Main description:

How do we understand, imagine and remember childhood? In what ways do cultural representations and scientific discourses meet in their ways of portraying children?

Childhood, Literature and Science aims to answer these questions by tracing how images of childhood(s) and children in Western modernity are entangled with notions of innocence and fragility, but also with sin and evilness. Indeed, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how different child figures emerge or disappear in imaginative and social representations, in the memories of adult selves, and in expert knowledge. Questions about childhood in Western modernity, culture and science are also addressed through insightful analysis of a variety of materials from the Enlightenment age to the present day - such as fiction, life narratives, visual images, scientific texts and public writings.

Analysing childhood as a discursive construction, Childhood, Literature and Science will appeal to scholars as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Childhood Studies, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Sociology of the Family.

Contents:

INTRODUCTION: Child Figures as Fragile Subjects

Jutta Ahlbeck, Paivi Lappalainen, Kati Launis and Kirsi Tuohela

PART I: The Ideal and Subversive Child

Paivi Lappalainen: Child Figures in Lasning foer barn by Zacharias Topelius

Maria Laakso: The Naughty Child in the Early Twentieth Century: Subversive Child Figures and Humor in Jalmari Finne's Children's Literature

Jenniliisa Salminen: Child Adults in Soviet Children's Literature - Lazar Lagin's The Old Man Hottabych

PART II: The "Normal" Child

Kati Launis: The Birth of the Modern Child in Finnish Literary Realism

Karin Zetterqvist Nelson: The Changing Construction of the Child Figure in Literature on Child Psychotherapy in Sweden 1945-1975

Shaul Bar-Haim: The Child's "Position": The Concept of Childhood in Interwar Psychoanalysis

PART III: The Sick and Disabled Child

Maria Nikolajeva: Visible, Audible and Sentient: Cognitive-Affective Engagement with Disability in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Leticia Fernandez-Fontecha: Little Patients: Photography and the Configuration of the Sick Child in Victorian Britain

Karen Lowton: The End of the 'Experiment': Positioning Children with Severe Liver Disease as Potential Survivors of Pioneering Liver Transplantation

Sarah Hardstaff: "With special obligations": Constructions of Young Adulthood and Caregiving in The Road to Memphis and Seventeen Against the Dealer

PART IV: The Evil and Victimised Child

Eleanor F W Betts: Victim, Monster, Child or Murderer? Representations of Children Who Killed in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers

Jutta Ahlbeck: The Nervous Child and the Disease of Modernity

Ewa Maciejewska-Mroczek & Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz: Between Monster Child and Innocent Baby: Mana