Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children's violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. It challenges received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms, proposing a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child's play that provides a deep context for understanding both the "development" of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein's and Anna Freud's interventions in child therapy.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 05 September 2023
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature delves into the profound implications of recurring portrayals of children engaging in violent, destructive, and occasionally restorative play with objects throughout a lengthy nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith elucidates, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be reconciled with the conventional portrayal of domestic childhood during that era. Instead, they suggest the existence of enactments of infant distress that align with the characteristics associated with post-psychoanalytic modernity, thereby creating a ripple effect within the literary texts that contain them. This includes the regression of developmental narratives, the elevation of wooden characters to newfound significance, the exposure of Realism's solid objects to peculiar fractures, and the unsettling blurring of boundaries between artificial and authentic interiority.

Toy Stories stands as the pioneering exploration of these scenes of anger and overwhelm, offering a groundbreaking reinterpretation of both the nineteenth century and its literary manifestations. By reimagining nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as foreshadowing the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic understanding of child's play that serves as a rich foundation for comprehending both the evolution of the novel and the enthusiastic reception of Melanie Klein's and Anna Freud's interventions in child therapy in Britain. In undertaking this, the book offers a vital reorientation of Klein and Freud's work, as well as their contentious disagreement regarding the inner life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.

Weight: 358g
Dimension: 153 x 230 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531503581