| "Sympathetic Adventures: Robinsonnades, Settler Narratives, Historical Romances, and Fictionalized Histories for Children, 1802-1852," argues that the juvenile adventure novel has a longer genealogy than historians and critics typically accord it. Adventure's genealogy lies not only in imperialism, or in the construction of the Romantic child, but in earlier, eighteenth-century debates about the nature of sympathy, debates that play out in once popular but now non-canonical works by British authors such as Barbara Hofland, Agnes Strickland, Jefferys Taylor, and Harriet Martineau; French writer Jeanne Sylvie Malles de Beaulieu; Canadian Catharine Parr Traill; and Americans William Cardell and Susan Ridley Sedgwick. Recognizing the way that "adventure" has been retroactively constructed, and recovering those texts that have been suppressed by such generic boundaries, allows us to see not only the limits of our current definition of adventure, but, more importantly, how many of our other general categories for understanding the rise of children's literature have been misconstrued. Redefining the boundaries of adventure allows us to interrogate the common equation of early children's literature with the rise of the middle class. It also leads us to question the common assumption that the shift from flat to round, or sympathetic, characterization is a progressive development by connecting that shift to debates in historiography about the most effective way to model exemplarity. Finally, it allows us to recognize that the binary "didactic/entertaining" typically deployed to differentiate eighteenth-century from nineteenth-century children's literature has, like adventure itself, been retroactively constructed. Removing such generic blinders allows us to see the continuities, rather than the oppositions, between those works intended to teach and those meant to entertain. |
