Wednesday Talk: Sept. 25, 2024, 10am-12pm – hybrid

Speaker: Lissa Paul, Professor of English, Brock University

Title: “Children’s Literature and Literary History: From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and from The Big Bad Wolf to Tom Wolfe”

Abstract: Not so very long ago an editor at a prestigious university press, on learning that I was writing on the children’s books by the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes, asked if Hughes wrote for children under his own name. The implication was that writing for children was a shameful occupation, akin to churning out romance novels for quick cash. By the late twentieth century, as approaches to understanding literary texts began to include attention to perspectives (including race and gender) beyond those strictly confined to words fixed on a page, scholars found that the study of children’s literature offered new ways of understanding literature, that is literature unqualified by the “for children” designation. In my talk I’ll address the ways in which children’s literature has evolved from being classified as something adults left behind to its current status, sitting comfortably and without apology in the academy as well as the nursery.

Bio: Lissa Paul (PhD, FRSC) is a professor in the Department of English at Brock University as well as the director the PhD Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Her attention to the small and the overlooked has resulted in high-impact projects in multiple disciplines including poetry for children, the foundational scholarly apparatus for studies in children’s literature, the recovery of histories of 19th century Barbadian fugitive enslaved people, and the transnational life and letters of forgotten 18^th century British author and teacher Eliza Fenwick.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/7uM3b91dnk

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon.  The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.