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This dissertation argues that ironic representations of childhood fueled modernism’s emergence and set the stage for a little-known, but unprecedented body of modernist children’s literature. Between the haunted children of Henry James and the many drowned children in Gertrude Stein’s wartime writing, modernism shape-shifts around the figure of the disenchanted child. In the first half of the dissertation, I examine the figure of “the child in the midst” from the emergently modernist writings of Henry James to the late modernism of Djuna Barnes. In What Maisie Knew and in The Turn of the Screw, James ironically turns figurations of childhood ― from simplicity to division, from transparency to opacity, from innocence to ambivalence ― and in so doing he also turns the novel toward ironic, ambivalent, and limited points of view. At the other end of the modernist timeline, Djuna Barnes’s Robin Vote is figured as a child and as a modernist work of art. Through her character’s devastating conjuncture of modernism and childhood, Barnes performs a double critique of figures (the child) and narratives (modernism) of re-invention on the eve of WWII. The waning years of modernism are a watershed for modernist children’s literature. In the second half of the dissertation, I argue that these two phenomena are profoundly linked. The turn to children’s literature operates as a politically radical extension of modernism’s longstanding challenge to childhood and serves, in addition, as a crucial aspect of late modernism’s rejection of high modernist methods and forms. In his works for children, W.E.B. Du Bois compares the problem of the color line to the child/adult divide and seeks to democratize the gap between them in part by addressing the black child as an adult. Stein’s wartime writings about and for children are similarly anti-nostalgic. The disillusionment of the lost generation is rooted for Stein in the nineteenth-century romanticization of childhood. Stein’s late modernism is preoccupied with representing and with killing children, with writing and with destroying children’s narratives as the conjoined prerequisites for killing the nineteenth-century child in the midst.

ETD_4137

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Michelle H. Phillips

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000066938

doi:10.7282/T34F1PH6

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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