
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