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Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting …