Artful Dodgers

• Challenges the critical commonplace that children's authors and members of the cult of the child wholeheartedly embraced Romantic notions about childhood innocence
• Offers a new interpretation of the often mentioned but rarely discussed "cult of the child," one which (for the first time) takes into account the Victorians' own richly self-aware discourse on this topic and uses it to depart from the trendy notion that the Victorians "eroticized innocence" (an idea popularized by James Kincaid)
• Makes use of previously ignored texts by female children's authors to offer a new account of the rise of the child narrator, as well as unearthing a wealth of new evidence about the presence of Victorian children on the stage and in the audience to map out children's theater as a distinct dramatic subgenre

Readership: Scholars of Victorian era children's literature, readers of journals like Victorian Literature and Culture and The Lion and the Unicorn

Marah Gubar, University of Pittsburgh

"an engaging and provocative analysis of the 20th-century critical construction of Victorian childhood ... she offers a compelling argument that late 19th-century children's fiction is both more sophisticated and more various than has been widely assumed." - Shelley King, Times Higher Education

"full of incisive close reading, rigorous yet flexible in method, richly and variously contextualized. It is literary study of a high order." - James Eli Adams, NBOL-19

Preface
Introduction: "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast"
"Our Field": The Rise of the Child Narrator
2: Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island
3: Reciprocal Aggression: Unromantic Agency in the Art of Lewis Carroll
4: Partners in Crime: E. Nesbit and the Art of Thieving
5: The Cult of the Child and the Controversy over Child Actors
6: Burnett, Barrie, and the Emergence of Children's Theatre
Index