Haphazard Families: Romanticism, Nation, and the Prehistory of Modern Adoption: Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
Autor Eric C. Walkeren Paperback – 29 apr 2024
There are no provisions for adoption in English common law, and adoption wasn't legally formalized in England and Wales until 1926. But a century earlier, untimely adoptions navigated the new exceptionalism of childhood in Romanticism. In Haphazard Families, Eric C. Walker explores the history of the adopted child in Romantic-era England. Taking up the stories of both fictional and historical adoptees, he demonstrates how these children, diminished to nonpersons, shouldered the burden of social constructs of nation, family, gender, and class. Walker further demonstrates how Rousseau’s infamous failure to follow his own ideals of parenthood shaped British reactions in famous texts such as Frankenstein and Emma. Incorporating perspectives from Romantic scholarship and critical adoption studies and examining the stories of adopted children associated with Queen Caroline, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, the Wordsworth siblings, Mary Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, Letitia Landon, and others, Haphazard Families considers how Romantic constructions of childhood supply foundational structures of modern adoptee subjectivity.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259085
ISBN-10: 0814259081
Pagini: 250
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
ISBN-10: 0814259081
Pagini: 250
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.4 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture
Recenzii
"Examining important figures through the children they abandoned, adopted, and imagined abandoning and adopting, Walker illuminates the Romantic era by putting de facto adoption at the center of British Romanticism. His insightful analysis of the lives of real and fictional orphans adds an important chapter to the known history of adoption." —Elisabeth Wesseling, editor of The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Games
"Adding an important new chapter to the history of adoption, Haphazard Families shows how the transfer of children from one home to another shaped British culture. Walker's absorbing case studies illuminate the development of the Romantics' valorization of children." —Sarah Raff, author of Jane Austen's Erotic Advice
Notă biografică
Eric C. Walker is Professor Emeritus of English at Florida State University, where he was department chair and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is the author of Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen after War, which won the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Book Award.
Extras
Whatever grim actuarial fates befell the bodily selves of the five abandoned children of Thérèse Levasseur, their anonymous afterlives were remarkably lively—and prominently literary. Before prerevolutionary France and Britain digested the two volumes of posthumous Confessions in the 1780s, Europe had already heard abundantly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau about childhood and children. In Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse in 1761, Rousseau gallantly assigned sacrificial parenthood to the eponymous mother, who dies while rescuing a child from drowning. In Emile a year later, a proper father took center stage, mapping proper care for the eponymous child: “I have already said what must be done when a child cries to have this or that. I shall only add that as soon as he can ask by saying what he desires, and, to get it more quickly or overcome a refusal, he supports his request with tears, it ought to be irrevocably refused him.” An old set of irrevocable refusals haunts the book.
Rousseau confessed his shaky credentials as a parent in a throwaway passage early in Emile: “He who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become one. Neither poverty nor labors nor concern for public opinion exempts him from feeding his children and from raising them himself. Readers, you can believe me. I predict to whoever has vitals and neglects such holy duties that he will long shed bitter tears for his offense and will never find consolation for it.” After his posthumous broadcast of his serial offenses, Rousseau suffered the scorn of antirevolutionary polemic in Britain. Edmund Burke in 1791 twisted a tight tether between bad politics and bad parenting. Celebrated by revolutionary France, Rousseau smugly proclaims “universal benevolence,” glared Burke, but “his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection.” In his “mad Confession of his mad faults,” the champion of sentiment “melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers.”
Literary London teemed with radical philosophers in the early 1790s, who sometimes behaved parentally as bears, and sometimes not. Sharing occasional paths with Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft also scorched Rousseau’s “wild chimeras” in Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, her target his empty afterthoughts (“what nonsense!”) about the education of women in Emile. A year later, however, William Godwin, soon to be the father of Wollstonecraft’s most famous daughter, celebrated Emile and Rousseauvian childhood as a primary inspiration in the most radical work of philosophy in British Romanticism, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice—the first section of which, written by an unmarried man without children, is all about how to raise them.
Godwin’s busy London circle in the 1790s is the epicenter of the literary afterlives in Romantic-period Britain of Thérèse Levasseur’s lost children. The chapters in this book track manifold cross-channel aftershocks in the wake of seismic Rousseauvian childhood, which supplies background noise throughout. Instead of pan-European Romanticism, this book foregrounds adoption in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture. Modern Anglo-American de jure adoption emerges from distinctly English jurisprudence, sharply different from French tradition. Adoption does not exist in English common law, whereas adoption in France navigates a civil code heritage of Roman jurisprudence, where adoption was a tool of dynastic and state power. Adoption, in short, marks a sharp cultural divide between British and French practice, and this book tracks for modern Anglophone adoption the vexed and formative British side of that fault line, exemplified in a set of untimely de facto adoptions that help focus the prehistory of modern adoption.
Rousseau confessed his shaky credentials as a parent in a throwaway passage early in Emile: “He who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become one. Neither poverty nor labors nor concern for public opinion exempts him from feeding his children and from raising them himself. Readers, you can believe me. I predict to whoever has vitals and neglects such holy duties that he will long shed bitter tears for his offense and will never find consolation for it.” After his posthumous broadcast of his serial offenses, Rousseau suffered the scorn of antirevolutionary polemic in Britain. Edmund Burke in 1791 twisted a tight tether between bad politics and bad parenting. Celebrated by revolutionary France, Rousseau smugly proclaims “universal benevolence,” glared Burke, but “his heart was incapable of harbouring one spark of common parental affection.” In his “mad Confession of his mad faults,” the champion of sentiment “melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers.”
Literary London teemed with radical philosophers in the early 1790s, who sometimes behaved parentally as bears, and sometimes not. Sharing occasional paths with Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft also scorched Rousseau’s “wild chimeras” in Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, her target his empty afterthoughts (“what nonsense!”) about the education of women in Emile. A year later, however, William Godwin, soon to be the father of Wollstonecraft’s most famous daughter, celebrated Emile and Rousseauvian childhood as a primary inspiration in the most radical work of philosophy in British Romanticism, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice—the first section of which, written by an unmarried man without children, is all about how to raise them.
Godwin’s busy London circle in the 1790s is the epicenter of the literary afterlives in Romantic-period Britain of Thérèse Levasseur’s lost children. The chapters in this book track manifold cross-channel aftershocks in the wake of seismic Rousseauvian childhood, which supplies background noise throughout. Instead of pan-European Romanticism, this book foregrounds adoption in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture. Modern Anglo-American de jure adoption emerges from distinctly English jurisprudence, sharply different from French tradition. Adoption does not exist in English common law, whereas adoption in France navigates a civil code heritage of Roman jurisprudence, where adoption was a tool of dynastic and state power. Adoption, in short, marks a sharp cultural divide between British and French practice, and this book tracks for modern Anglophone adoption the vexed and formative British side of that fault line, exemplified in a set of untimely de facto adoptions that help focus the prehistory of modern adoption.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Thérèse Levasseur’s Lost Children Chapter 1 The Burden of Romantic Childhood Chapter 2 National Children: The Madness of William Austin Chapter 3 Natural Children: Jane Austen and Adoption Chapter 4 Abandoned Children: Mary Shelley, Rousseau, and Frankenstein Chapter 5 Unexplained Children: Basil Caroline Montagu and the Wordsworth Circle Chapter 6 Found Children: Emma Isola and Charles and Mary Lamb Conclusion Untimely Adoption Appendix Austen Family Accounts of the Edward Austen Adoption Bibliography Index
Descriere
Examines literary and historical adoptions and constructions of childhood in Romantic-era England to reveal their influence on later Western adoption systems.