| Popis: |
The author examines the role of animal characters in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period moral tales for children, concentrating on a selection of stories by Dorothy Kilner and Sarah Trimmer which either feature an animal narrator or are focalised through an animal character. Such tales take their point of departure, Hoing argues, in a sense of the ontological closeness of animal and infant, of their shared lack of adult rationality. Hence, the animal characters are used in these stories as both a metaphor for and a metonym of the child reader, whose moral education requires them to identify with but also to transcend the pre-rational animal protagonist. The narrative structures of these tales, in Hoing’s analysis, therefore combine both an Enlightenment view of infancy as a limited developmental stage with an emergent Romantic valorisation of the sensibility and sympathy of infancy. |
