I am delighted to be part of the 2020–2021 speaker series hosted by the Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign! On October 8, at 1:00 pm EST, I will give a talk via Zoom titled “A Nasty, Biting, Thing: The Wayward Child as Collaborator.” The talk will look backward to some of the adult-child collaborations I explored in Between Generations and forward to my next project on children and vision.
In particular, I’ll focus on three intergenerational collaborations forged over art: the “Nursery Nonsense” feature in the popular Aunt Judy’s Magazine, which invited young artists to illustrate (and undermine) stories narrated by their parents; the 1897 nonsense bestiary Animal Land Where There Are No People, a collection of grotesque creatures created by four-year-old Sybil Corbet and recorded by her mother, Katharine (see above); and Flora, a 1919 collection of sometimes-subversive drawings by child artist Pamela Bianco, accompanied by poems by Walter de la Mare. All three illuminate shifting ideas of childhood and creativity circulating at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. More importantly, they challenge how we as scholars typically approach the place of the child in cultural production and children’s ability to acknowledge, and negotiate, those roles.
I look forward to sharing this work and will share the Zoom link when it’s available. I encourage you to check out the other speakers who are participating in this exciting series:
Victoria Ford Smith 