The Children's Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century (Children's Literature and Culture)

In The Children’s Book Business, Lissa Paul constructs a new kind of book biography. By focusing on Eliza Fenwick’s1805 product-placement novel, Visits to the Juvenile Library, in the context of Marjorie Moon’s 1990 bibliography, Benjamin Tabart’s Juvenile Library, Paul explains how twenty-first century cultural sensibilities are informed by late eighteenth-century attitudes towards children, reading, knowledge, and publishing. The thinking, knowing children of the Enlightenment, she argues, are models for present day technologically-connected, socially-conscious children; the increasingly obsolete images of Romantic innocent and ignorant children are bracketed between the two periods. By drawing on recent scholarship in several fields including book history, cultural studies, and educational theory, The Children’s Book Business provides a detailed historical picture of the landscape of some of the trade practices of early publishers, and explains how they developed in concert with the progressive pedagogies of several female authors, including Eliza Fenwick, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann and Jane Taylor. Paul’s revisionist reading of the history of children’s literature will be of interest to scholars working in eighteenth-century studies, book history, childhood studies, cultural studies, educational history, and children’s literature.

The Children's Book Business (Children's Literature and Culture)

Paul, Lissa

Teen & Young Adult

Routledge

In this lucid book, Lissa Paul writes with insight and authority about a matter all English teachers will find compelling: how the ways we analyze and teach literature shape our views and expectations of the world. Paul urges us to give the texts we teach sensitive multiple readings. She points out that variant versions and different editions of classic children's stories hold different meanings. From a feminist perspective, Paul considers such questions as : whose story is this? who is the reader? when and where was the reading produced? who is named and who is not? who gets punished and who gets praised? who speaks and who is silent? who acts and who is acted upon? who looks and who is observed? who fights for honor and who suffers? This accessible book will sharpen literary sensibilities and enhance our teaching by making us more responsive to such key questions.

Reading Otherways

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Thimble Press

In this lucid book, Lissa Paul writes with insight and authority about a matter all English teachers will find compelling: how the ways we analyze and teach literature shape our views and expectations of the world.

Heinemann

Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist (EARLY MODERN FEMINISMS)

This captivating biography traces the life of Eliza Fenwick, an extraordinary woman who paved her own unique path throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as she made her way from country to country as writer, teacher, and school owner.
Lissa Paul brings to light Fenwick’s letters for the first time to reveal the relationships she developed with many key figures of her era, and to tell Fenwick’s story as depicted by the woman herself. Fenwick began as a writer in the radical London of the 1790s, a member of Mary Wollstonecraft’s circle, and when her marriage crumbled, she became a prolific author of children’s literature to support her family. Eventually Fenwick moved to Barbados, becoming the owner of a school while confronting the reality of slavery in the British colonies. She would go on to establish schools in numerous cities in the United States and Canada, all the while taking care of her daughter and grandchildren and maintaining her friendships through letters that, as presented here, tell the story of her life.
Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Delaware Press

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Books by Paul, Lissa