"The Interest of Fiction and the Authority of Truth": Samuel Griswold Goodrich's Little Library
Jacob Crane
Bentley University
Jacob Crane is an assistant professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Tufts University in 2014. His research focuses primarily on how the United States’ conflicts with North Africa in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced representations of Muslim and Jewish identity in early American literature. His work has appeared in the journals Postcolonial Text, Atlantic Studies, and Early American Literature, and he has articles forthcoming in the African American Review and the Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
Abstract
By way of engaging with the conference’s theme of “Climate,” my talk will focus on Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s series of children’s travel narratives, the Little Library, published in the 1830s and ‘40s. The... [ view full abstract ]
By way of engaging with the conference’s theme of “Climate,” my talk will focus on Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s series of children’s travel narratives, the Little Library, published in the 1830s and ‘40s. The forerunner of modern abridged classics for children, the Little Library included popular 18th- and 19th-century works adapted, re-framed and re-narrated for young readers, including James Riley’s bestselling Barbary captivity narrative Sufferings in Africa, the voyages of the French explorer Lapeyrouse, John Jewitt’s captivity narrative set in the Pacific Northwest, and the narrative of Alexander Selkirk. Goodrich, a self-described “devotee of truth,” emphasized in advertisements that these works would provide lessons in geography, history and society, “rendering truth a substitute in education, for the too common use of romance.” While most of these works were written in the first-person, the Little Library’s adaptations are narrated by Goodrich’s alter ego, Peter Parley, who intervenes often in the narratives to assess the claims and observations of the original authors.
Goodrich’s selection of popular works demonstrates his vision for the Little Library as a carefully curated and controlled encounter with global racial diversity. I argue that the trajectory of the series as a whole represents a teleological process by which Goodrich attempts to develop the child reader into the skeptical citizen-reader through an interpretation of race, place and climate. That is, the series itself articulates a concept of reading as an increasingly autonomous and participatory process, assimilating its audience into the conventions of textual authority--from reception to research, from text to context.
Authors
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Jacob Crane
(Bentley University)
Topic Area
Childhood Teleologies: Climates of Growth
Session
S7a » Seminar 7.a: Childhood Teleologies: Climates of Growth I (15:45 - Friday, 23rd March, Boardroom East)
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