Children's Literature and Modern Thought: Bridging the Barrier of World War I

This project explores the relationship between literature directed toward children and literature not specific to children, and traces similarities, differences, and intersections. I believe that children’s literature has a unique ability to topically anticipate trends in adult literature, and this project will prove that hypothesis in three ways. First, I will provide a limited history of children’s and adult literature, paying specific attention to the decades between 1860 and 1940. Second, I will perform a close reading of three texts—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll and In Parenthesis by David Jones—illustrating specific examples of three very different stories with incredibly similar core elements. Finally, I will support my claims with an analysis of topic models assembled via MALLET and derived from a unique corpus of 125 texts of both adult and children’s literature published from 1859 to 1937.