| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation, “Deadly Toys: Mini Worlds and Wars, 1815-1914,” explores British literary representations of toy wars to argue that toy violence helps to illustrate adult-child power structures during the long nineteenth century. Chapter one examines how the Brontë siblings play at war in their juvenile poetry, showing a precocious understanding of trauma. While the Brontë children fantasize about being all-powerful authors and characters in their paracosm, my second chapter argues that children’s literature authors Edith Nesbit and Lewis Carroll compulsively reestablish dominance over both children and their enviable playthings by creating toy worlds featuring children stymied by illogical rules and potential (if not actual) violence. My third chapter distinguishes between war play and war games in works by H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson who criticize, and then promptly take over, children’s play. In my final chapter I look at how popular press maps of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—complete with cutout toy soldiers and flags—gamify real war, effectively abstracting and distancing the trauma of military conflict that the Brontë children were so aware of a century earlier and, in doing so, infantilizing adults. | en |
