We recommend — Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderand, animals, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Charles Darwin, Charles Kingsley, children, children's literature, elementary education, English, evolution, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Jessica Straley, Lewis Carroll, Margaret Gatty, On the Origin of Species, Rare Books Department, Rudyard Kipling, species, The University of Utah, Victorian, vivisection

Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature
Jessica Straley
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016

From the publisher: “Evolutionary theory sparked numerous speculations about human development, and one of the most ardently embraced was the idea that children are animals recapitulating the ascent of the species. After Darwin’s Origin of Species, scientific, pedagogical, and literary works featuring beastly babes and wild children interrogated how our ancestors evolved and what children must do in order to repeat this course to humanity. Exploring fictions by Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson, Burnett, Charles Kingsley, and Margaret Gatty, Jessica Straley argues that Victorian children’s literature not only adopted this new taxonomy of the animal child, but also suggested ways to complete the child’s evolution. In the midst of debates about elementary education and the rising dominance of the sciences, children’s authors plotted miniaturized evolutions for their protagonists and readers and, more pointedly, proposed that the decisive evolutionary leap for both our ancestors and ourselves is the advent of the literary imagination.

Jessica Straley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Utah. She has published articles on evolutionary theory, vivisection, and Victorian literature in Victorian Studies and Nineteenth-Century Literature and has contributed a chapter to Drawing on the Victorian: The Palimsest of Victorian and Non-Victorian Graphic Texts, edited by Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell.”

The Rare Books Department is pleased to have contributed images to this book from its copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865).

: Straley, Evolution, p. 96

: Straley, Evolution, p. 103

: Straley, Evolution, p. 104

: Straley, Evolution, p. 112-113

Congratulations, Professor Straley!

Journal of the week — Vojvodjanski zbornik

23 Monday May 2016

Posted by rarebooks in Book of the Week

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Arad, art, artists, Begrade, Bogdan Ciplic, Bogdan Suput, Bogdan Teodorovic, Budapest, children's literature, colorism, cubism, culture, Europe, fascists, German, Hungarian, Hungary, impressionism, Ivan Tabakovic, journal, landscapes, linocuts, Milan Konjovic, Milenko Sevan, modernist, Munich, Nava Sudarska, Novi Sad, Paris, Petar Dobrovic, portraits, Prague, prisoner-of-war, Romania, Serbia, Serbian, Serbo-Hungarian Baranya-Baja Republic, Sima Cucic, Stepan Bonarov, Vojvodjansk, Vojvojdina, woodcuts, World War II, Yugoslavia, Zagreb

Vojvodjanski zbornik: almanah. vols. 1 (1938) and 2 (1939)
Novi Sad: S.n., 1938-1939
PG1400 I5 V64

This journal of art and culture was produced in Vojvojdina, an autonomous province of Serbia, on the eve of the second World War. The journal, published in these two issues only, assembled the work of modernist artists and writers of the region, including many contributors whose work is otherwise unpublished or unrecorded. Many of the artists and writers did not survive the war.

The journals include prose, poetry and, in the first volume, illustrations – including original graphic works (woodcuts and linocuts) by Bogdan Teodorovic, Stefan Bodnarov, Milan Konjovic (1898-1993), Milenko Servan, Bogdan Suput (1914-1942), Ivan Tabakovic (1898-1977), Nava Sudarska, Petar Dobrovic (1890-1942) and others.

The journal was edited by Bogdan Ciplic and writer and critic Sima Cucic (1905-1988). Today in Serbia, annual awards for achievements in the field of children’s literature are given in the name of Sima Cucic.

Milan Konjovic (1898-1993) became a prominent Serbian painter. He went to school in Prague, lived in Paris between 1924 and 1932 and traveled throughout Europe before returning to Vojvodjansk. He survived a German prisoner-of-war camp.

Bogdan Suput, considered one of the great Serbian painters of the first half of the twentieth century, was born in 1914. He also spent time in Paris. In 1939 he returned to Belgrade where he became a member of the art group, “Ten.” That April, the Germans invaded Yugoslavia. Suput survived German captivity, but was shot by Hungarian fascists in Novi Sad in 1942. An art school in Novi Sad, begun sixty years ago, is named after him.

Ivan Tabakovic was born in Arad, Hungary (now Romania). He studied art in Budapest and Zagreb. He traveled briefly in Munich. In 1930 he moved to Novi Sad and began teaching in Belgrade in 1938.

Petar Dobrovic, a proponent, along with Milan Konjovic, of Serbian colorism, was known for his portraits and landscapes. He experimented with impressionism and cubism. He was President of the short-lived, small Serbo-Hungarian Baranya-Baja Republic in 1921. He died in Belgrade during the German occupation.

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~ News from the Rare Books Department of Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah

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