Abstract
Children and childhood have in many ways become one of the central concerns of our time in terms of political and public policy and the media in Western culture. Education, discipline, youth crime, drugs, child abuse, morality and the family have become constant topics of attention. The perceived loss of discipline in American and British schools, the murder or abuse of children, leading, for example, in Britain to new laws on arms-control and children’s homes, or in Belgium to a new political movement challenging alleged corruption in the police and judiciary, demonstrate that ideas about children and their role in society are made to engage with the widest issues of social, communal, moral, legal, and political concern. How are these ideas and problems formulated and understood: how does our society see and position childhood and the child? What factors are deemed to be of relevance to these discussions, and what kind of language can be used? In this volume new and original articles on childhood and the child, written by historians, literary critics, children’s literature critics, psychologists, and a film and drama theorist have been gathered together. All the articles are theoretical in their orientation, with an interest in exploring the specific difficulties that arise in writing about childhood, but they also all engage with particular examples and case-studies to demonstrate and clarify the problems and consequences of the theoretical issues.
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Notes
Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg, ‘Introduction: Thatcher’s Children?’ in: Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (eds), Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s (London: The Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 1–7, p. 1.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (series: Language, Discourse, Society, eds Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe) (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 7.
Allison James and Alan Prout, ‘Introduction’ in: Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: The Falmer Press, second edition 1997), pp. 1–6, p. 3.
Caroline Hunt, ‘Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1 (1996), pp. 4–11, pp. 6–7.
Martin Barker, Comics: Power, Ideology, and the Critics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989);
Chris Jenks (ed.), The Sociology of Childhood: Essential Readings (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1982);
Chris Jenks, Childhood (series: Key Ideas, series ed. Peter Hamilton) (London: Routledge, 1996);
Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: The Falmer Press, 1990; second edition 1997);
Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (eds), Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s (London: The Falmer Press, 1996).
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).
Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (series: Studies in Modern History, eds John Morrill and David Cannadine) (London: Longman, 1995), p. 30.
Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London: Routledge, 1990, paperback 1992), p. 1.
Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 263.
For contrasting discussions within psychology itself on the role of culture see, for instance: R.A. Shweder and R.A. Levine (eds), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
J. Stigler, R.A. Shweder, and G. Herdt (eds), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
R.A. Shweder, Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991);
Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (London: Routledge, 1994);
Michael Cole, Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 1996);
Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). These works (except for Erica Burman’s) are also referred to and discussed in a review of Bruner’s The Culture of Education entitled ‘Learning with Bruner’ by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in: The New York Review of Books, vol. XLIV, no. 6, April 10 (1997), pp. 22–4.
Daniel Stern, The Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-Infant Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 173.
Pilcher and Wagg, op. cit., p. 3. The quote within this quote is from: M. Hayes, The New Right in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1994), p. 89.
Chris Jenks, Childhood (series: Key Ideas, series ed. Peter Hamilton) (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 3.
Peter Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 172, p. 153.
Roberta Seelinger Trites, ‘Introduction: Theories and Possibilities of Adolescent Literature’, in: Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 2–3, p. 2.
Virginia Schaefer Carroll, ‘Re-Reading the Romance of Seventeenth Summer’, in: Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 12–19, p. 12.
Patricia Head, ‘Robert Cormier and the Postmodernist Possibilities of Young Adult Fiction’, in: Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 28–33, p. 28.
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Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1998). Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Children in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376205_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376205_1
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