Sandra Dinter

Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, often do not give up on the idea of its ‘natural’ core. Accordingly, this monograph reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.

In light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity
and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood increasingly continues
to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and
cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child
poverty and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse.
Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts,
as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing
on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection
assembles contributions concerned with current political, social and
cultural dimensions of childhood in the UK. The individual chapters,
written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and
the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood
issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children
in audiovisual media and literary awards for children’s fiction. Appealing
to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various
disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies,
sociology and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary
and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both
illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been
implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of
the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.

This paper examines the appropriation of the pedestrian theme from Jane Austen’s famous novel Pride and Prejudice (1813) in Jo Baker’s rewriting Longbourn (2013). First, it analyses walking in Austen’s novel, where it appears as a mild but harmless form of female rebellion and emancipated courtship in a coherent pastoral landscape. Subsequently, it moves on to Longbourn, which, by focusing on the walking of the servants who remain marginal in Austen’s pretext, recasts this pedestrian theme as a mode of intersectional critique and subjectivises and fragments the topography of Pride and Prejudice. The paper scrutinises how Baker depicts the differences in and limits of pedestrian mobility in Georgian society under the influence of dominant ideologies of race, gender and class and finally eradicates these inequalities by constructing a female character who transgresses the boundaries that Austen’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennet always leaves intact.

This article examines the spatial-semantic transformations of the Victorian garden in three novels for children: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), and Sarah Singleton’s The Poison Garden (2009). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopology’ and Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘spatial practices’, this article reconstructs the evolution of the garden from an intact pastoral setting to a sinister and alienating space. The primary concern of this article is to illustrate how this process of inversion can be read as a spatial mirroring of a gradual deconstruction of the Romantic concept of childhood.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, numerous successful Anglo-American novels have portrayed events though the eyes of child protagonists who epitomize Romantic ideals of childhood innocence, naivety, playfulness and curiosity in surprisingly affirmative ways. This article explores how Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (2010) links such an updated model of Romantic childhood to epistemological ideas ranging from classical philosophy (Plato) to poststructuralist thinking (Baudrillard) by employing a radically ignorant child character in captivity as the narrator and focaliser of her novel. Although Donoghue makes use of an affirmative model of Romantic childhood, her novel equally points to its factitious and obsolete quality as a cultural construct because it can only be temporarily contained in isolation.

This article examines John Harding’s novel Florence & Giles (2010) as a neo-Victorian reworking of Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw (1898). Focussing on the representation of childhood, this article aims to demonstrate that Florence & Giles is the first reworking of The Turn of the Screw that centres entirely on one of the child characters, who is simultaneously its protagonist and narrator. In the larger context of neo-Victorian fiction, which has tended to marginalise child characters, the work is equally progressive. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, the article argues that Harding radicalises the subversion of Victorian childhood innocence which is already implicit in James’s text as it foregrounds various modes of transgression, particularly through its effective employment of voice, space, and agency. Finally, the article intends to show how Florence & Giles intertwines the deconstruction of Victorian ideals of childhood with contemporary discourses on the issue of childhood.

The aim of the workshop is to examine and problematize the central factors, contexts and cultural manifestations of the various transformations that childhoods in Britain have undergone from the 1960s up to the present day, a period that has received varying degrees of attention in different disciplines. Widely-cited societal shifts in Britain, such as multiculturalism, the digital revolution and the dissolution of traditional family structures, as well as the public outrage caused by individual cases of bullying and juvenile delinquency have promoted the notion of a ‘crisis’ of contemporary childhood. At the same time, as recent nominations for, e.g. the Booker Prize and bestseller lists indicate, childhood seems to provide one of the most popular current issues to be explored in the arts. In deliberate contrast to prevalent assumptions and narratives concerning the condition of ‘the child’ in contemporary society, this workshop seeks to propose alternative descriptive and theoretical models, which acknowledge the complexity and growing pluralisation of childhoods in various societal contexts in Britain. The workshop’s interdisciplinary and interactive approach intends to implement cross-disciplinary collaboration in what has frequently been termed Childhood Studies. We wish, however, to explore the limits of such a project as well.

The workshop will be held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld from 7-8 November 2014.