Overview

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period.  Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy.  Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

Full Product Details

Author:   Martina Domines Veliki ,  Cian Duffy
Publisher:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Imprint:   Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Edition:   2020 ed.
Weight:   0.389kg
ISBN:  

9783030504311

ISBN 10:   303050431
Pages:   279
Publication Date:   30 August 2021
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: the Romantic cultures of infancy.- 1. ‘A detached peninsula’: infancy in the work of Thomas De Quincey.- 2.  William Blake’s Infant Joy.- 3. The infant, the mother, and the breast in the paintings of Marguerite Gérard.- 4. Mother at the source: romanticism and infant education.- 5. Coleridge, the ridiculous child, and the limits of Romanticism.- 6. Educational experiments: childhood sympathy, regulation and object relations in Maria Edgeworth’s writing about education.- 7. ‘Advice [...] by one as insignificant as a MOUSE’: human and non-human infancy in eighteenth-century moral animal tales.- 8. William Godwin, Romantic-era historiography and the political cultures of infancy.- 9. Experimenting with children: infants in the scientific imagination.- 10. ‘A wretch so sad, so lorn’: the feral child and the Romantic cultures of infancy.

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Author Information

Martina Domines Veliki is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Cian Duffy is Professor and Chair of English Literature at Lund University, Sweden.

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