Description: An analysis of children's rights in literature
Brief description: Susan Honeyman is professor of English at the University of Nebraska. She is author of Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction; Consuming Agency in Fairy Tales, Childlore, and Folkliterature; Child Pain, Migraine, and Invisible Disability; and Perils of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children's Rights, the latter published by University Press of Mississippi.
Review Quotes: Susan Honeyman's Perils of Protection is an engaging, incisive, and illuminating book. Deeply informed by histories of childhood, histories of the family, and children's rights studies, Honeyman meticulously examines a wide range of texts to demonstrate how the endurance of the myth of childhood innocence has often resulted in cultural practices that disempower and isolate children. Perils of Protection is also an ardent defense of children's rights to participation, pointing us to narratives of children, both fictional and real, who question and resist cultures of confinement. It is a vital volume, especially timely in this moment when we are bearing witness to vibrant activist movements initiated and animated by young people.--Lara Saguisag, assistant professor of English at the City University of New York-College of Staten Island and author of Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics