239855 Re-Inventing Romantic Childhoods (S) (SoSe 2013)

We often tend to take childhood innocence for granted, but childhood is in fact more ambiguous and unstable than it first appears. The very idea of childhood is a paradoxical one: Although Western societies often cherish and insist on childhood as a separate phase of life, childhood can only exist in transition. Its ultimate goal is to reach the ‘superior’ state of adulthood. Despite the originally Romantic assumption that children are supposed to be innocent and pure, children who are violent, sexual, and murderous challenge this myth. These contradictions have led scholars to proclaim a ‘crisis’ of childhood which has, in turn, also triggered numerous responses from the field of literature. This course will consider the historical development and literary and cultural construction of childhood and explore the recent academic interest in how this phase of life is constructed.

The first part of this seminar comprises an introduction to the traditional approaches and current debates in the field of Childhood Studies. Our literary analyses will start with essential works from the nineteenth century and look critically at notions of the ‘invention’ and ‘golden age’ of childhood in the nineteenth century. Whereas childhood is often studied in the context of children’s literature, we will mainly look at constructions of childhood in texts for adults. These texts do not hide the fact that representations of childhood always remain fantasies for and by adults. In this context, we will discuss poetry and prose by Romantic and Victorian authors such as William Blake, William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens. Finally, we will examine how contemporary British and Irish texts, among them novellas by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing and John Boyne, renegotiate the constructs of childhood that were established in the nineteenth century.