Professional Notes and Announcements
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Professional Notes and Announcements
NEH Summer Seminar
Dartmouth College will offer a NEH Summer Seminar for college teachers in the field of children's literature, 18 June to 12 August, 1995. The seminar titled "Subversion and Socialization in American Children's Literature," will study texts written during 1780-1914. For information, contact John Seelye, Department of English, University of Florida, 4008 Turlington Hall, Gainesville, Florida 32611-2036. Deadline for applications is 1 March 1995.
Paper Call for a Special Issue of Children's Literature
Cross-writing Child and Adult: Fictions with Dual Readerships, Authors with Dual Audiences
A surprising number of authors have written for both children and adults, from such earlier writers as Sarah Fielding and Maria Edgeworth through nineteenth-century greats such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Makepeace Thackeray to moderns such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Indeed, most of the women who made the DNB wrote for children as well as for adults: Frances Hodgson Burnett is famous but not atypical. Many literary works predicate a dual audience that includes both children and adults. Considering cross-writing—the authors and works that transgress the usual demarcations separating children's from adult literature—focuses attention on issues central to contemporary critical theory and cultural studies, for example audience, discourse communities, the interpretive conventions readers bring to texts. Notions of race, class, gender, and communal censorship are also relevant. What continuities or divergences mark the writings of those who create separate works for child and adult? How do we know which is which? How does writing for children or imagining a dual readership for a work influence authorial decisions and/or the author's rank in literary history? How does including children impinge on canonical standing? Theorized investigations of these and [End Page 244] similar questions from any variety of sophisticated critical stance are welcome. Send one copy to EACH of the guest editors for that volume: Mitzi Myers (2206 Bedford Drive, Fullerton, Ca. 92631) and U. C. Knoepflmacher (English, Princeton University). [End Page 245]
