Overview

Unrecognized in the United States and resisted in many wealthy, industrialized nations, children's rights to participation and self-determination are easily disregarded in the name of protection. In literature, the needs of children are often obscured by protectionist narratives, which redirect attention to parents by mythologizing the supposed innocence, victimization, and vulnerability of children rather than potential agency. In Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children's Rights, author Susan Honeyman traces how the best of intentions to protect children can nonetheless hurt them when leaving them unprepared to act on their own behalf. Honeyman utilizes literary parallels and discursive analysis to highlight the unchecked protectionism that has left minors increasingly isolated in dwindling social units and vulnerable to multiple injustices made possible by eroded or unrecognized participatory rights. Each chapter centers on a perilous pattern in a different context: """"women and children first"""" rescue hierarchies, geographic restriction, abandonment, censorship, and illness. Analysis from adventures real and fictionalized will offer the reader high jinx and heroism at sea, the rush of risk, finding new families, resisting censorship through discovering shared political identity, and breaking the pretenses of sentimentality.

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9781496821119

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This timely monograph asks us to look beyond the prioritizing of childhood in contemporary culture and to see the negative consequences of privatizing families, islanding childhood, [and] worshiping children individually but obscuring them as a political interest group (177). Honeyman skewers many contemporary beliefs about, and aspirations for, children. Her direct language is neatly balanced by scholarly rigor and thorough archival research.--Michelle J. Smith Children's Literature, Volume 48, 2020

Author Information

Susan Honeyman, Kearney, Nebraska, is professor of English at the University of Nebraska. She is author of Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction; Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature; and Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability.

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