Representations of Childhood in American Modernism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 1-11

3. American Modernism, Childhood, and the Inward Turn

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 13-35

4. The “Partagé Child” and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 37-64

5. An Innocence Worse than Evil in The Turn of the Screw

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 65-89

6. Nightwood: A Bedtime Story

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 91-117

7. The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 119-161

8. Drowning in Childhood: Gertrude Stein’s Late Modernism

   • Mason Phillips

   Pages 163-210

9. Back Matter

   Pages 211-234

   PDF

This book documents American modernism’s efforts to disenchant adult and child readers alike of the essentialist view of childhood as redemptive, originary, and universal. For James, Barnes, Du Bois, and Stein, the twentieth century’s move to position the child at the center of the self and society raised concerns about the shrinking value of maturity and prompted a critical response that imagined childhood and children’s narratives in ways virtually antagonistic to both. In this original study, Mason Phillips argues that American modernism’s widespread critique of childhood led to some of the period’s most meaningful and most misunderstood experiments with interiority, narration, and children’s literature.

• American modernism
• Childhood
• Children’s literature
• Late modernism
• black childhood
• innocence

“Phillips is a scrupulous, imaginative reader, and her book re-orients the study of modernism in the United States in persuasive and interesting ways.  The handling of canonical texts—Turn of the Screw, Nightwood—is sharp, and Phillips brings into play lesser-known texts by Stein, Dubois, and others.  The book is also a particularly sophisticated addition to the scholarship that bridges queer critique and representations of the child.” (Peter Stoneley, Professor of English, University of Reading, UK and author of “Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature” and “A Queer History of the Ballet”)

“Phillips’s provocative study opens up new ways of thinking about American modernism, offering a truly innovative reading of this crucial moment in literary history. Arguing that modernists resisted the traditional iteration of childhood as insulated, inspirational, and sentimental, Phillips focuses critical attention instead on the modernist interrogation of the failures and limitations of childhood innocence. Recognizing childhood’s central position within the most experimental literary movement of the twentieth century, Phillips offers her readers a deeply researched, beautifully written, profoundly convincing reinvention of what we thought we knew about modernism’s attitude towards youth.” (Katharine Capshaw, Associate Professor of English, University of Connecticut, USA)

“A nuanced and illuminating account of a neglected topic. Phillips’s book enriches our understanding of American literary history by weaving together insightful analysis of texts for and about children by major modernist authors whose engagement with children’s literature and childhood has not been fully acknowledged.” (Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of Literature, MIT, USA)

• Fairfax, USA

  Mason Phillips

 Mason Phillips is a Lecturer in the English Department at Howard University, USA. He works in the fields of modernism, African American literature, and childhood studies and has published in numerous journals including African American Review, Children’s Literature, and PMLA.

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