BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Rebuilding Britain through Modernist Children's books - Professor 
 Kimberley Reynolds\, Newcastle University
DTSTART:20151126T170000Z
DTEND:20151126T183000Z
UID:TALK62522@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Lucian Stephenson
DESCRIPTION:Britain entered the twentieth century with an acute housing sh
 ortage. In cities some of the nation's poorest families lived in 'one or t
 wo rooms ... sleeping three and four to a bed with never enough chairs (or
  boxes) all to sit down at once' (1913 Fabian Women's Group report\, Round
  About a Pound a Week). Poor children in the countryside fared no better. 
 For many children\, home was far from clean\, spacious or safe. It would b
 e hard to deduce this from most children's books published in the first ha
 lf of the last century\, however. For example\, popular images of home ran
 ged from cosy cottages as pictured by Beatrix Potter and Ernest Shepard to
  large town houses of the kind lived in by the Banks children in P.L. Trav
 ers' Mary Poppins (1934). From the 1930s\, a handful of left-leaning moder
 nist writers\, publishers and architects attempted to focus readers' atten
 tion on the urgent need for new housing and to involve children in the deb
 ate about what modern houses\, villages\, towns and cities should look lik
 e. As well as designing for children and incorporating children in archite
 ctural photographs and designs\, professional architects and some sympathe
 tic children's writers mounted an unprecedented campaign to capture the yo
 uthful imagination. Their efforts focused on publishing books that held ou
 t the promise that new buildings and modernist design principles could be 
 instrumental in positive social change. This talk will examine a selection
  of these texts as well as counterblast in the form of a picturebook that 
 examines the impact of suburban lifestyles on women and children.\n\nKimbe
 rley Reynolds is the Professor of Children's Literature in the School of E
 nglish Literature\, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University in th
 e UK. She has lectured and published widely on a variety of aspects of chi
 ldren's literature. Recent publications include an audio book\, Children's
  Literature between the Covers (Modern Scholar\, 2011) and Children's Lite
 rature in the Oxford University series of Very Short Introductions (2012).
  In 2013 she received the International Brothers Grimm Award. With the hel
 p of a Major Leverhulme Fellowship she has recently completed a monograph 
 titled Left Out: the forgotten tradition of radical publishing for childre
 n in Britain\, 1910-1949 (Oxford University Press\, 2016).
LOCATION:MAB 104\, Mary Allan Building\, Homerton College\, Hills Road\, C
 ambridge CB2 8PQ
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR