A. Gavin 
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.

Table of Content

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.Mc Gillis 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

About the author

KATHERINA DODOU Lecturer, Dalarna University, Sweden MARGOT HILLEL Professor and Head of the School of Arts and Sciences (Victoria), Australian Catholic University ANDREW F. HUMPHRIES Senior Lecturer in Education, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK DANIEL T. KLINE Professor of English, University of Alaska Anchorage, USA KATIE KNOWLES Liverpool University, UK EDEL LAMB Australian Research Council Fellow, University of Sydney, Australia PAUL MARCH-RUSSELL University of Kent, UK RODERICK MCGILLIS Professor of English, University of Calgary, Canada LUCY MUNRO Senior Lecturer in English, Keele University, UK ANDREW O’MALLEY Associate Professor, Department of English, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada PAT PINSENT Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, Roehampton University, UK KAREN SANDS-O’CONNOR Associate Professor of English, Buffalo State College, USA LIZ THIEL Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature, Roehampton University, UK NAOMI WOOD Associate Professor of English, Kansas State University, USA