Providing Models Of Dying: Middle-Class Childhood, Death, and American Juvenile Fiction, 1790–1860

Between 1790 and 1860, American children were avid consumers of fiction that presented stylized death rituals within antebellum bourgeois culture. As the future of the nation, children needed to be acculturated into the cultural practices of dying and mourning from an early age. This article argues that frank discussions of death in children's literature functioned to demystify the ubiquity of death for young people, teach children to accept death, provide model performances of death, and highlight children's active embrace of middle- class deathways. The Second Great Awakening, more than any other event, resulted in an increase in authors' representations of children as active shapers of death culture.