very specific here lol but ever since I've read Dostoevky's the Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, I've been obsessed with how he portrays that specific age of adolescence, like ages 13-15 or so. I'm working on a novel and I'm attempting to incorporate sections written from someone that age, and it very well could not work out in the end, but so far I'm just struggling to find that emotional/dramatic momentum that Dostoevsky created. Part of it was the relationship between Kolya and Alyosha. I have read the Mill on the Floss, and George Eliot does something very interesting in that novel too. But I can't seem to find other novels that aren't literal childrens novels lol. and for this reason, I'm expecting novels that only have a subplot involving people of this age!
by Bubbly-Fly-4090
3 Comments
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
OP, I’m not sure I’d write off “literal children’s novels,” depending on your goals. I also feel like class, geography, and the ages of the depicted children could be consequential. Have you read about how 19th-C ideas of childhood and its significance as a developmental state correlate with the of emergence of children’s literature as a genre?
Thomas Hughes’s _Tom Browne’s School Days_ is pretty seminal in this regard. Charles Dickens famously wrote kids like Pip in _Great Expectations_ or the titular protagonist in _Oliver Twist_. His audience was expected to span all ages, and the young characters can be starkly realistic or mawkishly sentimental by turns. _Alice in Wonderland_ , the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” place their child heroes and heroines in fantasy settings. If you look at Henry James, _What Maisie Knew_ (1897) could also be relevant.
I guess I pictured the siblings in _Brothers Karamazov_ to be a bit past childhood, despite Alyosha’s ingenuous qualities.
Oliver twist