Academic Scientific JournalsThe child and the natural world: Anna Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26881/bp.2024.4.06Keywords:
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children, Isaac Watts, Divine and Moral Songs, child, semiosphereAbstract
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) is one of the eighteenth century authors of religious hymns for children, a hymn variant initiated by Isaac Watts early in the same century. Nature, as the most important spatial and thematic motif in Barbauld’s prose hymns, serves to reveal the omnipresence and power of God to the child. The didactic hymns are addressed to the “rational child”; however, the child’s unity with nature and openness to metaphysics look forward to Romanticism.
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