- Dissertations of Note
In his analysis of a wide variety of animal fiction written between 1870 and 1945, Asker explores the shifting moral, political, and social bases for using animals as fictional characters. The dissertation is noteworthy not because it is concerned primarily with animals in children's literature, but because of the critical approach to animal characters in realistic, figurative, and fantasy literature. Asker concludes that "the modern Bestiarists represent a wide variety of fictional techniques and an equally extensive range of thematic interest." This conclusion is substantiated in the dissertation.
Cunningham's dissertation is written from the perspective of a social scientist and is both a historical survey of ideas about childhood and children's literature in Victorian literature and a projection of issues, unresolved in the nineteenth century, that he feels should be addressed in the twentieth century. He is particularly concerned about the dichotomy which appears to exist between the way a child views a children's book and the way it is perceived by an adult. He concludes that "at the very least we need to be reminded again and again that our taken-for-granted notions, notably our notions about childhood and child-rearing, may not be assumed to possess universal and external validity."
This dissertation is a psychological and sociological study as much as a literary analysis of Hawthorne's treatment of childhood and of his deepening awareness of the complexity of the child, although Elsen is primarily concerned with the metaphoric images of children in Hawthorne's fiction. These she calls "Child-figures" and views as vehicles by which Hawthorne "can express the best and worst of human nature."
Somewhat predictably Golden concludes that fifth graders responded more perceptively to realistic stories than to fantasy tales; eighth graders were more receptive to fantasy. See also Catherine Elizabeth Studier's "A Comparison of the Responses of Fifth Grade Students to Modern Fantasy and Realistic Fiction." Ed.D. diss. University of Georgia, 1978. 135 pp. DAI 39:7201-02A.
Hughes's work is a way of getting at Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward children and childhood through the ideas of fictional writers and educators. Given the theses that children are creatures of unrestrained passion, that they must be protected from themselves, that lack of self-control may be a virtue or a vice (depending on the interpreter), and that imagination and spontaneity are inexorably linked to childlikeness, Hughes explores the treatment of childlike characters in Wycherley, Fielding, Sterne, Cleland, and Beckford.
Johnson is not concerned with rehashing historical studies of "the new image of the child in the nineteenth century." He is most concerned with Emerson's perception of childhood, based on his own childhood and exhibited in such essays as "The American Scholar," "Education," "Domestic Life," and "Historic Notes, Life and Letters in New England." Johnson concludes that Emerson should be viewed "as an innovator not only of a new philosophy called Transcendentalism, but of a new image of the child laying a foundation for our child-centered culture." See also Thomas Leonard Jenkins's "Evolution of the Youth Figure in the Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal." Ph.D. diss. University of Colorado...