The Child in British Literature : Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary

The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii The Child in British Literature: An Introduction....Pages 1-18 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 ‘That child may doon to fadres reverence’: Children and Childhood in Middle English Literature....Pages 21-37 Shakespeare’s ‘terrible infants’?: Children in Richard III, King John, and Macbeth....Pages 38-53 Infant Poets and Child Players: The Literary Performance of Childhood in Caroline England....Pages 54-68 ‘Children read for their Pleasantness’: Books for Schoolchildren in the Seventeenth Century....Pages 69-83 Front Matter....Pages 85-85 Crusoe’s Children: Robinson Crusoe and the Culture of Childhood in the Eighteenth Century....Pages 87-100 Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child....Pages 101-115 Angelic, Atavistic, Human: The Child of the Victorian Period....Pages 116-130 Degenerate ‘Innocents’: Childhood, Deviance, and Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Texts....Pages 131-145 ‘She faded and drooped as a flower’: Constructing the Child in the Child-Rescue Literature of Late Victorian England....Pages 146-161 Front Matter....Pages 163-163 Unadulterated Childhood: The Child in Edwardian Fiction....Pages 165-181 ‘From the Enchanted Garden to the Steps of My Father’s House’: The Dissentient Child in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction....Pages 182-195 Baby Tuckoo among the Grown-Ups: Modernism and Childhood in the Interwar Period....Pages 196-211 The Post-War Child: Childhood in British Literature in the Wake of World War II....Pages 212-224 Shackled by Past and Parents: The Child in British Children’s Literature after 1970....Pages 225-237 Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the Contemporary British Novel....Pages 238-250 Back Matter....Pages 251-266 The first volume to consider childhood over eight centuries of British writing, this book traces the literary child from medieval to contemporary texts. Written by international experts, the volume's essays challenge earlier readings of childhood and offer fascinating contributions to the current upsurge of interest in constructions of childhood. The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood Medieval to Contemporary is a collection of fifteen original essays which critically assess childhood in British literature from Medieval texts to contemporary fiction. Tracing changes and consistencies in the representation of childhood across eight centuries (1200 to 2010), the volume is distinctive in being the first book-length treatment of the child across such a wide range of British literary history. Gathering international expertise, the collection includes essays written by scholars in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, and Europe. Experts on childhood in key periods of literature, the contributors reassess and challenge standard views of the literary child, offering fascinating new readings and providing compelling evidence that childhood has been a vibrant element in British writing for over 800 years "A sustained investigation of the representation and construction of childhood in literature across the centuries is long overdue, but here at last is a carefully assembled volume that comprehensively covers the subject. The impressive selection of essays, of consistently high quality, takes us from medieval literature, through the early modern and Victorian periods, to Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf and Iain McEwan. Many major landmark texts are discussed -- both works of literature and the key contextualising works by Locke, Rousseau, Freud and others. But the reader will find much that's surprising here too: neglected titles, forgotten authors, new contexts. Taken together the essays gathered here will challenge many of our assumptions about the place of childhood in culture and the ways in which this has -- or hasn't -- shifted over time. We will certainly no longer be able to believe that the child has not been an important and continuous theme throughout all of English Literature."--Matthew Grenby, Reader in Children's Literature, Newcastle University, UK