Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Childhood and the Politics of Play

Michelle Beissel Heath is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, USA, where she specializes in children’s literature and in nineteenth-century British literature. She has published articles on children’s citizenship, play, gender, and literary texts of the long nineteenth century.

Introduction: Play and Literary Citizenship

1. Dual/Dueling with Literary Legacies: Battles for Cultural Respectability and National Pride in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century U.S. and British Play and Games

2. Croquet and the Growing Girl: Playful Citizenship in Carroll, Yonge, and Alcott

3. Citizenship on the World’s Stage: Kipling’s Novels of Boyhood, the Boy Scouts, and Upton’s Golliwogg Books

4. "‘Art for Art’ is their motto": Aesthetic Citizenship, Children’s Play, and Class Politics in the Eyes and Hands of Burnett and Nesbit

Conclusion: It Takes a Village to Raise a Puppet: Twentieth Century Freedom, Limit, and Deviance in the Adventure Playground Movement and in Conceptions of Playful Child Citizenship in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Noddy Books