U. C. Knoepflmacher

U. C. Knoepflmacher, Professor of English at Princeton University, director of a 1984 NEH Summer Seminar on Children's Literature, won the ChLA literary criticism award for "The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (March 1983). He has also published articles in recent volumes of Children's Literature, "Little Girls Without Their Curls: Female Aggression in Victorian Children's Literature by Women Writers" (1983), and "Resisting Growth Through Fairy Tale in Ruskin's The King of the Golden River" (1985). In these articles, Professor Knoepflmacher shows how authors such as Margaret Scott Gatty, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Juliana Horatia Ewing, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and John Ruskin, used the disguise and displacement of literary fantasy to express socially repressed aggression and sexuality as well as regressive yearnings for childhood. Through careful analyses of specific works, using relevant biographical information, Professor Knoepflmacher explores how authors handle divisions between male and female, child and adult—within the author, within the literary text, and within the text's audience.

Professor Knoepflmacher brings to the study of children's literature a thorough knowledge of nineteenth century British literature. In addition to many articles on a variety of genres and authors, he has published three books on the Victorian novel and has co-edited two others, collected essays on The Endurance of 'Frankenstein' and Nature and the Victorian Imagination. To the latter volume he contributed an essay surveying "Mutations of the Wordsworthian Child of Nature" in nineteenth century poetry and fiction. He explored the relationship between gender and genre in "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters," in The Endurance of 'Frankenstein,' and in recent articles on power and masculinity in George Eliot's fiction, on genre and the integration of gender from Wordsworth to Virginia Woolf, on the projection of "the female other" in the Victorian dramatic monologue.

Professor Knoepflmacher also has a special appreciation for visual art. Having taken his B.A. in architecture, he sometimes provides drawings for his publications, including the book on Frankenstein and his ChLA award winning "Balancing of Child and Adult." This article and that on Ruskin's King of the Golden River include analyses of illustrations that accompanied the published texts he discusses.

Professor Knoepflmacher's 1986 ChLA Conference address will be "Roads Half-taken: Travel, Fantasy, and Growing Up."