Overview

Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties explores the relationship between the zoological and palaeontological specimens brought back from around the world in the long nineteenth century—be they alive, stuffed or fossilised—and the development of children’s literature at this time. Children’s literature emerged as dizzying numbers of new species flooded into Britain with scientific expeditions, from giraffes and hippopotami to kangaroos, wombats, platypuses or sloths. As the book argues, late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian children’s writers took part in the urge for mass education and presented the world and its curious creatures to children, often borrowing from their museum culture and its objects to map out that world. This original exploration illuminates how children’s literature dealt with the new ordering of the world, offering a unique viewpoint on the construction of science in the long nineteenth century.

Full Product Details

9783030725266

Table of Contents

Reviews

“By weaving together histories of children’s literature and animal collections, Talairach offers in Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties a useful revision of both of those histories. ... the most impressive feature of this book is the way that it, too, is a collection, an astounding one at that. Talairach brings together a tremendous array of primary and secondary sources to offer within this monograph his own unrivaled collection of curious beasties.” (Virginia Zimmerman, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (3), 2023) “Talairaich has masterfully synthesized a vast and rich array of research on both obscure and familiar children’s texts, tracing numerous allusions back to their origins and teasing apart the network of ideas in Victorian museum culture.” (Anna McCullough, Modern Language Review, Vol. 118 (3), July, 2023)

“Talairaich has masterfully synthesized a vast and rich array of research on both obscure and familiar children’s texts, tracing numerous allusions back to their origins and teasing apart the network of ideas in Victorian museum culture.” (Anna McCullough, Modern Language Review, Vol. 118 (3), July, 2023)

Author Information

Laurence Talairach is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and Associate Researcher at the Alexandre Koyré Centre for the History of Science and Technology, France. Her research specialises in the interrelations between nineteenth-century literature, medicine and science.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available