Children's Literature, Childhood, and Helen Hunt Jackson's Growth into Authorship
Lesley Ginsberg
University of Colorado
Lesley Ginsberg is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where she chaired the Department of English (2011-2016). Her work on nineteenth-century American literature has appeared in journals including American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. She has published book chapters in American Gothic, The American Child, Popular Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, and The Children’s Table. With Monika M. Elbert, she co-edited Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts (Routledge 2015).
Abstract
The links between Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) are well-known. Like Stowe, who in part credited the death of her son Charley with the impetus to write, Jackson (then H.H.) took... [ view full abstract ]
The links between Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) are well-known. Like Stowe, who in part credited the death of her son Charley with the impetus to write, Jackson (then H.H.) took up the pen after a series of losses including the death of her son Rennie. Jackson, who was born in 1830 in Amherst, was part of a generation enriched by the growth of antebellum children’s literature; she studied with John S.C. Abbott. Jackson kept some of the children’s books from her youth, works that emphasized Protestant redemption through conquest such as William Alcott’s Stories of Eliot and the Indians (1838). Drawing on Helen Hunt Jackson’s archives (Colorado College) and her library of more than one thousand books (Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum), this paper explores how antebellum literatures of the child may have offered a continuum for Jackson’s writerly and readerly lives as an adult, even as deaths of loved ones fixed time. Jackson’s contributions to Indian rights have been studied (Mathes 1990, 1998, 2015; Olund 2002; Weaver 2015) and there is copious analysis of Ramona as a racialized sentimental novel in the vein of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Padget 2000; Wagner 2002; Gonzales 2004; Wolff 2014). Scholars have discussed Jackson’s fascinating correspondence with Emily Dickinson (Pollak 2000, 2016; Crumbley 2002) and the impact of Ramona in Latin America (Irwin 2003, Gilman 2008). Few have studied Jackson’s contributions to c19 children’s literature (West 2004). This paper offers new directions in c19 U.S. childhood studies.
Authors
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Lesley Ginsberg
(University of Colorado)
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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