Happily Ever After? Ambiguous Closure in Modernist Children's Literature

This study explores the fruitful interchanges between modernist literary technique, the culture of modernity, and children's literature. While some recent scholarship has examined works that modernist authors like Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Cummings produced for child readers, modernist children's literature remains a largely neglected field. Examining texts by A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), Gertrude Stein (The World is Round), and J.M. Barrie (Peter and Wendy) through the lens of literary modernism, this project explicates how these authors adapt modernist techniques, ideologies, and preoccupations in their writing for children. Focusing on themes of alienation, disillusionment, memory, imagination, gender construction, child development, and the disruption of Arcadian myths, I argue that these texts adopt modernist techniques to explore, uphold, or challenge modernity's construction of the child. Embracing modernist indeterminacy and ambiguity, these texts directly engage with constructions of childhood as a mode of modernist experimentation. Recontextualizing these children's works in the context of literary modernism reveals how the two genres are symbiotically related, thereby broadening our understanding of literary culture and discourses of childhood in the early twentieth century.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Immediate Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2016

Author dc:creator

• Rovan, Marcie Panutsos

Contributors dc:contributor

• Linda Kinnahan
• Judy Suh
• Marah Gubar

• A.A. Milne
• Arcadia
• Children's Literature
• Gertrude Stein
• J.M. Barrie
• Modernism

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1125

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dsc.duq.edu:etd-2141