Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood ed. by James Holt McGavran, Jr. (review)

James Holt McGavran's third collection of essays on Romanticism as it is defined in the textual lives of, and literatures for and about, children continues the exploration of a perception he articulates in the introduction to the second volume in the series, Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations: "our culture is still pervaded . . . by the Romantic conception of childhood that first emerged two hundred years ago" (13). Each of these three collections is loosely structured around a dichotomous opposition: the first volume, Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, interrogates contemporaneous as well as subsequent tension between Romantic notions of fantasy and reason, pitting the visionary against the moralist; the second brokers the debate regarding the myth of Romantic childhood, whether it is viewed as a "transhistorical time of innocence and spirituality," or as an"often sentimental, sexist, but socially useful ideological manifestation" (12); and the third both charts pedagogical arguments surrounding what is to be taught and what is to be learned and plumbs the anxieties of former children as they find themselves the guardians and, most importantly, the teachers of what they arguably still perceive to be essentially the Romantic child. As a group, the essays are interesting and offer insights into material constructively added to dialogues about Romanticism. The single most common failure among them is an authorial ambition that exceeds the scope of these short articles—a number of the essays feel cramped by the space. Nevertheless, this third collection is a welcome addition both to the series and to the discipline.

The twelve essays in this collection roam broadly through both time and media: from the multiple evocations of Wordsworth's seminal definitions and considerations of childhood—McGavran's own "Missing But Presumed Alive: Lost Children of Lost Parents in Two Major Romantic Poems, 'Michael' and 'Christabel,'" and Jochen Petzold's defining referent from The Prelude: "The End Was Not Ignoble? Bird-Nesting between Cruelty, Manliness, and Science Education in British Children's Periodicals, 1850-1900"; to investigations of Alan Moore's graphic novels and the Teletubbies in Roderick McGillis's "The Sustaining Paradox: Romanticism and Alan Moore's Promethea Novels" (the essay that most closely interrogates the eponymous focus on "beauty and fear"), and Jan Susina's "Teletubbies and the Conflict of the Romantic Concept of Childhood and the Realities of Postmodern Parenting." Several of the essays address specific gender issues: angry or oversleeping girls in texts pre-dating and following Wordsworth's: Malini Roy's "Mary Wollstonecraft's Childish Resentment: The Angry Girl, The Wrongs and the Rights of Woman," and Dorothy H. McGavran's "Oversleeping Oneself: Elizabeth Gaskell's Wake-Up Call in Wives and Daughters"; the controversies in crafting a specifically Romantic boyhood: Petzold's essay, mentioned above, dealing with material farthest off the beaten path but one of the most successful in the collection, both for its originality and its ambition appropriate to the scope; and Mary Ellis Gibson's consideration of magazines that shaped both boys and girls for their gender-designated roles in Victoria's empire:"The Perils of Reading: Children's Missionary Magazines and the Making of Victorian Imperialist Subjectivity."

The most common thread among these disparate essays is the tracing of specific pedagogical philosophies, most frequently Rousseau's. Most directly, Claudia Mills interestingly charts in four late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century children's novels a continued engagement with Rousseau's convictions regarding the primacy in any program of education of children's own interests as the guide and motivator, as well as the belief that immersion in the world of Nature is necessarily formative ("Rousseau Redux: Romantic Re-Visions of Nature and Freedom in Recent Children's Literature about Homeschooling"). Andrew Smyth also explores how Maria Edgeworth's embedded pedagogies relate to Rousseau's prescriptions as well as how they reflect the specific...