Stories For Children, Histories of Childhood. Volume II

Literature

Rosie Findlay, Sébastien Salbayre

• Publisher: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais
• Year: 2007
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9782869064836
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The place of the child and childhood in our culture and his/her legal status is a subject which touches a sensitive nerve and triggers passionate responses just as much at the start of the 21st century as it did two hundred years ago. Curious then to note that the academic study of childhood had long been neglected by social historians while its literature, with a few notable exceptions, had too often been relegated to a minor category when not simply dismissed as "pulp fiction". Over the last two decades or so pioneering research has begun to redress this balance and paved the way towards a reappraisal of the child and childhood as a valid field of study. At the same time, by highlighting the areas which still require exploration, it has underlined the distance we still have to cover in order to achieve a balanced integration of both the child and childhood into the social and cultural "story" of our past. It is hoped that the papers published here will, in their own modest way, contribute to this ongoing process of replacing the child inside a culture which proudly claims to have created the golden age of childhood.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• On the Unreliability of Fiction as a Portrayer of Childhood
• Uncanny Visitors: The Child Ghost in “haunted” Children’s Literature
• “Wrecked at the critical point where the stream and river meet”? Lewis Carroll and the deconstruction of Childhood
• “Saving the world before bedtime”: The Puer Aeternus as a New Paradigm for Selfhood
• Desperately Seeking the Child in Children’s Books
• Childist Criticism and the Silenced Voice of the Child: A Widening Critical and Institutional Re-Consideration of Children’s Literature
• Crossover Versions of “Little Red Riding Hood”
• ‘Emptiness and Expectation’: Difference, Repetition and Memory in Time-Travel Stories for Children
• “Helpless and a cripple”: the disabled child in children’s literature and child rescue discourses
• The Art of Imagining Childhood in the Eighteenth Century
• Children Writing Childhood: Romantic Revolutions in the Imaginary Kingdoms of Thomas Malkin, Thomas De Quincey, and the Brontës
• Pip and Jim Hawkins: the Spontaneous generation of two mistakes of fiction
• The language of decadent childhood in Oscar Wilde’s tales
• ‘Nettles and thistles...turned into roses for life’. Constructions of childhood in the international child rescue literature 1850-1915
• Their past, our future: the relevance of WW2 experiences for contemporary children
• No Black Agency on the Back Seat: The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
• Representing War Trauma in Children’s Fiction: A Child in Prison Camp and Naomi’s Road
• Childhood and Sacrifice in the Contemporary Maori Novel
• Eternal Life and Everlasting Youth: English translations of Romanian fairy tales
• Deviation from or Adherence to Tradition: The Image of the Girl Child in The Dark Holds No Terror by Shashi Deshpande
• Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century India: Some Reflections and Thoughts
• De l’enfant mort à l’éternel enfant. L’histoire sans fin de J. M. Barrie
• De l’épistolaire dans le livre pour enfants
• La civilité puérile et honnête de Maurice Boutet de Monvel ; contraintes bourgeoises et turbulence enfantine
• Résumés/Abstracts
• Notices biographiques/Notes on contributors