About this Event
Please join the Northrop Frye Centre in welcoming our guest speaker, Katherine Wakely-Mulroney, for her talk on "Measuring Childhood in the Long Eighteenth Century".
All are welcome. A light lunch will be provided.
About the Talk
How did the language and design of early children’s books express changing attitudes towards childhood? High child mortality rates in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries led Christian educators to create spiritually improving works that could be read and understood by very young audiences. These books addressed profound concepts such as death and eternity in small, closely spaced type, providing readers with the maximum amount of information in the most compact form possible. By the late eighteenth century, childhood was increasingly viewed as a longer developmental process. Writers and publishers began producing shorter books with simpler language, larger lettering, and fewer words per page, trusting that readers would live long enough to receive information at a slower, more gradual rate. Their works anticipated and shaped modern children’s literature, which presents complex information tailored to the capacities of different ages.
About the Speaker
Katherine Wakely-Mulroney is an Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is the author of The Origins of Children’s Literature, 1658-1834 (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), and has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature and childhood. She is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry (Routledge, 2018) and judge for The Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry.
Event venue & nearby stays
VC102, Victoria College, Toronto, Canada
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