Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature

Abstract

Children and childhood have in many ways become one of the central concerns of our time in terms of political and public policy and the media in Western culture. Education, discipline, youth crime, drugs, child abuse, morality and the family have become constant topics of attention. The perceived loss of discipline in American and British schools, the murder or abuse of children, leading, for example, in Britain to new laws on arms-control and children’s homes, or in Belgium to a new political movement challenging alleged corruption in the police and judiciary, demonstrate that ideas about children and their role in society are made to engage with the widest issues of social, communal, moral, legal, and political concern. How are these ideas and problems formulated and understood: how does our society see and position childhood and the child? What factors are deemed to be of relevance to these discussions, and what kind of language can be used? In this volume new and original articles on childhood and the child, written by historians, literary critics, children’s literature critics, psychologists, and a film and drama theorist have been gathered together. All the articles are theoretical in their orientation, with an interest in exploring the specific difficulties that arise in writing about childhood, but they also all engage with particular examples and case-studies to demonstrate and clarify the problems and consequences of the theoretical issues.