Butler, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3540-5756
2024.
Heard but not seen: Gardens and their child ghosts in Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot and Lucy M. Boston.
Modernist Cultures
19
Item availability restricted. |
PDF
- Accepted Post-Print Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 15 April 2025 due to copyright restrictions. Download (313kB) | Request a copy |
Abstract
The post-Romantic idealisation of childhood in much late-Victorian and Edwardian literature often makes use of a garden setting as a locus amoenus associated (like childhood itself) with qualities of innocence. There was inevitably a disjunction between this idealised image and the lives of actual children, however. One aspect of that difference was the high incidence of child mortality, a phenomenon notably absent from most Golden Age children’s literature, though present in the lives of many of its authors. The depiction of child ghosts was one way of acknowledging this trauma. Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘They’ is a powerful case in point, one that echoes in the work of writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Lucy M. Boston. It is a text unusual both in the directness with which it exposes the disjunction noted above and in its willingness to explore (though not wholly embrace) new narrative and genre approaches to its resolution, some of which would go on to inform key texts of modernism and of twentieth-century rurality.
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Date Type: | Published Online |
Status: | In Press |
Schools: | English, Communication and Philosophy |
Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PE English P Language and Literature > PR English literature P Language and Literature > PZ Childrens literature |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Lucy M. Boston, ghosts, gardens |
Publisher: | Edinburgh University Press |
ISSN: | 2041-1022 |
Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 18 April 2024 |
Date of Acceptance: | 15 April 2024 |
Last Modified: | 19 Apr 2024 05:45 |
URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/167976 |
Actions (repository staff only)
Edit Item |