Childhood, Literature and Science

Childhood, Literature, and Science convincingly points to the variety of ways in which children and childhood are something highly evasive, multifaceted, and dependent upon time, space, and the available assortment of discursive categories. This impressive compilation of studies from scholars in the humanities and social sciences gives us new important insights of childhood, and contributes to the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies.

By stretching the analyses from the Enlightenment until the present day, across science, literature, life writings, and social policy, a complex narrative of western childhood is unfolded. Authors examine children’s literature, psychological testing situations, media debates on children who commit crimes, debates on reproductive technologies, autobiographical fiction, photographs of child patients, and much more, and the reader will be highly rewarded. It becomes clear that the category we in our everyday lives call ‘children’ carries many different meanings and ‘layers’. This volume also gives us a badly-needed readiness for action as citizens. As the editors write: "The notion of childhood is always, at the same time, a notion of adulthood".

—Mats Börjesson, Professor and Director of the Section for Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden

The rich essays collected in Childhood, Literature, and Science demonstrate that research grounded in language analysis and literary criticism has become indispensable for historicising our sense of childhood and youth. The discourses of childhood cannot be captured with essentialist dualisms between purity/innocence and order/discipline, any more than the figures of childhood will come into focus by repeating the obvious truth that childhood is culturally constructed. Readers seeking something more robust will find within these pages thick descriptions and close readings of ideal, subversive, normal, sick, transformative, evil, victimized, and lost childhoods that crossed national boundaries and extended over long periods into the living present.

—Patrick J. Ryan, President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Kings University College at Western University Canada