Introduction: change and childhood -- Childhood and evolution: Jekyll and Hyde and the monstrous child -- Childhood and aestheticism: The Happy Prince and the idealised child -- Childhood and religion: Lilith and the suffering child -- Childhood and empire: The Jungle Books and the savage child -- The uncanny child: The Turn of the Screw -- Childhood and education: Cautionary Tales for Children and the criminal child -- Conclusion: child and trickster: the end of eras.
Summary
This book reads Victorian fin de siècle literature through the medium of perceptions of childhood. It examines the connection between 'monstrous' and idealistic symbolic representations of childhood represented by key cultural discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Specifically, anxieties about change are linked closely to anxieties about childhood, procreation, and maturation in a range of Children's and Adults' texts from the 1860s to the 1890s. The book demonstrates the ways in which t ...
