Stephanie Olsen

Juvenile Nation (eBook, ePUB)

Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880-1914

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In the first five months of the Great War, one million men volunteered to fight. Yet by the end of 1915, the British government realized that conscription would be required. Why did so many enlist, and conversely, why so few? Focusing on analyses of widely felt emotions related to moral and domestic duty, Juvenile Nation broaches these questions in new ways.

Juvenile Nation examines how religious and secular youth groups, the juvenile periodical press, and a burgeoning new group of child psychologists, social workers and other 'experts' affected society's perception of a new problem character, the 'adolescent'. By what means should this character be turned into a 'fit' citizen? Considering qualities such as loyalty, character, temperance, manliness, fatherhood, and piety, Stephanie Olsen discusses the idea of an 'informal education', focused on building character through emotional control, and how this education was seen as key to shaping the future citizenry of Britain and the Empire.

Juvenile Nation recasts the militarism of the 1880s onwards as part of an emotional outpouring based on association to family, to community and to Christian cultural continuity. Significantly, the same emotional responses explain why so many men turned away from active militarism, with duty to family and community perhaps thought to have been best carried out at home. By linking the historical study of the emotions with an examination of the individual's place in society, Olsen provides an important new insight on how a generation of young men was formed.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Januar 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781472511416
• Artikelnr.: 40148582

Autorenporträt

Stephanie Olsen (Ph.D, FRHistS), is an historian of childhood and youth, education, experiences and the emotions, with a particular focus on the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is a Senior Researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (Tampere University), having previously held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions (Berlin) and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

She is the author/co-author of two monographs, Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Learning How to Feel: Children's Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization, c. 1870-1970 (2014), and the editor of Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives (2015). Along with Heidi Morrison, she is the editor of the 4-volume Children, Childhood and Youth in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Primary Source Collection. She co-edits the journal History of Education.