Prof. Marah Gubar

Professor Gubar singles out the two key terms that crop up most often in her work on children’s literature and culture, she would say “agency” and “precocity.” What kind of agency (if any) do children have, and how does it differ from adult agency? Do young people participate in the production of culture, or merely have it thrust upon them by adults? When is a competent child perceived as precocious, and how has our idea of what constitutes precocity changed over time? These are some of the questions Gubar addresses in her work on Anglo-American children’s literature and culture.

Professor Gubar's book Artful Dodgers (2009) made two historical interventions that have continued to elaborate in more recent work. First, she contends that the middle-class ideology of childhood innocence and dependency was much slower to spread than literary critics and historians generally assume. A fascination with the precocious child -- not the Romantic “Child of Nature” -- was a defining characteristic of the Victorian and Edwardian “cult of the child.” Second, Gubar suggests that one reason why we tend to overestimate the dominance of the ideology of innocence is that we have paid too little attention to theatrical representations of childhood, considering that drama was the most popular and widely accessible form of culture during this era.

Gubar's main theoretical intervention into children’s literature and childhood studies has been to argue that creative writers whose audience includes young people have done a better job than theorists of generating nuanced, non-naïve accounts of children’s agency. When we theorize about childhood, Gubar contends, we should take our lead from them, as she does in her new book project when I map out a “kinship model” of childhood and distinguish it from more disabling “difference” and “deficit” models. Gubar's goal is to formulate a new theoretical paradigm that allows scholars to acknowledge children’s participation in youth culture without pretending that they are fully autonomous agents