On ‘Lucy Fairchild’s Journal’: Martha Mary Sherwood, didacticism, and child voice

Cocks, N. (2023) On ‘Lucy Fairchild’s Journal’: Martha Mary Sherwood, didacticism, and child voice. In: 2023 The World Bang Jung Hwan Conference, 2023-11-09 - 2023-11-11, The President Hotel/Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, pp. 29-38.

Abstract/Summary

This short conference paper questions prevailing discourses of 'child voice' through reading a chapter from Martha Sherwood's classic of C19th didactic literature, The Fairchild Family. That text is read not simply to oppose liberal humanist accounts of 'child voice' because of the strict, unidirectional education it promotes, but also because it brings into question the unified subject, whose voice can represent its inner being in an unproblematic fashion.