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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.

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Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors The Child in British Literature: An Introduction; A.E.Gavin PART I: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE (1200-1700) ´That child may doon to fadres reverence´: Children and Childhood in Middle English Literature; D.T.Kline Shakespeare´s ´terrible infants´?: Children in Richard III, King John, and Macbeth; K.Knowles Infant Poets and Child Players: The Literary Performance of Childhood in Caroline England; L.Munro ´Children read for their Pleasantness´: Books for Schoolchildren in the Seventeenth Century; E.Lamb PART II: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY, ROMANTIC, AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE (1700-1900) Crusoe´s Children: Robinson Crusoe and the Culture of Childhood in the Eighteenth Century; A.O´Malley Irony and Performance: The Romantic Child; R.McGillis Angelic, Culpable, Human: The Child of the Victorian Period; N.Wood Degenerate ´Innocents´: Childhood, Deviance, and Criminality in Nineteenth-Century Texts; L.Thiel ´She faded and drooped as a flower´: Constructing the Child in the Child-Rescue Literature of Late-Victorian England; M.Hillel PART III:EDWARDIAN, MODERN, AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE (1900-2010) Unadulterated Childhood: The Child in Edwardian Fiction; A.E.Gavin ´From the Enchanted Garden to the Steps of my Father´s House´: The Dissentient Child in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction; A.F.Humphries Baby Tuckoo Among the Grown-Ups: Modernism and Childhood in the Interwar Period; P.March-Russell The Post-War Child: Childhood in British Literature in the Wake of World War II; P.Pinsent Shackled by Past and Parents: The Child in British Children´s Literature After 1970; K.Sands-O´Connor Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the Contemporary British Novel; K.Dodou Index

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´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

´Gavin is to be congratulated on editing such a coherent volume, which successfully tracks bigger shifts in literature as well as society´s construction of childhood, while each essay nevertheless retains its individual focus and nuance.´ - Merridee L. Bailey, University of Adelaide, Australia

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