Child Journalists, the Civil War, and the Intersectional Work of Reporting Grief

In 1864, editors of two nationally-circulating periodicals, Nellie Williams (aged 14) and her sisters, Allie and Mary (aged 12 and 17), reported that their only brother and Union Soldier, Leroy K. Williams, was missing in action. Filtering personal trauma through the performative discourses of nineteenth-century journalism, these young writers publicised their anguish over their brother’s capture. The culturally-situated intersectional identities reflected in and contested by their reporting—as white Northerners, working-class youth, loyal sisters, and enterprising journalists—expose a kaleidoscope of fissures and collisions between private and public, silence and enunciation, gender and class, trauma and resilience. The resulting tensions illustrate the ways by which genres shaped, and were shaped by, children’s articulations of suffering for a national audience during wartime.

Table of Contents

This is the table of contents for JJS 4.1, Special Issue on Juvenilia, Trauma, and Intersectionality

Collaboration and Connection

Juvenilia scholarship typically privileges a lone child author writing without adult intervention. This essay explores questions about intergenerational authorship and juvenilia through a focus on Homes: A Refugee Story, a work of “creative non-fiction” produced through the collaboration of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah and his former teacher Winnie Yeung. Homes chronicles the experience of al Rabeeah in Syria prior to his emigration with his family to Canada as a young teen. The essay authors draw on a joint interview they conducted with al Rabeeah and Yeung, who characterized their mode of collaborating as one between the young “storyteller” and adult “writer,” and discussed how they negotiated their roles in light of questions regarding agency, privacy, ethics, and trauma. The essay concludes by suggesting that fluid definitions of child writing and child agency may be particularly important when it comes to trauma narratives.

Introduction to Editor's Column

This essay introduces the Editor’s Column of this issue of the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, a special feature consisting of five essays exploring complexities of trauma, intersectionality, and juvenilia through focusing on a youth-authored text. The five essays emerge from different disciplinary perspectives, attend to a range of historical and geographical locations, and focus on young writers who are from marginalised backgrounds and/or are not typically at the center of scholarly attention. This introductory essay raises the point that further conceptual work is needed regarding trauma and forms of oppression; questions of age, power, and intersectionality; and the nature of our access to young people’s perspectives in relation to intersectionality and trauma. The essay concludes by suggesting that engaging with questions of trauma, intersectionality, and juvenilia requires specifying, broadening, and deepening our frames.

Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems

Silence, Guilt and Insidious Trauma in Auden’s Early Poems The title of the book of poems published in 1941, The Double Man, defines much of W.H. Auden’s life, constantly driven by a sense of duality and paradox. The double functions as a complex, subtle phenomenon in Auden’s case: It highlights an unresolvable tension between his private and public persona. The search for a compromise between personal wishes and social duties is a recurring theme in Auden’s later works but appears with particular intensity in the poems of his youth, resulting in a complex entanglement in which the poet’s identity is often (traumatically) negotiated. Since Auden’s life extended throughout most of the 20th-century—he was born in 1907, in York, and died in Vienna in 1973—his work provides a useful lens through which to examine some of the events that would change the world in unprecedented ways. For much of his career, he was worried about the impact his homosexuality would have on his attempt to fashion himself as a public poet, as the risk of public scandal and even imprisonment was high in Britain and the US until the late 1960s, and the issue of his homosexuality remains one of the most significant contexts for the study of Auden and of the ways he imagined himself. The impossibility of coming out in the 1920s, when he was an adolescent, posed a heavy burden on him and determined to a great extent his future identity and thus his way of life as a whole. Until now, however, the question of how Auden’s earlier poetic output, that is the 1922-1927 poems, has been “marked and structured and indeed necessitated and propelled by the historical shapes of homophobia, for instance, by the contingencies and geographies of the highly permeable closet” (Sedgwick 165), has remained largely overlooked, and much uncertainty still exists about the extent to which the poet’s “coming out” experience circulated in the vicinity of trauma and was marked by it.

"Because I won't ever forget"

Poetry within trauma-informed literacies has been influential to understanding youth writing. As the tendency to focus on the individual rather than structures of power remains, the authors of this essay point to collective resistance and connect youth writing to other creative texts in their engagement of black life, livingness, and pedagogical possibilities. Specifically, they draw on black feminist theories and methodologies to consider race, gender, class, diaspora, and time-space in poetry and juvenilia studies. The discussion concludes with questions about learning and writing as counter-expressions.

Child Writing and the Traumatised Body

Texts by young conflict survivors, including the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are worthy of historical and literary consideration on many fronts. How did young people experience, understand, and cope with damage to their bodies? What stigma did they face, and how did they make sense of their changed futures? How did they translate their experiences into prose, and how did they negotiate the meanings that such prose held within their societies? This essay suggests that juvenilia offers a deep well for other fields—trauma studies, the history of childhood, and even disability studies—to consider, and juvenilia studies might also incorporate new theoretical apparatuses that can help elucidate the personal, social, and political implications of young writers’ experiences of trauma and injury. Attention to children’s writing about their injuries may approach the asymptote of their trauma and offer insights for scholars working from numerous disciplinary points of origin. .

Editorial

This is the editorial for the Journal of Juvenilia Studies, volume 4, number 1.

“The Peripatetic Philosopher”: Unlocking the Trauma of Richard Jefferies

This article considered the juvenilia of Richard Jefferies in light of the traumatic experiences of his early childhood, which included the sudden loss of his elder sister and a move from the country to the city to live with his aunt and uncle. Using a psychobiographical approach the article considers the impact of the prejudice directed towards him from the local Swindon community during his mid-to-late teens, which spurred him forward in honing his skill as an observational writer. Consonant with this process was the discovery and expression of his authentic voice, which was tempered by the financial need to write for the local newspapers. The article illustrates how his treatment of an area of waste land near his boyhood home affords insight into his emotional wellbeing and his maturation as an author and thinker. Through the close reading of passages written between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, alongside excerpts from his mature works, the article identifies a new unexplored dimension to the author and his works at a formative time in his career.

Trauma in Phillis Wheatley’s Juvenilia

Reading Wheatley’s writings as juvenilia and considering her poetry and letters in relation to one another can productively complicate the view that her poetry is devoid of traumatic affect. This approach illuminates her agency in grappling with how to represent her traumatic childhood experiences. To hear trauma in Wheatley’s poetry requires recognition of her agency in representing her traumatic childhood experiences and their effects on her memory, attachment, and affect. This essay argues that the poems Wheatley published while under age twenty-one provide insight into the challenge of representing the traumatic separation from her mother when her physical and psychic survival depended on her affective relationship with her mistress Susanna Wheatley. What we can hear in Wheatley’s poetry about her childhood in Africa and her upbringing in the Wheatley household must be teased out of the performance of obedience and gratitude expected of her as an enslaved child. ⁠