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In This Article Literary Representations of Childhood

  • Introduction
  • Textbooks and Anthologies
  • Reference Works
  • Journals
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Childhood Studies Literary Representations of Childhood
by
Monica Flegel

Introduction

The child looms large in the literary imagination, both as a character in her or his own right and as a representation of a culture’s symbolic associations with childhood, such as innocence, savagery, emptiness, vulnerability, or freedom. It is important to remember, however, that although we all may lay claim to having been a child at one time, the child in literature is almost entirely constructed and represented by adults. This article provides an overview of the many ways the child is made to mean in literature, across a variety of times, nations, and cultures. It includes references to works that study the figure of the child in both children’s literature and adult literature—in part, because it is impossible to separate these representations from each other, but also as means of recognizing the significant crossover between child and adult audiences.

General Overviews

This section is divided into Historical and Cultural and Literary overviews, recognizing that historical studies often rely upon literary texts as forms of evidence, whereas literary studies often rely upon historical frameworks to perform their analysis. Both forms of overview, the historical/cultural and the literary, are important for the work they perform in denaturalizing universal narratives of childhood and elucidating the means by which such narratives take shape.

LAST MODIFIED: 03/23/2012

DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199791231-0021

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