Little Girls, Big Dreams
Creativity and Non-conformity in British Children's Literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12974913 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kiera Vaclavik (0000-0002-3712-0706, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-16 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Girlhood Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1938-8209 • E-ISSN: 1938-8322 |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3167/ghs.2023.160202 |
| OpenAlex | W4382542560 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 2 |
Published 70 years apart and adopting contrasting approaches to real-world detail, Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes bear a number of affinities. Both portray dynamic, creative, and skillful girls whose dreams and destinies they probe. In this article, I highlight Alice's inventiveness and the curtailment of her dreams, then examine Streatfeild's employment of a production of Alice in Wonderland to delineate two distinct modes of female creativity. While the endings of the two works seem distinct, offering far greater possibilities of self-fulfilment for Streatfeild's heroines, neither is unproblematic. If Streatfeild has no time for the interpersonal relationships and domesticity imposed upon Alice, she nevertheless insists upon a hierarchized value system that downgrades the very creativity it purportedly celebrates
Aesthetics · Alice (programming language · Art · Art history · Ballet · Creativity · Dance · Interpersonal communication · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Computer Science · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Psychology · Social Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Highly cited | No |
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