An Evolutionary Model of the Boy's Quest, 1863-1901

In tandem with the coming-of-age of children's literature itself, this dissertation explores the growth of the boy's quest-romance, a sub-genre of nineteenth-century boy's adventure literature. Like Franco Moretti, who observes that literary forms evolve according to the "pressure of cultural selection," I posit an evolutionary model of the boy's quest, focusing on the work of George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, R.L. Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling as forming a hypothetical branching of this model (Graphs, Maps, Trees 72). By framing close-readings of primary texts within the historical and literary cultural climate of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, I trace how the boy's quest evolves in response to popular tastes: first by disengaging itself from its Evangelical roots, and later by initiating a modernist experimentation with the linear quest structure. While Jacqueline Rose argues that children's writing resists such experimentation, my study challenges this view by demonstrating that children's literature does not simply reflect cultural change but also pioneers this change with its capacity for generic innovation. Focusing on the intersection between gender and genre in these texts, I begin by exploring this model of the boy's quest in MacDonald's Princess books (1872, 82) in order to test its gendered restrictions; by shifting his focus from Irene's search for identity to that of her male companion Curdie, MacDonald reinforces the connective thread between masculinity and quest-romance that my dissertation outlines. I next explore Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1863), in which the male narrator's emphasis on physical courage or "pluck" distances Kingsley's work from that of his Evangelical contemporaries and establishes an important precedent for Stevenson's "a-moral" romances. By highlighting David's ability to manipulate his own representation as a storyteller, I aim both to overturn the caricature of "poor Davie" common in criticism of Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893), and to suggest that Stevenson is introducing metafiction to the quest-romance, a trend that Kipling continues in the Mowgli stories (1893-5) and Kim (1901). In attempting to evade his protagonists' adult roles as imperial agents, Kipling dismantles the linear quest in favour of perpetual childhood, establishing an important precedent for J.M. Barrie into the early twentieth century.Ph.D.2017-06-30 00:00:0