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This book reveals how the period´s transforming identities affected by social, economic, religious, and national energies offers rich opportunities in which to analyze the relationship between identity and transformation. At the heart of this study is this question: what is the relationship between Victorian children´s literature, its readers, and their psychic development? Ruth Y. Jenkins uses Julia Kristeva´s theory of abjection to uncover the presence of cultural anxieties and social tensions in works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Carroll, Stevenson, Burnett, Ballantyne, Nesbit, Tucker, Sewell, and Rossetti.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1-Introduction: Emerging Identities and the Practice of Possibility

2-Imagining the Abject in Kingsley, MacDonald, and Carroll: Disrupting Dominant Values and Cultural Identity in Children´s Literature

3- Gender, Abjection, and Coming of Age: Games, Dolls, and Stories

4-Constructing the Self: Connection and Separation

5-Giving Voice to Abjection: Experience and Empathy

6-Engendering Abjection´s Sublime: Frances Hodgson Burnett´s The Secret Garden

7- Embodying Herethics: Rossetti´s Speaking Likenesses

Conclusion-Abjection´s Sublime: Imagining Love

Notes

Bibliography

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Ruth Y. Jenkins is Professor of English at California State University, Fresno, USA. She is the author of Reclaiming Myths of Power: The Victorian Spiritual Crisis and Women Writers and numerous articles on Victorian literature and culture, children´s literature, feminist, cultural, and writing theory.

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